Posted on 02/25/2023 10:48:13 AM PST by DoodleBob
Joyce Ann Kraner is eager for the pandemic to end and for life to get back to normal. Kraner, 49, wants to be able to hug her mother, who lives in a nursing home.
But she says she has no plans to get the vaccine, even though it's widely available in her community of Murfreesboro, Tenn. "I feel like I'm healthy," she says.
Despite the fact that millions of people have been vaccinated safely, Kraner worries about complications. She believes some people are having "life-threatening reactions" to the vaccine that the media isn't reporting. (Many such reports shared on social media are false or misleading.) And she's worried because it's so new: "We don't know the long-term effects. We don't know what it's going to do."
A recent NPR/Marist poll found that one in four Americans said they would refuse a coronavirus vaccine outright if offered. Another 5% are "undecided" about whether they would get the shot. Although the numbers were highest for Republican men and residents of rural areas, there were still a significant number of people across all ages and demographic groups who claim they will say "no".
Now some researchers are increasingly worried that this reticence will be enough to prevent the nation from reaching what's known as herd immunity, the point at which the coronavirus can no longer spread easily through the population and transmission peters out. Reaching high levels of vaccination would mean new outbreaks of coronavirus would die down quickly, as opposed to growing and spreading.
"Vaccine hesitancy is a big problem for all of us," says Ali Mokdad, who tracks coronavirus trends at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.
Up until now, the nationwide vaccine campaign has seen demand outstrip supply, but Mokdad believes that will soon change. By May, he believes, "We will have more vaccines than people willing to take the vaccine."
It's hard to know exactly how many people will choose not get vaccinated. NPR/Marist's polling has seen the number of people saying they would refuse a vaccine drop since the question was first asked in August of last year, and it continues to fall.
What it will take to return to 'normal'
The numbers who may refuse the vaccine remain potentially too high to contain a respiratory virus such as SARS-CoV-2 , which requires a very large segment of the population to be immune. Nobody knows exactly how large, but based on other diseases, researchers believe it is far above the current 32% of the U.S. population that's gotten at least one shot to date.
"What most of us want is safe return to something that looks more normal," says Samuel Scarpino, who models the coronavirus outbreak at Northeastern University. "That to me means 80-85%, probably, vaccinated."
There remain many obstacles to the U.S. getting to the roughly 80% immunity threshold — and some unknowns. It's unclear, for example, how many of those who say they will refuse a shot are immune because they've already had COVID-19. (The CDC recommends people who already had an infection to get vaccinated anyway, so many COVID-19 survivors will also be in the "yes" camp).
And roughly 20% of the population are children under the age of 16, who are not yet eligible to receive a vaccine — making it even more crucial that adults do get vaccinated.
But based on current polling data, Scarpino says that the herd-immunity tipping point for the virus remains out of reach: "We can't get there right now."
A new emergency in the making
Scarpino and Mokdad say the problem will not be immediately apparent. Both scientists expect COVID-19 cases to drop over the summer months, when a combination of vaccinations and warm weather will dramatically slow the virus down. Mokdad says he thinks the improved conditions will paradoxically make vaccination more difficult.
"It's very hard to convince people to take the vaccine in summer, when everything is going good," says Mokdad. He expects the warm weather and low infection levels mean that even people who originally intended to get a vaccine will put it off or forget about it all together.
But the fall and winter could be a very different story. Scarpino believes that more contagious variants such as the one first reported in the U.K. will dominate the fall and winter COVID season, raising the herd immunity threshold. Variants with higher transmissibility may require a larger share of the population to be immune before they can be contained.
Moderate rates of vaccination will prevent a nationwide crisis like that seen during the winter of 2020 and 2021, he says. But he worries that regional outbreaks could still overwhelm hospitals, close schools and force local governments to reinstitute restrictions in different parts of the United States, especially in areas where vaccination rates are low.
"If we're below 60-70% vaccination for COVID when we enter the fall respiratory season, that could easily tip us into an emergency situation," Scarpino says.
How to reach refusers
The reasons for saying "no" to a vaccine are often complex. NPR's polling shows that a diverse swath of Americans are reluctant. Some groups do stand out as more likely to refuse: Republican men, rural residents, and Americans under 45, for example. But the number of people saying no is relatively high across racial groups, economic classes and geographic regions.
