US, Russia have lowest vaccination rates, highest vaccine skepticism among several major nations: poll


Among 15 major nations surveyed in a poll by Morning Consult, the United States and Russia have the lowest rates of vaccinated people and the highest rates of vaccine skepticism.

In the United States, 66 percent of people polled said that they were vaccinated, while another six percent said they planned on getting vaccinated against COVID-19, and eight percent said that they were "uncertain." Twenty percent of American respondents said that they were "unwilling" to get vaccinated against COVID-19.

In Russia, 49 percent of respondents said that they were vaccinated against COVID-19, while 18 percent said they planned on getting vaccinated against COVID-19, and 13 percent said that they were "uncertain." Twenty percent of Russian respondents said that they were "unwilling" to get vaccinated against COVID-19.

Of the other 13 nations, 84 percent or more of respondents said that they were vaccinated against COVID-19, according to Morning Consult's polling.

The countries where people were surveyed include: Spain, China, India, Brazil, Italy, Australia, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Canada, South Korea, Mexico, Japan, the United States, and Russia.

Morning Consult noted that over the past three months, vaccine skepticism across the globe remained fairly stagnant, declining only at an average of two percentage points. However, since Morning Consult began tracking attitudes towards vaccination around the world, the number of vaccine skeptics decreased by an average of 19 percentage points across all 14 countries, except for the United States. In the U.S., the number of vaccine skeptics only went down a total of 6 percentage points.

Morning Consult conducts approximately 30,000 interviews in the U.S. and between 2,000 to 5,000 surveys in every other country based on their vaccine rollouts, and "among nationally representative samples of adults," the pollster wrote, noting that in India only the literate population was interviewed and that respondents are interviewed in their native language and are then translated professionally.