People are rejecting vaccinations

Across the country, people who have the option of getting vaccinated are turning it down. In Ohio, approximately 60 percent of nursing home workers refused their first dose. In Georgia, so many rural health care workers have declined the vaccine that the state decided to expand access to its doses because they were “literally sitting in freezers.” Similar reports have emerged from hospitals in Los Angeles, one of the hottest spots in the country.

At the same time, vaccine hesitancy seems to be decreasing generally. In several polls, the share of Americans saying they are likely or certain to take the vaccine has grown from about 50 percent last summer to more than 60 percent, and in one poll 73 percent — a figure some public health experts say exceeds the threshold for herd immunity.

To continue making inroads, it will be important to avoid lumping together the concerns of all vaccine-hesitant people, which may have less to do with conspiracy theories than the uncertainty surrounding the vaccine’s effects on pregnant people or the country’s history of medical racism.

“Not all Americans trust medicine and science,” Brendan Nyhan, a professor of government at Dartmouth, writes in The Atlantic. “Reaching them will require working with well-regarded institutions, such as religious organizations, schools, businesses and civic groups. It will be especially important to partner with advocates in communities that have been mistreated or marginalized in the past.”
How far behind are we, really?

Despite all these difficulties, some vaccine experts say they are not especially alarmed by the speed of vaccine distribution: With the exception of Israel and the United Arab Emirates, the pace of vaccination in the United States is comparable to or better than that of most other countries.

And as Fauci noted on Sunday, that pace has been picking up markedly in recent days. With the country now averaging 500,000 vaccinations a day, he said, Biden’s goal of vaccinating 100 million people in the first 100 days would be a “realistic” one.

“It’s the early stages of a really complicated task, but a task that we’re up for,” Nancy Messonnier, a top C.D.C. official involved in the vaccine distribution, told Stat on Tuesday. “I really expect the pace of administration to go up pretty massively in the next couple weeks.”
The New York Times