Fighting Low Vaccination Rates

It’s getting to the point where it’s hard to feel bad for people who get COVID. After all, the vaccines are more than readily available anywhere in the country. But it’s also easy to focus on the idiots out there who are refusing to get it in order to own the LIBZ. There are other, legitimate, reasons why some people aren’t getting the vaccine. We need to have a public health campaign focused at the micro level to make it as easy as possible. Not surprisingly, those at the lower end of the economic ladder have fewer opportunities for a vaccine than those farther up said latter. One significant issue is that workers are scared of missing work if get sick after vaccine. A Kaiser Family Foundation poll from a couple of weeks ago showed that 48% of unvaccinated adults listed fears of missing work as a major reason for not getting the shot. Now, it’s true that the top two reasons–with large majorities of the unvaccinated selecting these reasons–are side effects and safety of the vaccine, which are part of the misinformation campaign that is also politicized. Given that people in the poll could choose more than one answer, it’s hard to disentangle the economic factors from everything else. But the fact of the matter is that even in a situation where low-wage workers have more power on the job than anytime in recent memory, nearly one-half of the unvaccinated are too afraid of missing work in order to get it. That alone says a lot about the precarious nature of the economic underclass in America. And given low vaccine rates in Black and Latino communities, it all comes back to race as well.