Some St. Lawrence, Jefferson county towns have very low vaccination rates
President Joe Biden is making an all-out push to get the national COVID-19 vaccination rate to 70% before July 4th.
Governor Cuomo says once New York hits that level, he’ll end most all pandemic restrictions.
Health officials are focusing on the places with the lowest vaccination rates in the state, including several in the North Country.
About 60% of people 18 and over in the North Country have at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. But some towns have much lower rates.
For example, Lafargeville in Jefferson County has one of the lower rates in the state at 34.1%
"We’ll do a deep dive into that zip code and we’ll find out if we can have some success out there and we will mobilize a clinic out that way," said Jefferson County legislative chairman Scott Gray. He said a pop-up vaccine clinic reduces the obstacles to people getting the shot – driving a long distance, finding transportation, and just the hassle.
"They kind of had a 'meh' attitude towards it, kind of an ambivalent attitude, and [this way] it's there, they don’t have to go out of their way to get it done, so they get vaccinated," Gray said.
But some North Country towns were even lower than Lafargeville. Pyrites, Raymondville, Brier Hill, Rensselaer Falls, and Richville in St. Lawrence County were all at 30% or under. So was Paul Smiths in Franklin County, and Constableville in Lewis County.
A recent study by Jefferson Community College and Syracuse University found vaccine hesitancy may be an issue. It found a quarter of North Country adults are reluctant to get the shot.
Then there’s the case of Evans Mills, in Jefferson County, with a vaccination rate of 30.6%. That’s really an outlier, says Scott Gray, because it’s the Fort Drum area, and soldiers and families getting vaccinated on post aren’t counted in state data, but rather by the federal Department of Defense. "DOD, very simple," said Gray.
Other North Country communities with low vaccination rates include Ellenberg in Clinton County and Port Leyden and Castorland in Lewis County.
Gray says 18 to 49 year-olds remain the hardest to convince to get a vaccine, and his message is "in very simple terms, the vaccine works. People want their normal life back. This is the way to achieve that."
If these low-rate areas can pick up their numbers, they can help the state get to 70% and an end to the coronavirus rules that disrupted normal life for so long.
