Should star athletes get the covid vaccine early?

They are suggesting that athletes get earlier access to the coronavirus vaccines.

The process of injecting 330 million Americans with a vaccine for a disease that wasn’t identified one year ago began as a marvel of science and medicine. Soon it will be a daunting logistical challenge. And then it will be a vexing behavioral problem. There are too many people who want the vaccine right now and too many people who don’t want the vaccine at all.

That’s where the athletes would come in. Researchers say that prominent people getting the vaccine and urging others to get the vaccine could help overcome widespread skepticism—especially in the Black community. Polls have shown that vaccine mistrust is greatest among Black adults.

“I could envisage celebrity sports figures playing a very constructive role with vaccine hesitancy," said Harvey Fineberg, a former dean of Harvard’s School of Public Health and former president of the Institute of Medicine. “I could imagine a campaign that enlisted professional sports. ‘Let’s get everyone back in the game’ could be one tagline. And then ‘When it’s your turn, take a shot.’ That could coincidentally get vaccines to the athletes sooner."

Fineberg knows something about the monumental challenge of vaccinating the entire population of the United States in a few months. He co-authored the official study on the 1976 effort to allocate a vaccine in the U.S. for a feared influenza epidemic that never materialized. And he says it’s perfectly sensible to let athletes and other influencers get their shots early if that means they can serve as official ambassadors to people who are hesitant about the vaccine.

“I would be reaching out," he said. “I’m not joking. I think it’s a very serious proposition. Sports has suffered as much as any economic endeavor, so there’s a combination of enlightened self-interest to get involved and play their part. I see a lot of winning possibilities in it."

Whether athletes or the rest of the country see it that way remains to be seen. The only way for athletes to vouch for the vaccine after it’s approved by regulators is to get it themselves—early enough to participate in the advocacy campaigns telling millions of Americans to follow. But delivering on the communications side of the bargain risks being seen as preferential treatment and could revive the resentment generated by the leagues’ daily testing for healthy athletes as other Americans waited days for results.

What health experts and public officials have to decide is whether the value of vaccinating a few hundred athletes would be greater than the cost.

Saad Omer, a member of the study committee for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine framework for priorities in coronavirus vaccine allocation, warned that any sense that sports teams had been vaccinated before people with a more pressing claim would be counterproductive.

“If the message is that I, a multimillion-dollar football player, can’t wait my turn in line, that is a strong message in itself," Omer said.

Athletes rank far behind the most vulnerable and essential Americans who would get the vaccine first. The earliest they can expect to receive it is the spring—and that’s if everything goes to plan. But it’s precisely because everything may not go according to plan that many see advantages to inviting athletes to the front of the general public line.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s distribution playbook deems communication efforts essential but doesn’t prescribe how they should be handled.Some of those decisions will fall to the states. A spokeswoman for California’s public health department said: “We have not yet made a determination about whether or not our outreach and education efforts will include influencers, including professional athletes."

But there is a long history of health campaigns using everyone from politicians to pastors for messaging purposes. Researchers who studied trust and communication during the swine flu pandemic in 2009 found that President Barack Obama‘s daughters receiving their H1N1 shots made a difference in parents’ willingness to have their children vaccinated—regardless of ideology or party affiliation. President Gerald Ford and his family got their shots on television during the 1976 vaccination campaign.

“I have fantasies that we have video of everyone from Dr. Fauci to LeBron James getting their Covid vaccine," said Sandra Quinn, the chair of the family science department at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Health.

Anthony Fauci and President-elect Joe Biden, Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton have already suggested they would take their vaccines publicly. But other statements of confidence might have to be targeted to specific constituencies because vaccine perception varies demographically.

Polls show that Black people are more skeptical of the vaccines than Asian, Hispanic and white people. A Pew Research Survey from September found that only 32% of Black adults said they would definitely or probably get vaccinated. It was a decline from 54% in May. Another survey of more than 1,000 Black adults commissioned by the non-profit COVID Collaborative found that 14% trusted the vaccine would be safe and 18% trusted the vaccine would be effective—which many researchers say is lasting fallout of thedeceptive, federally run Tuskegee syphilis study of Black men between 1932 and 1972.

“I don’t think there’s any doubt that professional athletes could have an important role to play in terms of speaking up for the vaccine and trying to get members of their respective communities to have faith in it," said Arthur Reingold, the head of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Public Health, and a member of the National Academies’ vaccine distribution committee. “Whether that gets them higher in the line to get vaccinated themselves is a great question. I honestly don’t know the answer."

Scholars warn that it will be even more crucial to overcome such misgivings if there are side-effects in mass vaccination that further complicate the safety message.

“What if there are enough people having adverse reactions in the second dose that it may undermine confidence in the vaccines?" said Peter Hotez, a vaccine scientist at the Baylor College of Medicine. “In which case having something like the NBA or NHL might actually be an asset for health communications."

Sports influencers already stepped up in the earliest days of the pandemic. Stephen Curry preached about social distancing and introduced Fauci to his 30 million Instagram followers. Nick Saban yelled at Alabama’s elephant mascot for not wearing a mask.

Athletes have embraced activism this year, encouraging their fans to vote and leveraging their fame to demand change, but whether sports would take on this task is another unknown. NBA teams were pilloried for tapping a private channel of testing in the chaotic early days of the pandemic. That episode showed how the nation’s patchwork response would allow some organizations to get privileged access to critical supplies—and that many Americans would be furious at them.

But athletes who were tested weren’t directly taking scarce resources from someone else. That would make things worse, as the NHL’s Calgary Flames already know.

During the 2009 swine flu pandemic, as Alberta Health Services denied requests from senior living facilities, the Flames secured a private vaccination clinic for 150 players, staff and family members. It was a Canadian scandal. There were apologies, a public inquiry and official reports.

It’s also not clear that professional athletes will be the influencers of choice. Mitchell Warren, the executive director of AVAC, an advocacy group for HIV prevention methods, enthused about James as a possible frontman. But he cautioned that any campaign would need to be carefully vetted before it’s deployed.

“If we want to get vast numbers of people vaccinated, we need to understand who’s influencing them," Warren said. “It may be that LeBron doesn’t test well."

This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text.