What are your feelings about vaccination for yourself, your family members and individuals that you might interact with at work and/or your community?

Three vaccines, considered to be overall safe and effective (even with the small number of reported side effects), have become widely available to the public. However, there are some segments of the population who have either displayed what has been called “vaccine hesitancy” (in some of these cases, taking a wait and see attitude) or there are those individuals who are outright refusing to take the vaccine ever (and not for medical reasons). The country (and the world) is trying to reach herd immunity (usually cited at ~70% at the minimum goal) as fast as possible. With some people taking a wait and see attitude or outright refusing to be vaccinated, it may be next to impossible to achieve that goal in the foreseeable future unless we get some of these other individuals vaccinated. One major concern is the question: Will our vaccination efforts outpace the development of variants that might not be neutralized by the antibodies generated by our vaccines or neutralized by the antibodies generated as a result of natural infections in the recent past? So far, even with the Delta variant that has now become the dominant variant in the U.S. and across the world, the antibodies generated from vaccination and prior natural infection, seems to be doing relatively all right (slight loss in overall effectiveness) in this regard but the FDA et al. are constantly monitoring the situation.
As you also know, the CDC recently changed its guidelines regarding the wearing of masks which has also been causing some confusion. As an added thought, in reality, there are those including the head of the CDC who do say these guidelines need to take into account the needs of a particular part of the country. Some states have larger proportions of their population vaccinated than others. The coronavirus infections rates still vary somewhat across the country although numbers overall have dropped considerably especially in areas with successful vaccine campaigns. Location to some extent matters too. For ex., some areas can support outdoor activities more than others and some of these areas have been able to get by with lower vaccine rates in their communities because of this.
Some of this assignment relates also to the re-opening of the CUNY campuses in the fall. Gov. Cuomo recently mandated that all SUNY and CUNY students will need to be vaccinated if the student wants to take an in-person class in the fall. There will still be some fully online courses available for students who choose not to be vaccinated at this time (or have other reasons). We don’t know yet if the same vaccination requirement will be required of faculty and staff. We also don’t know where we will be with respect to mask requirements in the fall in a school setting nor what the social distancing recommendations will be. There already is some discussion of reducing the social distancing requirements from 6 feet to 3 feet. And of course, we don’t know what will be the situation with the variants. As mentioned above, the delta variant, which is more transmissible and seems to be more virulent, is the variant currently dominant across the world and increasingly so. Keep in mind when there is more virus replication in an infected individual, there is more chance of mutations occurring potentially leading to variants that even more worrisome than the delta variant. And I am sure you are aware there are some points of the world experiencing devastating COVID-19 surges right now and this includes now some parts of the U.S., especially some of the southern states where the vaccination rates are lower than the U.S. average.
So in this assignment, I would like your thoughts on at least some of the above. You should be able to talk about this utilizing some of the information you learned in the course and related readings in the news, lived experiences, etc. What are your feelings about vaccination for yourself, your family members and individuals that you might interact with at work and/or your community? Should we be worrying about achieving herd immunity in the population at large? What are your feelings about continuing to wearing of masks? Should we continue this practice in the fall, especially on campus and other indoor, somewhat crowded sites? What about social distancing recommendations in sites such as our campus? Some of this may relate to whether you intend to take some face to face classes in the fall. I believe many if not all nursing classes will have at least some face to face aspects to those classes and some of you are planning on entering the nursing program here or maybe elsewhere.

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