Until vaccines are available to every person nationwide, it’ll be hard to accurately gauge how widespread vaccine hesitancy is. But new polling data indicate that serious investment in persuasion campaigns will be necessary, especially in rural communities. Rural Americans are twice as likely as people in urban areas to say they will “definitely not” get a shot, and nearly three-quarters of them identify as Republican or Republican-leaning, according to new survey data from the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation. Rural Americans are more apt to see vaccination as a civil-liberties issue: “More (58%) rural residents view getting vaccinated as a personal choice rather than part of everyone’s responsibility to protect the health of others (42%),” the KFF survey found. (The reverse is true for urban residents.) This group is also much more likely than any other to say that the news media has exaggerated the pandemic’s seriousness, Liz Hamel, who directs KFF’s polling work, told me. It’s possible—even probable—public-health experts told me, that months from now, some rural areas will still have very low vaccination rates, providing isolated havens for the coronavirus. That outcome could be calamitous. First, as long as unvaccinated individuals live together in a community, frequenting the same shops, offices, and classrooms, the virus can find hosts through which to spread. Second, and even worse, a virus left unchecked will evolve—that’s what viruses do best—and could become more infectious, more lethal, and more resistant to existing vaccines. Which means that, ultimately, a new, super-charged coronavirus variant could create the conditions for another epidemic, the experts told me. This is why “we need people vaccinated now, not four months from now,” says Alan Morgan, the CEO of the nonprofit National Rural Health Association.