As of May 5, 2021 more than 56% of adults in the US have received at least one shot of COVID-19 vaccine according to the Centers for Disease Control, but the daily rates of vaccination are dropping fast. The people who wanted the vaccine have gotten it and now the ones who remain are the ones who are hesitant.
Vaccine hesitancy is one of the barriers to reaching herd immunity against COVID-19. Herd immunity is when enough of the population is vaccinated against a disease that the likelihood of an infected person transmitting the disease to others is minimal.
Doctors are not in total agreement on what percent of the population needs to receive the vaccine to reach herd immunity, or if it’s even possible, but all agree that the more people that are vaccinated, the sooner we can safely return to pre-pandemic activities.
So what is causing people to hesitate? Many think it is because they don’t have all the facts.
Dorothy Anna Moore, a Biology student at MCCC, says “ If people had a little bit of understanding and were open to hearing about the science and the facts then I feel like they wouldn’t have this hesitancy… it’s a shame that people are closing their mind to this.”
However, education about the facts and science may not be what people need most.
According to Dr. Saad Omer, the director of the Yale Institute for Global Health who studies vaccine hesitancy who was recently interviewed in The New York Times, “The instinct from the medical community was ‘if only we could educate [the hesitant people].’ It was patronizing and it turns out it’s not true.”
According to Dr. Omer his researchers found that the main reasons people are likely to be hesitant are based on moral intuitions and psychological dispositions. People who are skeptical of authority, people who are concerned for body purity, and people who have certain religious convictions are among those most likely to resist vaccination.
To find out more about how vaccine hesitancy is impacting our own community, the VOICE surveyed 14 MCCC students and found that 79% of students stated that they have gotten, or plan to get, the COVID-19 vaccine while 21% stated that they had not.
Hesitancy among students and their families followed along the lines of Dr. Omer’s research.
One student who has hesitant family members, Elijah Parkman-Williams (also VOICE Editor in Chief), says “My family ensures to take extra precautions when going anywhere, but a few of them do it out of being weary from a Christian standpoint. They pray that it doesn’t come onto any of us, but in the event that it did I would encourage them to take the vaccine for the sake of others in the house.”
Another student, who asked to remain anonymous to talk freely on the controversial topic, says she and her family plan to wait on getting the vaccine says, “I’m certainly not an anti-vaxer, far from it. But I’m not in a hurry… I trust the pharmaceutical industry as much as I trust the food industry, which means I’m skeptical, do my research, and take my precautions…In a few months, once we have more data, and if I feel more at ease, I’ll likely get the vaccine over the summer when I can spare a few days if I do get sick.”
The New Jersey Department of Health Commissioner Judith Persichelli told SpotlightNJ that, “ we know we also need more strategic approaches to reach all residents. Coupled with messaging, we, as you know, partner with church leaders and community leaders to create pop-up vaccination events to bring vaccine closer to where people are.”
The COVID-19 vaccine has also become a political issue making it more difficult to reach hesitant people. According to KFF Covid-19 Vaccine Monitor, about a third of adults resist vaccination and a significant majority of them are Republicans.
Professor Crystal Adams, an assistant professor in the Nursing department at MCCC, says, “If we could calm down the political noise around the issue of COVID and the issue of the vaccine then I think people will be more willing to listen to the science.”
A solution that many have suggested is making vaccines mandatory but this also brings up an ethical issue of whether it’s right to force people to take the vaccine by barricading even if that means the possibility of not reaching herd immunity.
In response to the vaccine mandate, Professor Adams said, “I think it’s a complicated solution [making vaccines mandatory]. But I do think it would be helpful, but I think it’s more complicated than simply yes or no.”
Despite the urgency that health officials have to vaccinate people, and making it mandatory could be a possible solution. According to an interview at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health conducted with Joanne Rosen, a faculty director at school Public Health, she says “It is a more complicated administrative manner to have a vaccine mandate that applies to adults… but that would be something that states would have to work into a mandate.”
While making the vaccine mandatory presents itself to be a plausible solution to reach people that are hesitant against the COVID-19 solution, it does not mean that this solution will lead to everyone getting vaccinated.
Professor Florence Lee Assistant Professor of Nursing Education at MCCC says, “there is always somebody or a few people who can get a note from a doctor for example to say that I’m allergic to something within the vaccine. There are ways to go around that mandate.”
When asked whether there was still hope in tackling this issue of vaccine hesitancy, Professor Lee told the VOICE, “Absolutely… making it available, making it free, seeking volunteers to administer the vaccine, putting it out in all of the communities and making sure that its fair and equitable distribution to everybody is how we can move forward… with some of the hesitancy that comes around.”
