(The Epoch Times)—The share of health care personnel recommending COVID-19 jabs and other vaccines to patients has declined significantly in recent years, with overall trust in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) declining, according to a recent study.
The peer-reviewed study, published in the journal NPJ Vaccines on Feb. 28, examined how vaccine attitudes and recommendations changed among health care personnel (HCP) during the COVID-19 pandemic. Researchers conducted a survey in January 2023 and compared the results with an earlier survey from September 2021, finding that health care personnel recommendations for vaccines “decreased substantially for nearly all vaccines and patient populations.”
In addition, trust in the CDC “decreased [from 79 to 73 percent], as did support for HCP COVID-19 vaccine mandates [from 65 to 46 percent].”
“This is concerning as HCP have long been the most frequently used and credible source of vaccine information, especially given public suspicion of vaccine information from pharmaceutical companies and government, and encouragement from HCP is strongly associated with patients vaccinating against COVID-19,” said the study.
Researchers found that health care personnel not vaccinated against COVID-19 were “far less likely to recommend vaccinating to their patients.” And even in the case of vaccinated personnel, they required regularly updated resources “to confidently discuss vaccines with hesitant patients.”
Study Participants
The study was conducted among 1,207 participants made up of four types of health care personnel—pediatricians; family medicine doctors; physicians assistants, nurse practitioners, and nurses; and pharmacists. Almost all personnel (96 percent) had received at least one COVID-19 vaccine, with 82 percent taking booster shots.
The most frequently boosted personnel were pediatricians, followed by family medicine doctors, pharmacists, and nurses. Almost three-quarters of respondents had high trust in the CDC, which was found to be critical with regard to receiving COVID-19 vaccines.
“Most HCP with high trust in CDC [90 percent] were boosted, compared to [61 percent] of HCP with low trust in CDC,” the study said, adding that those with high trust in the CDC were nearly six times as likely to be boosted compared to those with low trust in the CDC.
Among those surveyed, 46 percent supported COVID-19 vaccine mandates for health care personnel, with supporters observed to be much more frequent among the boosted population. Among the 218 health care personnel who had not yet taken the booster shot, the most common reason was concern about side effects, with 44 percent citing this issue.
Other major reasons cited included the speed of vaccine development and approval (27 percent), low risk of infection (27 percent), and discomfort with the Emergency Use Authorization (24 percent).
Over half the personnel said that a key challenge to vaccinating patients against COVID-19 was the concern raised by the patients. Sixty-four percent pointed to patient concerns about the necessity of vaccines, 60 percent to the safety, and 54 percent about the effectiveness of the jabs.
Health care personnel who had received booster shots recommended three brands of COVID-19 vaccines more frequently than those who had not been boosted: Pfizer-BioNTech (38 percent of boosted versus 12 percent not boosted), Moderna (46 percent versus 11 percent), and Johnson & Johnson (8 percent versus 2 percent).
The study was conducted by five researchers based in the United States, out of which four declared competing interests.
Two of them received research support from Merck, with one serving on the advisory boards of Merck, Janssen, Sanofi, and Moderna. Both received funding from the Vaccination Confidence Fund, which is jointly funded by Facebook and Merck.
A third researcher serves as a consultant to Pfizer on meningococcal B vaccine. The fourth individual is a paid health advisor to the University of Roehampton, which provided guidance on pandemic recovery and preparedness, including views on vaccines, to the Group of Seven leading industrialized nations.
Vaccine Mandates for Health Care Workers
Health care workers were subjected to rigorous COVID-19 rules during the pandemic. In 2021, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) issued a rule mandating all American health care workers be vaccinated, which applied to about 76,000 health care providers covering roughly 17 million workers.
Health care workers protested the mandate. The Pennsylvania Health Care Association warned that the Biden administration’s proposal had the “potential to exacerbate an existing workforce crisis and jeopardize access to care for tens of thousands of vulnerable residents.”
“After seventeen months of providing tireless care at the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic, long-term care continues to face a troubling trend of federal and state governments threatening and punishing the same healthcare heroes they once supported and rallied behind,” it stated.
In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the Biden administration to continue imposing COVID-19 vaccination requirements on most health care workers who were employed at places receiving funding from Medicaid and Medicare.
There are multiple studies among health care workers showing adverse effects following COVID-19 vaccination. A 2022 study on health care employees in Iraq found adverse events among vaccinated workers.
“The adverse effects associated with the Pfizer vaccine were significantly more prevalent in females than in males. Following the first dose, the participants experienced more adverse effects with the AstraZeneca vaccine. Following the second dose, more adverse effects were associated with the Pfizer vaccine,” it stated.
Another study among health care workers published in February 2024 found that 84.6 percent suffered at least one side effect after the first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. Some of these side effects included headaches, muscle pain, and chills.
A recently published study in the International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research found links between vaccine hesitancy among individuals and their knowledge of vaccinated people affected by side effects.
“Knowing someone who experienced a health problem following COVID-19 injection reduced the likelihood of injection,” the study stated. Such individuals “were more likely to oppose injection mandates and passports.”
Among those who were aware of at least one person who experienced COVID-19 injection adverse events, they said they knew about 57 deaths following vaccination.
“The health issues reported ranged from serious problems such as cardiac arrests and other heart-related problems, blood clots and other circulatory problems, to neurological issues, as well as milder effects such as feeling sick, headache, fever, etc.”
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.