Non-elderly Americans have pretty much give up on the COVID vaccine:
The CDC counts vaccination rates starting from zero at the beginning of each flu season in September. By the end of the 2024 season only 15% of middle-age Americans had bothered getting freshly vaccinated. In the 2025 season so far the number is 12%.
The good news is that things have gotten off to a good start among older Americans, who are already up to 45% coverage.
The broad reluctance to get vaccinated is remarkable. It's true that the risk has diminished considerably, but COVID is still killing 50,000 people a year and producing Long COVID in countless others. It's worth getting protected from!
What I find really odd is that there must be a fair number of people getting the flu vaccine but not getting the Covid vaccine. So that means there is either folks who don't generally distrust vaccines but specifically distrust the Covid vaccine or they don't think Covid is at least as risky as the flu. Strange.
"...So that means there is either folks who don't generally distrust vaccines but specifically distrust the Covid vaccine ..."
I get both and for me at least the flu vaccine has no side effects whereas the Covid vaccine makes me feel lousy for a day. And it isn't my imagination, I not only feel lousy I have an elevated temperature. I wonder if the dosage was determined in the same way in both cases.
The eternal dilemma,
https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:vgoqwcb5lcn4z227mfntg5eb/bafkreiakdnur675uruso6hc4rbviavcmf7r3wzxtlwit2g3rhyybzn6uze@jpeg
Can't fix stupid, and can't help people who don't want to be helped.
Just gotta hope all our future pandemics are relatively benevolent: fairly non-lethal and/or fairly non-transmissible and/or fairly easy to stop with a few changes in behavior. God forbid the next one has a death rate over 50% or spreads like wildfire or can't be stopped even by people willing to follow simple rules like "stay 6ft away" and "wear a mask" because then we're fucked.
The ideal pathogen (from a pro-apocalypse point of view) would be a respiratory virus that spreads as easily as influenza or even measles, makes people only mildly ill in the short term, but has a long-terms mortality like (untreated) AIDS or rabies.
... or occurs when TFG is still president ...
Got the flue vaccine but not Covid. I will make two points about the CVax. It is often worse than Covid ( had it twice, first time it sucked and 2nd was nothing). The vax you have to schedule 2 to 3 days you have nothing going on, at least I do. I am sure I will get it in January for Kevin’s reasons.
After 5 covid vaccines and 2 covid infections, my experience has been the opposite. Getting covid is much worse than the side effects of the vaccine.
While our experiences may be anecdotal, hospitalization and death rates show that we can be certain you are wrong about which one is often worse.
My experience is the pretty much same as Jdubs. My many vaccinations have caused me no particular problems; my two Covid infections cost me a week of work each time, and considerable discomfort and inconvenience during those weeks. And for the past two years I got my Covid vaccinations during my lunch hour; no lost work time nor inconvenience at all.
Think for a moment about that death rate--50,000 deaths per year. That's approximately the same number as traffic fatalities. For most people, preventing their own Covid death could likely be accomplished by a single shot in the arm once a year. Every time I drive home from work (especially on a Friday evening) I wonder if some drunk is going to T-bone me in an intersection and leave my wife a widow, an event they have never invented a vaccination to prevent.
Same here. Got initial jabs and all the subsequent boosters and the only negative impact was a 12-hour fever/24-hour headache on the initial vaccine. I finally got Covid last month and had 3 days of a 103-104 fever and a couple of weeks of a lot of phlegm. Took 17 days til I tested negative….I can only imagine how sick I would have been (I’m 66) without the vaccines.
Same here. Five vaccinations with no issues. One COVID infection that started bad but cleared up after I went on Paxlovid.
I've had six covid vaccines and had covid once. Covid was a bad cold that lasted about a week; the vaccines never had any side effects other than a mildly sore arm.
I guess everyone is different, but I have had zero to minimal reactions from the five COVID shots I have had since Feb 2021. I have always gotten the Pfizer shot. Anecdotally, some people seem to think the Moderna shot is more likely to produce side effects, but I have no way of knowing if this is true.
January is too late for the season.
We always get updated as soon as there’s a new Covid booster. Never have had any problems (would switch to Novavax if we did). We’ve both had Covid twice (me most recently, in October), with relatively mild symptoms and no long Covid. We’re big believers in the vaccines, as apparently is typical for our age group (I’m 67 and he’s 75).
More evidence that we can't really trust the 'market'.
Collectively, we often make very bad decisions with very bad outcomes for ourselves and society as a whole.
I'm inclined to get this one too but-- my doc told me it's the same formulation as last year's and not very effective. I wonder whether anyone else is hearing that. Last year he said that one wasn't effective either but I ended up getting it anyway.
I'm over 65 and haven't yet had covid (as far as I know) so if there was a big risk I presume he'd have encouraged me to get it. But I'll probably end up getting it just for kicks and because I've never had a bad reaction, just a little unease for half a day. (I can't say the same about the new shingles one, which made me briefly sicker than I'd been in years after the second dose.)
The shingles vaccine knocked me on my ass for 48 hours for the first shot (not the second). By the end of the day, I couldn't lift the arm I got the shot in above my waist, and I ran a pretty decent fever for close to 48 hours. Still, I hear that is all much better than shingles itself.
