Just over a year into vaccines being available, nearly 70 percent of Minnesotans age 5 and up have been vaccinated against COVID-19.
When it comes to the other 30 percent, there are a lot of reasons people have yet to get the vaccine: some just haven’t gotten around to it. Others face structural barriers that make it hard to access the shots. And some still have doubts about the safety and efficacy of the vaccines.
People’s doubts and fears vary in reason and origin. But some of them have been stoked — in good faith or bad — by people misinterpreting data coming from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, a federal database to which anyone can report their post-vaccine experiences.
It’s not just on social media where you find questions about vaccine side-effects linked to VAERS. Last week, Minnesota Rep. Glenn Gruenhagen (R-Glencoe), raised concerns he said he’d been hearing about COVID-19 vaccine safety in a state House Health Finance and Policy Committee.
Read more at MinnPost.