According to a new survey, more Americans have indicated that they are willing to be vaccinated against COVID-19.
An NPR-PBS NewsHour-Marist poll released on Friday found that the number of respondents who answered “no” when asked if they would choose to get vaccinated if they were given a COVID-19 vaccine dropped 5 percentage points.
The survey, which ran from Aug. 26 to Tuesday, found that 19 percent said “no” to whether they will choose to get vaccinated. In comparison, a Marist survey conducted between July 21 and 29 found that 24% of those surveyed said “no”.
The NPR-PBS NewsHour-Marist survey also found that 79% of respondents said they had already received the COVID-19 vaccine or had received it. The Marist survey conducted in late July found that 74% of respondents had already received or planned to receive the vaccine.
The issue of vaccination has fallen largely on partisan lines. About 95 percent of Democrats surveyed told the NPR-PBS NewsHour-Marist poll that they have already been vaccinated or will be vaccinated. Only 62 percent of Republicans surveyed said the same.
The survey also found that 37 percent of Republican respondents will not get the COVID-19 vaccine.
Given the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) recent full approval of the Pfizer vaccine, officials hope the decision will give the green light to some who were otherwise vaccinated to hesitate. The decision could also push companies to enforce vaccination requirements – measures that could save lives as the United States sees an increasing number of COVID-19 cases again.
The United States saw more than 171,000 new cases of COVID-19 on Wednesday and more than 162,000 the day before, which seems to follow closely what health officials warned earlier this summer about the possibility of arriving to several hundred thousand COVID-19 cases daily in the fall.
Approximately 73 percent of Americans 12 years of age or older have been vaccinated at least partially, while 62 percent are fully vaccinated.
The NPR-PBS NewsHour-Marist survey was conducted between August 26 and Tuesday and surveyed 1,241 adults contacted by cell phones and landlines. The margin of error is about 3.8 percentage points.