Attitudes towards COVID-19 vaccines may have “spilled over”
to other, unrelated vaccines along party lines in the United States
This study used data from pre- and post-COVID surveys to examine vaccine attitudes in the United States. We found evidence consistent with an ideological “spillover” effect: Liberals’ attitudes became more positive towards non-COVID vaccines (flu, MMR, HPV, chickenpox) and conservatives’ attitudes became more negative. These spillover effects are perplexing because the COVID-19 vaccines were developed more rapidly than the others and (some of them) were the first to use mRNA technology on a mass scale to achieve immunization. Hence, there were reasons to isolate one’s attitudes towards the COVID-19 vaccines rather than generalize them. This exacerbates current vaccine communication challenges.
- We compared political conservatives in the United States to liberals, measuring the degree to which their attitudes towards the COVID-19 vaccines extend to other, unrelated vaccines.
- Conservatives had far more negative attitudes towards the COVID-19 vaccines compared to liberals, but also had more negative attitudes towards the influenza, MMR, HPV, and chickenpox vaccines.
- We used an unsupervised machine learning algorithm to classify participants in a pre-pandemic survey into clusters of “likely liberals” and “likely conservatives.”
- This led to tentative results suggesting that conservatives in the United States spread their negative attitudes towards the COVID-19 vaccines to unrelated vaccines (flu, HPV, MMR, chickenpox).
- Liberals in the United States appeared to exhibit the opposite trend, generalizing their positive attitudes towards the COVID-19 vaccines to unrelated vaccines (flu, HPV, MMR, chickenpox).
US law requires vaccines to be safe and effective for a vaccine's approved medical use. Period.
In the case of liberals, believing that all common, major vaccines are safe and effective is rational and supported by a lot of empirical evidence. In the case of conservatives, neither rationality nor evidence supports their false belief. This is an example of blind, reality-denying loyalty to toxic MAGA cult disinformation.
That false belief gets some innocent people indefensibly killed. Period.
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