Let’s look at both of those issues, starting with vaccine skepticism.
The vaccine skeptic community includes both those who dispute the necessity of the vaccines and those who question their safety — and often both. Now one of the vaccines has cleared a significant safety hurdle, putting it in the same category as many vaccines with less ingrained oppositions. Will the skeptics be convinced?
The short answer is that we don’t know yet. But there are clues about what might lie ahead.
Polling suggests there are a significant number of unvaccinated people who remain open to the vaccines, if they are convinced of their safety. The latest Kaiser Family Foundation poll showed about 3 in 10 people aren’t getting vaccinated, and nearly two-thirds of them said safety was a concern. Among those who say they will “definitely not” get it, people overwhelmingly believed there was more risk from the vaccine than from the coronavirus. But among the 10 percent who say they’ll “wait and see,” they believe the virus is more dangerous by a 50-to-34 margin.
Those “wait and see” folks would seem to have some important new information in their deliberations.
If that held now, and many of them did get the vaccine, that would be a huge step forward in the vaccination effort. Another recent study also suggested about 3 to 5 percent of Americans could be convinced to get a vaccine if it received full authorization.
But there are reasons for skepticism.
One is that many people were completely unaware of the authorization status for the vaccines. Among unvaccinated people, just 25 percent knew the vaccines had been authorized on an emergency basis, while more than 7 in 10 didn’t know the answer. (Fifteen percent wrongly believed it already had full authorization, while 57 percent were unsure.)
It seems quite possible, as the KFF noted at the time, that citing the lack of full authorization was more of a proxy for safety concerns than a truly held belief. At the same time, the news of the full authorization would seem to be likely to push familiarity with that status higher.
From there, it’s about whether that actually makes the difference for enough people. Being “more likely” to get the vaccine doesn’t mean you’ll do it. And overlaying all of this are partisan views. While the vaccines received emergency authorization under the Trump administration, this one will come from the Biden administration.
Already, we’re seeing the likes of Fox News traffic in the idea that this authorization might have been “rushed” (while also somehow, almost in the same breath, debating whether it took too long). The authorization will undoubtedly be used by employers and the government to enact vaccination mandates — as the Defense Department quickly did Monday — and critics of that approach will now have to account for the authorization. The easiest way to do that is to cast doubt on the rigor of the process behind it or to suggest this was rushed to feed into the vaccine mandate push.
In the end, that mandate issue might be the bigger takeaway — but for a different reason. Regardless of conspiracy theories that are spreading about the authorization, the fact is that this makes it easier for employers and the government to mandate vaccinations. Some were already headed in that direction, but relatively few had used mandates. Now they can do so with a fully authorized vaccine — similar to other vaccines that are mandated in places like schools, etc. — which makes such mandates significantly more difficult to challenge in court.
It also raises questions about whether Republican governors who have fought vaccine mandates will continue the fight — and if so, how. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R) executive order banning government coronavirus vaccine mandates last month applied specifically to a “vaccine administered under an emergency use authorization.” Will that now be expanded to a fully authorized vaccine? And if it is, why was the line initially drawn at an emergency-use authorization?
This is an issue that could ultimately matter not just for those 10 percent of “wait and see” folks, but also for a smaller group that has said it would get the vaccines “only if required” and for the 14 percent who say they won’t get vaccinated, period. Some will be forced to choose between employment and their opposition to vaccination. Exactly how many depends upon whom they work for, how many employers mandate it, and how entrenched their opposition is.
But perhaps more so than the potential converts on the safety of the vaccines, this might be what will tell the tale of how much Monday’s authorization moves the needle.
As for how many employers will jump on mandating that vaccine, it remains to be seen. But these things have a tendency to snowball, and major employers in particular have already moved toward it. It’s also true that, even before the full authorization of the Pfizer vaccine, Americans supported targeted vaccination mandates by about a 2-to-1 margin.
The opposition to such mandates is vocal and will surely have some impact — and smaller employers might not want to risk losing employees in an economy in which many are struggling to find workers — but this is a pretty lopsided issue. And Monday’s announcement is likely to make it even more so.
“At the corporate level, that’s where I think it’s going to matter,” Scott C. Ratzan, who conducted the study mentioned above, told The Washington Post. “People are supportive of their employer recommending it and requiring it. … They are willing to follow if their employer recommends it.”
What’s clear is that we’re in a new era in the vaccination push.
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August 24, 2021 at 04:02AM
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What FDA approval of Pfizer vaccine means for unvaccinated rate - The Washington Post
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