Do You Want a COVID-19 Vaccination?

The CDC has stated that when a COVID-19 vaccine becomes available, nurses and other health care workers will be the first to have access to it.

On November 9, Pfizer and BioNTech announced that their “vaccine candidate was found to be more than 90% effective in preventing COVID-19 in participants without evidence of prior SARS-CoV-2 infection in the first interim efficacy analysis.”

In an interview with NPR, Dr. José Romero, who works as the head of the committee that develops evidence-based immunization guidelines for the CDC, explained that nurses and health care workers will get first access to the vaccine because of their exposure to patients and their vital presence to keep the health care system running. According to Dr. Romero, an approved vaccine could be available as early as December or January. “We anticipate having some vaccine for the high-risk individuals—health care providers—sometime in December or early January,” said Romero.

According to the CDC website, the goal of the vaccine recommendation is to “decrease death and serious disease as much as possible.”

And while some may see the advancement of a COVID-19 vaccine as a reason to celebrate, it’s also a reason to ask one very important question: do nurses want to get the vaccine?

Nurse.org shared the news with its Instagram community of more than 121,000 nurses and hundreds of nurses commented. Read the responses here.