EXTRA SCRUTINY PLANNED AMID VACCINE SKEPTICISM
Polling shows Americans’ fears over safety growing
Facing public skepticism about rushed COVID-19 vaccines, U.S. health officials are planning extra scrutiny of the first people vaccinated when shots become available — an added safety layer experts call vital.
A new poll suggests those vaccine fears are growing. With this week’s pause of a second major vaccine study because of an unexplained illness — and repeated tweets from President Donald Trump that raise the specter of politics overriding science — a quarter of Americans say they won’t get vaccinated. That’s a slight increase from 1 in 5 in May.
The poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found only 46 percent of Americans want a COVID-19 vaccine and another 29 percent are unsure.
More striking, while Black Americans have been especially hard-hit by COVID-19, just 22 percent say they plan to get vaccinated compared with 48 percent of White Americans, the AP-NORC poll found.
“I am very concerned about hesitancy regarding COVID vaccine,” said Dr. William Schaffner, a vaccine specialist at Vanderbilt University who says even the primary care doctors who’ll need to recommend vaccinations have questions.
“If the politicians would stand back and let the scientific process work, I think we’d all be better off,” he added.
The stakes are high: Shunning a COVID-19 shot could derail efforts to end the pandemic — while any surprise safety problems after one hits the market could reverberate into distrust of other routine vaccines.
On top of rigorous final testing in tens of thousands of people, any COVID-19 vaccines cleared for widespread use will get additional safety evaluation as they’re rolled out. Among plans from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Texting early vaccine recipients to check how they’re feeling, daily for the first week and then weekly out to six weeks.
Any vaccine before Election Day is extremely unlikely. Over Trump’s objections, the Food and Drug Administration issued clear safety and effectiveness standards that shots must meet — and Commissioner Stephen Hahn insists career scientists, not politicians, will decide each possible vaccine’s fate only after all the evidence is debated at a public meeting.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious diseases expert, says that should be reassuring because it means scientists like himself will see all the evidence.
“So the chances of there being secret hanky-panky are almost zero, because everything is going to be transparent,” he told The AP.
Furthest along in finalstage testing in the U.S. are a vaccine candidate made by Pfizer Inc. and Germany’s BioNTech, and another developed by Moderna Inc. and the National Institutes of Health.
Fauci says “the best bet” is that data about whether one or both work will emerge sometime in November or December.
In other developments on Wednesday:
• Melania Trump said that her and the president’s teenage son, Barron, tested positive for the coronavirus not long after his parents, but had no symptoms. She made the revelation in a lengthy note chronicling her personal experience with COVID-19, including being hit with a “roller coaster” of symptoms that she treated naturally with vitamins and healthy food.
• Health officials in the
California county with the highest rate of new coronavirus infections criticized an evangelical church leader who mocked face masks as “worthless” in a social media video, calling her comments infuriating misinformation that people should ignore.
The criticism was directed at Beni Johnson, a high-ranking official at the Bethel Church in Redding, a city at the epicenter of a countywide spike in coronavirus cases. A college affiliated with the church has seen hundreds of cases that have helped drive a spike in Shasta County.
• While bars in much of Texas were allowed to reopen, county judges in most of the state’s most populous counties are keeping taps closed.
Gov. Greg Abbott delegated to the county leaders the option of allowing taprooms to reopen Wednesday with occupancy limited to 50 percent capacity.
Nevertheless, with coronavirus case number escalating, county judges in most of the state’s most populous counties — including Democrat-led Dallas, Harris, Bexar and El Paso, Nueces, Webb and the Lower Rio Grande counties — have joined the leaders of most West Texas counties in opting out of allowing drinking establishments to reopen, according to the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission website.
• Kansas reported its largest seven-day increases in both COVID-19-related deaths and new coronavirus cases.
The state Department of Health and Environment said Kansas had another 67 deaths since only Monday, an increase of 8.7 percent, to bring the total for the pandemic to 838. The state has reported 115 additional deaths over the past seven days, for an average of 16 a day.