Why wouldn’t someone want a COVID-19 vaccine?
Staring at the raw numbers, it doesn’t seem like a hard choice. Thousands of people are dying of COVID-19 every day. Meanwhile, out of the 75,000 people who received a shot in the vaccine trials from Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, and Novavax, zero died and none was hospitalized after four weeks. As the United States screams past 500,000 fatalities, the choice between a deadly disease and a shot in the arm might seem like the easiest decision in the world.
Or not. One-third of American adults said this month that they don’t want the vaccine or are undecided about whether they’ll get one. That figure has declined in some polls. But it remains disconcertingly high among Republicans, young people, and certain minority populations. In pockets of vaccine hesitancy, the coronavirus could continue to spread, kill, mutate, and escape. That puts all of us at risk.
The Atlantic
Spain’s strategy for rolling out the smallpox vaccine ran into some very 19th-century problems.
Edward Jenner performing his first smallpox vaccination on a child in 1796.Science History Images / Alamy
When the United States green-lit two coronavirus vaccines in December, it was a rare bright spot during this pandemic: Scientists had developed a vaccine for COVID-19 far faster than any other vaccine in history. The end finally seemed at hand.
Since then, many,
many things have gone wrong. In mid-December, Pfizer reported that it had millions of doses sitting around in a warehouse, and no instructions on where to send them. Medical teams trained to vaccinate masses of people have been sitting infuriatingly idle. Health departments originally stuck to banking hours instead of vaccinating around the clock. Governors have slowed things down by relying on confusing guidelines about who can get vaccinated when. Unused doses have expired and been thrown away.