Atlantic article on why US vaccination rate has fallen to #36 on earth, provides three major reasons:
No group is more likely to reject the vaccines than young Americans without insurance. Members of this group are disproportionately young and low-income and lack easy access to a doctor if something goes wrong. Many of them don’t know that the vaccine is free. Meanwhile, the fear of side effects is one of the most common reasons people give for avoiding the vaccines. This fear, compounded by a feeling of estrangement from the health system, is keeping many Americans from getting vaccinated.
Americans aren’t radically different from Europeans on how much we trust public authorities or how readily we accept public-health restrictions to fight the pandemic. What makes the U.S. exceptional is our unusually low support for vaccines in general. The U.S. had significant levels of vaccine hesitancy before the pandemic.
And of course, the politicization of vaccines in America.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ar...nation/620201/