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Without a widespread willingness of the populace to get vaccinated, the consequences could be disastrous: The pandemic won't end, leading to future surges, an overburdened healthcare system, a crippled economy, and needless deaths. https://www.metrotimes.com/detroit/the-covid-19-vaccines-are-finally-here-but-many-in-michigan-are-skeptical/Content?oid=26220637
For Black people, vaccine skepticism is rooted in history. Medical schools used the bodies of enslaved Black people for anatomy dissections. Black women were sterilized and used for gynecological research. And then there was the Tuskegee syphilis study.
"We can't have a conversation about whether to take a vaccine without acknowledging the history of racism that we have had in the health care system," @MayorMikeDuggan said.
But skepticism of the vaccines goes beyond race. Less than half of Americans said they will definitely get the vaccine, and about a quarter said they will not, according to a recent survey from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
In a recent Kaiser Family Foundation survey, nearly a third of frontline workers nationwide indicated they were "vaccine hesitant," saying they "probably or definitely would not get a COVID-19 vaccine even if it were available for free and deemed safe by scientists."
At Henry Ford Health System, about 21% of its more than 30,000 employees have declined a vaccine, and another 19% have not responded to an invitation to get inoculated.
A Yahoo/YouGov poll found that 44% of Republicans believe a far-fetched conspiracy theory that claims Bill Gates, the billionaire founder of Microsoft, is using vaccines to implant microchips in people to monitor their movements as part of a global surveillance plot.
"The question is, do you want your body to build germ-fighting tools now when you're healthy or do you want to wait until you're on a ventilator struggling for life and then hope your body manufactures those tools?" Duggan said.
