LAist: Many Firefighters Are Still Declining The Vaccine As A Brutal Fire Season Looms

Last fall, L.A. County Fire and the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health surveyed the organization’s 4,900 employees and found that roughly 45% of them didn’t want to get the vaccine. That was similar to nationwide numbers from around that time. L.A. County’s Kazan and his colleagues knew that if they wanted to convince their people to get protected they had to break through the misinformation. If a firefighter wanted to refuse the vaccine, L.A. County Fire made it so they couldn’t just not show up, or casually check off a box online. The firefighters instead would have to leave the bubble of their fire house, drive to a vaccination site, and decline in person. That approach is “brilliant,” said Alison Buttenheim, who studies vaccine acceptance at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing. Read more at LAist.