• Poll: More than 4 in 10 health care workers not vaccinated
Roy Lakes wasn’t planning to get a coronavirus shot until he overheard a Zumba instructor urging her attendees to sign up. “You owe it to your kids, to your grandkids, to stay around,” the instructor kept saying.
Those words changed his mind. The 46-year-old from Anaheim, Calif., who has worked as a mental health counselor, has now set up an appointment with his doctor to discuss getting vaccinated.
Health-care workers were the first group in the United States to be offered coronavirus vaccinations. But three months into the effort, many remain unconvinced, unreached and unprotected. The lingering obstacles to vaccinating health-care workers foreshadows the challenge the United States will face as it expands the pool of people eligible and attempts to get the vast majority of the U.S. population vaccinated.
According to a Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation
poll, barely half of front-line health-care workers (52%) said they had received at least their first vaccine dose at the time they were surveyed. More than 1 in 3 said they were not confident vaccines were sufficiently tested for safety and effectiveness.
The nationally representative survey of 1,327 frontline health-care workers, conducted Feb. 11 through March 7, illustrates the challenges ahead as vaccine advocates try to persuade a wider population - with less familiarity with medicine - to get vaccinated.
While about 2 in 10 healthcare workers said they had scheduled a shot or were planning to, 3 in 10 healthcare workers said they were unsure about getting vaccinated or not planning to do so. As many as 1 in 6 health workers said that if employers required them to get vaccinated, they would leave their job.
Vaccination rates are particularly low among healthcare workers who are Black, those in lower-paying jobs such as home health aides and those with less education. Partisan politics also play a role, with more Democrats
saying they have been vaccinated and Republicans more likely to express uncertainty or concerns about the vaccines.
“Health-care workers are everybody,” said Bruce Gellin, president of global immunization at the Sabin Vaccine Institute. Gellin noted that the hesitancy and disparities encompass a range of health workers, from front-line infectious-disease doctors who followed the vaccine science and approval process carefully to home health aides who may have little access to such specialized knowledge or to the shots - in their work settings.
The Post-KFF survey is the most comprehensive survey of vaccine adoption across the health-care workforce, encompassing those working in hospitals, assisted-living facilities, patient’s homes and other health-care delivery settings. Other studies echo the findings. A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study found that by mid-January, 38% of staffers at long-term care facilities in the agency’s vaccination program had received a first dose. Becker’s Hospital Review found that among eight top-rated hospitals, between 63% and 84% of employees had received at least one dose by mid-February.
The new vaccines were shipped immediately after receiving emergency use authorization from the federal government. And because health-care workers were the first to be offered vaccinations, some took a wait-and-see approach.
“There was very little time to prepare health-care workers for the vaccines,” said Kelly Moore, deputy director of the Immunization Action Coalition, which promotes vaccine education.
Now that more than 75 million people have been vaccinated, with very few side effects and broad-based national educational campaigns being launched to counter concerns, experts hope vaccine confidence will increaseamong healthcare workers and others.
Swaying those minds toward vaccination will determine how quickly and completely the United States is able to bring the crisis phase of the pandemic to an end.
“Unless we all do it together, we’re not going to be victorious over the virus,” Gellin said.
--The
more people are vaccinated in the coming weeks, the closer the country will come to herd immunity, slowing the ability of the virus to transmit. But if large groups of the population never get vaccinated, the virus will continue circulating and mutating.
Even among health-care workers - who have seen the devastation of the virus up close and work in a field rooted in science - 36% expressed doubts about the safety and efficacy of the vaccines, a rate that closely mirrors that of the general public.
While individuals’ explanations for that hesitancy vary, they often revolve around three core ideas: safety, efficacy and trust.
About 8 in 10 healthcare workers who were not planning to get vaccinated against coronavirus or were on the fence said they were waiting to see how the vaccine affects others and were worried about adverse side effects. About two-thirds of those unvaccinated and without plans to get vaccinated said they did not trust the government to ensure the safety of the coronavirus vaccines.