Hmm, well mine was from the Royal College of Obs & Gyn. Technically your second cite is referring to your first, it seems.
The very same thing happened to my brother & his wife. They were pushing 40 when the blessed “Surprise!” occurred. So I get that non-planners are not necessarily “feckless” in your terms. But happy surprises like yours are certainly a minority experience versus the far more common “What us worry?” pair of 22 yos goin’ at it.
Both of these things. Congrats on the impending new one. 
This is a real believe-it-or-not:
Elderly Britons are refusing the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine because they’d rather ‘wait for the English one’ and failing to turn up for appointments as ministers scramble to turbo-charge the jab’s roll out.
Over-80s have turned their noses up at the Belgian-made shots in Stockton-on-Tees and insisted on having the Oxford jab, according to Dr Paul Williams who is administering the vaccine to residents.
And missed appointments led to up to 10 police officers receiving their first doses in Nottingham to prevent vital supplies going to waste. Once defrosted from -78C (-104F) doses of Pfizer’s jab must be used within days, official guidance from the UK’s regulator says.
The caveat here is that this is in the Daily Mail ( here - warning, cookie fest) and I have not yet been able to find the story in a more reputable source.
BTW- someone better tell them:
Manufacturer
MedImmune UK Ltd
6 Renaissance Way
Liverpool, L24 9JW
United Kingdom
MedImmune Pharma B.V., Nijmegen
Lagelandseweg 78
Nijmegen, 6545CG
Netherlands
j
ETA - should we also tell them “the English one” is a GMO?
OK, now found it on multiple other sources, like this one, which also includes this telling comment from the doctor in question:
Paul Williams, former Labour MP for Stockton South, said it shows nationalism has consequences, given they were delaying having a jab at the height of the pandemic.
j
The science behind who should get a vaccine first isn’t strong enough for this sort of event to be a big worry, IMHO.
Suppose someone took the emergency authorization phrase seriously and wants to wait for their national drug evaluation agency to give full approval. Fine. I read the journal articles, thought the approved products sound excellent, and will be glad to get my protection first. In a few months, when the cautious people see more data indicating that benefits exceed risk, they can have it.
Perhaps I am making people sound more rational, in this post, than, they are. But some of the early refusers just need more time.
I agree.
I think it’s good that certain groups are getting priority right now, but so many people need vaccinating that I don’t think we need to be worried yet about the consequences of people refusing. If someone refuses it, just move on the the next person. The main aim should be to get as many people vaccinated as soon as possible.
Some of the most troubling impediments to vaccination right now are (often well-intentioned) bureaucrats and politicians putting too many roadblocks in the way. In New York State, Governor Andrew Cuomo has placed such tight restrictions on who gets the vaccine first, including massive fines for hospitals and clinics that violate the rules, that some clinics have actually chosen to thrown some does of the vaccine out or let it expire rather than administer it to the “wrong” people. Others hospitals have supplies sitting in freezers because they’ve administered all of their doses to eligible people, but can’t move on to new groups without the Governor’s permission.
If you can keep it in the freezer, at least it can be used later, but once it’s out of the freezer it has to be used pretty quickly or discarded. One of the problems is that the vaccine comes in vials of 10 does, so if you have to open a new vial to give a person the shot, you need to have nine other people available if you don’t want the rest of the vial to go off. The same New York Times story talked about a health center in Harlem that faced exactly this problem:
They managed to find another couple of eligible people, but threw three doses away because they didn’t want to risk violating the Governor’s order.
In Britain, a different type of red tape is getting in the way. A whole bunch of retired doctors and nurses are willing to help administer the vaccine, so it can be distributed more quickly, but before they can do it, they need to complete a National Health Service checklist of certificates and documentation, including things like:
- Conflict resolution, level 1
- Data security awareness, level 1
- Equality, diversity & human rights
- Fire safety, level 1
- Preventing radicalisation, level 1
These are people who are coming back with the sole purpose of administering the COVID vaccine to people whom the NHS has already deemed eligible, and they have to sit through hours of online training on irrelevant human resources bullshit.
Agreed. And honestly, this new focus on getting angry at vaccine refusers is continuing the toxic nature of covid discourse in America.
This is a piece of depressingly predictable reading:
Depressingly predictable because, well, have a think about the sort of people you would expect to refuse a vaccine in the middle of a pandemic:
Interestingly, while vaccine hesitant and resistant individuals in Ireland and the UK varied in relation to their social, economic, cultural, political, and geographical characteristics, both populations shared similar psychological profiles. Specifically, COVID-19 vaccine hesitant or resistant persons were distinguished from their vaccine accepting counterparts by being more self-interested, more distrusting of experts and authority figures (i.e. scientists, health care professionals, the state), more likely to hold strong religious beliefs (possibly because these kinds of beliefs are associated with distrust of the scientific worldview) and also conspiratorial and paranoid beliefs (which reflect lack of trust in the intentions of others). They were also more likely to believe that their lives are primarily under their own control, to have a preference for societies that are hierarchically structured and authoritarian, and to be more intolerant of migrants in society (attitudes that have been previously hypothesised to be consistent with, and understandable in the context of, evolved responses to the threat of pathogens). They were also more impulsive in their thinking style, and had a personality characterised by being more disagreeable, more emotionally unstable, and less conscientious.
