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They can come to the front of the line for a COVID-19 vaccine if they want to, but some U.S. healthcare workers are skeptical about taking a vaccine that was developed in record time, even as the pandemic continues. .
Some want more time, despite assurances from experts that they trust the vaccine research process conducted by the US Food and Drug Administration.
“I think I would get the vaccine later, but now I’m a little suspicious,” nurse Yolanda Dodson, 55, told AFP.
Dodson works at Montefiore Hospital in New York City and spent the spring at the heart of the deadly fight against the virus.
The vaccine studies so far “look promising, but I don’t think there is enough data yet,” Dodson said.
“We have to be grateful to those who are willing to take that risk” to participate in the studies, he said. “It is a very personal decision.”
Diana Torres is a nurse at a Manhattan hospital who saw several of her co-workers die from the new coronavirus this spring.
She is particularly suspicious of the vaccines that were rushed to pass under the Trump administration, which she says has handled the entire pandemic as “some kind of joke.”
“This is a vaccine that was developed in less than a year and was approved under the same administration and government agencies that allowed the virus to spread like wildfire,” Torres said.
“They didn’t have enough time or people to study the vaccine,” he said.
“This time I’ll stop by and see how it unfolds.”
Data from clinical trials have shown that two vaccines, one developed by Pfizer and BioNtech, the other by Moderna and the US National Institutes of Health, are approximately 95 percent effective.
Normally, the FDA requires six months of follow-up, but if no adverse reactions appear in the first two months, it is rare to see anything in the next four, and the raging pandemic has altered the risk-benefit calculations.
There were 44,000 volunteers in the Pfizer trial and 30,000 in the Moderna trial, and the data was protected by company security barriers and analyzed by experts without political pressure.
Nursing colleagues who commented on Torres’ Facebook page seemed equally skeptical.
“They failed miserably with the PPE (personal protective equipment) and testing and now they want you to be guinea pigs for the vaccine,” wrote a friend.
Such reservations are common among the 20 million healthcare workers in the United States, the country worst hit by the pandemic with more than 272,000 deaths, said Marcus Plescia, chief medical examiner for the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO ).
“There are a lot of people who feel we don’t have enough data yet,” he said.
And yet many of the same people are saying “‘I’m going to get this (vaccine), but I’m going to wait a bit.’
This reluctance “could end up being a really big problem,” Plescia said, especially since hospitals probably won’t be able to force their employees to take vaccines.
There is a danger when very few people, including healthcare workers, get vaccinated, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said.
“This is the whole anti-vax movement of people who are skeptical about vaccines. On top of that, they have added skepticism about this,” he said Wednesday.
A Gallup poll from late October to early November found that only 58 percent of Americans would take a Covid-19 vaccine if it were immediately available, compared to 50 percent in September.
That reluctance has prompted New York and six other states to create their own commission to evaluate vaccine safety, Cuomo said.
“Most of us believe there is an ethical obligation to vaccinate ourselves,” Plescia said.
“Not only are we a very important workforce, healthcare workers take care of people who are very vulnerable,” and medical professionals would hate to see them get sick.
New Jersey radiologist Mohamed Sfaxi, whose rural hospital has seen an influx of Covid patients in the past three weeks, is among those trying to convince his reluctant colleagues to get vaccinated.
“We have people who are cautious, we have to talk to them and explain the data to them,” said Sfaxi, 57.
Many people, in his opinion, are concerned about the new “messenger RNA” technology used by the Pfizer and Modern vaccines, which hack human cells and effectively transform them into vaccine factories through tiny strands of genetic information.
Sfaxi says some are also concerned that vaccines have developed so quickly.
However, the reason it was so fast is simply “because science has progressed and the whole world focused on it,” he said.
Disturbed by the images he sees every day of the lungs of patients damaged by the new coronavirus, Sfaxi said he plans to get vaccinated as soon as possible, without “hesitation.”
Then, you will check yourself for antibodies on a regular basis.
“That will allow me to see when I start to have an immune reaction … and have a little less anxiety,” he said.
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