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As California has been considered the “epicenter” of the COVID-19 pandemic, several essential frontline workers prioritized in state and county vaccination plans declined to take the photo.
“So many frontline workers in Riverside County refused the vaccine – around 50% – that hospital and civil service officials met to work out how best to distribute unused doses,” said the public health director Kim Saruwatari, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Between 20% and 40% of frontline workers in Los Angeles County did not take the vaccine when it was first offered. More than half of the 700 eligible employees at a Tehama County hospital made the same decision, which resulted in the facility returning 200 doses to the health department.
“They returned these vaccines to us, and we quickly started bringing them out and using them,” said Dr Richard Wickenheiser, Tehama County Health Officer.
As unused doses at Tehama County hospitals are distributed to the next group of eligible individuals, the Times said “what is happening in other areas is unclear.” “State guidelines allow hospitals to offer the vaccine to lower priority people if frontline workers have already been offered the vaccine,” the report said.
The Times cited several public health experts, officials and hospital workers who cited several reasons for the skepticism, including pregnancy, lack of confidence in the federal government, politicization of the virus, and concerns about long-term side effects.
They are front-line workers with priority access to the COVID-19 vaccine, but they refuse to take it.https: //t.co/yDtTh6ccq2
– Los Angeles Times (@latimes) December 31, 2020
“I feel like the public’s perception with healthcare workers is incorrect,” said Nicholas Ruiz, an office assistant at Natividad Medical Center in Salinas, California. “They might think we all know all about this. They might think so because we are working in this environment.
“But I know there are a lot of people who have the same mindset as the audience where they’re still scared to get it,” he added.
Nursing home staff are also hesitant, as administrators and employees polled by The Times estimate that about 25% of staff “have expressed reluctance to take the vaccine.”
As the Times reports:
The consequences are potentially dire: if too few people are vaccinated, the pandemic will drag on indefinitely, leading to future outbreaks, undue strain on the health care system, and continued economic fallout. …
To persuade reluctant workers, many hospitals are using instructional videos and interactive webinars showing staff getting vaccinated. At an Orange County hospital, Anthony Wilkinson, an intensive care nurse who cares for coronavirus patients, said he had colleagues who had “lost faith in the big pharmaceutical companies and even the CDCs “.
Officials at UCLA Health, which includes four hospitals on two campuses, said: “Our workforce may be reluctant to get vaccinated.” However, they did not provide data indicating how many of the more than 37,000 employees had refused the vaccine. As of Tuesday, 7,300 staff members had been vaccinated.
“We are not asking staff to immediately decide to receive the vaccine,” UCLA Health said in a statement. “We want to give the proposed vaccines enough time to make a decision, and we hope staff will continue to understand that the benefits of vaccination clearly outweigh the risks.”
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