Science is too often thought of as a counter to faith or spirituality; one being grounded in the knowable and discoverable, the other being unexplainable and divine. But in this, the season to celebrate miracles, scientists have delivered us nothing short of one: a vaccine for the devastating COVID-19 virus that has upended life across the planet for almost a full year and taken 1.7 million lives.
On Friday morning, Vice President Mike Pence rolled up his sleeve and did a service to the country by getting a shot in the arm in front of the cameras. As the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, the one Pence received, is rolled out across the country along with the newly approved Moderna vaccine, front-line healthcare workers and those at greatest risk from COVID-19 are among those being inoculated.
The days that followed saw everyone from Marco Rubio to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posting videos while getting their first dose of the vaccine. This has come with some controversy, with some such as New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu saying Congress should not be vaccinated before those in long term care facilities. Heated debates about who should get to be first in line are unlikely to fade any time soon.
But agree or disagree, the decision to offer the vaccine to policymakers has been made, and if there’s anyone in our government who should go on television and receive the vaccine, it is President Trump.
The politics of vaccines were already fraught before COVID-19 came on the scene. In the last two decades, a partisan divide has opened up around vaccines, and contrary to the stereotype of anti-vaccine sentiment being prevalent among Hollywood celebrities and their crunchy cohort, it is Republicans who are least likely to say it is important for parents to get their children inoculated. While in 2001, 93% of Republicans and 97% of Democrats said vaccines were important for children, that number fell five points for Democrats and a whopping fourteen points for Republicans by 2019.
During this crisis and prior to the election, it was prominent Democrats who were more likely to express skepticism of the COVID-19 vaccine. While Trump touted Operation Warp Speed and said he thought a vaccine would be possible before the end of 2021, many scoffed at the idea. On the campaign trail and in the debate with Pence this fall, Vice President-elect Kamala Harris worried that the vaccine would be rushed and unsafe and said she wouldn’t take it if Trump said it was safe. (Harris will be getting the vaccine after all, shortly after Christmas.)
Nevertheless, it remains Republicans, not Democrats, who are the most reluctant to want to get the vaccine. In an Echelon Insights national survey conducted last week, my firm found only 60% of Republicans say that if a vaccine is approved by the FDA and made available to the public that they intend to get it, far fewer than the 74% of independents and 78% of Democrats who say they will. Furthermore, when Republicans are asked whether they think of themselves more as supporters of Trump or more as supporters of the Republican Party, those who are Trump supporters first are less likely (58%) than general GOP partisans (65%) to say they’ll get it.
Trump is a powerful voice to his own supporters. When he comes out and supports something, polls move and people move.
Yes, sometimes, when Trump moves numbers, it is to push Democrats away from something they might otherwise support. Even though the science seems clear that the benefits of in-person instruction outweigh the risks and that it is low-income students and students of color being most harmed during these shutdowns, Trump’s support of reopening schools has corresponded with very low support for school reopening among Democrats, with only 17% of Democrats preferring to get students back into schools soon in contrast to 45% of independents and 66% of Republicans in that same Echelon Insights survey.
But at the moment, Democrats seem on board with getting the vaccine. It is among Republicans where the pockets of skepticism and resistance are highest. The trio of ex-presidents, Clinton, Bush, and Obama, who have volunteered to get the vaccine at the same time on-air is not likely to move the very Republicans who are most skeptical. And while Republicans do hold the vice president in very high esteem, there is no doubt that Trump is on a different level as a force that can change Republican minds on an issue easily.
With his penchant for using television as a powerful tool and the fact that he can say a December vaccine rollout is a vindication of his optimism, Trump getting the shot on television would be an obvious win — for himself, but most importantly, for the health of the nation.
