A hospitalist in Missouri says people are disguising themselves to receive the COVID-19 shot in secret so that they don’t face backlash from vaccine-hesitant family and friends.
Dr. Priscilla Frase, the chief medical information officer at Ozarks Healthcare in West Plains, said in a video released by the organization this week how one pharmacist leading its vaccine effort had told her of several people “who have tried to sort of disguise their appearance” while getting the jab.
They’ve even gone “so far as to say, ‘Please, please, please don’t let anybody know that I got this vaccine. I don’t want my friends to know. But I don’t want to get COVID. I want to get the vaccine,’” Frase said in the clip.
Watch the video here:
On Thursday, Frase told CNN’s Anderson Cooper those people had “had some experience that’s sort of changed their mind from the viewpoint of those in their family, those in their friendship circles or their work circles and they came to their own decision that they wanted to get a vaccine.”
“They did their own research on it, and they talked to people and made the decisions themselves,” Frase continued. “But even though they were able to make that decision for themselves, they didn’t want to have to deal with the peer pressure or the outbursts from other people about them, ‘Giving in to everything.’”
Missouri stands towards the bottom of the nationwide vaccination table with some 41% of its population now fully inoculated with the shots that public health experts and scientists have declared a safe and effective way at mitigating the transmission of the virus and preventing serious illness, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Daily infections in the state have risen over the last week amid the spread of the highly transmissible delta variant of the coronavirus.
