Poll finds 30% of Americans plan to shun vaccine

In his first prime-time address since taking office, President Joe Biden announced Thursday evening that all American adults would be eligible for the vaccine by May 1.

But a new survey indicates that a sizable minority of Americans — particularly Republicans — are not yet willing to take it.

Twenty-two per cent of respondents to an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist College poll released Thursday said they had already been vaccinated, and an additional 45% said they would get the vaccine when it became available to them.

But 30% said that they would not. Among Republicans, that number leapt to 41%.

The poll revealed a stark racial disparity in terms of access to the vaccine. Roughly a quarter of both white and Black Americans said they had already been vaccinated — but among Latinos, that number dropped to 11%.

The results also flew in the face of a commonly circulated narrative suggesting that Black people are less willing to be vaccinated than others. In fact, while 25% of Black people said they did not want the vaccine, that number was 28% among white people, driven largely by Republicans’ ambivalence. Among Latinos, it reached 37%.

Fifty-two per cent of Latinos and 48% of Black people said they hadn’t yet gotten the vaccine but would take it when it became available to them. Just 43% of white people said that.

All told, the share of Americans saying they wouldn’t get the vaccine stood at 30%, down from a high of 44% in a Marist poll in September.

The recent Marist poll was conducted by phone from March 3 to March 8, among a random sample of 1,227 American adults. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.6 percentage points.