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Insights into those who have not been vaccinated yet but are not hesitant
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It had been weeks since Acy Grayson III, owner of Let It Shine, a home improvement outfit he runs out of his own home in the suburbs of Cleveland, had vowed to get a Covid-19 vaccine.
Appointments were available.
But Mr. Grayson, who never knows how long a job will take or when a new one will come along, had found it hard to commit to a time and a place. The mass vaccination site where appointments were not required was off his beaten path. He did not know that a nearby church, Lee Road Baptist, had been dispensing vaccines on Fridays — but the truth is, even if he had, it is unlikely he would have made the short trek to get one there, either.
“I know you’re trying to find out the reason people aren’t doing it,” Mr. Grayson said on a recent afternoon. “I’m going to tell you. People are trying to take care of their household. You don’t have much time in the day.”
The slowdown in vaccinations across the country has often been attributed to a blend of misinformation and mistrust among Americans known as “vaccine hesitancy.” But Mr. Grayson belongs to an overlooked but sizable group whose reasons for remaining unvaccinated are not about opposition to the shots or even skepticism about them.
According to a new U.S. census estimate, some 30 million American adults who are open to getting a coronavirus vaccine have not managed to actually do so. Their ranks are larger than the hesitant — more than the 28 million who said they would probably or definitely not get vaccinated, and than the 16 million who said they were unsure. And this month, as the Biden administration set a goal of 70 percent of adults getting at least one dose by July 4, they became an official new focus of the nation’s mass vaccination campaign.
In addition to “the doubters,” President Biden said at a news briefing last week, the mission is to get the vaccine to those who are “just not sure how to get to where they want to go.”
If the attention has centered on the vaccine hesitant, these are the vaccine amenable. In interviews, their stated reasons for not getting vaccines are disparate, complex and sometimes shifting.
They are, for the most part, America’s working class, contending with jobs and family obligations that make for scarce discretionary time. About half of them live in households with incomes of less than $50,000 a year; another 30 percent have annual household incomes between $50,000 and $100,000, according to an analysis of the census data by Justin Feldman, a social epidemiologist at Harvard. Eighty-one percent do not have a college degree. Some have health issues or disabilities or face language barriers that can make getting inoculated against Covid-19 seem daunting. Others do not have a regular doctor, and some are socially isolated. ...
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