[Photo/Agencies]
Millions of doses of Pfizer s COVID-19 vaccine will be available by the end of this month, but while some Americans have eagerly awaited the vaccine s arrival, others are taking a wait-and-see approach.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has proposed that the vaccine first go to healthcare workers and then adults in long-term care facilities, those with high-risk medical conditions, and essential workers.
A new Gallup Panel poll released on Tuesday showed that 63 percent of Americans are willing to be vaccinated against the disease, an increase from 58 percent in an October poll.
More than two-thirds of Americans in the 18-44 and 65-and-older age groups are willing to get the vaccine, according to the poll.
The U.S. death toll from COVID-19 surpassed the number of World War II combat fatalities on Thursday night, just hours after a committee of leading U.S. vaccine scientists recommended the Food and Drug Administration authorize the first COVID-19 vaccine for Americans.
The vaccine, though, won t help soon enough, said Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warning that the country s daily death count will likely rival national tragedies such as the 9/11 terror attacks and Pearl Harbor for months. We are in the timeframe now that probably for the next 60 to 90 days we re going to have more deaths per day than we had at 9/11 or we had at Pearl Harbor, Redfield said during at an event hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations, The Hill reported.
Millions of health care workers are slated to receive the first batch of potentially lifesaving COVID-19 vaccines by the end of this month. But not all of them want to be first in line.
Only one-third of a panel of 13,000 nurses said they would voluntarily take a vaccine; another third said they wouldn’t and the rest said they were unsure, according to a late October survey by the American Nurses Association.
Nina Siegrist, a registered nurse with Hospice of the Piedmont in Charlottesville, Virginia, said she wasn’t at all eager to get a COVID-19 vaccination.
“I actually even hate getting a flu shot, but I’ve had to get one every year since I became a nurse, she said. Where I stand is that if my medical director says, ‘Listen, all hospice clinicians are going to get vaccinated,’ then I’ll get vaccinated. But I definitely want to read the details on the clinical trials first.”