Managed Healthcare Executive® State of Industry Survey: COVID-19 Vaccine Worries

Yesterday’s Supreme Court decision blocking the Biden administration’s rules that would have required large employers to impose COVID-19 vaccine mandates has damped expectations for vaccine coverage. Public health experts say it is now unlikely the country will reach the 85% to 90% vaccination rate needed to bring the pandemic under control. Today the CDC’s vaccination tally shows that 208 million Americans, or 62.8% of the population, is fully vaccinated and that 78 million, or 37.5%, have received a booster shot.

A court challenge was expected but still in the future when respondents were filling out our State of Industry survey last fall.

We asked posed five questions about concerns about the COVID-19 vaccine.

By far the biggest worry was the misinformation about the vaccines: 66% of the respondents indicated that they were very concerned about that. The survey had 100 respondents but not all the respondents answered every question.

Whether an omicron-specific vaccine is needed is now being debated. A fairly large minority of respondents to our survey had worries about the vaccines being ineffective against future variants: 28% said they were very concerned about that prospect and 7% said put themselves in the extremely concerned category.

Low vaccination rates among children and teens had similar proportions in the very and extremely concerned camps: 33% of the respondents said they were very concerned about low vaccination rates among children and 17% rated their worry level as extremely concerned. For low rates among teens, the very concerned proportion was 35% and the extremely concerned one, 20%.