A Pew Research poll from late September showed that about half of US adults (51 percent) wouldn’t get a COVID-19 vaccine if it was available today — a big drop from the 72 percent who said they’d get one back in May.
Complicating things even more: This past week, two major drug manufacturers halted their vaccine trials because of safety concerns...
The anti-vax movement is nothing new — in 2019, the World Health Organization listed “vaccine hesitancy” as one of the top-ten threats to global health — but the growing distrust of a vaccine that, at this point, is only hypothetical is a rare cultural phenomenon...
“Some people might assume malicious intent on the part of scientists when they really are just struggling to keep up with a very complex situation,” says David Broniatowski, an associate professor at George Washington University who’s published several studies on vaccine misinformation. “Scientists don’t want to say the wrong thing and will often stay silent, or provide facts and statistics without context, leaving vaccine opponents to fill the vacuum.”