It's immunization season, meaning health agencies and medical centers are urging Americans to prep for winter by getting their COVID, flu, RSV, and pneumonia shots. Public health experts are expressing concern, however, that vaccination rates ahead of the holidays, with peak infection typically emerging from December to February, are stagnant, reports the Washington Post. According to the CDC, only about 37% of US adults ages 18 and over have received a seasonal flu shot, while just 19% of that group have gotten the updated COVID vaccine.
For children, those figures are even lower—33% for flu, and just under 9% for coronavirus. A smidge over 40% of adults 75 and older, meanwhile, have received a shot for respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV. Only 41% of eligible infants, who are also vulnerable to RSV, had received that antibody treatment as of March. Most of these numbers are similar to last year's, give or take a few percentage points. So what's driving the reluctance to get a protective jab? The Post notes that, for younger people especially, lack of insurance could be playing a part. But misinformation has also fueled Americans' mistrust of getting vaxxed, a concern that was present in certain circles even before COVID hit.
An Annenberg Public Policy Center survey from late last year found, for instance, that in August 2022, 73% of those surveyed believed the COVID vaccine is safe; that figure in November 2023 fell to 66%. A full 22% of respondents think it's safer to get COVID than to get vaccinated, up from 10% in April 2021. "There has been a loss of trust in science over the course of the pandemic," Tara Kirk Sell of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security tells the Post. Andrew Stanley Pekosz of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health adds that many people aren't even anti-vax, per se, but still hedge. "They just don't know what to believe, and when you don't know what to believe, you end up not doing anything," he says. (More vaccines stories.)
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