PITTSBURGH — From the classroom where she taught high school English, Margie Satterwhite Brown watched parents and their children lining up across the street in the parking lot of Bradford Regional Medical Center, in northern Pennsylvania.
The first vaccine against the most common cause of cervical cancer was approved in 2006, and in the years that followed, parents were eager to get their daughters protected.
More than a decade later, that kind of anticipation for a vaccine would be hard to imagine. Two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, fewer than half of McKean County residents were fully inoculated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and just 38% had received a booster shot by early March — among the lowest rates in Pennsylvania.
