ANDREW ROMANO
\nYahoo News<\/p>\n
According to a new Yahoo News\/YouGov poll, 44 percent of Republicans believe that Bill Gates is plotting to use a mass COVID-19 vaccination campaign as a pretext to implant microchips in billions of people and monitor their movements \u2014 a\u00a0widely debunked conspiracy theory with no basis in fact<\/a>.<\/p>\n The survey, which was conducted May 20 and 21, found that only 26 percent of Republicans correctly identify the story as false.<\/p>\n In contrast, just 19 percent of Democrats believe the same spurious narrative about the Microsoft founder and public-health philanthropist. A majority of Democrats recognize that it\u2019s not true.<\/p>\n As states relax their lockdown restrictions and responsibility for containing the coronavirus shifts, in part, to the American people, the vast gap between the right and the left over Gates reflects a growing problem: the dangerous, destabilizing tendency to ignore fundamental facts about the deadly pathogen in favor of misinformation peddled by partisans,\u00a0including President Trump<\/a>, and spread on social media.<\/p>\n That tendency is more widespread on the right, although liberals also believe some false narratives (including that COVID-19 deaths have already surged in states that were quick to reopen).<\/p>\n The new Yahoo News\/YouGov poll found that this \u201cchoose your own reality\u201d effect is distorting perceptions of nearly every aspect of the pandemic, from reopening to vaccination to the official death toll. A broad majority of the public is either \u201cvery\u201d (56 percent) or \u201csomewhat\u201d concerned (30 percent) about \u201cfalse or misleading information being communicated about coronavirus.\u201d That sentiment, at least, is not partisan: More than 80 percent of Democrats, Republicans and independents agree.<\/p>\n Yet blame for these concerns varies greatly by political affiliation. When Democrats are asked to select the top source of false or misleading information about the coronavirus, 56 percent pick the Trump administration; that number rises to 69 percent among Hillary Clinton voters. Republicans, however, point to the mainstream media (54 percent) as the primary culprit; 61 percent of Trump voters say likewise.<\/p>\n The result, in many cases, is two different sets of \u201cfacts\u201d \u2014 only one of which resembles the truth.<\/p>\n Take the Gates example. Half of all Americans (50 percent) who name Fox News as their primary television news source believe the disproven conspiracy theory, and 44 percent of voters who cast ballots for Trump in 2016 do as well \u2014 even though neither Fox nor Trump has promoted it. At the same time, just 15 percent of MSNBC viewers and 12 percent of Clinton voters say the story is true.<\/p>\n The spread of such an outlandish charge may seem silly, but it could have catastrophic consequences. Through his namesake foundation, the tech billionaire has long championed vaccines in developing countries. So far, he has committed\u00a0$300 million to combating the coronavirus<\/a>. If large portions of the public believe that Gates\u2019s intent is nefarious \u2014 and if they go on to convince themselves that any coronavirus vaccine will be dangerous \u2014 then many may refuse to get vaccinated. (There is a\u00a0parallel sentiment among some evangelicals\u00a0<\/a>to resist vaccination out of fear it would constitute the \u201cmark of the beast\u201d mentioned in the Book of Revelation.)<\/p>\n The more people refuse to get vaccinated, the harder it becomes to end the pandemic.<\/p>\n The new Yahoo News\/YouGov survey shows that skepticism about a possible coronavirus vaccine is already taking root on the right. There is little partisan disagreement over vaccines in general: 83 percent of Americans consider childhood vaccines either \u201csomewhat\u201d or \u201cvery\u201d safe, and more than 80 percent of Democrats, independents and Republicans share this view. The same goes for concerns over the safety of\u00a0\u201cfast-tracking\u201d the vaccine through the typical research and regulatory process<\/a>: 73 percent of Americans are at least somewhat concerned, with little difference by party affiliation.<\/p>\n But when it comes to actually getting vaccinated, Clinton voters are nearly 30 points more likely to say they will (72 percent) than Trump voters (44 percent). A majority of Trump voters say either that they plan to skip the shot (29 percent) or that they aren\u2019t sure (27 percent),\u00a0even though the president himself has been pushing hard for a vaccine.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n As a result, only half of Americans (50 percent) now say they intend to get vaccinated \u201cif and when a coronavirus vaccine becomes available,\u201d with nearly a quarter (23 percent) saying they won\u2019t \u2014 a 5-point decline in the percentage of \u201cyes\u201d responses and a 4-point gain in the percentage of \u201cno\u201d responses since\u00a0the previous Yahoo News\/YouGov survey two weeks ago<\/a>. The rest (27 percent) say they\u2019re not sure.