Antivaxxers

Might be worth looking at some statistics about what happens when you treat people in a certain way. Might be worth looking at whether politically its successful. When people and political parties for that matter play this game I wonder what the statistics show.

It’s probably an aversion to being “told” what to do
Rebellion to EU rules, Rebellion to having to vaccinate.

I know quite a few that hate having to comply with anything.

I think it’s a ridiculous correlation and while it may be possible to interpret the statistics accordingly, we all know what they say about statistics!

MayBeMaw

I think it’s a ridiculous correlation and while it may be possible to interpret the statistics accordingly, we all know what they say about statistics!

It doesn't matter if you think its ridiculous or not, its still a correlation.

As always, no-one should be praising or disparaging the survey until they have checked on who carried it out and when , on how many people, and what questions did they ask.

At rpubs.com/benwansell/729135 you can read the whole account of it, which starts with the introduction -
This document provides a selection of findings from a two wave survey conducted by Ben Ansell (Oxford), Martin W. Bauer (LSE), Jane Gingrich (Oxford), and Jack Stilgoe (UCL) on a representative sample of UK (ex-NI) residents using the polling company YouGov. The first wave took place on September 30th / October 1st 2020 and had 1642 respondents. The second wave surveyed the same group of respondents, receiving 1219 responses from the original 1642 participants (a retention rate of 74%), over the week commencing February 1st 2021.

This project received funding from the John Fell Fund at the University of Oxford (project number 0009190) and was approved by the Oxford’s research ethics committee with approval number R71718/RE001. The experiment in the second wave was pre-registered with EGAP on Jan 31st 2021.

Here are the Key Take Home Points from the account of the survey, unfiltered through any journalists with axes to grind. A long read, but straight from the horse's mouth. I haven't put it into italics, for speed of posting, but I have highlighted the section on "Demographics" as that is what most of the discussion on the thread is about..

" Willingness to take the vaccine has increased substantially since October 1st last year - the proportion of people saying they would be ‘very likely’ to take the vaccine has increased from fifty percent to over three quarters. The percentage of people who are ‘likely’ or ‘very likely’ to take the vaccine has increased from 78% to 87%.

Vaccine Rollout : Around thirteen percent of our sample had already received the vaccine in the first week of February. Our survey is roughly consistent with the vaccine rollout in the UK bearing in mind that YouGov surveys will not reach people in nursing homes and will have limited reach in the over 80s (our oldest respondent is 84).

Vaccine Refusal There is a group of around seven percent of the population who remain ‘very unlikely’ to take the vaccine and this has not shifted greatly. However, a majority of the groups of people who ‘didn’t know’ if they would take the vaccine or were ‘unlikely’ have now moved to ‘very likely’.

Demographics: There are no major gender differences any more in desire to take the vaccine, whereas women were substantially more cautious in October. Age remains a strong predictor of willingness to take the vaccine, though the 50-59 group appear to have converged towards their elders. Lower income people remain less likely to be willing to take the vaccine and this gap has if anything widened a little. There is only a weak positive relationship between education and willingness to take the vaccine. People whose education ended at 18 have jumped the most in their willingness (by almost 20 points). Finally, ethnic minorities were much less willing to take the vaccine in October and have moved towards White British (the most positive group) - however, this finding must be caveated by the fact that survey attrition was particularly high for ethnic minorities.

Political factors remain very strong predictors of willingness to take the vaccine. People who voted Remain are consistently (and statistically significantly) about seven points more likely to be willing to take the vaccine than Leave voters or those who didn’t vote in 2016. People who did not vote in 2019 are substantially less likely to want to take the vaccine than those who voted. Among those who voted in 2019, voters for the Brexit Party or the Green Party in 2019 are the most unwilling to take the vaccine (though these are small groups so this is measured with uncertainty). SNP and Liberal voters are most positively inclined. When we ask about current vote intention, supporters of Nigel Farage’s new Reform UK party are strikingly less willing to take the vaccine (only just over 50%). People who don’t know who they will vote for and people intending to vote Green also appear less likely to want to take the vaccine. Every SNP supporter in our sample was willing to take the vaccine.

Vaccine Nationalism does not appear to affect people’s willingness to take the vaccine. In our second wave survey we added a randomized wording of the question about willingness to take the vaccine. There were three arms to the experiment - a control question asking about willingness to take the vaccine, a treatment where the question mentioned that the UK was the first country to approve a vaccine: the US/German made Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, and a treatment emphasizing the UK’s role in developing the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine. We found no appreciable difference in attitudes towards taking the vaccine, whatever the question wording. Accordingly we treat the second wave vaccine question as unaffected by the treatment and directly comparable to the first wave.

