When vaccine hesitancy becomes political

Between the lines: Plenty of other American adults who haven't yet gotten their shots are planning to — they just don't feel particularly urgent about it. Others are still on the fence. Overuse of the "vaccine hesitancy" label could end up backfiring. “What I'm really worried about is building up this identity of, ‘if you're a Republican, you don’t want the vaccine.’ I think a) that’s not correct and b) it's really, really harmful,” said Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health. And conflating slow vaccination rates, high hesitancy rates and political leanings may paper over access issues. “It could be that people who believe in Trump and voted for Trump don’t want to get vaccinated. It could also be that those places did a lousy job making vaccines available," Jha said.