Washington: More than one in 10, for almost 15 million people, in the US has missed the second dose of the Covid vaccine, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
According to CDC data, on June 16, almost 11% of people had enough time to get the second dose missed their ideal window.
The number has increased from 8 percent at the beginning of the year, but CDC spokesman Kate Fowlie said the increase was “unexpected”, The Washington Post reported on Saturday.
The second shot was recommended three weeks after the first pfizer-bionech shot or four weeks after the first moderna shot.
The second dose is considered to be missed if more than 42 days have passed since the early jab.
People skip their second shots for various reasons, such as mistakenly believing that they only need one dose to be protected.
Some people also want to avoid sometimes unpleasant side effects that come with the second dose, and others only miss their second meeting appointments and cannot or not reschedule, the report said.
Some people also mistakenly think if they already have Covid-19, they only need one dose, David Broniatowski, Associate Director for the Institute of Data, Democracy and Politics of University of George Washington, quoted.
Others may be confused with public health officials who discuss whether one jab is sufficient, pressurized that some immunity is better than nothing, Broniatowski said.
“When you have such things, people begin to rationalize, ‘Well it might not need to get the second dose’, especially when they have other obstacles or other concerns,” he said.
But experts emphasize that resolving vaccination will be very important because the Delta variant which highly translined from Covid continued its spread, the report said.
On Saturday, the CDC said 182,109,860 people had received at least one temporary dose of 156,982,549 people fully vaccinated.
Broniatowski urged health officials to investigate why people did not get the second dose and shift their public messaging.
“If science finally becomes that we need a booster shooting, then we will need to find out, ‘How do we communicate it?'” He said.
“I think we can learn a lot now from seeing the reason why people who don’t follow up don’t follow up.”