As Covid Deaths Reach 46 in Flagler, Local Officials Detail Vaccination Plans and Refute Anti-Vaxxers’ Disinformation

Case loads in the county have exceeded 150 for three straight weeks, with a total of 580 cases since Nov. 15. The local surge reflects a surge statewide and nationwide. Daily case loads in the nation now routinely exceed 200,000, and daily deaths exceeded 3,000 on Dec. 9.

“Everyone knows that we expect the next three months to be rough months when it comes to Covid, over 3,000 deaths a day now in our country, it’s expected to continue,” Bob Snyder, who heads the Flagler Health Department, said today. “So now more than ever it’s more important than ever to be wearing our masks, social distancing and doing the right thing to prevent getting it ourselves or passing it on to others.”

Flagler County today or tomorrow will exceed 3,000 confirmed cases. Florida is nearing 1.08 million cases and 20,000 deaths.

Updating the community as they have almost weekly since the beginning of the pandemic on WNZF, Snyder and Dr. Stephen Bickel, the medical director at the Flagler and Volusia health departments, focused on the coming rollout of vaccines in the county.

The Food and Drug Administration this evening was expected to give vaccine authorization to Pfizer, one of two companies that have developed a vaccine to be used in the United States. On Thursday evening, Gov. Ron DeSantis in a video message said the state will be receiving a first shipment of 179,400 doses from Pfizer, by way of the federal government. The amount is far less than what the state had anticipated. More than half the shipment will be distributed to just five hospitals–Jackson Memorial in Miami, AdventHealth in Orlando, Tampa General Hospital, the Memorial Healthcare System in Broward County and UF Health Jacksonville. There, vaccines will be administered to health care personnel with high likelihood of exposure to the virus.

The remaining doses will be sent to CVS, Walgrreens and the Department of Health. The two chains “will be distributing vaccines to nursing homes and assisted living facilities locally and in the state over the next few weeks,” Snyder said.

When the general public gets the vaccine next year, in February-March, the emphasis at first will be on those 65 and over, and those with underlying conditions, “so we’re going to have to work out some kind of a triage system to make sure that the most vulnerable get it first. That is being worked out now,” Snyder said.




Vaccine administration in Flagler will take place at Cattleman’s Hall and on the surrounding grounds of the county fairgrounds, with three lanes of traffic set up and more than 30 people administering vaccines seven days a week, Snyder said. For now, that’s the only location for the general public. Once administered, individuals will have to stay in place, on the fairgrounds, for 15 minutes, to monitor any adverse reactions. Those reactions are expected to be extremely rare–and rarer than when taking most ordinary medicines.

“By the end of June we hope that everyone who wants a vaccine will have gotten it,” Snyder said. But it isn;t clear to what extent the smaller initial shipment to Florida will affect the timelines of priority vaccinations.

Both Pfizer and Moderna vaccines require two shots. Pfizer requires a shot three weeks after the first one, Moderna requires it at four weeks. “Full immunity is expected seven to 14 days after the second shot,” Bickel said. The first shot after the Pfizer vaccine already creates 50 to 52 percent immunity. But don’t let that cause you to neglect getting the second shot.

Bickel detailed the effects of taking the vaccine, and sought to reassure the public about its side-effects as the anti-vaccination movement–commonly known as anti-vaxxers–is getting a booster shot of energy from the pandemic and using it to question the safety, efficacy or necessity of the Covid vaccine, while playing up its potential side effects. As with anti-vaxxers’ opposition to other vaccines, the claims are more sound and fury than evidence. There is, however, copious evidence pointing to the safety of the Covid vaccines and their remarkable effectiveness.

“There is a small number of people, it might be 1 percent, it might be as high as 5 percent, who are in this kind of anti-vaxxer camp, where they are strongly opposed to vaccines for a variety of reasons, and probably most of them won’t change their mind,” Bickel said. “Then there’s this other group, 5, 10, 20 percent of the population, they’re a little skeptical, they’ve gotten vaccines in the past, they wonder if this other information they’re getting that it might be dangerous is true. We have to do an education campaign. I would just encourage those people to keep an open mind. This Covid is very serious, it’s very prevalent, so it’s not like you can just ignore it and nothing to worry about. There’s a real risk out there as we all know and were reminded again this week.” (Bickel was referring to Russell, the FPC principal.)

“It’s highly safe,” Bickel said. “There’s kind of this issue of perceived risk versus real risk, and people focus on this stuff with vaccines. But honestly, if you look at the benefit to risk ratio of vaccines, they swamp any medication that people take. If you look at the side effects potentially of medications, every medicine has a lot of various side effects, some rare, some not so rare. So I think there’s been a tremendous amount of focus on this, maybe because the whole process has been accelerated. But so far these things are looking very safe. That’s the bottom line.”




Millions of health care workers are getting inoculated first. “You might wonder,” Bickel said, “well, maybe they know something about health and about vaccines, and if they’re willing to do it, that might be an indication they are safe. But people can wait and see. They don;t have to make up their mind right away. I would say keep an open mind.”

Even if the vaccines had had 50 percent effectiveness, they likely would have been approved. The medical community was hoping for 70 percent, Bickel said. It got 95 percent from both vaccines. In the Moderna trials, no one had grave responses–no one was hospitalized.

Here’s how the typical vaccination will feel, in Bickel’s description: “Most people should expect that their arm may be sore, they may have a low-grade fever, 99, something like that, they may feel kind of achy, funny, like you do the first day you’re getting a flu, then it would go away. That’s just part of the inflammatory response that the vaccine is supposed to trigger. In fact, some of the people who were in the trials, were kind of using that if they got that to tell themselves whether they got the vaccine or the placebo. So those things are pretty minor.”

As to those rare but serious adverse reactions: “It triggers the immune system, sometimes the immune system goes a little awry and attacks parts of the body, which is the nervous system, which is obviously pretty serious. That’s a rare event.” One person in 100,000 to one in 1 million might get such a reaction, which can cause temporary paralysis. The vast majority of the severe, adverse reactions happen soon, within the two months, according to recent trials.

Meanwhile, Bickel said, “we’ve got two or three months until a lot of people will be able to get vaccinated, we’re at the highest level of covid activity in the country this whole year. We’ve got Christmas season coming up. People should be very vigilant. It’s not time to be complacent now.”




The county is averaging 25 to 26 cases a day, and has 500 people under surveillance from contact tracers–people who have been directly exposed, and people who have had contact with that group.

The Flagler Department of Health this week issued new quarantine options for those who have had close contacts with individuals with Covid-19. Close contacts are those individuals who have been within six feet of an infected individual for a cumulative of 15 minutes or more over a 24-hour period, regardless of mask usage. The Centers for Disease Control continues to recommend a 14-day quarantine when possible, but when necessary, quarantine can now be 10 days without testing or seven days after receiving a negative Molecular (PCR) test result taken on or after day six from exposure.

The individual contact must not have any symptoms of Covid-19 to stop quarantine. Exclusions for the new options include persons who are close contacts related to long-term care facilities, acute care facilities, assisted living facilities, and nursing homes. After ending quarantine, you should still watch for symptoms until 14 days after exposure and immediately self-isolate if you do develop symptoms.