Vaccine hesitancy snowballs in the US
My previous post was that we are on the cusp of a vaccine hesitancy problem in the US which is likely to snarl the effort and interfere with some of the more bullish expectations. Confirmatory evidence is arriving at a rapid pace. WashPost reports that most unvaccinated Americans do not intend to get the jab anyway:
2 in 3 (of unvaccinated Americans) told pollsters they were either “not likely at all” or “not very likely” to get the injections. That proportion has remained level for more than month. Meanwhile, just 14 percent of unvaccinated Americans said they were likely to get the vaccine.
At the same time, no-shows are on the rise and appointments are going unfilled just as the US opened vaccinations to all adults. There are reports of wide open vacancies from all over the US - Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Pennsylvania and even Hawaii, to name a few.
Here is a snapshot of a vaccine mega-center in New Jersey with over 11,000 open appointments just for the 10 remaining days of April:
As I mentioned before, this is the case while the covid-19 crisis grows outside the United States with vaccines in very short supply. The situation seems unsustainable. The US will probably have to succumb to diplomatic pressure to begin supplying vaccines and raw materials to its allies in the rest of the world.
We are fast becoming an over-supplied “vaccine superpower” and that has geopolitical consequences.
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