Motes and beams

Starting in May 2020, the Fox News poll asked "do you plan to get a vaccine shot against coronavirus when a vaccine becomes available, or not?"  Once a vaccine became available, they asked people if they had received it; if not, they asked if they intended to.  The figure shows the responses broken down by party.  Before the vaccine became available, it's the log of the ratio of intend/don't intend (ie, omitting don't knows); after, it's the log of the ratio of have/don't intend to (ie, omitting haven't but intend to and haven't and not sure).  

Before the vaccine was available, the only substantial variation among Democrats was that intention was lower in September 2020--the ratio in December 2020 was just a little larger than it had been in May (68%-17% in May and 75%-16% in December).  For Republicans, there was a drop between May and August, and it stayed pretty much constant after that point.  The ratio was somewhat lower in December than it had been in May (54%-29% in May and 49%-39% in December).  Once the vaccine was available, the ratio increased for both--that is, more people got the vaccine than had said they would--but it increased more for Democrats.  In the last survey (August 2021) 84% of Democrats said they had gotten the vaccine and 4% said they they didn't intend to; among Republicans it 56% said they had and 29% that they didn't intend to.  So there was a gap from the beginning, but it grew during 2020 and grew even more after the vaccine became available.  Of course, there's no way to be sure why it grew, but it's reasonable to think that it was because many leading Republican politicians played along with anti-vaccine sentiment.  

The partisan difference in vaccination rates was widely noticed at the time, but hasn't gotten much attention in the five-year retrospectives on Covid.  For example, this  interview with Stephen Macedo, Professor of Politics at Princeton and co-author of a new book on the response to Covid, spends time on school closures, "lockdowns," and dismissal of the lab leak hypothesis, criticizes Democratic governors for following blindly following "elite institutions" and the "laptop class", and praises Ron DeSantis as an example of political leadership: "he got himself informed, and I think he made a sound decision. I don’t know of others who did the same in such a high-profile way."  What about vaccinations?  Macedo acknowledges that "Morbidity from COVID trended upward in Republican states as compared with Democratic states only after vaccines became widely available."  But this point is made in passing and there's no discussion of whether anyone has any responsibility for the trend.  The language is also oddly abstract:  "morbidity trended upward" rather than "more people died" (the language in the rest of the interview was generally clear and straightforward).  

At the moment, it seems like liberals are inclined to think about what their side has done wrong, while conservatives are inclined to think about what the other side (ie liberals) has done wrong.  I don't think this tendency is universal, but the result of a combination of historical circumstances, the most recent being Trump's re-election.  But whatever the source, it has led to a strange blind spot in histories of Covid.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]