Political communication and vaccination rates: Covid-19 insights from the US

It is hard to wrap my mind around the scale of not just vaccine hesitancy in the United States, but outright rejection and politicization of vaccines. Unfortunately, this phenomenon is not limited to the US. Some recent studies have highlighted vaccine hesitancy throughout Europe as well. However, to give an idea of the scale of the resistance, in Italy, a survey by SWG in late July found that 8% of respondents were definitively anti-vaccine and 7% undecided. In comparison, the CDC found in household surveys from March—May 2021 that 24.9% of respondents said they probably or definitely would not get vaccinated, a stark difference. Additionally, although some studies noted low rates of vaccine acceptance in survey attitudes in Italy, 57.6% of the population has been fully vaccinated in comparison to only 51.5% of the population in the United States according to data from Reuters. Given how much earlier vaccines were widely available in the United States, this highlights the disparity in both attitudes toward vaccines and more concretely, actual willingness to be vaccinated. Recent studies have suggested that reaching herd immunity may be out of reach in many countries if the current levels of vaccine hesitancy are maintained, underscoring the importance of addressing this issue.

Vaccine hesitancy and rejection in the US did not develop in a vacuum: somehow, the Republican party and Trump managed to politicize a global pandemic, deepening national divides and splitting attitudes on Covid-19 along party lines. In early stages of the pandemic, as Trump minimized the threat of the pandemic, some governors took action at the state level to try to mitigate the impact and protect their constituents. Communication styles varied from state to state, with the West Coast governors (Jay Inslee of Washington, Kate Brown of Oregon, and Gavin Newsom of California) implementing emergency measures and focusing rhetoric around community safety. For example, Gavin Newsom was the first governor to implement a stay-at-home order, with 42 other governors eventually following suit (all eventually lifted by December 3, 2020). Inslee took on both Covid-19 and the Trump administration, in February 2020 commenting on a phone call with former Vice President Pence that, “our work [regarding Covid-19] would be more successful if the Trump administration stuck to the science and told the truth.” Other governors, such as Ron DeSantis of Florida, echoed Trump’s rhetoric, minimizing or outright rejecting the dangers and emphasizing economic recovery rather than mitigating the spread of Covid-19. All seven states that did not issue a stay-at-home order at any point in 2020 had Republican governors. Even now, as the Delta variant rips across the United States and Florida’s cases spike, DeSantis is threatening to withhold funding from schools that require children to wear masks.

This pandemic has been a case study for a plethora of academic and scientific fields, and political communication should not be overlooked. Wide-ranging, large-scale studies of political leadership and communication throughout this pandemic could reveal valuable insights for what strategies work to engage communities constructively. An important caveat here, however, is that not everything observed such as attitudes, vaccination rates, etc. can be attributed to communication alone: the population of a state that elects a governor who prioritized mitigating Covid-19 may also inherently been more disposed to welcome the vaccines. For instance, Democrats countrywide are more likely to have been vaccinated than Republicans: on average as of July 6th, according to an analysis by KFF, the vaccination rate in counties that voted for Biden in 2020 was 46.7%, compared to 35% of counties that voted for Trump. Democratic governors took more active stances in reaction to Covid-19, including encouraging the populace to get vaccinated. Breaking down what can be attributed to intrinsic attitudes and characteristics of the population versus what may have been influenced by governors’ communication choices is a methodological challenge stretching far beyond the scope of a blog post, but worth examining. Governors’ communication choices matters, as supported by a study finding that governor recommendations to stay at home had an impact on citizen behavior comparable to official stay at home orders, although the effect was influenced by political partisanship as well.

A few initial observations about governor communication and behavior in response to Covid-19 indicate that even if causation can’t be determined, there is certainly a correlation between a more active response and higher rates of vaccination. For instance, examining executive orders tracked by Ballotpedia, it can be observed that Democrat governors on average issued more executive orders from February 2020 to June 29th 2020 in response to Covid-19, as demonstrated by the chart below. Democrat governors issued an average of 47.04 with the highest being 132 from Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan, compared to an average of 36.33 executive orders from Republican governors and a high of 67 from Charles Baker in Massachusetts. This is an imperfect measure of responses to Covid-19 as it does not evaluate the content of the executive orders: for instance, some of the executive orders by Republican governors were lifting initial response measures far earlier than advisable, or taking other steps not necessarily in the interest of public health.