The COVID shots haven't caused me any problems, nor did COVID the one and only time that I know I got it. (Paxlovid seemed to deal with the fever pretty well, but I did want to sleep 24 hours/day for the next week or so.) I'm going with the presumption that the many shots I've gotten (up to 7 now? I've lost track) helped make it less awful than it might have been.
I'm a fulll on believer in vaccines, even if they aren't 100% effective. My wife and I got Swine flu (what was that, 2007? I can't remember the exact year), missing the vaccine introduction by about 6 weeks. If all the vaccine would have done was reduce the symptoms by a few tens of percent, or shortened the duration by a day or two, it would have been totally, totally worth it, even with a bunch of side effects. That was a pretty f@#$ing miserable 10 days or so. I can easily imagine that if we were in our 70's or later at the time, swine flu might have killed us.
"I hear that is all much better than shingles itself"
I've had shingles. Trust me, it is.
Your doctor is incorrect. Updated vaccine formulations were approved at the end of August (https://www.fda.gov/emergency-preparedness-and-response/coronavirus-disease-2019-covid-19/covid-19-vaccines-2024-2025).
It astounds me when doctors get something so basic wrong.
It may be they hadn't gotten the new one at their office yet?
What percentage of the un vaxxed senior citizens watch Faux News incessantly? My 101 year mother has not received her booster yet this year and believes the Covid vaccines did nothing, Fauci is lying criminal, and the CDC and FDA are useless. She was a NYC school teacher with a Masters degree and still has all her faculties, but watches Faux News all day.
It sure sounds like she's lost her faculties.
I'm 71 and have remained fully up to date with the Covid vaccinations. I've bever had even a hint of a side effect from any of the shots. But my head hurts constantly from living in a country apparently filled with monumentally stupid people. (Not to mention monumentally hateful ones--though the two are absolutely not mutually exclusive.)
Got the latest with my 79-year-old mother last week. Worst reaction ever for me to the vaccine, which was a grand total of three days with a sore arm. Have never gotten COVID, so I can't compare, but given that COVID can kill you or cause permanent damage and the vaccine causes a sore arm, I think the sore arm, the vaccine, and never having COVID is by far the superior option.
COVID simply isn't in the news any more. I haven't seen a story outside one on the vaccines in months and months. The headline stories were about decreasing death rates from COVID: in 2023 that appears to have been 76,000 deaths, dropping it to a range where it's still about three times more deadly than the flu.
I was a subject in the Moderna COVID vaccine trial starting August 2020. Turned out I was in the vaccine arm, not the placibo. I've been getting updates since then, on a 6-12 month basis.
From what I read, there are benefits to getting updated vaccines, but the immunity provided by previous shots isn't zero. Yes, people should get the updated shots, but if they don't, they still have significant protection.
It seems to me that the 18-49 cohort is doing pretty much what they did last year, while the 65+ cohort is doing a little better.
During the pandemic I regularly visited a Reddit called “Sorry AntiVaxxer” that detailed hard core antivaxxers that were dying from Covid. In the early stages of the pandemic Covid primarily struck people in urban areas due to the population density. This changed with the delta variant, which was possibly less lethal but more transmissible. It spread in rural areas where masking, social distancing and vaccination were rare. It was still lethal if you had a pre-existing condition such as a heart or lung condition or were overweight or smoked (conditions not at all rare in red states). While I initially followed the Reddit out of schadenfreude, I eventually began to feel sorry for the anti-vaxxers. Dying from Covid involves your lungs filling with fluid so that you eventually drown, a process that can take weeks. Previously militant antivaxxers would pathetically write that they wouldn’t wish their condition on their worst enemy while encouraging the friends and families to get vaccinated.
Given that COVID is prevalent throughout the year (7.5 waves in 4 years) and can reach more people than Influenza, it's kind of weird that the Influenza vaccine is more popular. It's as though there's a bias against COVID because of rampant COVID denialism.
Hand was overplayed with boosters, which anyone paying any attention could quickly learn were not keeping up with current mutations and were of limited effectiveness, sometimes common sense should be the rule not running scared and micromanaging, especially when just about everyone got actual COVID to some severity which was the best booster of all.
The obsessive focus on antibodies instead of t-cells was also not helpful, informative or prudential (in terms of effective immunity).
Similar to the above. Got all the shots when they came out, once had a 2-day unpleasant reaction, otherwise just a sore arm. Had covid twice, both a week of mild fever and bad coughing. The worst was having to stay home from work and missing an important conference I was really looking forward to.
On the other side ... my son is a pediatrician who was unable to save an unvaxxed five-year-old covid patient ... then the father tried to get him not to put "covid" on the death certificate.
I would not have been able to control myself from telling said dad "you killed your own daughter! Get the fuck out of this hospital!".
But my son is more diplomatic and proud of the (relatively few) such parents he's been able to convince to get their kids even the polio vaccine.
I can only get it where there's support for seizures, and for some reason, the last two years there haven't been places that had it. The doctor's office specifically didn't have it, they had it at their vaccine clinic, but they took away the support for those with minor risks.
So I haven't gotten it. I also haven't gotten COVID, so there's that.