A new study by UC San Diego’s Rady School of Management found that Republicans were more likely to be hesitant of getting the COVID-19 vaccine. NBC 7’s Priya Sridhar reports.
While more Americans are choosing to get vaccinated, many people are not for various reasons. Researchers are conducting studies to find out the demographics of people who are less likely to get vaccinated to help public health leaders in their efforts to target those people.
A new study from UC San Diego's Rady School of Management shows that Republicans became more vaccine-hesitant and less trusting of the media from March to August of 2020, while Democrat's views on the two topics stayed the same.
"We kind of started out with a hypothesis that vaccine attitudes would improve over time and we thought that would be the case based on prior literature that suggested that when communities are facing a threat they tend to become more accepting of the thing that would help get them out of the threat, in this case the vaccine," said Ariel Fridman, a doctoral candidate at UC San Diego Rady School of Management.
Fridman said the hypothesis turned out to not be accurate and that people who identified as Republican and cited certain news organization as their primary sources of information to be increasingly hesitant of the vaccine.
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"What we think is going on is that different perceptions of threat from COVID-19 may be driving these differences in vaccine hesitancy and those perceptions of threat may in turn be driven from different sources of news," Fridman said.
To read the full study, click here.
