OK, you’ve got full approval

The Food and Drug Administration was a go-to reason—or scapegoat—for many people hesitant to receive a covid-19 vaccine.

“If the vaccine is not FDA-approved, why are they passing it around?” asked a respondent to a call-out by the Miami Herald Editorial Board asking people why they didn’t want to receive a shot.

Things changed on Monday when the Pfizer vaccine finally received full approval by the federal agency. That means enough data demonstrated that the vaccine, which until then was under emergency use authorization, is safe and effective for most people and that the FDA reviewed and approved the vaccine’s manufacturing process and facilities.

This assurance from an agency that analyzed data from 40,000 clinical trial participants should convince vaccine skeptics, right?

Maybe not enough to convince rallygoers in Alabama who jeered when Donald Trump recommended they get vaccinated over the weekend. But for those who aren’t anti-vaxxers, this will show whether there’s anything that will change their minds or whether misinformation is more powerful than the FDA’s rigorous process.

People who opt not to get a shot are overwhelming hospitals.

A poll released in late July by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that 80 percent of respondents who aren’t vaccinated probably will not get a vaccine or definitely will not, while 16 percent said they probably will.

Another survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation in June left us more hopeful: It found that 3 in 10 unvaccinated people would be persuaded once full FDA approval happened.

If one-third of the unvaccinated change their minds, that’s roughly 1.4 million adults in Florida. These numbers seem overly ambitious. If the fact that more than 200 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine have been administered with mostly no complications, an FDA stamp of approval might not be the game changer that many people anticipate.

Though hope is everlasting, we must do all we can to ensure that covid-19 is not.