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Keith Mann's avatar

As a Canadian, I find it interesting to compare US data to Canadian data on subjects like this. The only study I could find that looked at the reasons why Canadians are vaccine hesitant was COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy in Canada: Content Analysis of Tweets Using the Theoretical Domains Framework (J Med Internet Res. 2021 Apr 13;23(4):e26874.doi: 10.2196/26874. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33769946/), which concluded:

"Vaccine hesitancy stemmed from the following themes: concerns over safety, suspicion about political or economic forces driving the COVID-19 pandemic or vaccine development, a lack of knowledge about the vaccine, antivaccine or confusing messages from authority figures, and a lack of legal liability from vaccine companies."

Notably absent are some of the reasons found in the KFF study: "worried about missing work", "difficult to travel to a vaccination site", "not sure how or where to get the vaccine" and "worried they will have to pay to get the vaccine."

I would theorize that this demonstrates that the absence of a universal social safety net cannot be overcome by a single effort, such as the US government's free COVID vaccine initiative. The effects of such things as job precarity and a lack of dedicated primary care physicians have consequences that impair emergency pandemic efforts, and which cannot be quickly remedied.

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John Kingston's avatar

This post made me think about how vaccinated people, including myself, complain about and attack the unvaccinated for not caring for others, for not being socially responsible, etc. But, of course, our own principal reason to get vaccinated was to protect ourselves, and it's only after having done so that we get the unearned virtue of protecting others.

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