Most unvaccinated Americans believe coronavirus vaccine poses greater health risk than the disease, poll finds

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Wed, 2021-08-04 18:36 — mike kraft

Most unvaccinated Americans believe coronavirus vaccine poses greater health risk than the disease, poll finds In contrast, an overwhelming majority of vaccinated adults said getting infected with covid-19 is a bigger health risk than the vaccine. Adela Suliman Washington Post

More unvaccinated adults in the United States view the coronavirus vaccine as a greater risk to their health than the disease caused by the virus itself, a poll found.

The Kaiser Family Foundation released a survey Wednesday that found there was a big split between unvaccinated and vaccinated adults in what they perceived as the bigger threat during the pandemic.

Just over half of unvaccinated adults (53 percent) said they believed getting vaccinated posed a bigger risk to their health than getting infected with the coronavirus. “In contrast, an overwhelming majority (88 percent) of vaccinated adults said that getting infected with COVID-19 is a bigger risk to their health than the vaccine,” the report found.

Unvaccinated adults were also much less worried about the more transmissible delta variant and had less confidence in the safety and effectiveness of the vaccines compared with those who got the shots, according to the KFF survey.

The majority of unvaccinated adults (57 percent) also said they thought the news media had “generally exaggerated” the seriousness of the pandemic, compared with 17 percent of vaccinated adults.

The poll comes as Biden administration officials increasingly frame the current outbreak as a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” with President Biden taking a tougher line, urging the unvaccinated to get inoculated.

“If you’re unvaccinated, you are much more likely to, one, get covid-19; two, get hospitalized; and, three, die if you get it,” Biden said on Tuesday. “This is a tragedy.”

New daily cases in the United States rose 52 percent over the past week, according to The Washington Post coronavirus tracker. Still, hospitalizations and deaths have lagged behind, which Biden noted was because the vaccines are effective in reducing the likelihood of severe illness or death. ...

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