Community health groups in California and across the country are training teens, many of them Hispanic or Latino, and deputizing them to serve as health educators at school, on social media, and in communities where covid vaccine fears persist. According to a 2021 survey commissioned by Voto Latino and conducted by Change Research, 51% of unvaccinated Latinos said they didn’t trust the safety of the vaccines. The number jumped to 67% for those whose primary language at home is Spanish. The most common reasons for declining the shot included not trusting that the vaccine will be effective and not trusting the vaccine manufacturers. And vaccine hesitancy is not prevalent only among the unvaccinated. Although nearly 88% of Hispanics and Latinos have received at least one dose of a COVID vaccine, few report staying up to date on their shots, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Author Archives: Heidi de Marco
Heidi de Marco, Reporter and Producer for California Healthline, produces bilingual multimedia stories about California’s ethnic and low-income communities. Previously, she was a freelance video journalist and photographer specializing in work abroad, including a series of short-form videos about artisans in Guatemala supported by Novica and National Geographic. She was a managing editor for El Pueblo in Los Angeles before moving to India for a postgraduate program at the International Center for Journalists. She is a DePaul University graduate and received a certificate in Spanish-language broadcast journalism from UCLA. She was part of the KHN team to win a NIHCM Digital Media Award in 2018 for “The Orphan Drug Machine” and the Association of Health Care Journalists’ Award for Excellence in Health Care Journalism in Business for the “Liquid Gold” series.