By Sarah Evans 
Now that we are more than half way through 2021 and COVID vaccines have been circulating for several months, the majority of Americans have been vaccinated or plan to be in the near future. Vaccine confidence is standing firm. However, there is still a small percentage that are staying hesitant. It’s important to enable vaccine confidence for everyone in order to create herd immunity.
Recent statistics show that 83% of social media users are vaccine confident; 92% of social media users believe the vaccines are safe; and 86% of social media users believe COVID vaccines are effective.
When it comes down to geography, race, and political affiliations we see that the likelihood of vaccination breaks down to 95% for the mainstream left, and 65% of the right; 90% for rural areas and 93% for urban areas; and 94% for Asian-American, 88% for African-American, 90% for Caucasian, and 93% for Hispanic.
Although those in the right wing political spectrum have the lowest percentage of vaccine confidence, they are trending upward. From December 2020, to March 2021, they saw a 22 point increase in vaccine confidence.
Americans who are still vaccine hesitant are actually more concerned with the loss of freedoms than they are with side effects of the vaccine. Sixteen percent of those on the right site loss of freedom as their reason not to get vaccinated, but only 7% site concern over safety of the vaccine.
Closing the gap across the board means listening to concerns, providing vaccine incentives, maintaining freedom of choice, and opening positive dialogue with every American.
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