Activity

Transcript for context: “The fight, the battle is being fought — one family, one physician, one health center. That’s why we’re doing as well as we are.
We’re talking about the minority [of vaccine refusers], and strategies against the minority. So I have the solution: Every study published in the last five years, you look at vaccine refusers, I’m not talking about people we can talk them into coming to terms, but refusers. (54:28 mark) Let’s just get rid of all the whites in the United States, because Houston is the most diverse city in the entire United States. There are seven Asian languages spoken in that city. I’ve been in the [racial] minority for more than 20 years in the city of Houston. The majority of them are what we all ‘Hispanics’ — it’s not a race or an ethnicity, it’s a political designation. A lot of them are from Central or South America, Mexico. Guess who wants to get vaccinated the most in Houston? Immigrants! It is the ‘well educated’ — in terms of pieces of paper and the paper on the wall — [who are the vaccine refusers], people that have been here for a long time, and it’s very unfortunate and.
But I think we need not lose the big picture. The big picture is there are physicians out there — family practitioners, pediatricians, internists — talking one on one with either the older child — I don’t know when a child stops being a child. For me, I was 30, I wrote my mother and said ‘Hey, I’m a grown-up’. They’d already given me an M.D. degree by then, so it’s a good thing I was grown up.
I think that we need to do things as an articulate media-trained group to encourage that conversation, and encourage our health care system to value what vaccines do. Give people enough time to talk to individual families. Most hesitant people, it’s absolutely right, someone said it earlier, some families are having ‘pre-natal visits’. That’s the time to talk about vaccines. This war is fought one on one, with individual families. We need to support those policies that give health care providers, nurses, I mean nurses are really really important, they’re the ones who are probably giving the shots, and if they’re not on board with accepting vaccines, then do you think they’re gonna be supportive of you recommending a vaccine? You have to have your whole [health care] practice situation on board.”