President Donald Trump has lately been hinting that a vaccine for the coronavirus will be ready to go before the election, but will anyone care? A new poll from Axios-Ipsos shows that Americans on both sides of the political aisle are quickly losing their faith in a coronavirus vaccine, with increasingly few numbers saying they’re willing to take the first generation version, saying they’re going to wait and see how other people fare first. The chart below shows how rapidly the number of people who say they are likely to get the first generation of the coronavirus vaccine as soon as it’s available.
All told, six in ten Americans say they don’t want the vaccine right away. Thirteen percent said they’d take the vaccine immediately. 30 percent say they’ll wait a few months after it becomes available. Slightly fewer — 23 percent — say they wouldn’t get the vaccine at all. The rest said they’d wait anywhere from a few weeks to a year before getting the injection.
The news is a blow to doctors who’ve looked to the vaccine as U.S.’s best chance of getting the pandemic under control, and highlights the risks of politicizing healthcare. Between the U.S.’ already robust anti-vaxx community, reports of political expediency taking precedence to sound science and the swirling mess of conspiracy theories around COVID-19, faith in institutions is crumbling at an alarming rate and necessary information is getting lost in the process. It’s important for sound, sober judgment to take the place of the political ping-pong match playing out in D.C., but rebuilding that kind of trust will take time. And as the U.S. nears a grim milestone of 200,000 COVID-related deaths, time is one thing we don’t have.
