Booster Shots Are Complicating Efforts to Persuade the Unvaccinated to Get Their Shots

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Tue, 2021-10-12 09:43 — mike kraft

Vaccinated people have been burning up the phone lines at the community health center in rural Franklin, La., clamoring for the newly authorized Covid booster shot.

But only a trickle of people have been coming in for their initial doses, even though the rate of full vaccination in the area is still scarcely 39 percent.

The dichotomy illustrates one of the most frustrating problems facing public health officials at this stage of the pandemic: Almost all the eligible adults who remain unvaccinated in the United States are hard-core refusers, and the arrival of boosters is making efforts to coax them as well as those who are still hesitating even more difficult. In the September vaccine monitor survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation, 71 percent of unvaccinated respondents said the need for boosters indicated that the vaccines were not working. ...

In some ways the Covid vaccine landscape reflects great progress: Millions of holdouts have decided to get vaccinated over the past couple months, many prodded at the last minute by mandates or anxiety over the highly transmissible Delta variant. (Three unvaccinated people who showed up for shots in Franklin the other morning came because each knew someone who had recently died from Covid.) The decline of new cases recently in many states is another marker of the success of the vaccine campaigns, public health officials say.

But millions of adults are not covered by mandates. Experts in vaccine behavior fear that the country is bumping up against the ceiling of persuadable people, one that is significantly lower than the threshold needed for broad immunity from Delta and, possibly, future variants.

“One day we just hit a wall,” said Dr. Steven Furr, who practices family medicine in rural Jackson, Ala., where he has even made house calls to give patients their Covid shots. “We had vaccinated everybody who wanted to be vaccinated and there was nobody left.”

About 56 percent of the U.S. population is fully vaccinated, a level that exceeds some early estimates about what it could take to achieve so-called herd immunity against the coronavirus. That percentage will surely rise once the shots are authorized for children under 12. But Delta is so contagious that experts have revised their optimum coverage estimates to 90 percent or higher. ...

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s vaccine surveys, those who say they will never get the vaccine — the “definitely nots” — have held steady for months between 15 and 12 percent of respondents. The rising vaccination rates of late reflect the steady shrinking of a different group — those who say they had been waiting to decide and could be convinced. They now total just 7 percent, down from 39 percent in December.

(An additional 4 percent of respondents say they would get vaccinated only if their workplace or school mandates it.) ...

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