What do we do about COVID vaccine refusal?

Health-care workers refusing a COVID-19 shot is a troubling sign for the year to come

Syringes.
(Image credit: Illustrated | iStock)

At Ohio nursing homes, the state's governor said Wednesday, about 60 percent of staff have chosen not to take a COVID-19 vaccine despite their work with the single most vulnerable population in this pandemic: elderly and unwell people in an institutional setting where transmission is often swift and symptoms severe.

In California, many frontline health-care workers are refusing vaccination, too. "At Providence Holy Cross Medical Center in Mission Hills, one in five frontline nurses and doctors have declined the shot," the Los Angeles Times reported Thursday. "Roughly 20 percent to 40 percent of L.A. County's frontline workers who were offered the vaccine did the same, according to county public health officials. So many frontline workers in Riverside County have refused the vaccine — an estimated 50 percent — that hospital and public officials met to strategize how best to distribute the unused doses."

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.