Forty-one percent of American voters are not willing to receive a vaccine for the Chinese coronavirus, a Harvard CAPS-Harris poll released Monday showed.
Vaccine rollout is continuing state by state, but a sizeable portion of American voters remain skeptical about receiving a vaccine for the coronavirus. While a majority, or 59 percent, are willing to receive the vaccination, 41 percent are not. Two-thirds of those who are not willing to receive the vaccine cited potential side effects as a concern, while one-third doubted the efficacy of the vaccines. Slightly over a quarter, or 27 percent, said they were not overly concerned by the virus, followed by 23 percent who said vaccines should be reserved for more vulnerable populations. Seventeen percent cited health concerns, according to the Hill.
“The single most concerning number in this month’s poll is that 4 in 10 of those who have not been vaccinated do not want to take the vaccine. This includes 60 percent of Black voters,” Harvard CAPS-Harris polling director Mark Penn told the outlet.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser on the coronavirus, has repeatedly said 70 to 85 percent of the population needs to receive the vaccine in order for life to return to normal. In the meantime, he believes people must continue to wear masks, and that major public health measures should remain in place.
He told Fox News’s Dana Perino:
And just to be doubly sure, there are a couple of reasons to wear masks even after vaccination. One, you want to protect other people in case you have virus in your nasal fairings, and if you look in the community, there’s enough virus out there that before we start pulling back on things like public health measures, you want the overwhelming population vaccinated. And as I’ve said, the calculation — even though it’s still an estimate — would be somewhere between 70 and 85 percent of the population.
Fauci has also said that the primary goal is to see the “entire world vaccinated.”
“You’ve got to be able to get — with the help of the developed world — the entire world vaccinated,” he said during a February appearance on NPR’s Fresh Air.
“As we allow this infection to exist to any degree in any part of the world, it will always be a threat. So we’ve got to approach this the way we approach smallpox, the way we approach polio, and the way we approach measles and other devastating global outbreaks,” he explained.
Nearly 77 million vaccines have been administered in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) March 1 data.
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