Absolutely.
Yeah, I don’t have much hope on that front. What I am hoping is that some additional people will get vaccinated when it’s required by the military, or schools, or workplaces, or other institutions. Which, in some cases, won’t be until after full approval.
You can’t logic the hardcore antivaxers and covid deniers into getting jabbed, but there are actual honest-to-god skeptics who are not categorically against getting vaccinated but are holding back to see how side effects, etc., play out. They may strike those of us who got vaccinated as early as possible as being unduly cautious about the vaccines in light of the virus’s risks, but some people take to heart more the story of Thalidomide than that of smallpox or polio. Emergency vs. full approval is significant to many such people. Others even more skeptical won’t trust any government approval and will be convinced by only (1) the passage of time without an outbreak of some new significant side effect or (2) someone they personally trust persuading them.
I believe the true skeptics will be squeezed into getting vaccinated by the Scylla of a longer and longer period with no widespread serious side effects arising and the Charybdis of the Delta variant. An acquaintance of my fiancee was a skeptic holdout despite working somewhat intimately with the public (which I repeatedly expressed nervousness about), but he eventually got vaccinated, and that was before Delta took off. We see the screaming paranoid antivaxers most prominently, but thousands of people every day are still getting vaccinated right now in the U.S. and until then they were in the non-vax statistics right alongside the full-blown antivaxers, inflating their numbers.
TL, DR and IMHO: full approval won’t get all the holdouts vaccinated but it will get a decent chunk, and some is better than none.
It also makes it more palatable for employers and schools to require vaccination.
Switzerland went through the standard approval process for Moderna, Pfizer and J&J. As Moderna and Pfizer were approved earlier, Switzerland ordered their vaccines. After J&J was approved, Switzerland decided to not order any, as there would be enough Pfizer and Moderna vaccine to vaccinate the targeted popluation before J&J would be delivered in October 2021.
There was a good reason for doing the approval according to the normal procedure. As Switzerland does not have a procedure for emergency use of vaccines, it would have taken longer to create the process for the emergency use than to go through the normal approval process.
The goal was 80% vaccination against coronavirus. Switzerland’s barely reached 50%. So for Switzerland, at least, official approval hasn’t made much of a different in the absolute vaccination rate.
In comparison to the U.S., Switzerland does not have any mandatory vaccinations. Despite this, most children have the typical childhood vaccinations against chicken pox, measles, polio, etc.
How much do you (and anybody else) think such institutional vax requirements can/will increase the percentage of fully vaccinated Americans residents? 5-10% maybe? (That’s a totally wild guess.)
Well, it depends how widely it’s required. If all the colleges and high schools required vaccinations it would make a huge difference, as young adults are greatly underrepresented among the vaxxed. Just that could push the needle… More than 5%, according to a really quick mental calculation. If only the high tech industry (Google, etc.) requires vaccination it will barely matter, as that community is already highly vaxxed, and it’s likely to be fairly easy for the vaccine-shy to arrange to work from home.
So …i guess we’ll see.
I have no information on which to base any estimate. But I will note that things like vaccination rates have critical numbers, and that even fairly small changes near those critical numbers can have very large effects.