Nation faces slow slog to get reluctant Americans vaccinated
WASHINGTON — Now that President Joe Biden has met his goal to have all adults eligible for the coronavirus vaccine, health officials around the country are hitting what appears to be a soft ceiling: More than half the nation’s adults have received at least one dose, but it is going to take hard work — and some creative changes in strategy — to convince the rest.
State health officials, business leaders, policymakers and politicians are struggling to figure out how to tailor their messages, and their tactics, to persuade not only the vaccine hesitant but also the indifferent. Officials in many states are looking past mass vaccination sites and toward having patients get vaccinated by their own doctors, where people are most at ease — a shift that will require the Biden administration to ship vaccine in much smaller quantities.
White House and state health officials are calling this next phase of the vaccination campaign “the ground game,” and are likening it to a getout-the-vote effort. The work will be labor intensive — much of it may fall on private employers — but the risk is clear: If it takes too long to reach “herd immunity,” the point at which the spread of the virus slows, worrisome new variants could emerge that evade the vaccine.
“If you think of this as a war,” said Michael Carney, senior vice president for emerging issues at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, “we’re about to enter the handto-hand combat phase of the war.”
On Wednesday, Biden urged all employers in the United States to offer full pay to their workers for time off to be inoculated and to recover from any aftereffects. He also announced a paid leave tax credit to offset the cost for companies with fewer than 500 employees, and appealed to the unvaccinated to get their shots.
“If we let up now and stop being vigilant,” he warned, “this virus will erase the progress we have already achieved.”
The president’s plea came as he marked “an incredible achievement by the nation” — 200 million shots in the arms of the American people, a target he said the nation would hit on Wednesday, with a week to go before his 100th day in office. By Thursday, Biden said, more than 80% of Americans older than 65 will have had their shots.
But the distribution of those shots in uneven: While New Hampshire has given at least one shot to 59% of its citizens (that figure includes children, most of whom are not yet eligible), Mississippi and Alabama are languishing at 30%.
The laggards are trying to adjust. In Louisiana, where 40% of the adult population has had one shot even though all adults have been eligible since March, officials are delivering doses to commercial fishermen near the docks and running pop-up clinics at a Buddhist
temple, homeless shelters and truck stops. Civic groups are conducting door-to-door visits, akin to a get-out-the-vote effort, in neighborhoods with low vaccination rates.
In Alabama, Dr. Scott Harris, the state health officer, is trying to reach rural white residents, who are mistrustful of politicians and the news media. Harris is asking doctors to record cellphone videos, with a plea: “Please email them to your patients, saying, ‘This is why I think you ought to take the vaccine.’”
Some companies are contemplating their own vaccine clinics and educating their workers about the benefits of protecting themselves against a virus that has killed more than 568,000 people in the U.S. Others are talking about giving their workers incentives, like cash gift cards — a notion Biden raised in his remarks at the White House on Wednesday.
Shirley Bloomfield, CEO of NTCA — The Rural Broadband Association, which represents small, rural telecommunications companies, has been working with the White House on pushing her members to get the vaccine.
“One of my CEOs is paying everyone $100 to get the vaccine,” she said. “I think we all have to be a little more creative because we’re seeing that saturation point.”
Vaccine mandates could be an option, just as many employers led campaigns to ban indoor smoking. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has told companies they can require vaccination to protect public health.