Recent polls of Americans point to an increased willingness to get the coronavirus vaccine amid growing confidence in the vaccinations and distribution of a third vaccine that has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
This week, President Biden unveiled a partnership between Merck and Johnson & Johnson to produce the latter’s single-dose COVID-19 vaccine, adding that through this and Pfizer and Moderna’s dual inoculations, the US will have enough vaccine doses to vaccinate every American adult by the end of May.
In studies conducted in recent weeks, Americans have shown a greater willingness to receive the vaccine, despite initial hesitancy at the start of the vaccine rollout.
In a poll from the Pew Research Center Published Friday, 69 percent of American adults surveyed between Feb. 16 and Feb. 21 said they had already received or planned to receive the vaccine, up from 60 percent who said they intended get vaccinated in November.
Pew reported that about 19 percent of respondents in the survey have already received the vaccine, while another 50 percent said they were “sure or likely” to be vaccinated.
In a Kaiser Family Foundation poll released late last month, 55 percent of American adults said they either received at least one dose of the vaccine (18 percent), or wanted to get the shot as soon as possible (37 percent).
Recent Axios / Ipsos polling also showed similar results: 57 percent said they would get the vaccine or had already received it, versus just 13 percent of adults who said in September they would be willing to get the vaccine as soon as it was available to them.
Despite the increased willingness to be vaccinated among Americans in general, minority groups and those with lower incomes continue to say they are less willing to receive any of the FDA-approved vaccines.
Black and Hispanic adults are more likely than white adults to say they will “wait and see” before deciding whether to get the coronavirus vaccine, Kaiser found, although Pew found on Friday that a majority of black Americans – 61 percent – now say they plan or have already been vaccinated, compared with 42 percent who said the same in November.
Pew found that 14 percent of lower-income adults say they received at least one dose of a vaccine, compared to 20 percent of middle-income adults and 27 percent of higher-income adults.
These findings come because public health experts have said that anywhere from 70 percent to 90 percent of the U.S. population would need to be vaccinated to achieve herd immunity, with enough people going to be resistant to the virus that causes COVID-19. are almost eliminated.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)About 57.4 million Americans have received at least one dose of the coronavirus vaccine as of Saturday, 29.8 million of them already with two doses.