U.S. health workers are the first to receive the COVID-19 vaccine – but an alarming number across the country refuse to do so.
Earlier this week, the Ohio government, Mike DeWine, announced that approximately 60 percent of nursing home workers in his state have chosen not to be vaccinated so far.
More than half of New York City ambulance workers have shown skepticism, The Post reported last month.
And now California and Texas have a high percentage of health worker refusals, according to reports.
An estimated 50 percent of front-line workers in Riverside County, Golden State, chose the drug, the Los Angeles Times reported, citing public health officials.
More than half of the hospital workers at St. Elizabeth Community Hospital in California who were eligible for the vaccine did not, the paper reports.
And in the Lone Star State, a Houston Memorial Medical Center doctor told the NPR earlier this month that half of the nurses at the facility would not receive the vaccine, for political reasons.
The excuse shared by the Texas nurses was echoed in a recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll, which found that 29 percent of health workers were “hesitant to vaccinate,” the Times reported.
Respondents who opposed the vaccine said, among other things, they were concerned about the influence of politics on the development of the vaccine, the paper reported.
A nurse at a California hospital who chose not to take the vaccine because she is pregnant said her colleagues, who took the same path as her, believe they don’t need the vaccine to survive the pandemic.
“I feel like people are thinking, ‘I can still get to this end without getting the vaccine,'” April Lu, a 31-year-old nurse at Providence Holy Cross Medical Center, told the Times.
A high rate of vaccine refusal, not only among health professionals, but also the general population, could be problematic, Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch told the paper.
“Our ability as a society to return to a higher level of functioning depends on protecting as many people as possible,” said Marc Lipsitch.