On June 19, the L.A. Times reported:
While about 72% of adult Californians and 64% of Los Angeles residents 16 and older have received at least one vaccine dose, only about 51% of city firefighters and 52% of LAPD officers are at least partially vaccinated.
What gives with these people?
Slate took a look at the issues in an interview with Justin Feldman, a social epidemiologist at the Harvard FXB Center for Health & Human Rights.
The first thing to know is that the vaccines not only do a really good job of preventing disease, but they also provide some protection from transmitting it to others. So police who are not vaccinated having contact with communities, especially those with low vaccination rates at this point in the rollout, is concerning. There’s about 60 million people who report having at least one contact with police in a given year. There’s also about 10 million arrests that happen in a year.
And these contacts are going to be disproportionately lower income people, Black people, and other people of color. These are the same communities that have been dying and hospitalized at the highest rate. They’re also communities that have struggled to get access to vaccination—and that’s not a question of hesitancy. It’s a question of are the vaccines being made available locally.
... When you look at the demographics and politics of police officers, they are often younger. And, in general, we see a lower vaccine uptake among younger populations because they don’t believe that they are susceptible to the worst effects of the virus. And if you have a lot of white men with conservative politics represented among police, you see the same since that demographic in the general population has pretty high vaccine hesitancy. Therefore it’s not surprising to me that you’d see a similar pattern happening in police departments.
Feldman points out, this hesitancy is harmful -- most especially to officers themselves.
Police like to tell us that they keep communities safe from things like shootings and assault, but they are not doing much to guard us from more severe health risks.
Police also like to draw attention to how dangerous their job is and point to officers who are killed on the job by civilians.
And in 2020 the leading cause of death for police officers was COVID-19. So even within their own workforce and institutions there is much larger risk of COVID than of violence.
Eventually the Federal Drug Administration will move the vaccines from an "emergency use" status to full approval. They are certainly carrying out a huge trial, as over 175 million of us have had our shots with hardly any bad results. Once the vaccines win full approval, police and fire departments and all first responders should be legally required to receive vaccination as a condition of employment unless individuals have a darn good medical excuse. The military will certainly be subject to these rules, as are many privately employed individuals already.
Will police unions resist this common sense requirement?
1 comment:
This is absolutely alarming. You would think losing people in their departments would send them to vaccinate.
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