The pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and BioNtech announced Nov. 20, 2020, that they will seek emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration for a vaccine to prevent COVID-19. On Nov. 16, Moderna announced that a vaccine it has been working on has been shown to be close to 95% effective.
But no vaccine will be nearly that effective in reality if people refuse to take it. And recent polls suggest that about 40% of Americans won’t take a COVID-19 vaccine when it becomes available. Those numbers are even higher among nonwhite Americans.
