203 Doctors Told Us What They Actually Think Of COVID Vaccines, And Everyone Should Hear Their Answers
A growing refrain among vaccine skeptics is that they won't get vaccinated against COVID-19 because a handful of health scientists have told them they don't have to.
Robert Malone, the self-proclaimed inventor of mRNA technology back in the 1980s, has been among those celebrated by the far right for voicing unproven concerns about COVID-19 vaccines to his 280,000-plus Twitter followers.
While it's easy to explain away an embittered, bruised-ego scientist, it's much harder to dismiss the significant majority of healthcare professionals who support the vaccines and the preponderance of evidence backing them up.
Enter the anti-vaxxer's latest unfounded claim: that most public health officials secretly don't support vaccines. In fact, a friend of mine recently made a stunning declaration that she wholeheartedly believes: "Most experts are too afraid to speak up, but I suspect 9 out of 10 doctors would advise against COVID vaccines if you asked them privately."
Though I could have readily dismissed such a callous and unsubstantiated statement, the journalist in me began to wonder whether I should.
After all, if a meaningful percentage of individuals with legitimate infectious disease and vaccination expertise were concerned, that would be worth reporting. Besides, I'd asked her to question her convictions, so shouldn't I be willing to do the same?
With that in mind, I began researching epidemiologists, virologists, health department directors, pediatricians, infectious disease experts, and public health officials. I deemed it important to find such people in all 50 states and in counties that leaned both left and right in case politics had tainted anyone's objectivity.
No one directed me where I should look nor which experts I could turn to; and I steered clear of anyone I'd seen making regular cable news appearances to ensure I was getting fresh perspectives from experts who may not have already spoken up.
In my research, I identified more than 200 such individuals, and, in the interest of taking up as little of their limited time as possible, decided to ask them all the same two yes or no questions with an invitation to elaborate if they chose to.
I also wanted them to know they could answer freely, so I offered anonymity — a condition that some appreciated and others waived.
My two questions were simply whether they believed the benefits of COVID-19 vaccinations outweigh any potential harms, and whether they'd recommended the shots to their own children if they had any in the 12–18-year-old age groups. Responses began pouring in almost immediately.
Over the next few days, I heard back from 203 of the doctors I'd reached out to. If my friend's unfounded suspicions were correct, 183 of them should have recommended against vaccination.
