Growing Resistance to Taking First-Generation Coronavirus Vaccine

to taking a COVID vaccine is growing. Thanks for joining us, Margaret, Thanks so much for having me. I wanted to talk about the vaccine. You know a lot of people have made this the kind of final thing. Once the vaccine comes, everything will be back to normal. We'll be able to get our lives going again. But there's been a lot of kind of conflict with the vaccine. How soon is it gonna come as it being pushed out too early

and they're at Axio. So you guys have been conducting regular polls on people's attitudes towards the vaccine, and in your latest pole, it seems that there's a resistance growing to the vaccine. A larger share of Americans are saying that they're not as eager to try the first generation coronavirus vaccine. Margot tell us a little bit about what the polls are saying about this. We have been measuring since March people's attitudes towards the pandemic and how it's

been impacting them. And this is everything from like how's your mental health too, are you going out to eat? And more recently we've been including some questions about the vaccine or the promise of a vaccine, And what we've seen is, over the course of the past month, dramatic and consistent and pretty unmistakable decline. We asked several questions, but I think the most important one is are you likely to take a first generation version of the COVID

nineteen vaccine as soon as it becomes available? Right, because it's like, oh, we're all waiting for the vaccine, so it's available, great, are you going to take it? And we've seen across the board overall a decline from the mid forties now to thirty percent of Americans saying maybe

learn to take it. But look at this really steep decline among Democrats from the mid fifties down to and decline among Republicans from the load of mid forties down to thirty three percent, So a really consistent decline across party lines. And this is important for a couple of reasons. One, Democrats and Republicans almost never behaved the same way about anything to do with a coronavirus, and we've seen this

month after month after months. If there's a split, the most clear split is almost always likely to be along part of the lives, but the other is a very interesting cross trend. There's another number that we haven't mentioned yet, and it's independence. If you were an Independent, you were around forty percent likely to say you would take this first generation vaccine as soon it's available as of late August months ago. Now that number has barely declined it all,

from forty percent to forty three percent. So Democrats, Independence, and Republicans are all at about the same place right now, less than half willing to touch a first generations vaccine when it becomes available. But the Independence have barely moved it all. And we asked ourselves in our posters, why why would that be true? And the best conclusion that we have at this point, and we'll have data to follow up on this in the leaks to come, but

at this point it looks like it's largely politically druven. Yes, there are some scientific concerns of scientists warning let's be patient, you know, we don't want to rush things, But it's really that it's been politicized. If you look at what else has happened over the same period of a month.

If the President Trump, right at the end of the convention, began putting out this idea that a vaccine could be ready before the end of the year, and as the days went on he began to say he could even be ready before the election, then there was a pushback scientists, public officials saying, no way, no way, the vaccine got to be in the American public's hands, and probably not even ready ready before the end of the year, much

less before the election. And that is precisely the period of time where we have seen people's interest in being the guinea pigs on this decline, and we have so much news around the vaccine and development. All that happened what you just described, and then at the same time Astra Zeneca put a hold on their thing because there might have been some adverse effects. So people are hearing all this stuff and you know, they're like, I want

to pump the brakes on it. My question is, I'm looking at it as far as people want to reopen, people want to get back to it. But these people that don't want to get these first generation vaccines, all that is is going to put delays and delays and delays on things. So you know, it's already gonna be a few months after a vaccine is approved before it can get out to the general public, let's say. So

everything just kind of pushes things down the line. It makes me question, are people more comfortable just getting coronavirus naturally and going through it then going through the vaccine route. You know, it gets very confusing. That is a behavioral question that's completely unbounded by science. What we know is that when people actually get it, or when people have proximity to someone who got it much less someone who became very ill or died, their understanding of the disease

really changes, right, or the virus really changes. It's one thing to think about it in the abstract. Oh, it's just like the flu. It's not that big deal. It's another thing if you of you know, had a loved one beyond a ventilator or recover and survive and then not be the same like four months again. And so this is happening as our children are going back to

school or learning remote. Everyone knows who has a kid that learning and remote is kind of a disaster, but it's like the best you can do if your kid goes back to school. Our poll found it's heard of the people whose kids had returned to school already have had reports like within a couple of weeks of COVID illness or scares inside their school district. And so we know that mask us is really important for reducing your susceptibility or your ability to spread it, right, we know that.

But from a political perspective, the president has sent such mixed messaging on masks that he has really shifted to a vaccine message and this notion that just trust me, like, you know, we'll get through the election and by then there would be a vaccine. And what we see is that people are not treating a vaccine like it's a silver bullet, like between a quarter and a third of the people in our survey, so they didn't want to take it at all. Forget about how quickly they don't

want to take it. That's not the majority, but it's an important number if you're looking for anything approximating the sort of hurd immunity that people have talked about. So if you can't inoculate enough people, what would be the impact on society. But beyond that, it's these two trends

that you talked about. On the one hand, everybody wants to get back to quote normal life, and on the other hand, there are real scientific barriers that are going to slow that moment where we can get back to normal. And then beyond there is a real question of public trust. How do you get enough of the public and people are resistance the idea of taking vaccines for very different reasons. If you actually unpack some of these cross currents, you

might not trust vaccines in general. You might not trust pharmaceutical companies. You might not trust President Trump, And you like the idea of the vaccine until he said it's going to be ready, and then now you're like, oh,

I don't want it, or the other way around. You may put a great deal of trust in what President Trump says and be more likely to take a vaccine if he says that it's safe, and so we know that the numbers add up to a situation of real uncertainty if you are a government official or a public health official and you want science and reason and consensus to guide the day. But after that, that's about all we know. Everybody wants it to end. Nobody's clear on how to get there or what to do for it.

But I mean, you know, we'll see once the vaccine gets approved, and then we'll go from there and we'll see how many people actually do come to the table and get the vaccine. Margaret Talive, Politics and White House editor at Axios, thank you very much for joining us. Appreciate it so much. I'm Oscar Ameiras, and this has been reopening America. Don't forget that. For today's big news stories, you can check me out on the Daily Dive podcast

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