Most Americans support some vaccines. We can work with that.

Vaccine-skeptical people still mostly vaccinate their kids

Anti-vaccine and vaccine-hesitant views have proliferated since the COVID-19 pandemic. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz/MediaNews Group/Los Angeles Daily News via Getty Images)

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Welcome back to The Argument’s monthly poll series, where we survey Americans on the issues everyone’s fighting about. Our last surveys have asked about immigration, AI, and free speech. Our full crosstabs are available below the paywall in this post for paying subscribers and our full methodology can be read here.

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Skipping childhood vaccinations gets kids killed. Right now, it gets kids killed occasionally — a dozen here from whooping cough, a couple here from measles. But if vaccine hesitancy becomes widespread, we’ll dream of the days that these preventable childhood deaths numbered in the single digits.

I try to keep these facts front and center when we talk about vaccination: Whooping cough used to kill thousands of children each year. Before we introduced the measles vaccine, 50,000 people were hospitalized with the disease every year and 500 died.

So it’s very depressing to see answers to two questions in The Argument’s November poll, which asked 1,508 registered voters a wide range of questions on personal health and the MAHA movement.