Poll: One-Third of Americans Say They Haven’t Gotten a COVID-19 Vaccine

A nurse holds a Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine in Southfield, Mich., on Nov. 5 2021. Jeff Kowalsky/AFP via Getty Images

About one-third of Americans said they hadn’t received a COVID-19 vaccination, according to a new poll from the Economist/YouGov survey that was recently released.

The poll asked (pdf) respondents to indicate whether they had received a vaccine for the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, which causes COVID-19, and about 31 percent said they had not.

Of that figure, about 61 percent said they don’t ever plan to get any of the COVID-19 vaccines. Another 20 percent said they “might” get a vaccine in the future, the poll found.

Forty percent of independents, 36 percent of Republicans, and 14 percent of Democrats said they hadn’t received a vaccine dose, the survey found. Eight percent of people who voted for President Joe Biden in 2020 hadn’t received a vaccine dose, and 43 percent who voted for former President Donald Trump hadn’t.

The survey, which was carried out between Jan. 15 and Jan. 18, polled roughly 1,500 U.S. citizens and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.8 percentage points.

The survey comes after the Supreme Court wrote in a 6–3 majority opinion on Jan. 13 that the Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) likely doesn’t have the authority to issue a vaccine-or-test mandate, which was slated to apply to businesses with 100 or more employees.

“The Act empowers the Secretary to set workplace safety standards, not broad public health measures. Confirming the point, the Act’s provisions typically speak to hazards that employees face at work. And no provision of the Act addresses public health more generally, which falls outside of OSHA’s sphere of expertise,” the opinion reads.

Some companies have opted to keep the vaccine mandate despite the Supreme Court ruling. But some companies, including Starbucks, dropped the requirements.

On Jan. 21, President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate for all federal workers was blocked by a federal judge, who ruled that the federal government doesn’t have the authority to impose the rule. Unlike the OSHA rule, federal workers don’t have the ability to opt out of the vaccine mandate by submitting to weekly testing.

“So, is submitting to a COVID-19 vaccine, particularly when required as a condition of one’s employment, workplace conduct? The answer to this question became a lot clearer after the Supreme Court’s ruling earlier this month,” U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Brown, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, wrote in his opinion.

The federal government appealed the ruling shortly after it was handed down.