Why aren’t people accessing the new Covid vaccines? Elizabeth Tracey reports

Play

New Covid vaccines are here, yet the number of people choosing to get them is underwhelming. Amesh Adalja, a critical care medicine physician and pandemic preparedness expert at Johns Hopkins, says many people are trying to understand why.

 Amesh Adalja: We saw kind of tepid uptake of updated COVID-19 vaccines. That's the long tail of this pandemic is that it was harnessed by the anti vaccine movement to get their message out there and that doesn't bode well for us because that means that there's going to be more preventable infections occurring. Our job is a lot harder now to convince people that what they heard was misinformation and I think this is one of the biggest threats we face when it comes to vaccines. which really should be valued. They should be running to get new vaccines.       :28

Adalja says a look at the numbers clearly demonstrates just how effective the Covid vaccines are, preventing millions of hospitalizations and deaths, particularly among the most vulnerable. He urges everyone who is eligible to get the latest vaccine and remain up to date as new ones are released. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.