“We need to disentangle what percentage of these under-vaccinated pockets are due to skepticism and true hesitancy and what percentage is really due to access still being an issue,” she said.
Investigating the root causes of hesitancy in these pockets can yield important insights, said Timothy Callaghan, who studies rural health at Texas A&M University. Political affiliation, he said, is often only part of the story. “There are a lot of other factors at play,” he said.
Texas, for example, has a lower vaccination rate than a blue state like Connecticut, but also a larger rural population and more people of color, two other factors for which polling suggests hesitancy is more common.
Not all pockets, moreover, line up neatly with statewide demographics. New York state, for example, has been a leader in vaccinating its population with more than 67% of adults having received at least one dose of a vaccine. On Tuesday, Governor Andrew Cuomo said that enough adults had been vaccinated for the state to lift its remaining pandemic restrictions.
Bloomberg’s analysis revealed pockets where less than 25% of the population were vaccinated, the average population was 64,000 compared to 1.29 million in more vaccinated areas. The median annual income in these places was $48,600 compared to $66,100 in vaccinated areas. And of those in less vaccinated areas, 72.1% voting in the last presidential election cast their ballots for Trump.
“If certain groups are less likely to vaccinate, it makes it more likely that Covid-19 will continue to be a high risk in certain communities,” Callaghan said. “And if Covid continues to spread in certain areas and then people go to visit those areas, they become at risk.”
To address this hesitancy, the most important task may be to dig deeper into the myriad reasons people are opting out of vaccination.
“The first thing is to recognize that a sort of one-size-fits-all approach isn't going to work,” Callaghan said.
—With assistance from Drew Armstrong and Andre Tartar.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.