| For the near future, the U.S. doesn't have enough Covid-19 vaccines. Hospital workers are lining up for the first doses, the government is securing new supplies of the shots cleared for use and drugmakers with experimental vaccines await trial results needed to evaluate them. But the balance is likely to tilt in the new year: With hundreds of millions of doses in the pipeline, at some point the U.S. will probably have enough shots for everyone ready to take them. At that moment, the challenge will shift from making and distributing the vaccines to persuading the public to take the shots we do have. And persuasion – getting people to trust the recommendations of authorities and change their behavior accordingly – hasn't been a strong element of of the U.S. response to the pandemic, to say the least. Think of masks: By now broadly adopted by much of the public, they remain a flashpoint for a vocal minority. Some people will likewise reject vaccines outright. Others remain persuadable but will need more reassurance and engagement to make them comfortable taking the vaccines. And it's not clear that the U.S. vaccine effort is up for that. The stakes are particularly high in communities of color, where people have suffered disproportionately from Covid-19. Decades of mistreatment by medical authorities has left lingering distrust. A one-size-fits-all approach to promoting vaccination would fail some of the most vulnerable, said Toyin Ajayi, a physician and chief health officer of Cityblock Health, a startup that focuses on low-income patients with complex needs. The U.S. risks looking around a year from now to say, "We just invested billions of dollars in this vaccine rollout, and guess what? Rich white people got vaccinated at twice the rate of poor people of color," Ajayi said in a recent interview. If the country is committed to avoiding that scenario, leaders, health officials and communities need to work now to understand people's needs and gain the trust of skeptics. How well we do that will determine whether the vaccines that could end the pandemic in the U.S. actually will.--John Tozzi | 
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