I don’t think there’s a single thing in that para which I wasn’t expecting. Vaccine resistance also maps to younger age, lower earning (which itself, I’m confident, will map to poorer educational attainment) and getting your information from social media.
There’s an interesting section about, Well, how do we get to these people?
Moreover, given their lack of altruism, their internal locus of control, and their anti-migrant views, messages tailored to vaccine hesitant or resistant individuals could emphasise the personal benefits of vaccination against COVID-19, and the benefits to those with whom they most closely identify. Furthermore, given that the results of this study indicate that vaccine hesitant or resistant individuals are typically less agreeable, less conscientious, less emotionally stable, and less analytically capable, public health messaging targeted at these persons should be clear, direct, repeated, and positively orientated.
j
This might be an important passage to quote as well:
The UK data collection took place between March 23rd and 28th, 2020. Data collection began 52 days after the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in the UK, and the same day the UK Prime Minister announced that people were required to stay at home except for very limited purposes. The Irish data collection took place between March 31st and April 5th, 2020. This was 31 days after the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in Ireland, 19 days after the first physical distancing measures were enacted (i.e. closure of all childcare and educational facilities), and two days after the Taoiseach (Irish Prime Minister) announced that people were not to leave their homes except for very limited purposes. Therefore, these data were collected within the first week of the strictest physical distancing measures being enacted in both countries.
And this one, in the section on limitations:
Third, questions were answered with regards to a hypothetical vaccine whose effectiveness, risk of adverse side-effects, and contraindications were unknown. Continued monitoring throughout the pandemic, and throughout the development of the vaccine(s) for COVID-19, will help us to better understand changing levels of hesitance and resistance to vaccination, and our group are engaging in this work.
It’s possible attitudes have changed considerably in the last nine months, or at least since the approvals of and release of safety data related to the vaccines.
Agreed, but there’s a limit to what you can quote, both for fair use and for readability of the post. I was struck at the time by the first para you quoted. The government decides that the situation is so grave that everybody is locked down for the first time in living memory… if that isn’t enough to persuade you that you need to be vaccinated, what the hell is? (Vaccine accepting numbers - ie not refusing or hesitant - were 64.9% in Ireland and 69% in the UK).
j
Well, I’m struck by that too. It certainly seems that not everything reconciles. I’m not sure what to think the answer is.
Very interesting. And, as you say, disappointingly unsurprising. I have a quibble, not with your words, but with the report’s …
I find an interesting set of contradictions there which I’ve highlighted by removing the intermediate distracting text. They’re anti-authority, but pro-religious authority. They think they’re in control of their lives, but prefer an authoritarian society.
Sounds like the usual contradictory rag-bag we associate with low information conservatives and reactionaries. IOW
I don’t think; I beleive. And one of the things I most believe is that everybody else should believe just as I do.
And yet the latter part of this is exactly the angle the paper takes, as if it were self-evident that any concerns at all about these vaccines couldn’t possibly be anything but unfounded.
I too noticed the set of contradictions. But maybe there is another answer for it. Maybe the answer is that this paper simply threw the kitchen sink at its target, with every negative characterization it could imagine, even if that led to inconsistencies.
This I don’t get. The rest tracks, but this one sticks out. When the government is saying “It’s safe, it helps, you should do it,” why don’t they?
Actually, it seems to me that I’m hearing a lot less from the anti-vaccine loons than I’m used to hearing in regard to the MMR, DTaP, Salk-polio, rotavirus, HepB, Prevnar 13, and
Gardasil. There’s much less loony pushback on regarding the COVID vaccine.
I’m gussing that it’s because they have seen what it’s like to live with the disease. They’re getting a taste of what their parents and grandparents had just been through when they took their children in for the MMR or polio vaccine.
Here in the UK, social media has been doing its thing again:
Some of the disinformation seen by the BBC on social media and on WhatsApp is religiously targeted. Messages falsely claim the vaccine contains animal produce or alcohol. For Muslims and Hindus, for example, eating meat such as pork goes against their religious beliefs.
Dr Samara Afzal has been vaccinating people in Dudley, West Midlands. She said: "We’ve been calling all patients and booking them in for vaccines but the admin staff say when they call a lot of the South Asian patients they decline and refuse to have the vaccination.
My bold. Makes you wonder where this all originates - individual nutcases within the South Asian community or something more sinister. According to the article, vaccine uptake (in the so-called BAME community - I hate that word) is being significantly depressed:
It found 57% said they would take the vaccine - compared with 79% of white people.
j
Even more startling figures from a story in The Guardian:
j
Don’t black people only comprise 3% of the UK population?
Pretty much:
people from Asian ethnic groups made up the second largest percentage of the population (at 7.5%), followed by Black ethnic groups (at 3.3%), Mixed/Multiple ethnic groups (at 2.2%) and Other ethnic groups (at 1.0%)
Still, these are shocking reports, and if they’re anywhere close to true this represents a major problem in our black and south asian communities.
j
.
The last thing any sane society wants is for the lower SES folks to constitute a reservoir of the disease. And in UK as in USA, there is considerable correlation / overlap between non-white and lower SES.