Assistant Professor in General Internal Medicine, Aaron Scherer, PhD, is the primary investigator (PI) for a large, cooperative agreement with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to conduct surveys on immunization-related issues with health care professionals and the general public. His and his team’s work help inform the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which makes vaccination recommendations.
“Supplemental funds to this agreement provide funding to conduct additional surveys for ACIP on COVID and/or COVID vaccination with the general public and health care professionals, with a particular focus on the financial impacts of having COVID, and the commercialization of the COVID vaccines now that the emergency health emergency declaration has ended,” Scherer said.
Scherer’s agreement with the CDC outlines that he will conduct three surveys a year. His team has overshot the mark, conducting 18 surveys since April 2021. These surveys have focused not only on COVID vaccines, but additional diseases like pneumonia, Lyme disease, RSV, and HPV, with even more surveys currently being designed.
“These surveys have been included in 16 presentations by the ACIP work group members at full ACIP meetings, and three presentations I’ve been invited to give to ACIP Work Groups,” Scherer said. “Additionally, we’ve seen a number of papers from our survey data that have been published in places like JAMA Internal Medicine, JAMA Network Open, and CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly (MMWR).”
In June 2023, Scherer was invited to present to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ National Vaccine Advisory Committee (NVAC), with a focus on ways to “potentially address” vaccine fatigue, informed by data collected in these surveys. Scherer highlighted how only five scholarly articles discussed vaccine fatigue that occurs after a vaccine becomes available, and only three of those discussed vaccine fatigue from a health care provider perspective.
“I say ‘potentially’ because we actually don’t have a standardized definition or measure of vaccine fatigue, and there is hardly any research on the topic,” Scherer explains, “so my recommendations are based on what we know about addressing vaccine fatigue with patients.”
Recommendations for intervention include:
Provide a strong and presumptive vaccination recommendation but ask about any questions the patient may have.
Before providing any additional information, elicit all of your patients’ concerns by utilizing the ‘what else?’ tactic until their concerns have been shared.
Even if you disagree with them, thank the patient for sharing their concerns with you and ask their permission to share your perspective on vaccines.
Direct patients to accurate, credible information sources that you trust and that the patient trusts.
These recommendations are a direct result of research Scherer has conducted at UI Health Care, and are a condensed version of the full two-page tip sheet for helping providers discuss vaccines with their patients, combined with the video, “Addressing COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy with your patients.”
Through his talks, Scherer emphasizes the role that trust plays between patients and health care professionals.
“Vaccination is an incredibly important, but infrequent, health behavior,” he said. “As the COVID pandemic has highlighted, the success of our vaccine promotion efforts really does hinge on the extent to which there is trust or mistrust between the participating parties. It’s important that when we are having conversations about COVID vaccines – or any vaccine, really – whether it’s with a patient, a friend or family member, or the general public – that we keep our relationships with that person or group at the forefront of our minds.” He notes that research indicates health care providers’ ability to empathize actually decreases during conversations about vaccines and so extra effort should be made to demonstrate empathy, “when we’re engaging in work-related or routine tasks, feeling burnout or overwhelmed, or having a discussion with someone we disagree with.”
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