In a recent Texas A&M University-led study, about 31 percent of 5,009 surveyed Americans said they don’t plan to get the COVID-19 vaccine once it becomes available to them.
Experts say between 70 to 90 percent of the population needs to be vaccinated in order for herd immunity to end the pandemic that’s caused the deaths of more than half a million Americans in the last year. So even as the rollout picks up speed, with President Joe Biden announcing on Thursday a plan to make all adults eligible for the vaccine by May 1, vaccine hesitancy could stand in the way of reaching herd immunity.
A combination of skepticism, misinformation and political polarization may influence the willingness of millions of people to accept vaccination. Polling from the Kaiser Family Foundation currently shows that 15 percent of Americans “definitely will not get vaccinated.”
Timothy Callaghan, who led the Texas A&M survey that was published in January in Social Science & Medicine, has studied vaccine hesitancy since he joined the School of Public Health in 2016 as an assistant professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management. Prior to the novel coronavirus, he says there was already a clear correlation between partisanship and vaccine hesitancy, and a profile for groups who are more likely to refuse vaccination.
“We already had a pattern of vaccine hesitancy before the pandemic,” Callaghan said. “But then the politicization that happened with COVID-19 and the response to COVID-19 sort of accelerated vaccine hesitancy.”
The willingness of millions of people to be vaccinated may determine how long it will take for society to return to some semblance of pre-pandemic normalcy. And when it comes to vaccines, a difference of opinions could have immediate—and potentially fatal—consequences.
“The vaccines won’t help us get back to normal if we can’t get enough people to take them,” said School of Public Health Dean Shawn Gibbs. “The only way to get there is vaccine uptake.”
Gibbs said Callaghan’s research has played an important role in helping the School of Public Health identify groups who could benefit from more information and education on the issue.
“It’s letting us drill down into the populations that we need to increase messaging for, and really starting to get an understanding of the mis-messaging that’s out there in order to counter it,” he said.
Respondents to the survey Callaghan led answered a series of questions about their behaviors and attitudes about COVID-19, including why they did or did not intend to pursue vaccination. The results showed that politics plays a crucial role: each one-point increase in conservatism increases the odds of vaccine refusal by 18 percent. People who said they intended to vote for Donald Trump in the presidential election— the survey was conducted in mid-2020—were 29 percent more likely to refuse vaccination.
Callaghan said people with conservative ideology tend to be more hesitant than liberals—which correlates with the fact that those who are vaccine hesitant tend to be less trusting of scientists. However, it’s an issue that spans the political spectrum.
On one side, the Trump administration downplayed the severity of COVID-19 “while simultaneously denigrating scientists,” Callaghan said. Meanwhile, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris indicated on the campaign trail that they would not trust a vaccine produced under the Trump administration, which he said sowed doubt among liberals.
“If you look at the data and compare the levels of vaccine hesitancy in May to last September, it spiked about 20 percent across liberals and conservatives,” Callaghan said. “Both sides were getting information from an environment clouded by a lot of things.”
Following Andrew Wakefield’s controversial paper in The Lancet in the 1990s, Callaghan said there’s always been an undertone of conspiratorial thinking among some individuals who are vaccine hesitant. In the COVID-19 era, more people are “paying attention and looking for as much information as they possibly can,” he said.
He said African-Americans are already significantly more likely to refuse vaccination due to distrust of the medical establishment, the result of decades of historical medical abuses against Black people. Black survey respondents were 41 percent more likely not to pursue vaccination, according to the study. Vaccine refusal was found to be even higher among women, at 71 percent. Women said they were hesitant based on safety concerns and the effectiveness of the vaccine. The Black respondents, meanwhile, said their hesitancy also stemmed from a lack of financial resources or health insurance.
While a profile has been established of who is likely to get vaccinated, Callaghan said it will still be a challenge to use that set of correlates to determine how best to persuade people to get the shot.
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