Vaccine policy approval : We also asked four vaccine policy and government performance questions after the survey experiment. Again, we found no appreciable differences across question types. We found strong overall approval of the speed with which the regulator approved vaccines (69% approve or strongly approve), the government’s overall performance in rolling out the vaccine (74% approve or strongly approve), and the priority order of vaccination - vaccinating the elderly and health workers before other key workers (78% approve or strongly approve). There is substantially weaker support for the policy of delaying the second dose (just 41% approve or strongly approve).

Vaccine policy group differences : There are no gender differences in policy approval. With age in general older people have higher approval - there is an especially sharp cutoff in attitudes towards the priority order at the age of 50 (the last age group to be covered by the JCVI priority!). Income, education, and ethnicity have little effect on policy approval. Political factors do have more impact. People who voted Leave in 2016 are much more supportive of the government’s vaccine rollout performance and of the policy of delaying the second dose (and more marginally of the priority order). People who voted Conservative in 2019, or who support them now, are unsurprisingly much more supportive of the government’s performance than Labour voters but they are also more supportive of the regulatory approval process, delaying the second dose, and the priority order"

Thank you Elegran.
I was interested to see that SNP and Liberal voters are most positively inclined to taking the vaccine.
In my experience, people who vote for those parties are more likely to have an outlook that prioritises the good of the community, as well as their own individual interests.

Something that wasn't covered, I don't think, is whether the Leave voters still believe that Leave was a good idea.
If they don't believe it was a good idea, perhaps they are less likely to want to follow the instructions of the person, Johnson, who persuaded them into it.

Am I right in thinking that, in America, covid vaccination is quite political and Republicans ( especially Trump supporters) are far less likely to be vaccinated than Democrats?

MayBee70

Am I right in thinking that, in America, covid vaccination is quite political and Republicans ( especially Trump supporters) are far less likely to be vaccinated than Democrats?

My brother who is Republican says this is very true, apparently Biden is the devil incarnate.

Such is the polarization of politics in the US

I don’t know why these universities decided to ask this question, because it’s totally irrelevant. What matters is why those who choose to remain unvaccinated do choose that, and what we can do about it, if anything.

maddyone

I don’t know why these universities decided to ask this question, because it’s totally irrelevant. What matters is why those who choose to remain unvaccinated do choose that, and what we can do about it, if anything.

I'm not sure it is irrelevant though maddyone. If there is something that inclines a person to vote in a particular way, and that something also inclines them to avoid the vaccine, then it would be useful to know about it.

Then we might have a better understanding of how to approach influencing a given group of anti-vaxxers to make them change their minds.

Thanks for the summary Elegran.

Well there might be something in that Alegrias, I’m not sure. I just wish they’d get vaccinated.
I voted remain and got vaccinated, but I know a number of people who voted leave and they’re all vaccinated too. We all went on to higher education, if that has any relevance. The authors of the study think it has got relevance, but the numbers who have been vaccinated suggest that both higher educated and others have all been happy to accept vaccination.

The authors do say that "There is only a weak positive relationship between education and willingness to take the vaccine. " and " Income, education, and ethnicity have little effect on policy approval. Political factors do have more impact. "

I was listening to the radio today and heard a report on a country (I just cannot remember which) with very high vaccination rates. This was attributed to the government keeping at a good distance from the rollout of vaccines, so that it always remained a public health process and never became political, which it has in other countries, including Britain.

Katie59

MayBee70

Am I right in thinking that, in America, covid vaccination is quite political and Republicans ( especially Trump supporters) are far less likely to be vaccinated than Democrats?

My brother who is Republican says this is very true, apparently Biden is the devil incarnate.

Such is the polarization of politics in the US

As I said in my earlier post, yes that is what appears to be happening. Though there are millions of Republicans in the US who are vaccinated.

As I stated in my previous post, it is typically the progressive liberals and orthodox who are antivaxxers, as evidenced by the measles outbreaks we have had here in the US the last 5-7 years.

A large portion of the conservatives who refuse this vaccine, are otherwise fully vaccinated themselves, as are their children.

I do find it rather ironic that those who refuse it typically are Trump supports and call the vaccine Biden's vaccine, though it is 100% a Trump vaccine.

I also want to mention that both Democrats and Republicans think the President on the other side are devil incarnate, so that is not a new phenomenon. It has reached new levels in the last 6 or so years.

