What impact did the J&J pause have on vaccine attitudes? See COVIDstates.org latest report. The pause happened just as we were in the field, so we were well positioned to evaluate. A few key take aways:
1) There is no evidence of significant changes in vaccine enthusiasm before/during pause/after pause.
2) If we zoom in on a small panel of unvaccinated respondents from right before to right after, we can see the shift of vaccine enthusiasts and mildly hesitant individuals to vaccinated. (For interactive version of this graphic, go to: public.flourish.studio/visualisation/…)
3) But the number of vaccine resistant & strongly hesitant people was pretty stable. So: we are starting to run out of vaccine leaning people to vaccinate, hence we should expect a continued decline in daily vaccination rates...
Here is a detailed breakdown of vaccine enthusiasm/resistance, just looking at 1100 repeat respondents from right before and after the pause. (Just sampling unvaccinated respondents from right before.)
Knowledge of the pause was _very_ high; 74% of respondents correctly agreed with a statement that a pause had occurred (vs 6% disagree).
Finally, there is a strong preference gradient among vaccines, in aggregate, for Pfizer > Moderna > J&J.
First, simple thing to note: the attitudes of health care workers re vaccination are pretty close to the general population, except for the fact that they have had access to vaccines earlier than other folks.
So, they provide an indicator for how things might go more generally.
So, how has it gone?
Not great, in terms of equity.
(1) Gender: Men are twice as likely to report getting vaccinated than women, & half as likely to be vaccine resistant. 3/14
See our latest report, (survey) experiments with vaccine messaging. In first experiment, we varied the messenger-the question, what impact did this have on vaccine resistance? Treatment effects below (higher = more vaccine resistance).1/7 COVIDstates.org
Take away: lots of potential for a backfire here. Celebrities and athletes have null effects, and anyone with a political hue risks driving away anti-partisans more than they persuade same partisans. (See this figure for partisan breakdowns). 2/7
Fauci is an illuminating case, because he has become a partisan figure, and evoking him makes Democrats a bit less resistant, but Republicans and Independents substantially more resistant, with a net effect of increasing resistance. 3/7
What is the relationship between the pandemic and the protests? Check out our latest 50 state survey examining the relationship between the size of the protests and the pandemic.
(1) The protests were BIG: about 5% of respondents participated in the protests, & even in the states with the fewest protesters, about 2% of adults reported participating. Truly historic in terms of scale and geographic scope (2/n)
(2) The protests, unsurprisingly, heavily tilted young, with a remarkable ~10% of people in their 20s participating, and ~1% of people older than 60. 8.5% of African Americans, 6.3% of Hispanics, and 4.0% of whites and Asian Americans participated (3/n)