For Dr. Willard Keith it’s simple: vaccines save lives

Dr. Willard Keith is well known to many in the community. He’s been practicing medicine in the county for decades, and currently is at the urgent care center at Baptist Health Powderly Clinic. He sat down to talk about the covid-19 pandemic and ways to help people better understand the vaccine.

“I see a little bit of change in attitude toward the vaccine, people seem to want to take it,” Dr. Keith said. While he still encounters patients at the urgent care center who are adamantly against taking the covid-19 vaccine, he said many are changing their minds.

“I think the reason is, they’ve seen the terrible things that happen to people that they know,” he said.

At first, people were hesitant to take the vaccine because it was new, but now there’s a lot more data. “I think as we see people who have gotten it [covid-19], and when you see your friends getting sick, people who are in the same age group and hitting younger people,” Dr. Keith said these are influencing people to go ahead and get vaccinated.

Dr. Keith said the recent spike in cases has resulted in double the volume of patients they see at the urgent care center. “There’s hardly enough help to manage the load, there’s been a huge increase,” he said.

As people in the healthcare field face this round of covid-19, and the more contagious delta variant, they are now more than 18 months into the pandemic. The rate of infection is highest in unvaccinated people and so many of the patients are experiencing a preventable illness. “You know, it’s a disease of the unvaccinated by and large,” Dr. Keith said.

Dr. Keith said he predicts there is a much larger group of people who have had covid-19, but have gone undiagnosed. With more than 4,000 positive cases in the county, the number of people with some immunity from contracting covid-19 is nearly 14%. Another 47.6% of the total population have received at least one dose of the vaccine, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control.

While having covid-19 does give a person some antibodies against further infection, people sometimes do contract the virus more than once. Taking the vaccine allows the body to learn to respond and adds to the immunity.

“With the Pfizer vaccine, one shot and you have about 35% efficacy with it,” Dr. Keith said. “You get that second shot, and the body is like, ‘Aha! I’ve seen this character before!’, and then you produce a ton of antibodies.”

Dr. Keith said he is seeing an increase in the number of children in the urgent care with covid-19. In August, the Muhlenberg County Health Department reported 101 cases in people too young to be vaccinated. The younger patients don’t seem to be very ill with the virus for the most part, he said.

“The presentations just vary so much, we’ll have someone that we’ve just tested to be thorough, and they’re positive,” Dr. Keith said. He is seeing more children with RSV, or respiratory syncytial virus, a common virus among children. He attributes younger kids not being exposed to RSV because they were home the past year and a half. Now they are back in school, and RSV is spreading to children who have not come in contact with the virus before.

Dr. Keith said he has never seen anything like the politicalization of the covid-19 virus. “I was part of the polio vaccine, as a child. We just lined up and got it.” His son is an emergency room doctor in North Carolina, and said he had a patient recently who told him it was against his politics to get vaccinated.

When people argue they are afraid of what the vaccine might do to them, Dr. Keith said to remember we know exactly what can happen if someone contracts covid-19. “Your odds of dying from the vaccine are minuscule compared to what they are from covid-19,” he said. “Vaccines have helped save more lives than every other medicine and every other treatment that there is in the world.”