Poll finds fear of vaccine increasing
Apoll finds that a quarter of Americans say they won’t get a COVID-19 vaccination.
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 repeatedtweets fromPresident 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 inMay.
The poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found only 46% of Americanswant a COVID-19 vaccine and another 29% are unsure.
More striking, while Black Americans have been especially hard-hit by COVID-19, just 22% say they plan to get vaccinated compared with 48% of white Americans, the APNORC 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.”
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 sixweeks.
Any vaccine before Election Day is 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, said 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 said.
Meanwhile, the White House has embraced a declaration by a group of scientists arguing that authorities should allow the coronavirus to spread among young healthy people while protecting the elderly and the vulnerable — an approach that would rely on arriving at “herd immunity” through infections rather than a vaccine.
Many experts say “herd immunity” — the point at which a disease stops spreading because nearly everyone in a population has contracted it — is still far off. Leading experts have concluded, using different scientific methods, that about 85% to 90% of the U.S. population is still susceptible to the coronavirus.
On a call convened Monday by the White House, two senior administration officials, both speaking anonymously, cited an Oct. 4 petition titled “The Great Barrington Declaration,” which argues against lockdowns and calls for a reopening of businesses and schools.
“Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health,” the declaration states, adding, “The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection.”
The declaration has more than 9,000 signatories fromall over theworld, its website says, although most of the names are not public. The document grew out of a meeting hosted by the American Institute for Economic Research, a libertarian-research organization.
Its lead authors include Jay Bhattacharya, an economist at Stanford University, the academic home of Dr. Scott Atlas, President Donald Trump’s science adviser. Atlas has also espoused herd immunity.
The declaration’s signatories include Sunetra Gupta and Gabriela Gomes, two scientists who have proposed that societies may achieve herd immunity when 10% to 20% of their populations have been infected with the virus, a position most epidemiologists disagree with.
“The idea that herd immunity will happen at 10% or 20% is just nonsense,” said Dr. Christopher Murray, director of the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, which produced the epidemic model frequently cited during White House news briefings as the epidemic hit hard in the spring.
The outbreak has infected more than 7.9million Americans and killed over 216,000, according to Johns Hopkins University.