One in three Americans will opt out of getting a coronavirus vaccine if and when it becomes available, according to a new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll.
While 60% of respondents say they will get vaccinated if one becomes available to them, 35% say they won’t, despite a worldwide COVID-19 death toll topping 760,000, according to the results released Friday. The remaining 5% of respondents say they are unsure.
The results show that Democrats were more likely to get vaccinated with 71% saying yes, compared with just 48% of Republicans who would do so. Comparatively, 61% of independents said they would get vaccinated.
Friday’s results align with a previous poll conducted by 360aproko News between Aug. 9-12, which revealed that 26% of Americans wouldn’t get a coronavirus vaccine. About 55% said they planned to, while 20% remained unsure, according to the poll results.
The Fox News poll also revealed that Democrats (66%) and independents (54%) are more likely than Republicans (43%) to get vaccinated.
However, to varying degrees, the results also showed that the majority of Democrats (90%), independents (67%) and Republicans (58%) favored requiring masks to curb transmission of the disease. The pandemic shut down much of the U.S. economy, leading to the worst slump in the post-World War II era.
The results reflect the power of the anti-vaccine movement, despite claims that it spreads misinformation and places followers at higher risk.
According to a 2018 study published in the National Institutes of Health, the opposition to vaccines is “as old as the vaccines themselves.”
Still, it has grown as the world rushes to create an inoculation for COVID-19, which has killed over 167,000 Americans to date, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
While anti-vaccine groups continue to urge parents to avoid vaccinating their children and promote their views on social media platforms, an overwhelming majority of scientists and doctors firmly believe “that vaccines are both effective and safe,” U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff told the Washington Examiner.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said that thousands died every year from diseases like whooping cough, polio, measles, Haemophilus influenzae, and rubella before a vaccine was developed and became widely used, effectively lowering rates of the diseases to the point where most of them are nearly gone from the U.S.
G”Most vaccine-preventable diseases are spread from person to person. If one person in a community gets an infectious disease, he can spread it to others who are not immune,” the CDC said. “But a person who is immune to a disease because she has been vaccinated can’t get that disease and can’t spread it to others. The more people who are vaccinated, the fewer opportunities a disease has to spread.”
