HJBR Jan/Feb 2021

HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF BATON ROUGE I  JAN / FEB 2021 45 Louisianans who will carry the vaccination message forward for us. We know that the messenger can be as important as the message itself, so we’ll be looking for every opportunity to ensure that our messengers will reflect the rich culture and diverse communities that make Loui- siana so unique. I, for one, am looking for- ward to getting back to the crawfish boils, the festivals and the restaurant meals my family and I have missed so much over the past months. I know we can get there, but I also know that it will take a tremendous amount of work to get us in a different, safer space. We know that wearing masks will be with us for some time and that getting back to the large gatherings we love so much won’t be like flipping a switch. It will be import- ant for our healthcare workforce to lead by example and promote vaccination to their patients, families and communities. If you get vaccinated as a priority group, talk to your friends and relatives about the experience. Learn about the vaccine’s amaz- ing technology, and discuss it as an exciting development with the potential to change how we protect the public against viruses. Share photos of yourself getting the vac- cine, and celebrate your protection after you complete your regimen. I’m excited to one day tell my daughter about all the people I worked alongside in these most historic times and the hero- ic actions they took to stop the pandemic. Let’s all be ready to tell our children how we took simple but effective measures to bring a highly contagious virus under control and created a world that was more safe, healthy and equitable than we found it. n Joseph Kanter, MD, serves as interim assistant sec- retary of the Office of Public Health and assistant state health officer of the Louisiana Department of Health. He is also a clinical assistant professor of medicine at LSU Health Sciences Center, adjunct assistant professor of medicine at Tulane Universi- ty School of Medicine and a practicing emergency physician. around the vaccine’s rollout, and we are proud that the early indications showed that our long-running effort to plan for the vac- cine were paying off. But we know there is plenty of work to do. We will reach a point sometime soon when everyone who wants the vaccine will be able to get it, but it is possible that we will need an extra push to get us to the numbers of vaccinated people that will help us put the pandemic behind us. It will take a wealth of strategic planning, effective and target- ed communications and an army of public health nurses and doctors to get us to the other side, but I know we can do it. Louisiana has a long history of beating back threats to the public health, but we also know that we’ve lost too many souls along the way. That’s what we are hoping we can change as the vaccine becomes more widely available, so you will be seeing the LDH lift- ing up and promoting a range of prominent that strives to ensure every state resident has the potential to live healthy, productive lives and have unrestricted access to care. That’s why we’ve also done so much work around health equity in the last two years. In 2019, when we created our Office of Community Partnerships and Health Equi- ty, we knew we had to do something about the health disparities that have gone on for too long in Louisiana. COVID-19 exposed those inequities in devastating and tragic fashion, but we also knew that it was cre- ating more momentum than we had ever experienced to take deliberate steps toward closing the gaps. Those steps have been front-of-mind in our planning for the COVID-19 vaccine, knowing that there are many vulnerable communities in Louisiana that either har- bor uncertainties toward the vaccine or lack easy access to care. We benefited in December from the flurry of media coverage Joseph Kanter, MD Interim Assistant Secretary Louisiana Department of Health Office of Public Health “It will be important for our healthcare workforce to lead by example and promote vaccination to their patients, families and communities.”