Healthcare workers most likely to refuse Covid vaccine

Forget the general public, vaccine hesitancy is highest among doctors and nurses, with more than half saying they don’t want to be given one of the new Covid-19 vaccines.

They fear longterm side effects from vaccines that have been tested for less than a year, and some nurses are concerned that the vaccines will stop them from conceiving when they want to start a family.

Surveys of healthcare workers in the US and across Europe reveal that vaccine hesitancy levels are as high as 76 percent, according to one poll of 2000 senior care home staff in France.

In Germany, half the nurses and around 25 percent of the doctors surveyed said they won’t have the Covid jab, while one German state has reported that only a third of healthcare workers were happy to be vaccinated.

Similar patterns have been seen in the US. One poll conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation discovered that 29 percent of healthcare workers would “probably or definitely not” have one of the new Covid vaccinations—a figure that is higher than among the general US population.

Vaccine hesitancy is also growing among the public. Last spring, around 79 percent of Germans said they would be willing to be vaccinated, but this has fallen to just 32 percent, according to a recent YouGov poll, and a further 33 percent said they would wait for the first round of vaccines to be completed before deciding. Similar wariness has been recorded in France, with just 40 percent of people willing to be vaccinated, down from 59 percent in August.

The Pfizer/Moderna vaccine, which uses new RNA technology, is viewed with the greatest suspicion. Pollsters say many healthcare workers had seen anti-vax videos on the web, but they may also have been influenced by reports already coming out about serious adverse reactions to the Pfizer vaccine, including several deaths that happened soon after vaccination.

(Source: Financial Times, January 7, 2021)

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