The Homa Files

Less than 50% of Americans get flu shots!
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Currently, over 80% of Americans 65 and older have gotten covid vax shots; almost 60% of adults over 18 have gotten jabbed …

How does that stack up to the take-up rate for flu shots?

According to the official CDC numbers …

> Over the past decade, annual flu vaccination rates among adults over 18 have ranged from 37% to 48% … averaging about 45%.

> Our covid vaccination rate is already about 15 percentage points over that average …. driven by the 83% vax rate among folks over 65 … which is about 20 percentage points higher than historic averages.

Note that only about 1/3 of adults 18 to 49 get flu shots … and it’s likely that the take-up rate is lowest among the younger adults in the 18 to 49 bracket?

All of this sounds pretty familiar, doesn’t it?

But, geez, this is a pandemic and vax effectiveness rates are very high?

So, shouldn’t covid vax rates be much higher?

Well, they are for the most consequentially vulnerable group — those over 65.

But, for the others, vaccination rates seem to be reverting to the historic means for flu shots.

Which suggests that classical vax-hesitancy reasons — e.g. fear of needles and side effects, perception of invincibility — make be kicking in.

We’re all creatures of our past experiences, right?

This entry was posted on May 7, 2021 at 10:00 am and is filed under COVID - vaccine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.