About one-third of U.S. military members have refused to be vaccinated for COVID-19, a Pentagon official said in a report Wednesday.
Air Force General Jeff Taliaferro, the deputy director for operations of the joint staff, said according to a congressional panel that ‘acceptance rates are somewhere in the two-thirds area’, according to the Daily Beast.
Although the vaccine is “clear for service members”, soldiers need training to help them understand the benefits of the shots, he told the Army Services Committee.
In total, the Department of Defense fully vaccinated 147,000 service members and 359,000 received a first dose, Pentagon official Robert Salesses told the outlet.
Those who refused can still be deployed, Taliaferro said.
“We have proven over the past year that we are fully capable of working in a COVID environment,” he told Inside Defense.
Officials said they expect all staff from the Department of Defense – which also includes civilians and contractors – to be vaccinated by the end of July or early August, the website reported.
At least 235,258 people in the department have been infected with COVID-19 in the past year, according to a Military.com version, with many of the worst outbreaks aboard naval vessels – including the USS Theodore Roosevelt, where hundreds of sailors made the mistake last year .
The military’s military acceptance rate is at the same level as the general population of the US, according to a journal of the Social Science and Medicine study, which found that 31 percent of the general population do not intend to be vaccinated .
An earlier study found that up to 51 percent of Americans would refuse the shots.
A Pentagon representative on Wednesday did not immediately respond to a request for comment.