This week an entertaining and humorous photonovela was published entitled “ Infectious Rumors ”, which explains the myths and the importance of receiving vaccines -not just the dose against the covid- 19 but also flu, shingles and others.
This is an effort by VaccinateLA, a community initiative of the University of Southern California (USC), which seeks to reduce access barriers to immunization against covid – 19 in Los Angeles.
Lourdes Baezconde-Garbanati, associate dean of community initiatives at USC’s Keck School of Medicine, said VaccinateLA was created in response to the differences seen in access to covid vaccines – 19 in the Latino and African-American communities surrounding the USC campus.
“We focused on the East and South Los Angeles area because we found disparities between African Americans and Latinos in terms of hospitalization and death, due to covid and in terms of how many people were getting vaccinated,” he explained.
He indicated that they were astonished and quite shocked to see the differences as they highlighted the disparities and the program was created specifically for these two communities es.
The initiative has been responsible for informing these communities, primarily low-income, through educational messages, system navigation services, vaccination clinics in partnership with community leaders and organizations, faith, advocacy groups and healthcare providers.
The project
VaccinateLA is an initiative that has the participation of 14 departments of the USC as well as 160 community groups.
Some of the participants are the film school, the Annenberg School of Communication at USC, the Institute of Space Sciences, the Department of Sciences of the Population and Public Health as well as the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles (CHLA) and the Clinical Translation Institute (CTSI).
It is considered a community participatory research project that combines both the community and the academic resources of the USC, so they have had unique participation and outreach strategies.
“These include pop-up vaccination clinics where we show up like a Saturday in a church or events and public activities with a whole group of what we call community, promoters or community health workers that we train to be a link with the community they help ” , explained Baezconde-Garbanati.
He added that even some of the promoters go door to door to make sure that people have been vaccinated or if they want to be vaccinated, helping them to schedule appointments.
Some of the obstacles they have encountered in the community is that for many getting vaccinated is not a lack of belief in the vaccine but rather not knowing how to get an appointment.
Even the use of technology in this case becomes a burden for our communities.
Through “trans-disciplinary” work the entities work together to create something similar to a chemical reaction, something new ”, said the dean.
In this case, videos began to be created that address misinformation in the Latino community about the vaccine.
The video was a good example to turn it into a photonovela which was created by the USC Faculty of Pharmacy, which also addressed the subject of vaccines and n general with a kind of special attention to the covid vaccine – 19.
The photonovela was recently published in Real America News and currently can also be found online.
Baezconde-Garbanati said that people like the fotonovela because they can identify with some characters, which apart from being comic is critical and informative.
entertaining, which also raises some kind of conflict or emotion “, he explained.
” That’s part of the plot, what makes people want to keep reading and want to know what happened. ”