41 percent say they are not willing to receive coronavirus vaccine

Forty-one percent of voters said they are not willing to get the coronavirus vaccine, according to a new Harvard CAPS-Harris poll released exclusively to The Hill on Monday. 

The same survey found that 59 percent of respondents said they were willing to receive the vaccine. 

Among those who said they were unwilling to get the vaccine, 66 percent said they were concerned about side effects, while another 33 percent said they did not believe it was effective. Twenty-seven percent said they were not concerned about the virus, 23 percent said it should go to more at-risk individuals and 17 percent said they had health concerns. 

“The single most concerning number in this moths poll is that 4 in 10 of those who have not been vaccinated do not want to take the vaccine. This includes 60 percent of Black voters,” Harvard CAPS-Harris polling director Mark Penn told The Hill. 

The findings come as Johnson & Johnson begins to ship 3.9 million doses of its recently approved vaccine throughout the U.S., joining the already available Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. 

While the U.S. has made progress in the battle against the pandemic with vaccines, masks, and social distancing, medical experts are warning that new variants of the virus are threatening to undo that progress. 

“Please hear me clearly: At this level of cases with variants spreading, we stand to completely lose the hard-earned ground we have gained,” said Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, on Monday. 

The Harvard CAPS-Harris poll of 2,006 registered voters was conducted from Feb. 23-25. It is a collaboration of the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University and The Harris Poll.

Full poll results will be posted online later this week. The survey is an online sample drawn from the Harris Panel and weighted to reflect known demographics. As a representative online sample, it does not report a probability confidence interval.