EDITORIAL: Vaccine hesitancy cuts across many demographics

It’s conventional wisdom in some quarters that COVID cases are on the rise again — albeit with fewer fatalities and hospitalizations — because hordes of toe-wiggling, science-denying Trump lovers refuse to get vaccinated. Like all misperceptions, this one harbors some truths but ignores others.

It didn’t help that many of those in attendance at the Conservative Political Action Conference this month in Dallas cheered when a speaker pointed out that the Biden administration had fallen short of its vaccination goals. This sort of stupidity masquerading as contrarianism is beyond excuse. The same can be said of teachers unions that harmed children by stubbornly keeping schools closed in large part because then-President Donald Trump wanted them open.

It’s true that polls show Republicans are more hesitant than Democrats about the shots. And a recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that Republicans, rural residents, and white evangelical Christians are “disproportionately more likely to say they will definitely not get vaccinated,” a response describing 14 percent of the population. But the poll also found that “at least half across most demographic groups now report being vaccinated.” So the anti-vax crowd, to the extent it leans right politically, represents a significant minority.

In addition, the unvaccinated tend to skew younger, while vulnerable older Americans have overwhelmingly embraced the vaccine.

Finally, numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that vaccine hesitancy is prevalent among some minorities. Blacks and Hispanics “have had persistently lower rates of vaccination compared to their white counterparts across most states,” Kaiser noted. The trend holds in Nevada, where — according to CDC data as of July 7 — just 26 percent of Black residents and 35 percent of Hispanics had been vaccinated, compared with 38 percent of whites.

This belies the stereotypes about vaccine “deniers” and deserves more attention. If public health professionals hope to persuade the unvaccinated to become inoculated, they must have accurate demographic information rather than political caricatures about those who have yet to sit for the shots. About 67 percent of American adults have already received at least one shot, but more aggressive efforts to reach out to skeptical populations is necessary. The Kaiser poll, for instance, found that “higher shares of Black and Hispanic adults” may be inclined to use mobile vaccine clinics. Clark County should pay heed.

Meanwhile, Republicans who refuse to get inoculated out of some misguided sense of sticking it to progressives panicked over COVID should remember that the vaccines represent the Trump administration’s greatest triumph — and that the former president himself received two shots even though he enjoyed natural immunity.