WATCH: Local physicians bring vaccine talks directly to public

Dr. Randy Hill, left, with Garland County TEA Party Chairman Reggie Cowan, listens to a question during the weekly meeting of the Garland County TEA Party at Hibachi Sushi Buffet Wednesday. - Photo by Tanner Newton of The Sentinel-Record
Dr. Randy Hill, left, with Garland County TEA Party Chairman Reggie Cowan, listens to a question during the weekly meeting of the Garland County TEA Party at Hibachi Sushi Buffet Wednesday. - Photo by Tanner Newton of The Sentinel-Record

A family physician in Hot Springs in practice for over 28 years spoke candidly to the Garland County TEA Party this week about COVID-19 vaccines, noting he wanted to put aside all personal opinions and specifically explain how the virus and vaccinations work.

Dr. Randy Hill was the guest speaker at Wednesday's weekly meeting of the Garland County TEA Party, held at Hibachi Sushi Buffet. Hill joins a growing number of local physicians who are speaking directly to the community, some on the social media accounts of school districts and medical facilities.

"I've reached out to some other community organizations, as well. I just think we as physicians need to get out in the community and just answer questions that people have as it relates to the vaccine and the current pandemic. You know, a lot of people are concerned about the vaccine. I get it; I'm not here to judge anybody or criticize anybody for their beliefs -- I'm just here to answer some questions," Hill said.

"Being a physician, it's pretty technical so in order to kind of break it down to less technical terms, you know, I thought it might help to explain how vaccines work, how the virus affects the body and hopefully dispel myths. ... I'm not here in the sense of judging anybody; I'm not here to coerce anybody or make people do something that they don't feel comfortable with doing. I'm here to kind of discuss the pandemic and some of the issues our communities are facing and what we can do to try to mitigate the pandemic."

Providing some insight into just how the virus works, Hill said that it comes down to the body's lack of recognition of the threat it poses. He noted that, first of all, the virus gets into the body and infects it.

"And the problem is, the means that your body has to fight off an infection ... your immune system creates what's known as antibodies," he said. "And I'm going to speak in simple terms not because I'm trying to be demeaning, it's just the way I speak and the way I talk to my patients. So what happens is, your body does not have eyeballs, but rather it has receptors that feel for these things. It has no receptors for the coronavirus because it's a unique virus."

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Hill said there is a particular analogy he uses to provide a better understanding of just what the world is dealing with in the current crises.

"If I was sitting in a room and somebody was about to attack me that had a gun, I'd have to recognize 'Is this a bad guy and I could shoot him?', or, 'If it's a good guy then I don't shoot him,'" he said. "So your body doesn't have eyeballs but rather it has receptors that feel for the endogens. It creates what's known as antibodies, which will help fight the virus off. So when you get a vaccine, what the vaccine does, it kind of presents a picture of the bad guy to your body. So your immune system can now recognize that this is something that we should fight."

While the human body, he said, sometimes will individually figure out a lot of the cases, the reason COVID-19 -- and, in particular, the delta variant -- is so dangerous is because it is a new variant of the virus that has not been in humans before.

"So basically the purpose behind the antibodies is to make your body have a sensation that you may have been infected by the virus and create an antibody to the virus," he said. "Now just to let you know, nothing's foolproof. There have been some adverse reactions to the vaccine. We've had 6,000 deaths out of 480 million vaccines that are given. We don't know, though, whether those deaths were due to things like if you got in a car wreck -- I've got hospice patients that I vaccinated that died a week later -- due to cancer, those types of things. So a lot of that data has to be rooted out."

Hill said the "hard part" for everybody is the lack of data.

"Y'all need data," he said. "And then this thing is constantly evolving, so I've been really amazed at how fast we can chase it. When the vaccine came out, I was skeptical -- about its efficacy -- I didn't think there was any way it could work that good. But it apparently has worked. It's about 90% effective. I could tell you that of the patients that we have in the hospital right now, none of them had the vaccine. We had one with the vaccine that got better in two days and went home. The average age of patients that we have in the hospital right now are between the ages of 20 and 50. Again, I'm just trying to let the statistics be known. I'm not trying to be judgemental. I want to be very clear about that."

Regarding the adverse effects of the vaccine, he said the most common is that the arm gets sore. He noted people who have had the virus do have some immunity but there are still a lot of studies being done.

"We don't know how long the immunity lasts," he said. "I saw something in JAMA (The Journal of the American Medical Association) just a week ago that mentioned the fact that people that get really sick with the COVID, when they get it -- to generate a better immune response -- their antibodies (get stronger). So people that have had a mild case of it, they don't have as good of an immune system."

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