The director of the Defense Health Agency acknowledged Friday that about one-third of service members still don’t want to get the COVID-19 vaccine, but he expects that to change with much greater acceptance to come.
“There’s the early adopters, and then there’s the late adopters who want to see how it goes first,” said Lt. Gen. Ronald Place. “So that’s just human behavior. … Can I say for sure that (much greater acceptance) is going to happen? Of course not. But I am very confident that as we go through this vaccination process that more and more and more of our service members, their families, our employees, etc., will get vaccinated.”
Place participated in a virtual media roundtable
after spending the week in Hawaii visiting medical treatment facilities and installations.
The Defense Health Agency leads the Military Health System and manages a health care network at more than 400 military hospitals and clinics around the world, along with TRICARE health plan contracts.
Place said the agency also is responsible for leading the distribution and
administration of the COVID-19 vaccine to the military’s up to 2.25 million active-duty and Reserve forces and 11 million total who are eligible under the Defense Department umbrella, including retirees, family members, civilians and others.
“I am truly happy to report that earlier this week we broke the 1 million mark for doses delivered into the arms of our beneficiaries and our employees,” Place said. “Our goal is to ensure an overwhelming majority of our (Defense Department) dependants are offered the vaccine by this summer, enabling us to celebrate a renewed Independence Day.”
Place said, “What I can tell you is that we have not run short of people who are interested in getting vaccinated,” and that number is more than supplies have allowed.
He expects vaccine availability to ramp up in the next month or so, and it will “no longer be a supply-constrained environment. It will be, do we have enough people to vaccinate? Do we have rooms big enough to get the number of people in them to be vaccinated?”
Maj. Gen. Jeff Taliaferro, vice director for operations on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently told members of Congress that early data pointed to vaccine acceptance rates for service members “somewhere in the two-thirds territory.”
Military members are not required to get COVID-19 shots because vaccines were approved under “emergency use authorizations” and not after full study.
Place said the one-third of military members who may not be volunteering for the vaccine “aren’t hard over on the ‘no.’ Again, many of them are ‘Not now. How about later?’”
Through “sensing sessions” the “No. 1 answer” from younger service members for not taking the vaccine is, “I’m young and healthy. Give it to somebody who needs it,” he said.
The second reason is that although the short-term safety profile of the vaccines “is exceptional,” Place said, “nobody, and I mean nobody, knows the long-term safety.”
For someone who’s young and healthy, “it’s a rational question that they have,” he added.
That said, Place said that “when you’re unsure of things and you see others around you receive it and you see them do well,” that changes behavior.
For most it’s a sore arm and maybe a little bit of fever “that goes away very rapidly,” he said. “And now I’m protected from (COVID-19). I think that’s a motivator for many of us.”
