A text message designed to track the side effects of COVID-19 recipients is now available in English only, which will limit the data it can collect.
The program, named v-safe, is how the Center for Disease Control and Prevention will follow up with people who take the vaccine. It has been rolled out with the first wave of vaccinations in the previous week.
“When you’re talking about technology, literacy, and language is usually the second tier,” Jorge Rodriguez, a health technology equity researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston said, continuing, “Version one is English-speaking, and the Spanish version will come later, the Mandarin version will come later.”
The CDC aims to roll out a Spanish version of v-safe “fairly shortly,” Tom Shimabukuro, a member of the Vaccine Safety Team on the COVID-19 task force, said. The agency also aims to offer v-safe in simple Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese. However, Shimabukuro didn’t have a timeline for when it can be available.
“They’re all in the process of undergoing a translation from English to these other languages.”
The agency’s information toolkit with the COVID-19 vaccines, which included fact sheets for the health care workers who are a part of the first wave of vaccinations, is still only available in English.
Translations of the kit into other languages are in progress. The lag is a concern for the approximately 25M people in the United States who only speak English. Information about vaccines must be available for people with low literacy and broadly translated, David Curry, an executive director of the New York University and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia-affiliated Center for Vaccine Ethics and Policy.
“We energetically urge and are confident that CDC will extend a special effort to enhance these materials,” he stated in a public comment made in the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices meeting on December 12th.
Until the translations are complete, the agency’s vaccination information and the v-safe program cannot be easily accessible for non-English speakers. After translation, people who speak languages aside from the v-safe plans to include may not be able to participate.
A part of vaccine recipients not covered by these languages might not be enormous; however, it overlaps with groups that are already underserved by the health care system. Non-English speakers tend to have worse health outcomes overall, and they had worse outcomes from COVID-19.
“Given the disparities that we’ve seen in terms of outcomes in the pandemic, for this specific vaccination campaign, it’s even more critical to get the information out in various languages,”
Pharmaceutical companies and federal agencies made an effort to enroll diverse populations in COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials. Dropping some of that focus in the vaccine follow-ups like v-safe can stall that work.
“You do wonder how much you will lose on the progress made in those trials by having this be one of your primary ways to collect data on symptoms and follow up after the vaccine,” Rodriguez says.
V-safe is one of the ways the CDC and the FDA will monitor the safety of the COVID-19 vaccines. Other systems include the two-decade-old Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), where doctors and individuals can report the reactions that they think would be linked to a vaccine. It is a natural surveillance system – the fed agencies depend on people sending in reports, Shimabukuro says.
In contrast, V-safe is the agency’s active surveillance program and how the CDC is reaching out to people and asking them about their experience with a vaccine. It will capture a different set of information than VAERS, comprising the information from people who had no or minimal side effects. By starting with English, that data can be limited; Rodriguez states that “You’re setting yourself up for disparities in vaccination tracking.”
The CDC’s information page on v-safe is available in multiple languages. Translating the page only changes the text on the page, not the information in the app’s images.
“It’s going to exclude a good chunk of the population, and that’s the same underserved group that may have low literacy, which is often essential workers, who may have had worse health outcomes during the pandemic,” Rodriguez says.
That is why it is vital to have multiple ways to collect data on vaccination outcomes, “I’m a big fan of technology,” he says. “But we have to acknowledge its limitations and capture some of this information in other ways to make sure the sample you’re getting is representative of the population.”
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