US health professionals are first in line to receive the COVID-19 vaccine – but an alarming number across the country refuses to do so.
Earlier this week, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine revealed that about 60 percent of nursing home workers in his state have so far decided not to get vaccinated.
More than half of New York City’s EMS workers showed skepticism, the Post reported last month.
And now California and Texas are facing a high rate of health worker refusals, according to reports.
An estimated 50 percent of frontline workers in Riverside County, Golden State, opted against the drug, reported the Los Angeles Times, citing public health officials.
More than half of employees at California’s St. Elizabeth Community Hospital who were eligible to receive the vaccine did not, the newspaper.
And in Lone Star State, a doctor at the Houston Memorial Medical Center told NPR earlier this month that half of the facility’s nurses would not get the vaccine, citing political reasons.
The excuse shared by the Texas nurses echoed in a recent survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation, which found that 29% of health professionals were “hesitant about the vaccine,” the Times reported.
Research respondents inclined not to get the vaccine said, among other reasons, that they were concerned about the influence of policy on the development of the vaccine, the newspaper reported.
A California hospital nurse who chose not to have the vaccine because she is pregnant, said her co-workers who chose the same path she believes do not need the vaccine to survive the pandemic.
“I feel like people think, ‘I can still do this to the end without getting the vaccine,'” April Lu, a 31-year-old nurse at Providence Holy Cross Medical Center, told the Times.
A high percentage of refusal of the vaccine, not only among health professionals, but also the general population, can be problematic, Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch told the newspaper.
“Our ability as a society to return to a higher level of functioning depends on having as many people as possible protected,” said Marc Lipsitch.