She is beautiful “To be vaccinated with everything that can be vaccinated”, Sophie (who did not wish to give her name), a 58-year-old psychiatric nurse, hesitates. Will she take advantage of her priority access to the Covid-19 vaccine? “For the moment, I cannot because I was ill in February, but I do not know yet what I will do next month”, she explains, lost between the contradictory injunctions of her executive, who had asked her to come to work, even positive for SARS-CoV-2, if she was asymptomatic, and those of the Minister of Health, Olivier Véran, who attacked caregivers in March, calling on them in a letter to be vaccinated quickly so as not to infect their patients. “It’s all incoherent, Sophie breathes. Just before, we were heroes, and there we are villains who refuse to be vaccinated. “
Like her, a number of healthcare workers are still reluctant to take the vaccine leap, although they have been among the priority targets since February 6 (and those over 50 since January 4). Even if these uncertainties are less numerous from week to week. According to the latest figures from weekly bulletin of Public Health France (SPF) published on April 15, 68% of healthcare professionals have now received a first dose, or 8% more than last week.
A significant acceleration, if we consider that they were only 30% in early March, when the executive sounded the alarm. “We must not overestimate the mistrust of the vaccine, among caregivers as in the general population”, emphasizes Alexis Spire, research director at the CNRS in sociology. “There is a core of refractories, a small minority, below 15% of the population, for the rest, it is not hostility but hesitation”, says the researcher.
Nearly 70% of first-time injectors is more than we expected. According to a study conducted from December to February among 10,000 caregivers by the Study Group on the risk of exposure of caregivers to infectious agents (Geres) and Judith Mueller, professor at the School of Advanced Studies in Public Health, vaccination intentions only reached the threshold of 60% of participants, a sample not representative but similar to the population of caregivers in France. “Today, it seems that we have achieved this intention, observes the epidemiologist. We measured a margin of 5 to 10% of people who did not yet know if they wanted to be vaccinated: which way are these people going to switch? Perhaps we will reach 80%, which would be a very high level. But if we want to achieve this goal, we must work on group dynamics, and not convey clichés about caregivers. “
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