With help from Grand Forks’ city government and the state and local health departments, staff at the school’s social work and public health programs asked 1,381 North Dakotans if they’d get an FDA-approved COVID vaccine when one was available to them. Of those, 74.2% were willing, 4.3% weren’t sure, and 21.4% were unwilling.
Surveys and focus groups found a handful of common themes among people who weren’t willing to get a vaccine: skepticism of health department and pharmaceutical companies’ competence and motivations; misconceptions about the virus’ effects or who it might harm; worries about risks posed by the vaccine, founded or not; as well as overtures to personal choice.
“I don’t think I should be forced to take it,” one respondent wrote. “If I do, I do and if I don’t, I don’t.”
Another echoed the motto made famous by women’s rights activists: “My body my choice.”
University researchers found that people who were willing to get vaccinated tended to be from more “urbanized” areas, live in the easterly part of North Dakota, were more often female, and tended to be older and lean politically left, but those descriptors weren’t an ironclad predictor of whether or not someone might be wary of a COVID vaccine or not.
“It appears to be something that may be spread across the board,” Isaac Karikari, the director of the university’s social work master’s program and the study’s principal investigator, said of vaccine hesitancy.
The same group of university staff and students studied the number of people who wore masks into Hugo’s grocery stores and the motivation behind those choices. They found that residents wore masks into those stores more frequently after company leaders announced they would require face coverings but before the requirement itself went into effect, which, the researchers told Grand Forks City Council members, suggests that people are more likely to “mask up” if leaders and other “influencers” in their lives do the same.
A more recent round of research indicates that people may act similarly with vaccines.
“If people they perceive to be important to them, or people in their networks, were supportive of this kind of responsible behavior, it appeared to have an impact on how they responded, as well,” Karikari told the Herald.
There’s also a noticeable gap between the number of survey respondents who said they’d be willing to get vaccinated against COVID and the number of people in North Dakota who’ve actually been vaccinated. About 40% of Grand Forks County residents and 38% of North Dakotans have been fully vaccinated, according to health department data. Those figures are much lower than the 74% of survey respondents who said they were open to a vaccine, and the rate at which state and county residents are getting vaccinated has trended sharply downward since mid April.
Beyond caveats presented by the relatively small sample size and demographics therein -- most respondents were middle-aged white women who consider themselves somewhat liberal -- Karikari speculated that some people might believe day-to-day life has returned to normal and thus don’t need a vaccine, or that they’re wary of getting one despite generally being receptive to the idea, or that they might not have ready access to a vaccine, among other possibilities.
“Intention does not always represent action,” he said. “So, the key issue, then, is what is making people hesitant to go all out and actualize that intention?”
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June 27, 2021 at 10:00PM
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Cynicism, personal choice among reasons for COVID vaccine hesitancy, UND study suggests - Grand Forks Herald
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