About the author: 

David A. Graham is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

SEVERAL YEARS AGO , two sociologists researched whether
Americans were willing to take a novel vaccine during a pandemic.
Taking poll data from the midst of the 2009 H1N1 swine-flu outbreak,
they broke out hesitancy by race, age, and partisanship, among other
factors. Although the H1N1 pandemic was very different from today’s
COVID-19 pandemic—not nearly as many people in the United States
fell ill, far fewer died, and vaccines were not as widely available as
they are now—the results were striking.

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The researchers found widespread hesitation. Nearly two-thirds of
Americans were unwilling to receive a shot. But those qualms were
relatively evenly distributed in the population. Older people were
more willing to get the vaccine than younger ones, and white and
Latino people (about 37 percent each) were more willing than Black
people (25 percent). Democrats (39.6 percent) were more willing than
Republicans (32.2 percent), but the spread was small.

Twelve years later, there’s another pandemic, another vaccine, and

more vaccine hesitancy—but that hesitancy has spread differently
within the population. Although public-health experts
initially worried that Black Americans would be highly vaccine-
hesitant, there’s now racial parity among people who want shots.
Instead, young conservatives are the great outlier. According to Kaiser
Family Foundation polling, 13 percent of Americans say they
definitely won’t get a COVID-19 vaccine, but that includes 18 percent
of people ages 30 to 49, and a whopping 29 percent of Republicans.
Hesitancy is particularly high among people who live in rural areas
and white evangelicals—for whom increased church attendance
correlates with increased hesitancy, according to a survey from the
Public Religion Research Institute.

Derek Thompson: What ‘taking the pandemic seriously’ means now

COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy doesn’t line up with the H1N1 polling,

nor with standard patterns of hesitancy—for example, crunchy left-
wing opposition to childhood vaccinations. But the patterns do line up
with resistance to mask wearing and stay-at-home orders.

In other words, the pattern of resistance to the coronavirus

vaccines looks less like COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and more like
COVID-19 denialism. While a significant chunk of Americans profess
to be uneasy about getting shots to prevent COVID-19, most come
from the swath of the population that has tended to downplay the
disease’s severity and to resist other measures to fight it, rather than
the swaths that have resisted vaccines for other diseases.

The U.S. has reached a turning point in its fight against COVID-19;
all FDA-approved vaccines are now open to all adults. Soon anyone
who wants one will be able to get one, and scarcity will no longer be a
controlling factor. The Biden administration this week rolled out
plans to reach out to vaccine-hesitant groups, including rural
Americans and Republicans, in an effort to move closer to herd
immunity. But some Americans seem to believe that scientific concern
is being weaponized for partisan ends, and see their own resistance as
a defense of freedom. And if the problem is not vaccine hesitancy but
COVID-19 denialism, then overcoming it may prove much harder.
THE SAME DEMOGRAPHIC  splits presenting now on vaccines have
existed all along. In both May and December 2020,
Kaiser found more-than-30-point splits between Republicans and
Democrats on mask wearing, and NBC News found similarly large
gaps. Other pollsters found differences of a similar size between
Democrats and Republicans on whether respondents were regularly
practicing social distancing and supporting stay-at-home orders. All
these factors move roughly in line; the partisan split also corresponds
to the divergent approaches that Presidents Donald Trump and Joe
Biden took toward the pandemic on the campaign trail.