As appearing in LIBARTS.Source.colostate.edu | March, 2022 | by Josh Zaffos

CSU anthropologists work to reduce barriers and misperceptions surrounding COVID vaccines

One of the most troubling aspects of the response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been the low vaccination rates among socially marginalized communities. Individuals from communities of color, non-native English speakers, those who are incarcerated, and those experiencing homelessness and transient people have generally been more hesitant to receive COVID-19 vaccines than others – even as virus infections have been disproportionately higher for these groups in many places.

Pueblo County, Colorado, a metropolitan area south of Denver with relatively high poverty rates and COVID infections, was a case in point even after the county established a mass-vaccination center at the county fairgrounds. So, last year, when the Federal Emergency Management Agency asked why and what could be done to overcome a potential public-health crisis, it turned to Colorado State University Professor Emeritus Kate Browne and a team of cultural anthropologists.

“The anthropological perspective can really help us understand the thinking process and the narratives and barriers behind vaccine hesitancy,” said Joshua Bauer, an anthropology master’s candidate who worked on the project. “The social and human dimensions of multi-faceted disasters” – from hurricanes to pandemics – “are so entangled with concepts of identity, loyalty to community, the sort of ‘insider-outsider’ dynamics of who you trust, who you don’t trust, as well as the constant negotiations that people have to make.” Anthropologists, Bauer said, can help with the untangling of those barriers.

This past summer, Browne recruited Bauer and Shadi Azadegan (M.A. ’21) — “two of the most exceptional students I have ever worked with,” she said – to help lead a study and co-author a report, funded through a grant from FEMA. The project investigated what Browne refers to as “the ‘why’ questions,” gathering insight to identify and address the reasons and rationales for vaccine hesitancy among marginalized and diverse populations in Pueblo County and how to overcome those barriers and shift attitudes. Bauer studies archaeology but calls cultural anthropology “my first love.” After completing Browne’s Resilience, Well-Being, and Social Justice course in Spring 2021 – “a crash course in social-science and cultural field work,” according to Bauer – he jumped at the opportunity to collaborate with her on ethnographic research.

“Ethnography – spending time on the ground with people who we observe and talk to and who come to trust us and confide their stories with us – is the gold standard method for anthropologists,” said Browne who co-leads the Culture and Disaster Action Network, a group of researchers and practitioners who study disaster response and resilience and which has been working with FEMA and emergency managers since 2018. “Although this was his first cultural interviewing situation, Joshua’s language skills, cultural sensitivity, and quick resourcefulness at pivotal moments all impressed me.”

Bauer and Azadegan compiled advance research on Pueblo County and its ethnic diversity, social history, and data on positive cases of COVID-19 and vaccination patterns. Bauer, who speaks Spanish, served as the primary contact for Latinx community groups. He also communicated with trusted, local community members – culture brokers, in ethnographic terms – to enlist them to organize and facilitate five focus groups in Pueblo to increase participation from target populations. Through those focus groups, Browne and Bauer listened to male and female inmates, migrant farmworkers, and homeless populations share their concerns and perceptions toward COVID vaccines and public health. In the case of migrant farmworkers, the CSU anthropologists heard that individuals were willing to receive a vaccine but were worried that missing a day of work to get a shot might get them fired. For this community, the risk and consequences of getting COVID are less than the costs of losing their job and income to support families here, and in some cases abroad. Other respondents said they worried that government officials might arrest or deport them if they tried to get a vaccine at the county’s mass vaccination site and expressed a distrust of government based on personal experiences or examples from history. Such barriers made it less likely for immigrants to go to a large, centralized, government-run vaccination site, like the county fairgrounds.