21 percent of voters say they would get a no-cost vaccine as soon as possible: poll

Just over 2 in 10 Americans say they would attempt to get a free coronavirus vaccine immediately were it released this year, according to a poll released Sunday.

In a CBS News/YouGov survey, 21 percent of Americans indicated that they would go out and be vaccinated as soon as possible should a no-cost COVID-19 vaccine be released, while more than half (58 percent) said that they would wait to see how others were affected by the injection before getting one themselves.

The same percentage as would get it immediately, 21 percent, also said that they would “never” get a COVID-19 vaccine. That number could prove challenging to health experts who have sought to slow the virus’s spread and have warned that many public activities and large-scale gatherings will not be possible until much of the population is vaccinated.

The majority of respondents expressed skepticism on the time frame of a vaccine being produced as being their reasoning for not getting the vaccine immediately. Sixty-five percent of respondents said that they would consider a vaccine before the end of 2020 to be the result of insufficient testing or the vaccine otherwise being “rushed” through production. Just 35 percent said that a vaccine before the end of 2020 would represent a scientific breakthrough.

A party split exists on this issue, with 77 percent of Democrats saying that a vaccine in 2020 would be the result of it being “rushed through,” while only 48 percent of GOP respondents said the same.

Both President Trump and the national news media rank far below national health experts and state governors in terms of who Americans trust to deliver accurate information about the pandemic.

Forty percent of those surveyed said they trusted what Trump said about the virus, down from 46 percent in March, while just 35 percent said they trust the news media, compared to 45 percent in March.

CBS News/YouGov’s survey was conducted Sept. 2-4 among 2,493 registered voters around the country. The poll’s margin of error is 2.4 percentage points.