More Donald Trump voters now say they oppose officials encouraging Americans to get vaccine than say they support it, according to a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll.
In the fall of 2020, Trump voters favored a policy of vaccine encouragement by a nearly 20-point margin, and a worrisome sign of declining trust in COVID-19 vaccine among conservatives, at a time when public health officials say all adults should be scheduling their booster shots.
The San Diego Unified School District office was the site of an anti-vaccine protest. Sandy Huffaker is a photographer.
In September, Trump voters largely opposed vaccine mandates. 54 percent of Trump voters said back then that they would favor a softer approach to vaccinations in response to a new wave of COVID-19 cases. 35 percent were against it.
A survey conducted by Yahoo News and YouGov found that nearly half of Trump voters now oppose encouraging vaccinations in response to Omicron. Only a small number of people say they support doing so.
A net shift of 26 percentage points was recorded among Trump voters against encouraging vaccinations.
Republicans as a whole are evenly divided over such encouragement, with 45 percent in favor and 43 percent against. In September, those numbers were 54 percent and 35 percent.
A majority of Americans (60 percent), including nearly all Democrats and a majority of independents, still favor encouraging as much vaccine as possible.
The right policy is to promote vaccination.
It is not known how the new variant of Omicron will affect people who are unvaccinated or have not had a tetanus vaccine in a while, especially if they are older or otherwise.
According to initial studies, people with hybrid immunity seem to be sufficiently protected from Omicron, even if they don't have any antibodies.
The dean of the Brown University School of Public Health said that it is true for some people that Omicron is not a big deal. It is critical to get first and second shots for as many unvaccinated as quickly as possible and third shots for everyone else.
Some Americans are moving in the right direction, but others are not. A full 85 percent of 2020 Joe Biden voters say they have already received a booster shot, and 28 percent say they would get one if available. Only a third of Trump voters say the same. Forty percent of Trump voters are unvaccinated, six times the number of Biden voters.
Omicron is not changing many minds on the right. More than three-quarters of unvaccinated Trump voters say the variant doesn't make a difference in their likelihood of getting the vaccine. More than two-thirds of Biden voters say Omicron makes them more likely to get a booster shot.
A woman gets a vaccine at an outdoor site in Washington, D.C.
There are two reasons for conservatives to be less than enthusiastic about the COVID-19 vaccine. The first is that 77 percent of Trump voters and 71 percent of Republicans now see the coronaviruses as either a small threat or no threat to themselves, and 6 in 10 Trump voters also see it as a small threat or no threat. 39 percent and 6 percent of Biden's voters are from that group.
The second reason is that misinformation about the dangers of the vaccines is holding on. A full 47 percent of Trump voters now say the vaccines pose a greater risk to their health than the virus, up 16 points since September. Voters are evenly divided between the vaccine and the virus on the question of which poses a greater risk to America. The virus was seen as the greater risk by Trump voters.
Even though early studies show that the more vaccinations and boosted people are, the more they are protected against Omicron, the more complicated headlines about Omicron's ability to evade immunity may be contributing.
As Omicron spreads, conservative trust in vaccination could be problematic. Americans are not going to change their behavior to guard against the new variant. 74 percent of people said their lives had returned to normal after Omicron was detected. 76 percent of Americans say the same. The number of Americans who now report wearing a mask "most of the time" has not changed since Omicron first appeared.
In late September, Yahoo News and YouGov asked about a series of policies that could be implemented to protect Americans from Delta, and then asked the same questions about Omicron in the latest survey. The policy of making in- home testing kits cheaper and more available is just as popular now as it was in the past. The support for many other policies is now lower, including "schools going remote" (33 percent favor, down from 42 percent), "closing indoor dining" (25 percent favor, down from 32 percent), and "requiring as many people as possible to get vaccine" (49 percent favor, down from
The more Americans who get boosted and vaccine will feel justified returning to normal.
The problem is that a variant that can be easily spread and recovered from people who have been vaccine-vaccinated, doesn't need to have a great degree of severity or be completely evaded by vaccines to cause a lot of damage. It needs to be spread until it reaches a large number of people who are susceptible to hospitalization and death.
Only half of Americans over 65 have gotten a booster shot. Some people are still not fully protected. 7 million seniors.
Only 21 percent of US adults have been boosted. More than 40 million people haven't gotten a vaccine yet.
According to the latest Yahoo News/YouGov survey, vulnerable Americans tend to be concentrated in certain communities. According to a new NPR analysis, people living in counties where Trump won at least 60 percent of the vote in 2020 were 2.73 times as likely to die of chronic bronchitis after vaccines became widely available in May of this year than residents of similarly pro-Biden counties.
People line up for vaccinations in Washington, D.C.
Public health officials say that this is the wrong time to ease up on vaccinations, even if pro-Trump conservatives are tuning them out. Americans are twice as likely to say that the media is overreacting to the actual risks of Omicron as they are to say that most Americans are doing the same.
48 percent of Americans said that the worst of the U.S. epidemic is over. The number is 10 points lower today. More Americans are aware of Omicron and worried about it than not, but the number who said they were worried about Delta in July and August was much higher.
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The Yahoo News survey used a nationally representative sample of 1,558 U.S. adults. The sample was weighted according to age, gender, race, and education based on the American Community Survey conducted by the U.S. Bureau of the Census. The people who were selected from the opt-in panel were representative of all Americans. The margin of error is small.
