America Is Now in the Hands of the Vaccine-Hesitant
It’s official: America’s vaccine-supply crunch is over. The U.S. has ordered, optioned, or procured enough doses to immunize every single member of the population more than five times over, and all adults will be eligible for the shots by May 1. In other words, after months of careful rationing and distribution snafus, we’ve finally hit a new phase of the pandemic endgame: vaccines galore.
Next we must confront a more pernicious problem than one of mere logistics: There’s plenty of supply, but what about demand? The worry that significant numbers of Americans might end up refusing a safe, effective, and available COVID-19 vaccine has been salient from the start: Just a few months into the pandemic, pollsters warned that less than half of American adults were sure to take one. But as long as these vaccines were either in development or scarce, this was a hypothetical scenario. Now, at last, our hesitancy will be tested.
The outlook, at the moment, is mixed. Americans’ overall acceptance of the vaccines seems to have increased in recent months, as some of those who said in 2020 that they’d have now waited, seen, and drifted into . When you consider all the polls together, about 60 percent of Americans are apparently planning to be immunized, if they
