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U.S. healthcare workers are the first to receive the COVID-19 vaccine – but an alarming number across the country are refusing to do so.
Earlier this week, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine revealed that about 60% of nursing home workers in his state have so far chosen not to be vaccinated.
More than half of New York’s EMS workers have shown skepticism, The Post reported last month.
And now California and Texas are experiencing high refusal rates from healthcare workers, according to reports.
About 50% of frontline workers in Riverside County, Golden State, have chosen not to use the drug, The Los Angeles Times reported, citing public health officials.
More than half of hospital employees at St. Elizabeth’s Community Hospital in California who were eligible to receive the vaccine did not, according to the newspaper.
And in Lone Star State, a doctor at Houston Memorial Medical Center told NPR earlier this month that half of the nurses at the facility would not get the vaccine, citing political reasons.
The excuse shared by Texas nurses was echoed in a recent Kaiser Family Foundation survey that found 29% of health workers were “hesitant to get the shot,” the Times reported.
Survey respondents who opposed taking the vaccine said, among other reasons, that they were concerned about the influence of politics on vaccine development, the newspaper reported.
A nurse at a California hospital who chose not to be vaccinated because she is pregnant said her colleagues who had chosen the same path as she believed they did not need the vaccine to get through the pandemic.
“I feel like people are thinking, ‘I can still do this until this 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 refusals not only among healthcare workers, but also in the general population, could 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.
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