Despite divides, vaccines are now as popular as Christmas trees
To put this 75% in perspective, consider two popular things in American society: Christmas and household pets.
Right now, nearly as many Americans have taken a Covid-19 vaccine than considered Mother Teresa a hero (81%) a few months before she passed away in the late 1990s.
In other words, the only way we’ve gotten to the 75% of American adults is by some portion of the vaccine-hesitant crowd at the beginning of the year being convinced to get a dose.
The poll numbers show vaccine-hesitant (people who say they probably won’t get a vaccine) and vaccine-resistant (people who say they definitely won’t get a vaccine) crowds have been shrinking.
Just 20% of American adults indicated in the Axios/Ipsos poll this past week that they were not too likely or not likely at all to get the Covid-19 vaccine. That’s a decline from 40% in the beginning of January.
An even smaller 14% say they were not likely at all to get the vaccine. This is down from 21% at the beginning of January.
Both this 20% and 14% are record lows in Ipsos polling.
Interestingly, the drop in vaccine hesitancy and resistance seems to be transferring to how parents feel about their children getting the vaccine. Over 50% of children aged 12 to 17 (i.e. those who are eligible to be vaccinated) have received at least one dose. This is about a 10-point increase from the beginning of August.
In Ipsos polling, only 25% of parents of children 12 to 17 years old now say that they are unlikely to get their kid the vaccine. That was 39% at the beginning of the summer.
Just 15% say they are not likely at all to get their kids the vaccine. This is half the 30% who said the same thing at the beginning of the summer.
The fact that the vaccine hesitant and resistant groups are getting smaller is perhaps the greatest sign of how the vaccination effort has broken the political mold. Opinions aren’t frozen in place.
Look back at every election since 2000, and you see a fairly static country. The Democratic candidate for president has consistently gotten between 48% and 53% of the national vote.
And while there is a blue/red divide on vaccinations, no recent electoral map looks like the vaccination rate among adults. A majority of adults in every state (blue or red) have gotten at least one dose. There has not been a single election in the last 200 years in which a majority of voters in every state voted for the same candidate.
There’s obviously still work to be done to convince as many holdouts against vaccination to get a shot, but the mountain isn’t anywhere as steep as it looked at the beginning of the year.