2 in 3 in US won’t seek vaccination right away

Two-thirds of U.S. voters say they will not try to get a coronavirus vaccination as soon as one becomes available, and one in four say they don’t want to ever get one, according to a new USA Today/suffolk poll.

“I don’t plan on being anyone’s guinea pig,” said Ebony Dew, an independent from Capitol Heights, Maryland, said. “I don’t plan on getting it at all.”

The 40-year-old access-control specialist questions the safety of a potential vaccine, echoing concerns shared by millions of Americans.

“I feel like their testing is a trialand-error,” Dew said. “And I also feel that they don’t really know all that much about this virus, so how can they create a cure for it just yet?”

The poll of 1,000 voters follows similar surveys conducted in the past month that indicate that as many as one third of Americans would decline a vaccine, fueled by mistrust of the Trump administration’s push to speed up its development and by, among a sizable slice of the country, general opposition to immunizations or vaccinations.

President Donald Trump has been promoting Operation Warp Speed, a multi-agency initiative to expedite rapid production of COVID-19 tests, treatments and vaccines. Its goal is to produce and deliver 300 million doses of vaccine by January. Three vaccine candidates are in Phase 3 trials in the United States, and more are expected to enter Phase 3 trials this month, according to Alex Azar, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.

Experts say that the level of public resistance to a vaccination is a concern because it undermines the utility of the vaccine.

“If you have 330 million doses of vaccine, and nobody wants it, it accomplishes nothing. You’ve got to use the vaccine. It’s just as important as how effective the vaccine is,” said Dr. David Salmon, a professor at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University and an expert in global disease epidemiology and control.

“You probably need between 70% and 80% of the population to get immune in order to really control COVID,” Salmon said. “And when I say immune, I mean both get the vaccine, and the vaccine worked for them.”

The USA Today/suffolk poll found that about two-thirds of the 1,000 voters surveyed — 67% — would either not take the vaccine until others have tried it (44%) or not take it at all (23%)

The other third of respondents were split between those who said they would take the vaccine as soon as it is available (27%) and those who were undecided (6%).

Roni Caryn Rabin

International clinical trials published this week confirm the hope that cheap, widely available steroid drugs can help seriously ill patients survive COVID-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus.

Based on the new evidence, the World Health Organization issued new treatment guidance, strongly recommending steroids to treat severely and critically ill patients, but not to those with a mild form of the disease.

“Clearly, now steroids are the standard of care,” said Dr. Howard C. Bauchner, the editor-in-chief of JAMA, which published five papers about the treatment.

The new studies include an analysis that pooled data from seven randomized clinical trials evaluating three steroids in more than 1,700 patients. The study concluded that each of the three drugs reduced the risk of death.

JAMA published that paper and three related studies, along with an editorial describing the research as an “important step forward in the treatment of patients with COVID-19.”

Corticosteroids should now be the first-line treatment for critically ill patients, the authors said. The only other drug shown to be effective in seriously ill patients — though only modestly — is remdesivir.

Steroids such as dexamethasone, hydrocortisone and methylprednisolone are often used by doctors to tamp down the body’s immune system, alleviating inflammation, swelling and pain. Many COVID-19 patients die not of the virus but of the body’s overreaction to the infection.

In June, researchers at Oxford University discovered that dexamethasone improved survival rates in severely ill patients. Researchers had hoped that