On March 10, CNN medical analyst Dr Leana Wen was concerned that millions of Americans would reject the experimental Covid-19 vaccines, especially as businesses are reopening. She told anchor Chris Cuomo that “we have a very narrow window to tie reopening policy to vaccination status. Otherwise, if everything is reopened, what’s the carrot going to be? How are we going to incentivize people to actually get the vaccine?”.
Transcript from CNN
WEN: My main concern is that we’re not going to reach herd immunity because of vaccine hesitancy. And I know that’s hard for a lot of people to believe, who desperately want the vaccine right now. And they’re thinking, “Oh, well, it’s just a small percentage of people, who are actually anti-vaxxers.” And that’s true. There is the anti-science, anti-vaxxer contingent.
But I think that there are many more people, millions of people who, for whatever reason, have concerns about the vaccine, who just don’t know what’s in it for them. And we need to make it clear to them that the vaccine is the ticket back to pre-Pandemic life. And the window to do that is really narrowing.
I mean, you were mentioning, Chris, about how all these states are reopening. They are reopening at a 100 percent. And we have a very narrow window to tie reopening policy to vaccination status. Because otherwise, if everything is reopened, then what’s the carrot going to be? How are we going to incentivize people to actually get the vaccine?
So that’s why I think the CDC and the Biden Administration needs to come out a lot bolder and say, “If you’re vaccinated, you can do all these things. Here are all these freedoms that you have,” because otherwise, people are going to go out and enjoy these freedoms anyway.
And I fear a situation of coming into the form, where we never reach herd immunity, and then we get hit by the next surge of COVID-19, in the fall, something that we could have prevented, if we just got people vaccinated now.
