Fifty percent don’t want it. Seventeen percent don’t trust it. Forty percent want it but can’t get it, but 92 percent of those said they’d keep trying. Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is warning health providers to be on the lookout for injection usurpers. So goes the great American ambivalence for the H1N1 vaccine.

With vaccine scarce and—by some accounts—in high demand, it’s difficult to get a handle on exactly what U.S. citizens think about the much lauded and maligned inoculation. Although polls for the Los Angeles Times and by the Harvard School of Public Health (which reported the numbers above) seem to underscore national indecision, recent reports of vaccination line jumpers and charlatan cure-alls point to a country that fears both flu and vaccine.

“There is a peculiar duality in the collective cultural mind just now, a kind of pandemic doublethink,” writes Dr. Perri Klass in the New York Times. “Many [doctors] are answering frantic calls from people desperate for the vaccine. But at the same time, we are all coming up against parents who are determined to refuse that same vaccine.”

In search of a reason, Klass contacted University of Texas history professor and polio epidemic expert David M. Oshinsky. According to Oshinsky, America’s irresolute attitude could be the result of a false sense of security cause by a lack of modern epidemics.

“People had a sense of risk versus reward and listened to public health officials,” he said of past situations. “That to me is probably the biggest issue of all. You’re dealing with parents who’ve never seen a smallpox epidemic, a polio epidemic.”

Whether their message is met with indifference or enthusiasm, health officials said they would continue to spread the word, hoping to reach the 159 million people in priority vaccination groups and 250 million total, according to the Washington Post.

"Whether it's an anthrax attack or a pandemic,” said Paul Jarris of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, “the question is: How do you get to people?"