Lauren S. Grossman is a physician, assistant professor of emergency medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, and medical director of the university’s Integrative Medicine Center. She writes in STAT that all Americans should be vaccinated against COVID-19 when a vaccine is available.
My work as an emergency medicine physician has taken me to urban and rural areas on both coasts and in the middle of the country. No matter where I see patients, I hear excuses like these for not getting immunized against influenza:
- “Flu shots don’t work.”
- “I got the vaccination once and it made me sick.”
- “We don’t believe in vaccination.”
- “Vaccination is dangerous.”
It puzzles me, then, that they’ve come to the emergency department because they are feeling awful with fever, chills, cough, body aches, and fatigue — in other words, with the flu — expecting a fix for something that could have been easily prevented.
Indeed, 43% of Americans forgo getting vaccinated against influenza. That doesn’t bode well for the highly anticipated vaccine against coronavirus, something that President Donald Trump has said we might have by the end of the year, though others say it will take longer.
To achieve herd immunity, which makes it more difficult for an infectious disease to spread through a population, 80% or more of us need to be immune to Covid-19, either because we’ve been infected with the virus that causes it or we’ve gotten the vaccine against it.