Welcome to Valley Medical Group

Valley Medical Group Patient News

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June 27th, 2022

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Dear Valley Medical Group Patients,

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Barbeques with friends and neighbors, a cool drink in hand. Spending a warm weekend at the beach with your family. Attending a live concert with friends. Being sick in bed for a week with a fever, wracking cough, body aches, and no sense of taste or smell. I bet you didn’t see that coming! Many of us did not, when we caught the latest BA.5 variant of Omicron during the last few months. Rates are rising in many parts of the country and remain at least 8 times higher than in July 2021. “I’m at the point in my life where I’ve got the vaccine and I’ve had COVID. I figure I’m fairly safe,” said a man in LA who fell ill soon after. While many of us are tired of constant vigilance and have come to understand the harms of pandemic restrictions on society and individuals, it is not yet time to go back to life before COVID.

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The most important thing you can do is be up to date on your COVID vaccines. It is a confusing time. “I already got my COVID shots,” is something we hear often. But are you up to date? Being up to date means being boosted at least once and often twice if you are older or have a variety of conditions which reduce your ability to fight off a COVID infection. If you are unsure if you are up to date, I recommend using the great tool developed by the CDC to determine if it is time for your booster https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/booster-shot.html.

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What about the new COVID shots? Like many Americans, we are anxious for vaccines which provide better or longer-lasting protection than the current mRNA vaccines like Pfizer and Moderna. These companies have developed Omicron specific boosters which the CDC has recommended be used beginning in October 2022. While there are reasons to think these might work better than the current versions of Pfizer and Moderna, their benefits are not clear, and it is too soon to tell if they will be available to administer before the winter surge we suspect is coming.

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Do the Boosters work? The answer is yes! People who were not boosted had a 4 times greater risk of severe disease or death during Omicron than those who were up to date. While it is true protection afforded by vaccines against coming down with omicron is weaker and only lasts a few months, a reduction in the risk of severe illness and the disruption caused by a milder infection remains important reasons to be up to date.

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Thank you and be well,

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Paul D. Carlan, MD  President and Executive VP, VMG

Valley Medical Group

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VMG Working to be an Anti Racist Practice

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In honor of Black Maternal Health Week (April 11-17th), we want to raise awareness of the Kaiser Family Foundation's report on Racial Disparities in Women's Maternal Health. VMG stands firmly in the belief that "It Takes A Village" to raise a child, to raise awareness, and to undo racism! Therefore, we are sharing resources so our whole community can become more knowledgeable on this topic, starting with the Black Mamas Matter Toolkit!

 

Where better to begin than in utero to assert the birthright of our children, mothers, and all humans to live in a world free from racism. This past year, COVID highlighted the racial differences in access to healthcare and the prevalence of illnesses that co-exist among Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. Now, let us take the recent CDC statement committing to address racism as a serious threat to public health as a collective call to action to encourage systemic interventions to address the factors that impact the health and wellbeing of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. These include stress, food insecurity, police brutality, inequities in the legal system, poverty, employment discrimination, environmental hazards, educational inequities, etc.

 

We hope this holistic, race conscious approach to health will redirect resources to racially marginalized groups and support funding for research on the long term impacts of racism and intergenerational trauma on mental and physical wellbeing. Valley Medical Group, for its part, has committed to a Climate Survey and Interrupting Racism trainings for our whole staff to root racism out of public health and provide culturally sensitive and proactive, racially responsive care to all our patients.  

 

For further resources, please check out: 

Nine Organizations Working to Save Black Mothers

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