They waited, worried, stalled, then got the shot
CHICAGO — They acknowledged that they could have showed up months ago. Many were satisfied that they were finally doing the right thing. A few grumbled that they had little choice.
On a single day this past week, more than a half-million people across the United States trickled into high school gymnasiums, pharmacies and buses converted into mobile clinics. Then they pushed up their sleeves and got their coronavirus vaccines.
These are the Americans being vaccinated at this moment in the pandemic: the reluctant, the anxious, the procrastinating.
In dozens of interviews Thursday in eight states, at vaccination clinics, drugstores and pop-up mobile sites, Americans who had finally arrived for their shots offered a snapshot of a nation at a crossroads — confronting a new surge of the virus but only slowly embracing the vaccines that could stop it.
The people being vaccinated now are not members of the eager crowds who rushed to early appointments. But they are not in the group firmly opposed to vaccinations, either.
Instead, they occupy a middle ground: For months, they have been unwilling to receive a coronavirus vaccine, until something or someone — a persistent family member, a work requirement, a growing sense that the shot was safe — convinced them otherwise.
How many people ultimately join that group — and how quickly — could determine the course of the coronavirus in the United States.
Some of the newly vaccinated said they made the decision abruptly, even casually, after months of inaction. One woman in Portland, Oregon, was waiting for an incentive before she got her shot, and when she heard that a pop-up clinic at a farmers market was distributing $150 gift cards, she decided it was time. A 60-yearold man in Los Angeles spontaneously stopped in for a vaccine because he noticed that, for once, there was no line at a clinic. A construction worker said his job schedule had made it difficult to get the shot.
Many people said they had arrived for a vaccine after intense pressure from family or friends.
“‘You’re going to die. Get the COVID vaccine,’” Grace Carper, 15, recently told her mother, Nikki White, of Urbandale, Iowa, as they debated when they would get their shots.
White, 38, woke up Thursday and said she would do it.
“If you want to go get your vaccine, get up,” White told her daughter, who was eager for the shot, and the pair went together to a Hy-Vee supermarket.
Others were moved by practical considerations: plans to attend a college that is requiring students to be vaccinated, a desire to spend time socializing with high school classmates or a job where unvaccinated employees were told to wear masks. Their answers suggest the mandates or greater restrictions on the unvaccinated that are increasingly a matter of debate by employers and government officials could make a significant difference.
Audrey Sliker, 18, of Southington, Connecticut, said she got a shot because New York’s governor announced that it was required of all students attending State University of New York schools. She plans to be a freshman at SUNY Cobleskill this fall.
“I just don’t like needles in general,” she said, leaving a white tent that housed a mobile vaccination site in Middlefield, Connecticut. “So it’s more like, ‘Do I need to get it?’”