DOH brings free vaccines to RRPS building, legislators get update on respiratory illness

RIO RANCHO -- The New Mexico Department of Health had its mobile vaccine unit ready to get people protected for sick season at the Rio Rancho Public Schools District Office Oct. 22.

“This is our mobile vaccine team. They’ve really been with us through COVID and now have expanded to do COVID, flu vaccines and some childhood vaccines. They travel all over the state, really, helping people who don’t have good access to vaccines,” said Miranda Durham, chief medical officer for NMDOH.

She says people who are either uninsured, underinsured or people who live in areas where health care is less accessible can all benefit from the mobile vaccine unit. She added that the way they get the unit out to the community can happen multiple ways.

“Sometimes community partners will reach out and ask our vaccine team to join their health fair, and usually those things get advertised locally in community, and then we do have on our vaccinenm.org a schedule of where they’ll be when there are public events,” she said.

The dynamic behind vaccines going out to communities has changed since COVID as well.

“Lots of things are different. I would say in some ways, the vaccines are more important than ever, both flu and COVID. Now we have RSV for people 75 and over, people 60-74 with underlying medical conditions. It’s more important now because we are all together and most of the time we aren’t wearing masks. To just stay healthy through the winter, avoid hospitalization and the bad consequences of those diseases, it’s important to get vaccinated,” Durham said.

She added that during COVID there was less access to things like mobile vaccines but despite that there were plenty of opportunities to get vaccinated like with a doctor, at a pharmacy or otherwise.

While vaccines have been a trust issue for some, Durham says at the end of the day the flu and COVID vaccines keep people from hospitalization and death.

“It protects from the worst consequences of the diseases,” she said.

She recognized that people can get busy or distracted from dealing with their health but reminds them that getting vaccines doesn’t take too much time out of a day. During the mobile vaccine clinic at RRPS, people were in and out of the van in a matter of minutes. A doctor’s or pharmacy visit can take up to half an hour. Durham also mentioned how easy it is to schedule ahead of time with the advancement of technology.

Durham and others from the NMDOH were also at the RRPS administrative building to update the Legislative Health & Human Services Committee on respiratory diseases.

The main three they are focused on are flu, COVID and RSV. The DOH tracks the diseases with public health surveillance via data collection.

“Had we been doing a presentation like this three or four years ago, I think we would have come and talked about the seasonal update because viruses followed a pretty predictable, seasonal pattern. When weather got a little colder and people started going indoors and there was more mixing, you would see a variety of of viruses pop up. Sometimes the season would start a little earlier sometimes a little bit later, but it was pretty regular, and COVID sort of changed all of that,” Secretary Patrick Allen said.

He added that tracking COVID helped them find better methods of dealing with the other diseases as well. COVID was the only one that didn’t settle into a seasonal pattern, though.

“We’re watching for diseases, for their emergence, for their patterns, for trends, for ways that they’ve been transmitted places. We use a variety of tools to be able to do that,” Allen said.

One way they track the COVID data is through sewer shed testing. According to the DOH numbers, the wastewater testing in Rio Rancho shows they found about 80,000 COVID viral copies per liter in September, which was down by about 40,000 from August. As of October, that number shot up to about 150,000 viral copies. The increase can indicate more individuals will be infected in a certain month.

Flu, unlike COVID, has a seasonal trend that the DOH can follow. As the colder months approach, the disease will infect more. RSV will have a similar affect on the community.

Public Health veterinarian Erin Phipps spoke next about the rise in avian influenza which is impacting agricultural populations that raise and use dairy cows. Unpasteurized milk has the potential to spread the disease to humans. Tying to that, medical epidemiologist Daniel Sosin went over the importance of health equity in New Mexico. Then, Durham informed people about resources for vaccinations, including the public portal VaxView people can use to find out which vaccines they’ve had and which ones they need.

At the end of the presentation, representatives and senators had a chance to ask questions or make comments.

Rep. Kathleen Cates, whose district lies in Sandoval County, simply thanked the DOH for their work and said she vaccinates to protect her mom, who is older and more susceptible to disease.

“I get vaccinated because I love my mom,” she said.

Rep. Alan Martinez, whose district also lies in Sandoval County, was concerned about the privacy and security of VaxView and the New Mexico State Immunization Information System. DOH explained that the portal is open for anyone’s use but only for their own information, not to be used to get into other’s information. Martinez maintained and argued that it violates medical privacy because anyone could get a password, email or other information to unlock the account.

“It’s still bothersome. It would seem like there would be a little bit more protection of my medical information because I could walk away with somebody’s phone. It doesn’t seem like that’s a lot of protection, in my opinion, but I’m not an attorney or a doctor,” he said.

The representative and the DOH as well as other representatives that defended the portal seemed to agree to disagree.

For more information on vaccines for COVID, flu and RSV visit nmhealth.org.