Are you willing to get the Covid vaccine when offered?

For years now, health experts have been warning that COVID-era politics and the spread of anti-vaxxer lies have brought us to the brink of public-health catastrophe—that a Great Collapse of Vaccination Rates is nigh. This hasn’t come to pass.

In spite of deep concerns about a generation of young parents who might soon give up on immunizations altogether—not simply for COVID, but perhaps for all disease—many of the stats we have are looking good. Standard vaccination coverage among babies and toddlers, including the pandemic babies born in 2020, is “high and stable,” the CDC reports. And kindergarteners’ immunization rates, which dipped after the pandemic started, are no longer losing ground.

Whatever gaps in early childhood vaccination were brought on by the chaos of early 2020 have since been reversed, Alison Buttenheim, a professor of nursing and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, told me. “We’ve substantially caught up, which is incredible. It’s actually an amazing feat.”

But even in the shadow of this triumph, a more specific crisis in vaccine acceptance has emerged. Americans aren’t now suspicious of inoculations on the whole—the nation isn’t anti-vax—but we have lost faith in yearly COVID shots. Barely any children have been getting them. Among adults, the drop in uptake has been rapid and relentless: By the spring of 2022, 56 percent of all adults had received their initial booster shot; a year later, just 28 percent were up-to-date; so far this COVID season, just 19 percent can say the same.

Of course, the dangers from infection have been dropping, too. Almost all of us have been exposed to COVID at this point, either through prior immunization, natural infection, or—most likely—both. That makes the disease much less deadly than it’s ever been before. (Among kids, the CDC now attributes “0.00%” of weekly deaths to COVID.)

But for one age group in particular—people over 65—the crashing vaccination rates should inspire dread. More than 1,500 deaths each week are still associated with COVID, and almost all of them are senior citizens; current data hint that COVID has been killing seniors at seven times the rate of flu. Across the nation’s nursing homes and retirement communities, the Great Collapse is real.

Like younger American adults, seniors haven’t been avoiding all recommended immunizations, just the ones for COVID. Their flu-shot rates have gone down a little in the past few years, but only by a handful of percentage points from a pandemic-driven, all-time high of 75 percent.

This season, about 70 percent of people over 65 have received their flu vaccine, in line with average rates that haven’t changed that much for decades. In the meantime, seniors’ uptake of the latest COVID shots has fallen off by more than half since 2022, to just 38 percent.

These diverging rates—steady for the flu, plummeting for COVID—are notably at odds with the attendant risks. Seniors seem to understand the value of inoculating themselves against the flu. So why do they forgo the same precaution against something so much worse?

One might blame the toxic political battles around vaccines, and rampant misinformation about their ill effects. “Something terrible has happened to broaden and intensify public rejection of vaccines and other biomedical innovations in the United States,” the vaccine expert Peter Hotez wrote in his recent book, The Deadly Rise of Anti-science.

Certainly toxic politics and rampant misinformation exist, but the turn against the experts that Hotez and others have decried doesn’t really fit the emergency described above.

Taken as a whole, the population of Americans over 65 is hardly soured on vaccines. Nor are they afraid of COVID vaccination in particular: Though political divides persist, more than 95 percent of seniors received their initial round of shots. More than 95 percent!...........

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/a...S&cvid=b09d20815fef4841821f4b50619601b5&ei=16

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/01/covid-19-vaccines-seniors-risk/677104/