While access to COVID-19 vaccines remains limited, polls suggest some Americans want to “wait and see” how the shots work for other people before getting vaccinated themselves.
But experts say getting the vaccine as soon as it’s available to you is vital to protecting yourself and others, stopping virus variants, and resuming some degree of normalcy.
According to polls from the Kaiser Family Foundation, health policy think tank, the proportion of people in this “wait and see” category has fallen over time from 39% in December to 31% in January. In February, the most recent survey, it was 22%. This happened along with a gradual increase in the number of respondents (most recently 55%) who reported that they had either received at least one dose or would receive the vaccine as soon as possible.
Black adults (34%), young adults ages 18 to 29 (33%), Hispanic adults (26%), adults without a college degree (25%), and non-health workers (25%) had the highest percentages of respondents in the waiting group.
The most common concerns in the expectant cohort were the possibility of serious adverse events; the possibility of getting COVID-19 out of the vaccine, which according to health authorities cannot happen; the prospect of missing work due to side effects; and the possible need to pay for the vaccine out of pocket, even though the vaccines are free. A quarter of watchers said that a single-dose vaccine would increase the likelihood of an injection.
Susan Lopez, a hospitalist at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, says community members have raised questions about waiting for COVID-19 vaccination during each of the 12 vaccination sessions she has done.
“I get a lot of questions about long-term effects, such as months and years later, especially with regard to mRNA vaccines, as they keep hearing that it’s new technology,” Lopez told MarketWatch. Many people also feel overwhelmed by the technological logistics of registering for a vaccination appointment, she added.
Lopez said she tells community members who say they want to wait that she is there to provide them with the information they need to make the best decision for them. But she assures them that no safety steps have been skipped in the vaccine development process, that all vaccines have been studied, and that researchers will continue to collect safety information.
Lopez stressed the importance of asking people why they want to wait rather than hire. Healthcare professionals need to recognize that those feelings are valid, she said, while also answering questions and providing information.
About one-fifth of respondents to KFF’s latest survey said they would definitely not get vaccinated (15%) or would only do so when needed (7%). But KFF CEO Drew Altman compared the wait-and-see cohort with ‘convincingly changing voters’. He reasoned that they should be a major focus of efforts to build trust in vaccines, “especially in black and Latino communities where the need to build trust in vaccines and address information needs and barriers to entry is most urgent. . “
He also predicted that many will get their photos after seeing people they know get vaccinated without incident.
“Those whose minds can be changed more quickly are in the wait-and-see group – and hopefully all of their minds can be changed,” said David Abramson, a clinical associate professor of social and behavioral sciences at the NYU School of Global Health who studies restraint. vaccines and was not involved in the KFF research.
“If that were the case, we would be closer to an 80% [coverage] rate, and that would be great, ”Abramson added. “We would have the herd immunity levels we would like to have.”
The Food and Drug Administration has granted emergency use clearance to the Pfizer PFE with two doses,
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and Moderna MRNA,
vaccines, as well as the one-shot Johnson & Johnson JNJ,
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By Thursday afternoon, 64 million people in the U.S. (19.3% of the total population) had received at least one dose of vaccine, and 33.8 million (10.2% of the population) had been fully vaccinated, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
‘I generally scare them about how bad COVID can be’
What’s the rush to get vaccinated? For starters, the longer you wait, the longer you won’t be protected from COVID-19, said Alison Buttenheim, a behavioral epidemiologist at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing.
People tend to be concerned about the safety and efficacy of vaccines, she added, but many are not properly weighing the risks of the disease they are trying to prevent. “It’s very easy to just focus on the benefits and potential harms and risks of the vaccine and simply ignore the disease,” she said. “We all misjudge our risk.”
William Parker, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Chicago with first-hand experience in caring for patients with severe COVID-19, says he stresses people should wait and see that they don’t want to see him in the hospital.
“I generally scare them about how bad COVID can be,” said Parker. “What’s so exciting about the vaccines is that they are immensely effective in preventing these really bad outcomes – hospitalizations and deaths.”
According to Johns Hopkins University, the virus had killed more than 530,000 people on Thursday.
A race to “starve the virus of hosts” – and ward off variants
The urgency stems from the need to “starve the virus of hosts,” Abramson said. Public health professionals want to reduce the number of people in a community who are potential carriers and carriers of the virus, he said, so that more and more people are getting vaccinated, “that will soon begin to suppress the virus population itself.”
Health workers also want to quickly suppress the number of people who are sick with COVID-19, Abramson added – “and for every day that people wait and aren’t vaccinated, that’s another day they have at least the opportunity to get sick. and in the worst case hospitalized and maybe even die. ”
“For me, speed is really the answer here,” he said.
The threat of COVID-19 variants also makes vaccination a time-sensitive goal, experts say. For example, the variant first identified in South Africa is more contagious and appears to make coronavirus vaccines less effective. A senior British scientist warned last month that the much more contagious variant first identified in the UK could ‘take the world by storm’.
“As the virus has more time and more hosts to communicate with, the more likely it is that additional variants will emerge, or that the variants currently circulating will gain a foothold in the population and become a more serious problem,” said Abramson. “It’s really just a math game to reduce the number of potential hosts.”
Lopez added, “Any chance we have of protecting people sooner rather than later will be an opportunity to save a life or save someone from long-term COVID effects.”
‘A way back to normalcy’
The CDC said this week that fully vaccinated people can gather indoors and be exposed with other fully vaccinated people. They can also do this with unvaccinated people from another household, assuming no one in that household is at increased COVID-19 risk.
(Fully vaccinated people, meaning those who have had their second or only dose of vaccine at least two weeks earlier, should still wear masks and exercise physical distance in public settings, the guidance added.)
The CDC guidance, along with any additional state-level guidelines, will provide “a way back to normalcy for many people,” Abramson said. “The sooner people are vaccinated, the sooner they can take advantage of changes in remote control protocols, protective measures, etc.,” he said.
“My wife and I are fully vaccinated, [and] one of my colleagues and his wife were fully vaccinated, so we all ate together, ”added Parker. “That is perfectly acceptable once you are fully vaccinated.”
And from a herd immunity standpoint, Buttenheim said, “The sooner we can achieve 70% or 80% coverage in the country, the sooner we can get back to life – and, if this is important to you, preserve vulnerable people. . safe.”
An altruistic reason to get vaccinated as soon as the injection is available to you is to be a visible example to others, especially if you come from a group that faces a high degree of hesitation or possible delay in vaccinate, Buttenheim added.
“We are really social creatures, and we definitely look around our social environment to get clues as to what to do,” she said.
Three vaccines, ‘all great’
Experts have also expressed concern that Americans are skipping the vaccine they are first offered and waiting for a “more effective” option – the result of disparate figures on vaccine efficacy that scientists say should not be directly compared .
The Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines have an efficacy rate of about 95%, but their studies were conducted before concerns about coronavirus variants grow, against which J & J’s 66% efficient viral vector-based vaccine was tested. The global J&J efficacy rate also disguises the vaccine efficacy in the US of 72% and 85% against serious diseases.
While the two mRNA-based vaccines differ from the J&J vaccine in several important ways, all three are effective in preventing serious illness, hospitalization and death – the measures that are the most common, according to public health experts. matter.
‘The information I give [people] is essentially, no matter what vaccine you get, it prevents hospitalization and death – so the best one is the one they can get first, ”said Lopez.
Buttenheim agreed. “We just want people to get the vaccine that they are being offered,” she said. “They are all great.”
Also read: Americans argue which COVID-19 vaccine they want, but Fauci says they should take what’s available to you