U.S. health workers are first in line to receive the COVID-19 vaccine – but an alarming number across the country are refusing to do so.
Earlier this week, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine announced that about 60 percent of nursing home workers in his state have so far chosen not to be vaccinated.
More than half of EMS employees in New York have shown skepticism, The Post reported last month.
And according to reports, California and Texas now have a high degree of bounce for health workers.
An estimated 50 percent of frontline workers in Riverside County in the Golden State voted against the drug, the Los Angeles Times reported, citing public health officials.
More than half of the hospital workers in the St. Elizabeth Community Hospital in California who were eligible to receive the vaccine, the newspaper did not.
And in the Lone Star State, a doctor at Houston Memorial Medical Center told NPR earlier this month that half of the nurses in the facility would not receive the vaccine, citing political reasons.
The apology shared by the nurses in Texas was reflected in a recent survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation which found that 29 percent of health care workers “hesitate against vaccines,” the Times reported.
Respondents to the surveys, which leaned towards taking the vaccine, said, among other things, that they were concerned about how politics would affect the development of the vaccine, the newspaper reported.
A nurse at a California hospital who chose not to take the vaccine because she was pregnant said her co-workers who chose the same path as her believe they do not need the vaccine to carry out the pandemic not.
“I feel like people are thinking, ‘I can still make it until it ends without getting the vaccine,'” April Lu, a 31-year-old nurse at Providence Holy Cross Medical Center, told the Times.
A high percentage of vaccine rejection among not only health care workers but also the general population can be problematic, Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch told the newspaper.
“Our ability as a society to return to a higher level of functioning depends on protecting as many people as possible,” said Marc Lipsitch.