"I don't think there's one particular group," says Tara Kirk Sell, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. "I don't think that it works to classify people who are vaccine hesitant all having the same reason for being vaccine hesitant."
"Everyone knows someone in their life who is not willing to get vaccinated," agrees Kolina Koltai, a vaccine misinformation researcher at the University of Washington.
Koltai says that misinformation is proliferating right now, often tailored to different groups with different grievances. "For the first time in a very long time we have everyone deciding whether to vaccinate themselves as adults," she says. "We're all becoming susceptible to anti-vaccine narratives that can be promoted in ways that are beyond anti-vaccination communities."
Kirk Sell says that countering misinformation and encouraging vaccination cannot be done as a "blast broadcast."
"You need to speak to these different groups: the minority groups, the Republicans and the other people who feel like they have some distrust in science," she says. Often the best way to do so, she says, is through groups and leaders at a local level who are in favor of vaccination.
Last week, the Biden Administration launched a major initiative to try and encourage vaccination by enlisting faith groups, unions and even NASCAR to promote getting vaccinated. It's the kind of broad, grass roots effort experts say can help.
The question is, will it be enough? "We need to vaccinate as much as possible right now, stop the circulation of this virus in the U.S. and elsewhere," says Mokdad. "Then we can control it."
“Wow, there is so much disinformation there, a single response is useless”
______
That was my exact same thought. How could someone write such an article speaking with such authority and get every single thing wrong as to the best way to respond to the Covid virus? They can’t say now that “Well no one knew better at the time, and we were going with the best information available”, because some people certainly did know better, but their voices were silenced and their livelihoods threatened should they dare go against the government narrative.
Just took my 'every 2 weeks' Ivermectin prophylaxis. Using Front Line Dr. prophylaxis protocol.
Just read where Dr. in Tenn. was removed from medical board because he trumpets Ivermectin saving hundreds of his patients. Doctors once held great respect and trust. Those days are gone.
Isn’t it the vax that prevents herd immunity.? If enough people actually get the virus, it eventually dies out.
What pandemic?
If we haven’t reach herd immunity by now we ain’t gonna.
Given what we now know about the effectiveness of Ivermectin and the uselessness of the vaxx, can that medical board be sued? Undermining the health of thousands of people and contributing to the death of some of them ought to be cause for action.
You sure got that right!
The answer to your question, though, is apparently a huge number of "follow the leader" whackos (especially following the crop of leaders we have today) would NOT want to know. That's why we have big problems in our country at the moment.
The vaccines themselves are the problem. There will be no herd immunity until the vaccinated all are dead.
Far too many judges have been politicized meaning that getting to the truth and administering justice is secondary to them doing the bidding of a political party.
China's judiciary does the bidding of the CCP. The Nazis judiciary did the bidding of the Nazi party. Sadly, our nation's judiciary is not far behind these despot governments.
IMHO - It will take a miracle or a civil war to bring our nation back to our Constitutional and republican (not party) roots.
There is a concept in statistics called "back testing" where you test your model on actual historical data. The belief is, if it worked on historical data, it has a good chance of working in the future. Hold that thought.
I've been reading up on mainstream psychologists' take on "misinformation" and how to "prebunk" it. Basically, prebunking is the process of informing the reader that misinformation is coming, to point out its flaws, and inject "truth."
The real problem for The Authorities, is that this thing called the interwebz lasts forever. We have the ability to back test The Authorities' honesty and truthfulness, and WOW did they fail. As Irenic wrote, "So many have destroyed trust, brands, fields of science and medicine, governments. They have thrown respect and trust away with both hands, they can’t unload it fast enough."
Thus, when The Authorities nowadays try to lay one on us, we outright laugh in their face. THAT is why they're so peeved. We don't even bother playing Debate Society with them. They're like the popular kids in 11th Grade who looked down on we urchins, when in reality we had no desire to go to their stupid parties and drink wine coolers or dress like a preppie.
It's been DECADES since Tuskegee and blacks STILL distrust the medical industrial complex. Do The Authorities think we back testing "little people" across ALL races are going to let them off the hook this fast? Buckle up, it's gonna be a long ride.
Good for you!!
Everyone we know, who have been on a similar protocol (since 2020), have NOT contracted China Virus.
Great post
Thank you. I had a great comment to provoke my response....
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