The new resistance

Millions of elderly Americans are still hunting for appointments to get vaccinated against covid-19. Millions of younger Americans are waiting impatiently for their turn in line. But there’s one group whose members are far more skeptical about the vaccine—and in some cases are actively refusing to get jabbed at all. That group is Republicans, especially GOP men.

In a recent NPR/PBS/Marist survey, fully 49 percent of Republican men said they do not plan to get vaccinated—a higher share of refusers than any other demographic group.

The finding, which has been confirmed in other polls, has confounded public health professionals.

“We’ve never seen an epidemic that was polarized politically before,” Robert J. Blendon, a health policy scholar at Harvard, told me.

Republicans have become more resistant— especially since a Democrat became president.

They don’t trust the federal government— and they trust it even less since Joe Biden came to the White House. They don’t trust scientists, and they especially don’t trust Dr. Anthony Fauci, Biden’s chief medical adviser.

Blendon said he expects many of those Republican skeptics to come around once they see friends and relatives get immunized without ill effects.

“We have to find a way to depoliticize this issue,” he said. “Instead of hearing Joe Biden or Tony Fauci tell them to take the vaccine, they need to hear it from physicians in their own states—people who have never worked in Washington.”

Unvaccinated people who contract covid-19, even if they don’t become seriously ill, can pass the virus to family and friends.

And resisters are making it harder to achieve “herd immunity,” the point at which the virus can no longer find new hosts to infect. That’s when the pandemic will come to an end.