U.S. Covid Vaccination Poll Finds Status Varies House by House

U.S.|A poll reveals another U.S. vaccine divide, this one by household.

A new poll has found that Americans are sharply divided by household over vaccination status, with 77 percent of vaccinated adults saying everyone in their household is vaccinated and a similar share (75 percent) of unvaccinated adults saying no one they live with is vaccinated.

Sixty-seven percent of Democrats reported living in households where everyone had been vaccinated, compared with 39 percent of Republicans. Ten percent of Democrats said they lived in homes where no one had been vaccinated, compared with 37 percent of Republicans, according to the poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation, which has been tracking the public’s attitudes toward and experiences with vaccinations.

Overall, half of U.S. adults live in a fully vaccinated household and one in four lives in a completely unvaccinated household. The remainder, about one in five adults, lives in a household occupied by both vaccinated and unvaccinated people, including children under 12 who are not currently eligible to receive a vaccine.

The telephone survey of 1,888 adults 18 and older living in the United States was conducted from June 8 to June 21 and had a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points.

As policymakers continue to experiment with lotteries, free beers and other incentives, the poll found that workers were more likely to get the shot when their employers encouraged them to and provided paid time off to make it easier. Two-thirds of the employed adults surveyed said their employer had encouraged workers to get vaccinated, and half said their employer had provided them paid time off to get the vaccine and to recover from side effects.

The workers who said their employer had taken either one of those steps were more likely to report having been vaccinated, even after the poll controlled for other demographic variables. The finding suggested that more employers’ encouraging vaccination and offering paid time off could lead to higher vaccination rates among workers.

As virus cases fall across much of the United States, the poll found that optimism over the idea that the pandemic may be ending could hamper vaccination efforts, with half of unvaccinated adults polled saying that the number of cases is now so low there is no need for more people to be vaccinated.

If adult vaccinations continue their current seven-day average rate, about 67 percent of U.S. adults will have received at least one shot by July 4, just shy of President Biden’s target of having 70 percent of adults at least partly vaccinated by that date, according to a New York Times analysis.

Lazaro Gamio contributed reporting.