Vax Campaign Centers Student Athletes

Wilbur Cross High School junior Fredo Delgado looks directly at the camera, a basketball cradled in his left arm. ​“What’s up. I’m Fredo. Want your life back?” he asks.

He passes the ball to his classmate and teammate Christian McClease, who now holds the answer to that pandemic-era riddle between his two hands. ​“Get vaccinated,” McClease says. ​“We did.”

Delgado and McClease are both 16-year-old juniors and basketball teammates at Wilbur Cross High School.

They’re also both featured in a new student athlete-anchored video campaign launched by the New Haven Health Department and funded by the Connecticut Department of Public Health Vaccine Equity Fund.

The goal: To encourage young New Haveners to protect themselves, their families, and their communities by getting vaccinated against Covid-19 by having fellow Elm City teens step up and talk about why they decided to get the shot.

On Tuesday afternoon, Delgado and McClease joined Mayor Justin Elicker, city Health Director Maritza Bond, New Haven Public Schools Athletic Director Erik Patchkofsky, and a host of community vaccine education partners at a City Hall press conference to promote the youth-focused public health effort.

“I did this because I wanted to help the city out, to make sure everyone gets vaccinated so we can get back to sports and everything else,” Delgado said during Tuesday’s presser.

McClease offered a similar explanation for why he decided to get vaccinated, and why he agreed to participate in the education and outreach campaign.

“I encourage my fellow athletes and teammates and classmates to get vaccinated,” he said. ​“Make sure everybody’s safe in case another outbreak happens. I encourage them [to get vaccinated] so everybody around them can be safe.”

After the press conference, Delgado and McClease said the Covid-19 pandemic has hit way too close to home for them to turn down a life-saving measure like getting vaccinated.

McClease said both of his parents, as well as several of his younger brothers, have contracted Covid at some point during the past 18 months. Delgado said his mom also came down with Covid earlier this year. Fortunately, all have recovered, and most of their family members are now vaccinated.

The two Wilbur Cross High School basketball teammates said they got their Pfizer vaccine shots at the same time at the city Health Department offices on Meadow Street: Their first shots in June, their second in July.

Neither experienced any side effects. Both are relieved to be back at school and playing basketball.

Asked about the most common concern they hear from their fellow high school classmates who still have not gotten vaccinated, Delgado and McClease both said there’s a lot of fear around what’s in the shots.

“They don’t want Covid in their bodies,” said McClease.

The mRNA vaccines by Pfizer and Moderna do not contain any live virus. Rather, per the CDC, they teach the body’s cells to make a ​“spike protein” that serves to ward off the virus that causes Covid-19. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine also does not contain a live Covid-19 virus; rather, it uses a weakened, inactivated cold virus to spark the body’s immune response to Covid.

Elicker said that 71 percent of eligible New Haven residents have received at least one vaccine shot, while 64.7 percent of city residents over the age of 12 are fully vaccinated. Those numbers drop to around 51 percent and around 41 percent respectively for eligible young New Haveners in their teens and early 20s, he said.

Thank you to the NHPS Athletics Department and ​“our young people for really stepping up and showing their faces all around the city,” Elicker said to Delgado, McClease, and Patchkofsky. ​“Having young people that are willing to put themselves out there, do the right thing, and encourage their friends, is a big deal.”

Community Action Agency President and CEO Amos Smith and URU The Right To Be Inc. Founder and CEO Crystal Emery also joined Tuesday’s presser to tout the importance of community-based partnerships for getting New Haven’s vaccination rates higher.

“This is an all out war and it’s time to be taken seriously,” Smith said, directing his comments in particular at New Haven parents who are still wary of the vaccine and who have declined to encourage their teenage children to get vaccinated.

“Those children deserve what all parents want for our children, which is an opportunity to live our life to the fullest and succeed.”

Vaccination clinics that take place at schools and churches and community organizations are so important because ​“we’re meeting people where they are,” Emery said. ​“Every time someone is vaccinated, that means we are making the environment more safe.”

Click here to watch the full City Hall press conference. And click on the embedded video below to watch another pro-vaccination video featuring New Haven youth as part of the same Health Department-backed campaign.

YNHH: Hospitalizations Down 45%; Vax Is Key To Avoiding Hospitalization & Death

In a separate Covid-related virtual press conference hosted Tuesday afternoon by Yale New Haven Health, the regional hospital system’s CEO Marna Borgstrom and top doctor Thomas Balcezak said that YNHH has seen a 45 percent drop in the number of Covid-related hospitalizations over the past two weeks.

That means that the regional health system — which includes seven hospital campuses in Connecticut and Rhode Island — is down to 74 Covid inpatients, 41 of whom are in New Haven.

“This is primarily a disease requiring hospitalization of mostly the unvaccinated,” Balcezak said. He said 33 percent of those currently admitted to the hospital who have Covid have been vaccinated. Many of those patients are in the hospital for reasons unrelated to Covid, though. They came in after a car accident or for a surgery and, when they got tested at the hospital, learned that they were also asymptomatic carriers of Covid.

“Vaccination is still your best way of avoiding hospitalization or death,” Balcezak said.

Also, ​“breakthrough cases can happen, even if you are vaccinated. Which is the reason why we’re still suggesting a layered approach” — including frequent testing and, especially when indoors around other people, wearing face masks.

Click here to watch the full YNHH press conference, which also covered updates on booster shots, vaccines for kids aged 5 through 11, and YNHH’s workplace vaccination mandate — including how roughly 700 of the hospital system’s 28,000-plus employees remain unvaccinated.