If you can access the New York Times, here is an interesting and lengthy opinion piece by UNC Prof. Zeynep Tufekci about unvaccinated people:
Opinion | The Unvaccinated May Not Be Who You Think
Excerpts (BBM):
There has been strikingly little research on the sociology of the pandemic....
The research and data we do have show that significant portions of the unvaccinated public were confused and concerned, rather than absolutely opposed to vaccines.
Some key research on the unvaccinated comes from the
Covid States Project, an academic consortium that managed to scrape together resources for regular polling. It
categorizes them as“vaccine-willing” and “vaccine-resistant,” and finds the groups almost equal in numbers among the remaining unvaccinated. (David Lazer, one of the principal investigators of the Covid States Project, told me that the research was done before the mandates, and that the consortium has limited funding, so they can poll only so often.)
Furthermore, its research finds that the unvaccinated, overall, don’t have much trust in institutions and authorities, and even those they trust, they trust less: 71 percent of the vaccinated trust hospitals and doctors “a lot,” for example, while
only 39 percent of the unvaccinated do.
[...]
Relentless propaganda against public health measures no doubt contributes to erosion of trust. However, that mistrust may also be fueled by the sorry state of health insurance in this country and the deep inequities in health care — at a minimum, this could make people more vulnerable to misinformation.
Research on the unvaccinated by KFF from this September showed the most powerful predictor of who remained unvaccinated was not age, politics, race, income or location, but the lack of health insurance.
The Covid States team shared with me more than a thousand comments from unvaccinated people who were surveyed. Scrolling through them, I noticed a lot more fear than certainty...most of it was a version of: I’m not sure it’s safe. [...]
Their surveys also show that only about 12 percent of the unvaccinated said they did not think they’d benefit from a vaccine: so, only about 4 percent of the national population. [...]
The testimony we’ve seen from unvaccinated people in their last days with Covid, sometimes voiced directly by them from their hospital beds, gets at some of the core truths of vaccine hesitancy. They are pictures of confusion, not conviction. [...]
As of 2015,
one quarter of the population in the United States had no primary health care provider to turn to for trusted advice.
[...]
Finally, consider something hidden amid all the other dysfunction that plagues us:
fear of needles.
Don’t roll your eyes. Prepandemic research suggests that fear of needles
may affect up to 25 percent of adults and may lead
up to 16 percent of adults to skip or
delay vaccinations....
More at link, of course! Worth reading if you can access it.
