‘The little engine that could:’ Why Woodford is the most vaxxed county in Kentucky.
In the mottled light of a stained glass window in the parish hall of Versailles Presbyterian Church, chairs are set out six feet apart. A slow but steady stream of people use them to wait for their COVID-19 vaccine, then wait to make sure they don’t have a reaction.
This scene is set every Wednesday, as it has been since June when the Woodford County Health Department moved from mass vaccination sites to a weekly clinic. It’s one of the reasons that Woodford County has the highest vaccination rate in the state (73 percent) and is now one of just two counties that is not in the red zone for COVID cases (20.8 per 100,000 people compared to Bell County, which has 227 per 100,000). Franklin County has stayed close behind.
There are other reasons, of course. “I think people in Woodford County as a whole care about other people,” said Rosilyn Polan, a small horse farm owner who showed up to get her third shot ahead of the Keeneland September Sale because she is immune-compromised.
That’s the standard line from people who love Woodford’s small-town hominess that’s centered on the still-vibrant Main Street and stretches out to manicured horse farms and rural areas. But that’s what people say everywhere in small towns and rural counties, even in places where vaccination rates are considerably lower.
So what is it? Right now, Kentucky’s highest vaccine rates are in wealthier, more educated urban areas. Woodford County has wealth and high education levels. It has the horse farms, whose owners worked with the health department to get their employees vaccinated. It has people like Diane Demus, dubbed “the Ambassador,” a cancer patient who most weeks persuades someone else to get the shot, particularly in the Black community, where there is historic distrust of the medical establishment.
“I have to be careful,” Demus said. “So the people around me need to get the shot. I just say, look how many people have died from not getting the vaccine.”
Woodford County has a new school superintendent, Danny Adkins, who is working with the health department to start a new community testing program at the schools. Right now, the vaccination rate for those aged 12-17 is 44 percent. (Looking at you, Fayette County, where it’s only around 27 percent.) Eighty percent of Woodford teachers and staff have gotten the shot, too.
“We have a laser-like focus on what’s best for kids,” Adkins said. “We will do whatever it takes to do that.”
Or as Judge Executive James Kay says, “We want to keep our kids in school and our economy open. We want to be first in line for better days to come and we are more united in our efforts than many other communities.”
‘Communication and accessibility’
It’s still hard to believe that Woodford County is just blessed with nicer, more cooperative people than anywhere in Kentucky. What is clear, though, is that in a state full of understaffed and very overworked public health departments, Woodford County’s is getting remarkable things done.
Cassie Prather, the health department director calls the agency ‘the little engine that could and did.” When she got there in 2017, there were 10 employees, down from 25 in 2010. In 2020, she used federal funds to hire five full-time disease investigators. (Full disclosure: Prather is the daughter in law of Paul Prather, the Herald-Leader’s religion columnist.) When we all started to relax — briefly — last spring after the advent of the vaccine, many health departments started letting extra staff go. Prather redirected some of her folks, like sending Tara Keegan out to doctors’ office to market vaccination efforts.
“I knew another outbreak was possible because of how viruses mutate,” said Prather. “But our work was not finished, there was still a need for testing and vaccination and getting information to the community.”
Prather focused on her employees’ strengths. For example, Robin Miller and Kelly Finnell were both fluent in Spanish. Miller came from the school system, where 17 percent of the students are Hispanic, so they were both crucial to helping get members of the Hispanic community in for shots. Miller helped establish the health department’s contact tracing in the public schools. Mary Ann Kinman was a long-time member of Versailles Baptist Church, and became the outreach coordinator to area churches, which was necessary after July 4 weekend.
Keegan remembered sitting on her deck on July 4 weekend, going over that week’s numbers, startled by the sudden climb in COVID cases. Sixty people from King’s Way Church had tested positive with what turned out to be the deadly and much more transmissible Delta strain. What they thought was a vacation was quickly over, even though compared to other counties, Woodford County has not had nearly as many cases.
“Our success is due to our high vaccination rate and that is due to the ambition of Cassie Prather,” said Robin Miller. “She is a visionary.”
Many in Versailles are quick to describe her in such terms but Prather, who is currently at home taking care of one of her five children who tested positive for COVID, deflected the compliment.
“I think I’m only as amazing as the team that surrounds me,” she said. “This really has been a team effort from a strong public health system that involves more than just the health departments — hospitals, emergency services, law enforcement, public schools, faith based communities — we had all of those entities working toward the same goal of protecting this community from the virus.”
Prather frequently gets calls from other health departments for advice. “Communication and accessibility,” she says. Accessibility to the vaccine, taking it to people in rural areas or in big workplaces. And constant communication to counter the tsunami of misinformation that inundates many TVs and computers.
The Woodford County Health Department’s Facebook page posts daily charts and graphs of the county’s COVID status, which are a more accurate day by day accounting than the state’s weekly report. At first, trolls attacked the site, or people laughed at the reports of deaths, but they soon set up a page manager that automatically hides trollish or incorrect comments.
But there is no doubt in anyone’s minds that small-town living helps. The health department is right next to Ace Hardware on Main Street, which is right across from the Episcopal, Baptist and Presbyterian churches. Around the corner is Taqueria Becerra, a popular Mexican restaurant. Servando Becerra said because everyone knows everyone else, “you don’t want to be that guy who won’t get the vaccine.” His sister, Elizabeth, interned at the health department and also helped with outreach in the Hispanic community.
Nearly all the health department employees live in Woodford County, their kids go to school there. Prather will go and speak wherever she is asked to; Kinman walks across the street to choir practice, and like all of them, talks up vaccines wherever she goes.
“This isn’t scaleable,” Miller said. “It’s all about the relationships here so people trust us when we tell them they should get a vaccine. It’s the goal of building relationships as opposed to being a regulator with a clipboard.”
This story was originally published September 3, 2021 at 9:53 AM.
