dr-berry

By Pepper Fisher

PORT ANGELES – The Clallam County Health Dept. has reported 29 new cases of Covid-19 this week. We asked Health Officer Dr. Allison Berry about the outbreaks she’s tracking right now and whether the latest cases are the more contagious variants making the rounds in other parts of the country.

“Those are mostly related to the outbreaks that we’re tracking. So the church outbreak alone is 17 of those cases and we don’t have variant testing back on those, yet. That can take a couple weeks for that kind of thing to come back. We haven’t seen any of the, kind of, more scary variants out here yet. But I think the key thing to know is, as we start to see those rise in the Seattle area, and certainly, as we start to see our residents travel more, it’s kind of a matter of time before they show up here.”

Are any of these latest cases among vaccinated people?

“Just one. One person in the church outbreak was vaccinated. They were pretty elderly and their symptoms are quite mild, blessedly. But otherwise, all of these other cases are unvaccinated people.”

Dr. Berry says there’s been a significant slowdown in getting people vaccinated, indicating that those who wanted one are for the most part served.

But Dr. Berry says many more of the people who attend the church with the outbreak are now interested in getting the shot.

“We certainly have seen people who didn’t take Covid seriously, who take it more seriously once they get it, or once someone they love gets it. And we would prefer for folks to be able to take it seriously before that time. But even then, like, in the case of this church outbreak, we’ve had a lot of folks who go to that church who now have expressed interest in getting vaccinated.”

Many of those who don’t want the vaccine are distrustful of their safety and efficacy. State Senator Phil Fortunato here in Washington echoed many of his constituents this week when he pointed out that the COVID vaccines aren’t fully approved by the Food and Drug Administration and are being distributed under a special “emergency use” authorization.

We asked Dr. Berry to address that issue.

“We’ve had shocking numbers of people who have been vaccinated worldwide. And so we really are seeing the data come out about the safety of these vaccines. And I think it’s important also to understand that an EUA, an emergency use authorization, is still a very intensive process to get through. The FDA is very serious about safety. They had to look at massive piles of data to figure out whether or not these vaccines were safe. And they continue to monitor these vaccines. And we continue to see that they are incredibly safe. Really, the only thing that is different between an FDA “EUA” authorization, which is what these vaccines are under, and a full FDA approval is whether or not the company asks for it.”.