Pressures to Take the Coronavirus Vaccines: Safety, School, Salary, and Social

Pressures to Take the Coronavirus Vaccines:  Safety, School, Salary, and Social.

Without a tested, manufactured and available vaccine yet, it is premature to estimate its public acceptance.  The core people who might be opposed to taking it is estimated at 20%.  Other people have hesitancy, because it is called rushed, and it doesn’t exist yet, and hasn’t yet been scientifically and politically endorsed.

If destiny and sanity triumphs, when the vaccines emerge in early 2021, hopefully, we will have proactive political leadership who will take and promote the vaccines themselves, and push for funding and early and widespread distribution. 

The horrendous number of deaths by next year, and the social contacts where people will know sick people, and how much they have suffered, will self-motivate people to take the vaccines for their personal safety, and for the safety of their families, and coworkers.  While the government has been funding treatment for the Coronavirus, with a successful vaccine, insurance plans may not cover people for Coronavirus treatment if they refuse to take the vaccines.

The schools will undoubtedly require students to be vaccinated for in-person classes, which will also allow their parents to go to work.  This will make it very inconvenient and costly for vaccine fearful parents to have to self educate their children.  When vaccines become widely available, schools may also discontinue public funding of internet classes.

Industries and businesses are not going to take the risks of two week quarantines of many of their employees by hiring or continuing someone who refuses to take a well established Coronavirus vaccine.  With heightened awareness, they may also require flu vaccinations.  In restaurant businesses, nobody may want to go there if they are not guaranteed that the staff is vaccinated.  This would be even true for vaccinated patrons if the vaccine was not 100% effective.

Since masks and social distancing will be abandoned in a vaccinated world, nobody will want to socialize with those who are not vaccinated.  They will soon find themselves and their families socially isolated, since the Coronavirus can still be spread asymptomatically or presymptomatically.  Hanging out with other non-vaxers would be the most dangerous situation.  Non-vaxers may be required to wear masks, which would be the last insult, since some of them are probably non-maskers as well.

All of these pressures will reduce the percentages of the non-vaccinated.  The misinformed who believe that the Coronavirus is no worse than the flu are being countered by new studies that show that it is 5 to 10 times more lethal.  Much more will be known about the Coronavirus a half year to a year from now.

Of course, we have been assuming effective vaccines without serious or long term side effects.  If some vaccines are not 100% effective, an option could be to take several vaccines.  There are still two effective pneumonia vaccines to cover the larger number of infections.

Of course, some vaccines may be time limited if the Coronavirus mutates significantly in a year.  Or the antibodies or T cells generated by a vaccine may reduce in time.  This could require more vaccinations on a yearly basis.

We see many pressures that vaccine opposition may not effectively stop the establishment of a Coronavirus free society.

About Dennis SILVERMAN

I am a retired Professor of Physics and Astronomy at U C Irvine. For two decades I have been active in learning about energy and the environment, and in reporting on those topics for a decade. For the last four years I have added science policy. Lately, I have been reporting on the Covid-19 pandemic of our times.
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