Wendell Pierce, actor and avid New Orleans Saints fan, once offered this thought on how the National Football League earned its huge, loyal fan base:  

“…they have provided not only entertainment for sports fans, but memories, good memories, family memories to these fans, that can only bring about good will.”

It’s that time when we’re approaching the start of football season, and, oh yeah, flu and Covid season. Football creates memories, but what about vaccinations? For me, there’s one: the day my wife and I drove 45 minutes to a massive industrial parking lot, where we were delighted to sit in line with hundreds of other cars, waiting to slide into one of 10 lanes under giant shade structures where my wife and I each stuck an arm out a window so pharmacy techs could put a shot into each of us. Then we went out to lunch to celebrate our good fortune in having been vaccinated against Covid. Looking back, a pleasant vax memory.

We just learned of a family in Ohio getting a fresh vax memory. They were at a Walmart pharmacy when they came across a Hall of Fame quarterback, Warren Moon, getting a shingles shot.  And they ended up with a signed football.

It was part of a program called Huddle for Health put on by the NFL Alumni Association as part of the Hall of Fame activities in Canton, Ohio.

A quick history of that organization…

1967. Elvis married Priscilla. The first ATM appeared in London. OJ Simpson got carried off the field after leading USC to a 21-20 victory over UCLA. Green Bay won the first Super Bowl. And, a group of professional football players founded the NFL Alumni Association,  eventually summing up their purpose with “Caring for Kids, Caring for Our Community and Caring for Our Own.” One of those “carings” includes promoting immunizations.

We spoke with two of the people who were part of the “Huddle for Health” and also at the NFL Alumni’s health symposium in Canton: Tom Groom and Michelle Bonjour.

Tom, an advisor to the NFL Alumni and to STChealth, explained that it was in 2021 that the CDC turned to the NFL Alumni to help increase Covid vaccination rates. “Given the historical lack of trust in the African-American community, these athletes were in a position to go into the churches and the barbershops and get out the message: you need to be informed for you, for your family and for your neighborhood.” The Alumni also created online messaging, bringing in Jerry Rice, Chris Carter and other HOF players:     https://nflalumnihealth.org/covid-19/

(By the way, if you visit the website, you’ll find that the group also joined with the DEA to create an informative interview video about fentanyl: https://nflalumnihealth.org/one-pill-can-kill/ )

The NFL Alumni Association is now making a new push to improve health, including vaccinations. That takes us to the Symposium in Canton where former ESPN anchor, Sage Steele (photo below with Michelle), moderated discussions with Hall of Famers like Emmitt Smith (shown with Tom).

Michelle said of the event in Canton, “These are people who can leverage who they are and what they have done to make a difference, especially with diseases that hit minority communities hard. They further leverage that background when they partner with other organizations that do events.”  If your reading this and thinking, “Wait a minute — we do events,” then you should know that there are 40 chapters of the NFL Alumni around the country, and they are looking for teammates to improve health awareness. Inquiries can be made via Tom Groom at [email protected].

Finally, the players who spoke at the symposium offered up plenty of advice aimed at kids, and Michelle made notes for her three teens, and gave us a look at these some highlights of what she was able to jot down listening to football legends like Ray Lewis, Emmitt Smith and Warren Sapp:

• I don’t care about winning; I care about effort!
• Excellence is not a one-time thing; it’s an everyday thing.
• Never be satisfied with anything because once you do, you stop growing.
• Your greatest strength is understanding your weaknesses.
• I love every aspect of my life—including the work, because that’s what keeps me going.
• Don’t be in the way of your own success—get out of the way.
• Dig in. Ask questions. Don’t just talk surface stuff—you have to support each other.
• Who you hang out with reflects where you are going.
• If you don’t have vision, everything is going to be hard.
• Evil never stops moving. It says in the Bible, “A man’s days will be short and filled with trouble.” If that’s true, who are you going to surround yourself with, and who will hold you accountable?
• I don’t want excuses, I want effort.
• We don’t run from pain. We embrace it and learn from it.
• Fail. Then come back. See how you come back.

* * * *

STATS OF THE MONTH

Immunization as a Disaster Response

By Bill Davenhall, Geospatial Advocate

We should have seen it coming!

At first, we mostly waited until disaster struck to manage the episode—be it weather, wildfire, or undesirable results of mass gatherings. In recent years, however, we have seen the development of emergency preparedness, and a great deal of applied information and communication technology has followed. With that preparedness have come experiments in collecting and using census data. For example, a new data set is now available that attempts to measure the social vulnerability of populations to unpredictable events across all the critical geographical geographies—events that have increasingly become perhaps the “new normal”—extreme weather events, wildfires, and the spread of infectious diseases. Today, most people on planet Earth have witnessed, to some extent, the increasing frequency of such “unpredictable” events.

Community Resilience is frequently defined as the capacity of individuals and households to absorb a disaster’s external stresses. Now, the US Census Bureau is experimenting with developing measures that predict the social vulnerability of communities — those characteristics that inhibit community resilience. The Social Vulnerability Index includes topics such as poverty status, disability status, age, broadband internet access, and health insurance coverage. Hazard risk data come from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s National Risk Index (based on the expected loss of building value, population, and agricultural value). The immunization ecosystem needs to be aware of the availability of this type of data from the US Census Bureau.

What constitutes Social Vulnerability?  Well, here are the multi-faceted factors that the US Census Bureau used in the computation: 

(1) Income-to-Poverty Ratio (IPR) < 130 percent,

(2) Single or zero caregiver household, or only one or no individuals living in the household who are 18-64

(3) Unit-level crowding with > 0.75 persons per room,

(4) Communication Barrier  (i.e. Limited English-speaking households, and/or No one in the household has a high school diploma),

(5) No one in the household is employed full-time, year-round,

(6) Persons who report having any one of the following issues with disabilities (i.e., hearing difficulty, vision difficulty, cognitive difficulty, ambulatory difficulty, self-care difficulty, and independent living difficulty),

(7) No health insurance coverage,

(8) Being aged 65 years or older,

(9) No vehicle access,

(10) Households without broadband internet access.

Detailed data tables are available for the following geographies, Nation (1), States (51), Counties (3,142), and Census Tracts (84,414)—in  Excel formats.

This innovative experimental data product is certainly interesting in its thoughtful conceptualization of using census data sampling techniques nationally. These techniques could also be helpful for many other “semi-predictable” events, such as disease outbreaks and pandemics, impacting any US geographic region. It might even contribute helpful information that immunization planners could use to better prepare for future responses to public health threats.

Below are the national implications of this data for the states with a million or people with 3+ social vulnerabilities. See if you will be surprised. You can access the full data set for the entire US here.

As always, I appreciate a 2^nd opinion!

Community Resilience 2022

Persons with 3+ Social Vulnerabilities by States with 1 Million Such Persons

(Note: The next to last column is the total population count as each state’s total is added in, and the final column is the percent of the national total. So you’ll see that these 23 states contain 83% of the national population of those in the Social Vulnerable category.)