The title of this article in the Boston Globe today has certainly caused some alarm in Massachusetts. “State police were offered COVID-19 vaccines at work. Hundreds have refused to get themGiven the priority that Governor Charlie Baker has given to the vaccination of first responders and the efforts that have been made to achieve this, it would certainly be a disappointment if state police showed a great hesitation in the This is clearly what the title of the article says, but is it true?
Although the Baker administration has turned down requests for specific clinics for teachers, arguing that it could divert doses from other populations in need amid a reduced supply, the state created three state police vaccination sites. for soldiers and other first aid during the first phase of deployment.
As of Friday, 2,002 of 2,847 eligible State Police employees, including civilians, had received at least one dose at one of the departmental clinics in Framingham, Plymouth or Chicopee, according to data released in response to a Boston request Globe …
“Police officers in general, especially today, with all the scrutiny on them, I think they are very skeptical about almost everything,” said Dennis Galvin, a retired state police major and president of the Massachusetts Association (Massachusetts Association for Professional Law Enforcement), a group of current and retired police and criminal justice advocates. Galvin said he is scheduled to receive his first dose on Tuesday.
According to the figures reported, it seems at first glance as if more than 800 of the nearly 2,800 troops had approved the vaccination. This far exceeds 25% and would probably not send a very good message to the rest of the state’s residents. But there is clearly more to it than meets the eye.
First, like the Globe readily admits, these records only come from the three specific pods that the state created solely for police vaccination. Some of the officers may have ended up going somewhere else to get vaccinated, especially if they live a significant distance from any of the three police pods. Others may have underlying conditions that led their doctors to advise them to wait.
Police union officials representing state soldiers told reporters they do not control or track vaccinations among its members. Police officers have been advised to consult their doctors and decide for themselves. In other words, they can neither confirm nor deny the total number of unvaccinated police officers. Therefore, it is entirely possible that the vaccination rate among soldiers will be substantially higher.
Unfortunately, this may not be the case in other areas of law enforcement in the state of the bay. He Globe has been able to identify the numbers in two areas where it is confirmed that the vaccination of the vaccine is much higher than average. At the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office, 66% of people working there have declined the possibility of murder. It’s almost as bad in the Corrections Department, where more than half have said no, thanks for a shot. This is especially worrying if infection rates are taken into account in prisons, where outbreaks have increased much faster than in the general population when they occur.
For some reason, he had had the impression that all the hesitation had diminished significantly now that the shots had been deployed in large numbers. The catastrophic results of vaccination are almost unprecedented, and even serious incidents occur, although non-fatal side effects are only observed in a small percentage of those vaccinated. Hopefully we’ll fix it all eventually, but at least for now there’s clearly some first aid in Massachusetts that still has its doubts.