About a third of US military members have refused to be vaccinated against COVID-19, a Pentagon official said in a report Wednesday.
Air Force Major General Jeff Taliaferro, the Joint Staff’s deputy director of operations, told a conference panel that “the acceptance rate is somewhere in the two-thirds area,” the Daily Beast said.
While the vaccine is “clearly safe for the military,” soldiers need education “to help them understand the benefits of the shots,” he told the House Armed Services Committee.
In total, the Department of Defense fully vaccinated 147,000 military personnel and 359,000 received a first dose, Pentagon official Robert Salesses told the outlet.
Those who declined can still be deployed, Taliaferro said.
“We have already demonstrated over the past year that we are fully capable of operating in a COVID environment,” he said, according to Inside Defense.
Officials said they expect all Defense Department personnel – including civilians and contractors – to be vaccinated in late July or early August, the site reported.
At least 235,258 people in the ward have been infected with COVID-19 in the past year, according to a Military.com count, with many of the worst outbreaks aboard naval ships, including the USS Theodore Roosevelt, where hundreds of sailors caught the bug last year.
The military acceptance rate of the vaccine is comparable to the general U.S. population, according to a journal of Social Science & Medicine, which found that 31 percent of the general population does not plan to get vaccinated.
An earlier study found that up to 51 percent of Americans would refuse the shots.
A Pentagon representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.