Americans who got most COVID-19 news from Trump less likely to be
Americans who relied most on former President Donald Trump and the White House coronavirus task force for news about the coronavirus outbreak in the early days of the pandemic are now among those least likely to have been vaccinated against the virus, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.
In late April 2020, as part of the Center’s American News Pathways Project, respondents were asked to name the source they relied on most for pandemic news. At that point, it had been more than a month since the World Health Organization had declared the coronavirus outbreak to be a pandemic, businesses and schools in the United States were closing their doors, and the nation was approaching the 1 million mark in number of confirmed cases as the sweeping impact of the pandemic was becoming clearer.
Over a year later, at the end of August 2021, the Center asked U.S. adults about their vaccination status. Of the 10,348 respondents who took the August survey, 6,686 had also taken the April 2020 survey. Looking at the group who took both surveys reveals distinct differences in vaccination rates based on where people turned most for COVID-19 news.
Pew Research Center surveyed U.S. adults to examine the relationship between Americans’ sources for COVID-19 news and having gotten a vaccine for COVID-19. The question about COVID-19 news sources was asked April 20-26, 2020, and the question about whether Americans received at least one dose of a vaccine for COVID-19 was asked Aug. 23-29, 2021. A total of 6,686 U.S. adults completed both surveys.
Everyone who completed the surveys is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The surveys were weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories using the procedure and benchmarks described in the methodology for the 2020 survey. Here is the methodology for the 2021 survey. Read more about the ATP’s methodology. Here are the 2021 questions used for this analysis, along with responses, and the 2020 questions used.
This is the latest report in Pew Research Center’s ongoing investigation of the state of news, information and journalism in the digital age, a research program funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts, with generous support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
Those who cited Trump and his task force and those who cited personal and community networks as their favored COVID-19 news sources are far less likely than those who relied on other source types to have received at least one shot of the vaccine. Roughly six-in-ten (59%) of…
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