{photo used with permission Pexels/Godisable Jacob}
I’m reviewing a friend’s new book and he wrote in a sentence that 24.3% of people who voted in the 2016 presidential election agree with the statement “Vaccines have been shown to cause autism.”
And I was like, what? Did I already know this in 2016 and I forgot? I do turn off my Facebook account for months at a time… maybe I missed this.
I went to the source, which was a YouGov poll you can see here, endearingly headlined “Belief in conspiracy theories largely depends on political identity.”
The breakdown is this: 18% of Clinton voters who answered the YouGov poll completely believe vaccines can cause autism. And 31% of all voters who took the poll completely believe vaccines can cause autism. What a strange, half-assed way to present that information, right? What about the Trump voters?
Then I went looking for the actual poll because the writeup doesn’t say how many people took the poll or what the division between voters was.
The poll was of 1,376 people. Here’s the breakdown.
The 2016 YouGov poll
So the media spun this YouGov survey as “One in three Trump supporters believes vaccines cause autism,” when clearly that was not the newsworthy revelation, because one in three Clinton supporters also believes vaccines cause autism.
See here:
Democrats who believe vaccines definitely or probably cause autism: 28%.
Republicans who believe vaccines definitely or probably cause autism: 29%.
Independents who believe vaccines definitely or probably cause autism: 34%.
There is only a 1-point difference between Democrats and Republicans, and the media don’t care about Independents. But the YouGov article and the media who covered the YouGov story want their readers to believe that Trump voters were the issue.
The real story is in the other numbers:
White Americans who believe vaccines definitely or probably cause autism: 28%.
Hispanic Americans who believe vaccines definitely or probably cause autism: 32%.
Black Americans who believe vaccines definitely or probably cause autism: 44%.
That is a 16-point difference between blacks and whites.
I guess YouGov was entirely uncomfortable with the headline “Belief in conspiracy theories largely depends on race.”
And that’s not all.
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Hi. Levi here. I’m on Patreon now for only $3 a month and I want to invite you to join me.
Read 2,028 more words in this article– vaccine distrust broken down by races in America, who is “unvaccinated” and who is “under-vaccinated” and is it by choice or circumstance? Are affluent white mothers really the driving force behind vaccine schedule non-compliance, or is that a story the media has spun? Read about attitudes toward the risks and health benefits of the MMR, flu, and HPV vaccines in professional surveys, and who is least likely and most likely to comply with the vaccines included in the “Every Child By Two” program.
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