WASHINGTON – By the thousands, members of the U.S. service are refusing or postponing the COVID-19 vaccine as frustrated commanders struggle to break Internet rumors and find the right bid that will persuade troops to give the injection.
Some Army units are seeing that only a third agree with the vaccine. Military leaders in search of answers believe they have identified a convincing potential: an imminent deployment. Navy sailors on ships going to sea last week, for example, were choosing to shoot at rates in excess of 80% to 90%.
Air Force Major General Jeff Taliaferro, deputy director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress on Wednesday that “very old data” suggests that only two-thirds of the military who received the vaccine accepted it.
This is higher than the rate for the general population, which a recent survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation estimated at around 50%. But the significant number of forces decreasing the vaccine is especially worrying because troops often live, work and fight together in environments where social distance and wearing masks are sometimes difficult.
The military’s resistance also comes at a time when troops are deploying to administer shots at vaccination centers across the country and while leaders are looking to American forces to set an example for the nation.
“We are still struggling with what the message is and how we influence people to choose the vaccine,” said Brig. Gen. Edward Bailey, surgeon of the Armed Forces Command. He said that in some units only 30% agreed to take the vaccine, while others are between 50% and 70%. The Forces Command oversees the main units of the Army, covering about 750,000 Army, Reserve and National Guard soldiers on 15 bases.
In Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where several thousand soldiers are preparing for future deployments, the vaccine’s acceptance rate is about 60 percent, Bailey said. This “is not as high as we would expect for frontline personnel,” he said.
Bailey heard all the excuses.
“I think the most fun I heard was, ‘The Army always tells me what to do, they gave me a choice, so I said no,'” he said.
Service leaders have been campaigning vigorously for the vaccine. They held city halls, wrote messages to the force, distributed scientific data, posted videos and even photos of leaders being vaccinated.
For weeks, the Pentagon insisted that it did not know how many troops were refusing the vaccine. On Wednesday, they provided few details about their first data.
Individual military service officers, however, said in interviews with The Associated Press that refusal rates vary widely, depending on a service member’s age, unit, location, secondment status and other intangible factors.
The variations make it more difficult for leaders to identify which arguments in favor of the vaccine are most persuasive. The Food and Drug Administration has allowed emergency vaccine use, so it is voluntary. But Defense Department officials say they expect that to change soon.
“We can’t make it mandatory yet,” said Vice Admiral Andrew Lewis, commander of the 2nd Navy Fleet, last week. “I can say that we will probably make it mandatory as soon as possible, just as we do with the flu vaccine.”
About 40 Marines recently gathered in a conference room in California for a medical staff briefing. An officer, who was not allowed to publicly discuss private conversations and spoke on condition of anonymity, said Marines are more comfortable asking questions about the vaccine in smaller groups.
The officer said that a marine, citing a false and widely publicized conspiracy theory, said: “I heard that this thing is actually a tracking device.” The medical team, said the officer, quickly unmasked this theory and pointed to the marine cell phone, noting that it is an effective tracker.
Other frequently asked questions revolved around possible side effects or health problems, including for pregnant women. Army, navy and air force officials say they hear the same thing.
The Marine Corps is a relatively small service and the troops are generally younger. Similar to the general population, younger service members are more likely to refuse or ask to wait. In many cases, military commanders said, younger soldiers say they have had the coronavirus or know others who have it and conclude that it is not bad.
“What they are not seeing is that the 20-year-olds who became very ill, were hospitalized or died, or people who appear to be well, but later found that they developed lung and cardiac abnormalities,” said Bailey.
A ray of hope is implantation.
Lewis, based in Norfolk, Virginia, said last week that sailors on the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, which operates in the Atlantic, agreed to strike at a rate of about 80 percent. USS Iwo Jima seamen and Marines from the 24th Marine Expeditionary Expeditionary Unit, who are also standing out, had rates of more than 90%.
Bailey said the Army is seeing opportunities to reduce the two-week quarantine period for units deployed to Europe if the military is widely vaccinated and the host nation agrees. The US Army in Europe can reduce quarantine time to five days if 70 percent of the unit is vaccinated and that incentive works, he said.
Acceptance numbers drop among those who are not standing out, military officials said.
General James McConville, the army’s chief of staff, used his own experience to encourage troops to be vaccinated. “When they asked me how I felt, I said it was a lot less painful than some of the meetings I attend at the Pentagon.”
Colonel Jody Dugai, commander of the Bayne-Jones Army Community Hospital in Fort Polk, Louisiana, said that so far the squadron-level conversations with eight to ten colleagues have been successful and that getting more information helps.
At the Joint Readiness Training Center in Fort Polk, Brig. General David Doyle has a double challenge. As a base commander, he must persuade the nearly 7,500 soldiers at the base to fire and must ensure that the thousands of soldiers entering and leaving for training exercises are safe.
Doyle said the acceptance rate at his base is between 30% and 40% and that most of the time it is the younger soldiers who refuse.
“They told me that they don’t have much confidence in the vaccine because they believe it was done very quickly,” he said. Senior health officials attested to the vaccine’s safety and effectiveness.
Doyle said it appears that peers tend to be more influential than leaders to persuade troops – a sentiment echoed by Bailey, the surgeon in the Army Force Command.
“We are trying to find out who the influencers are,” said Bailey. “Are you a squad leader or a platoon sergeant in the Army? I think it probably is. Someone who is older and interacts with them more regularly than the general officer who takes his picture and says, ‘I got the picture.’