Health experts agree that the best way to end the COVID-19 pandemic is to vaccinate to get out of it. Unfortunately, Americans’ willingness to get a COVID-19 vaccine is waning, even as a third wave of punishment takes well over 1,000 lives in the U.S. each day.
The latest evidence of this appears this week in the Journal of the American Medical Assn., And shows that vaccine skepticism is increasing among Americans of all stripes.
Regardless of age, race or sex, American adults were significantly less likely to say they would be vaccinated in late November and early December than they were in early April. And while interest in COVID-19 vaccines has declined across the board, some groups of Americans are even less willing to be vaccinated than others.
Overall, 74.1% of North American adults interviewed between April 1 and April 14 said they were “slightly” or “very” likely to receive a COVID-19 vaccine when it became available to them. At the time, the country had confirmed about 550,000 coronavirus infections, and nearly 22,000 people died as a result, according to data from the World Health Organization.
Let’s move on to the end of the year. Between November 25 and December 8, 56.2% of American adults still planned to get vaccinated when their turn came. This is despite the fact that, at the end of the survey period, more than 14.5 million Americans were infected and about 280,000 died, according to WHO.
Women are less likely than men to accept the vaccine. In the past few weeks, only 50.6% said they plan to get vaccinated, up from 69.5% in April. Among men, interest in immunization dropped from 79.1% in the spring to 62.3% eight months later.
When questioned recently, 80.6% of Asian Americans said they would receive the COVID-19 vaccine. It sounds like a lot, but it was even higher in April – 90.9%.
No other racial or ethnic group is so interested in a COVID-19 vaccine. Only 58.6% of white Americans surveyed in November and December said they would get one (up from 77.8% in April), along with 52.7% of Latin Americans (up from 73.1%) and a mere 37, 6% of black Americans (compared to 50.7%).
The enthusiasm for COVID-19 vaccines increases with age – but it has also decreased with time. Americans 65 and older remain interested in the vaccine, with 69.1% of respondents recently saying they would get it. This compares to 57% of people aged 50 to 64 years and 50.9% of people aged 18 to 49 years.
In April, 69.1% was the lower limit of the spectrum; that was the percentage of people aged 18 to 49 who said they planned to get vaccinated. They were joined by 76.7% of people aged 50 to 64 years and 83.8% of the elderly.
The study also examined the differences associated with educational background. The authors found that the more time people spend in school, the more likely they are to want a vaccine.
In November and December, 70.3% of those who completed college said they planned to get vaccinated when they could (against 85% in April). At the other end of the spectrum, 47.6% of those with a high school diploma or less intended to be vaccinated (against 67% in April).
The results are courtesy of the USC’s Understanding America Study, which has asked members of a national representative panel about issues related to COVID-19 every two weeks since March. Unlike other surveys that measured Americans’ feelings about COVID-19 vaccines in a single moment, this tracked changes in the same group of more than 8,000 people since the early days of the pandemic. (In each two-week period, between 5,259 and 6,139 answered questions that were asked, in English or Spanish.)
Although the US Food and Drug Administration did not authorize any COVID-19 vaccines at the time the latest research was completed, early clinical trial results suggested that the candidate vaccines from Pfizer and BioNTech and Moderna were safe and highly effective.
But even this good news could not contain a drop of nearly 18 percentage points in Americans’ willingness to be vaccinated, the authors of the JAMA report lamented.
“Educational campaigns are needed to increase the public’s willingness to consider vaccination with COVID-19,” concluded the team of researchers from USC, UCLA and the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health.
“The low probability of obtaining the COVID-19 vaccine among black individuals and those with less education is of particular concern because of their disproportionately greater burden of COVID-19 disease,” they added.