Vaccine Hesitancy Is Still Strong In Many COVID-19-Battered States
A lot has happened over the past month that had the potential to convince vaccine hesitant Americans to get the jab: More than 1,000 Americans are dying every day, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration fully approved one of the COVID-19 vaccines, and Republicans have been more emphatic that everyone — even their supporters — needs to get vaccinated.
But the effect has been mixed. Each month for the past four months, Morning Consult has asked Americans whether they’ve gotten the vaccine and, if not, whether they plan to. The most recent results show a notable dip in the number of vaccine-hesitant Americans — those who say they do not plan to get the vaccine, or are unsure if they ever will — in some hard-hit states, while others barely budged even as COVID-19 cases climbed and prominent Republicans promoted the vaccine during the same period when the poll was conducted (July 24 to August 23). Packed ICUs and Ron DeSantis speeches aren’t always enough to sway people who reject the vaccine.
Take Florida, where new COVID-19 cases began climbing in early July. Now, the average number of deaths per day in the state is higher than at any other point of the ongoing pandemic. The day before Morning Consult’s most recent round of polling began, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis publicly promoted the vaccines, saying that they are saving lives and defended himself against pushback from Republican anti-vaxxers who thought he was doing too much to tout the vaccine. Vaccination rates in the state did climb during this period: from early July to early August, the number of doses administered daily increased by 50 percent, though they remain far below April’s peak. But according to the Morning Consult survey, from July to August the percentage of Floridians unsure if they wanted to receive the vaccine only decreased by 0.6 percentage points — less than the poll’s 1 percent margin of error. The number of vaccine refusers in the poll decreased by 1.2 percentage points.
In South Carolina, July and August also saw a cascade of new cases that rival the state’s peak in January. Some state Republicans — but not all — have stressed vaccination. Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham has been promoting the vaccine since he received his first dose last year, doubling his efforts after he tested positive for a breakthrough case in August. But vaccination rates increased only modestly here, from a seven-day moving average of around 3,000 doses per day at the start of July to 5,206 at the start of August. And like other southern states, South Carolina barely saw a change among vaccine-hesitant residents between July and August polls. The percent of South Carolinians who said they did not plan to get the vaccine dropped from 22.9 percent to 21.6 percent, while those who were unsure was essentially unchanged at 12.6 percent.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/vaccine-hesitancy-is-still-strong-in-many-covid-19-battered-states/
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