I spoke to some Americans that I met a few years ago who told me that their family had split up into Trump supporters and non Trump supporters. Same here with brexit. It’s as if the world was going mad even before the pandemic happened.

That is 100% true maybe70. I have heard of cases of estrangement between generations over it.

Our Thanksgiving is this Thursday. I can just imagine how it will be around our tables this year with the discussion of politics, vaccines and now supply chain shortages.

I have chosen to agree to disagree and limit all conversations I have because I value my relationships. I am not going to lie though, I am pretty pissed off about the antivaxxers and starting tomorrow we are required to be wearing masks again indoors in public spaces. And since I got my booster last Saturday and it hit me pretty hard, I may get mouthy.

Our hospital ICU beds are full of the unvaccinated so I am torn. If you refuse the science of getting vaccinated, how can you want the science of saving your life? Would you turn away life saving science if you had cancer and they were offering it to you?

I know it is unethical and immoral of me to think this way, but I do feel like those who chose to be unvaccinated should go to the back of the line in terms of health care. We have had several instances of vaccinated people dying from other conditions that could have been treated if they had the ICU level of care.

MayBee70

I spoke to some Americans that I met a few years ago who told me that their family had split up into Trump supporters and non Trump supporters. Same here with brexit. It’s as if the world was going mad even before the pandemic happened.

I have a brother and a sister resident in the US, living a few miles apart, poles apart politically and hardly speak to each other.
Both families are vaccinated so they do agree on that, if nothing else.

Here we have yet another (patheticly) weak attempt to link anything negative to Brexit - let's face it (for some) anything will do!

Vaccine uptake is strongly linked to level of education, though (and not by just a few percentage points, either) which is hardly surprising!

And yet the survey that started this thread found that there was only a weak correlation there, Hetty

" Demographics: There are no major gender differences any more in desire to take the vaccine, whereas women were substantially more cautious in October. Age remains a strong predictor of willingness to take the vaccine, though the 50-59 group appear to have converged towards their elders. Lower income people remain less likely to be willing to take the vaccine and this gap has if anything widened a little. There is only a weak positive relationship between education and willingness to take the vaccine. People whose education ended at 18 have jumped the most in their willingness (by almost 20 points). Finally, ethnic minorities were much less willing to take the vaccine in October and have moved towards White British (the most positive group) - however, this finding must be caveated by the fact that survey attrition was particularly high for ethnic minorities."

A weak correlation with education level, that is. On politics -

" Political factors remain very strong predictors of willingness to take the vaccine. People who voted Remain are consistently (and statistically significantly) about seven points more likely to be willing to take the vaccine than Leave voters or those who didn’t vote in 2016. People who did not vote in 2019 are substantially less likely to want to take the vaccine than those who voted. Among those who voted in 2019, voters for the Brexit Party or the Green Party in 2019 are the most unwilling to take the vaccine (though these are small groups so this is measured with uncertainty). SNP and Liberal voters are most positively inclined. When we ask about current vote intention, supporters of Nigel Farage’s new Reform UK party are strikingly less willing to take the vaccine (only just over 50%). People who don’t know who they will vote for and people intending to vote Green also appear less likely to want to take the vaccine. Every SNP supporter in our sample was willing to take the vaccine."

Elegran, I expect it depends upon which survey you read.
I was looking at the wider picture (vaccine uptake in general) and the ten year, ongoing Vaccine Confidence Project is interesting:

'Overall, the determinants most consistently associated with improved uptake were high confidence in vaccines (66 countries); trusting health-care workers more than family, friends, or other non-medical sources for medical and health advice (43 countries); higher levels of science education (35 countries); sex, with women more likely than men to report any child having at least one vaccine in 41 countries and men more likely than women in just one country (Chad); age (younger age groups associated with increased chances of uptake in 43 countries); and high information-seeking behaviour (18 countries).'

www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31558-0/fulltext

Lancet survey dated September 10th, 2020.
The survey in the OP is in two waves, one dated September 30th / October 1st 2020 The second wave surveyed the same group of respondents, over the week commencing February 1st 2021. The two sets of results were then compared,

Their exact words on education were "higher levels of science education (35 countries)" In this country, science is still considered a branch of knowledge closely akin to magic and alchemy, and it is a source of pride to some to be able to say that they don't understand a word of it.

lemongrove I’m another very enthusiastic Brexit supporter and ditto for the vaccinations.
Why do people on this forum keep going back to Brexit? It is done. Get over it for goodness sake. Talk about sour grapes.