Poll: Biden vaccine mandate splits US on party lines

A survey of Americans on President Joe Biden’s plan to require most workers to get either vaccinated or regularly tested for COVID-19 finds a deep and familiar divide: Democrats are overwhelmingly for it, while most Republicans are against it.

With the highly contagious delta variant driving deaths up to around 2,000 per day, the poll released Thursday by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research showed that overall, 51 percent say they approve of the Biden requirement, 34 percent disapprove and 14 percent hold neither opinion.

About three quarters of Democrats, but only about a quarter of Republicans, approve. Roughly 6 in 10 Republicans say they disapprove. Over the course of the outbreak, Democrats and Republicans in many places have also found themselves divided over masks and other precautions.

“I don’t believe the federal government should have a say in me having to get the vaccine or lose my job or get tested,” said 28-year-old firefighter Emilio Rodriguez in Corpus Christi, Texas. The Republican is not vaccinated.

Democrat and retired school secretary Sarah Carver, 70, strongly approves of the Biden mandate. The suburban Cleveland resident said she wants more people vaccinated to protect her 10-year-old grandson, who is too young to get the shot, and her vaccinated husband, who has breathing problems and Alzheimer’s disease.

“I believe Dr. Fauci,” Carver said, referring to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease specialist. Carver has had two doses of the Moderna vaccine.

Sixty-four percent of vaccinated Americans say they approve of the mandate, while 23 percent disapprove. Among unvaccinated Americans, just 14 percent are in support, while 67 percent are opposed. Most remote employees approve, but in-person workers are about evenly divided.

Exactly how the mandate will work is still being hammered out by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Some health experts have said weekly testing is a poor substitute for vaccination but a necessary part of the policy.

“Testing is used here to make it inconvenient” to avoid vaccination, said immunologist Gigi Gronvall, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. The choice will be: “You can get your two doses of vaccine, or here’s what you’re going to be doing every week.”

The hope, Gronvall said, is that mandates will force people who have procrastinated to join the 56 percent of the U.S. population now fully vaccinated.

The testing choice makes the Biden workplace mandate more palatable to Cassie Tremant, a 32-year-old volunteer for a wildlife rescue group in Austin, Texas. She agrees with the mandate as long as people can opt out by getting tested weekly. A Democrat, she is fully vaccinated. Her grandmother was hospitalized with COVID-19.

Roughly two-thirds of Americans say they are at least somewhat worried about themselves or family members becoming infected with the virus, though intense worry has declined. About 3 in 10 are now very or extremely worried, compared with about 4 in 10 in mid-August.

About two-thirds of Americans are at least somewhat confident the COVID-19 vaccines will be effective against virus variants.