The difference is stark. In January, 24 percent of respondents to Monmouth University’s national poll said they would “likely never get” a dose of a coronavirus vaccine. By July, it was 17 percent. And in a new poll released Thursday, a new low: Only 13 percent of respondents said that they would probably keep refusing a vaccine dose. White House chief of staff Ron Klain celebrated the news on Twitter.
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“The combination of persuasion, outreach, convenience of vaccinations — and vaccine requirements — has cut this number nearly in half,” he wrote. “It’s hard to calculate how many lives have been saved.”
His enthusiasm is understandable, as is the political utility of his sharing it. But it’s worth asking an important related question: Has that number actually been cut in half?
It is certainly true that Monmouth’s polling has shown both an increase in vaccinations and a decrease in vaccine resistance since the beginning of the year. That includes a decrease in the percentage of people age 55 and older who say they won’t get vaccinated, an important consideration since that group is most at risk from covid-19, the disease the virus causes.
But this is also one poll, using one possible question wording. That word “likely,” for example: How much wiggle room does it offer?
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We can compare the Monmouth results with results from other pollsters, like the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF). It has been asking a similar question since late last year, with an important distinction. There’s no wiggle room here; respondents are asked to assert whether they will “definitely not” get vaccinated. Those who thought they probably wouldn’t could say that they were going to wait and see or that they would get a vaccine dose only if required.
In KFF’s polling, there’s been no drop. Since last December, about the same percentage of people has consistently rejected the idea of getting a vaccine dose.
Let’s throw another pollster into the mix: YouGov, which conducts biweekly polls for the Economist. It has also asked about vaccination for the past year, but with a shift: In April, the question wording changed. Before that point, YouGov asked respondents whether they would be vaccinated when possible. After, they were asked to describe their vaccination status. Before that change, there was more opposition to vaccinations expressed by respondents. After, the responses have been fairly consistent — and just a bit higher than KFF’s.
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(For these polls, we used the last poll in each month or, for November of this year, the most recent.)
If we pick out the “no thanks” responses from each poll and overlay them, the results are mixed. KFF’s are consistent. Monmouth’s have declined. YouGov’s have been consistent since the wording change. There’s variation, yes, but it’s hard to tell whether that’s a function of margins of survey error causing responses to bounce around or actual trends.
Klain’s point was that Americans keep getting vaccinated despite the stated opposition in some quarters. (Those quarters tend to be occupied by White Republicans.) That’s true, but the increase in vaccination rates has been slow. If the ice is thawing, it’s not thawing rapidly. Don’t worry about ocean levels yet. (Sorry. Starting to drift over into another subject area of concern to the White House.)
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There is one aspect to this worth pointing out, though. Overall, about 81 percent of U.S. adults have received a dose of a vaccine, a figure that aligns neatly with the level of opposition seen in YouGov’s poll. But federal data also indicate that nearly everyone over 65 has been vaccinated, while 1 in 7 seniors told YouGov this month that they will refuse to get a dose. So either the federal government’s aggregated data on actual vaccination numbers are wrong … or a lot of older Americans are telling YouGov that they are refusing the vaccine even though they’ve already gotten it.
For those interested in getting as many people vaccinated as possible, like Klain, this is an acceptable trade-off. If you want to tell everyone you oppose the vaccine but went ahead and got it anyway, that’s better than not getting it at all. With rare exception, posturing poses a lower risk of harm than does failing to protect yourself against contagious diseases.