<\/p>\n This emerging trend against coronavirus inoculation may be linked to\u00a0the smokescreen of misinformation<\/a>\u00a0that\u00a0anti-vaccination activists and others<\/a>\u00a0have spread online as\u00a0researchers have started to make progress on a possible vaccine<\/a>. Whatever the cause, just 42 percent of Americans now trust the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other public health authorities to judge the risks of vaccines; 31 percent do not and 27 percent are unsure. A majority of Democrats trust the CDC; a plurality of Republicans (41 percent) do not.<\/p>\n Vaccines are not the only subject of misinformation. Another example with dire implications is hydroxychloroquine. A majority of Fox News viewers (53 percent), along with nearly half of Trump voters (49 percent) and Republicans (44 percent), think the antimalarial drug is an effective treatment against COVID-19 \u2014 even though\u00a0study after study has not proved that to be true<\/a>. In fact,\u00a0a new study of 96,000 hospitalized coronavirus patients on six continents<\/a>\u00a0found that those who received the drug had a significantly higher risk of death compared with those who did not.<\/p>\n Far fewer Trump voters, meanwhile, say that hydroxychloroquine is ineffective (just 17 percent) or that they are not sure (34 percent) \u2014 an upside-down perspective that may have something to do with the fact that the president told reporters Monday that\u00a0he has been taking the drug for the last \u201ccouple of weeks<\/a>\u201d as a preventive measure.<\/p>\n In contrast, only 5 percent of Clinton voters say hydroxychloroquine is effective. Seventy-three percent of Clinton voters say it is not.<\/p>\n The poll also found that a plurality of Trump voters (41 percent) say they would take hydroxychloroquine if it were available to them. Only 4 percent of Clinton voters say the same; 80 percent say they would not take the drug.\u00a0The Food and Drug Administration has warned<\/a>\u00a0that hydroxychloroquine should be used only in clinical trials or hospitals because it can trigger fatal heart arrhythmia in COVID-19 patients.<\/p>\n The left is not immune to picking and choosing its preferred version of events. Democrats (58 percent) are more likely than Republicans (33 percent) to believe that \u201ccoronavirus-related deaths have surged\u201d in early-to-reopen red states such as \u201cFlorida, Georgia and Texas\u201d \u2014 as are Americans in general (45 percent). Yet average daily deaths have declined in\u00a0Georgia<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Florida<\/a>\u00a0since reopening, while holding roughly steady in\u00a0Texas<\/a>.<\/p>\n That said, the right is more inclined than the left to believe easily invalidated coronavirus claims \u2014 especially if Trump himself has made them.<\/p>\n Majorities of Trump voters (53 percent) and Fox News viewers (60 percent) agree, for instance, that the U.S. has conducted more coronavirus tests than the rest of the world combined,\u00a0a frequent Trump boast<\/a>. In reality, the U.S. has\u00a0conducted fewer tests<\/a>\u00a0than the next three countries (Russia, Germany and Italy) put together, and\u00a0fewer per capita than 38 foreign countries<\/a>.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s claims that he \u201calways viewed [the coronavirus] as very serious<\/a>\u201d and that \u201cnobody ever thought a thing like this could happen<\/a>\u201d elicit similarly divergent responses, even when not attributed to Trump.<\/p>\n Asked whether the president always viewed the coronavirus as a very serious threat, a majority of Trump voters and Republicans (51 percent in both cases) say yes; just 3 percent of Clinton voters and 8 percent of Democrats concur. In reality, Trump\u00a0downplayed the threat at least 44 times<\/a>.<\/p>\n Asked whether \u201cthis kind of pandemic\u201d was \u201csomething nobody thought could happen,\u201d a similar number of Trump voters (51 percent) and Republicans (52 percent) answer affirmatively. Only about a third of Democrats (36 percent) and Clinton voters (30 percent) say the same \u2014 which squares with\u00a0the fact<\/a>\u00a0that the U.S. intelligence community, public health experts, officials in Trump\u2019s own administration and\u00a0Gates himself<\/a>\u00a0had warned for years that the country was at risk from a pandemic like this.<\/p>\n Majorities of Trump voters (58 percent), Republicans (57 percent) and Fox News viewers (65 percent) also believe that \u201cChinese scientists engineered coronavirus in a lab, from which it accidentally escaped\u201d \u2014 an\u00a0improbable<\/a>\u00a0theory\u00a0disputed by the intelligence community<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Dr. Anthony Fauci<\/a>, the nation\u2019s top infectious disease expert. Pluralities of each of these three conservative-leaning groups also believe that \u201cCOVID-19 was intentionally created by Chinese scientists as a biowarfare weapon,\u201d which\u00a0not even the Trump administration is alleging<\/a>.<\/p>\n And while most Americans believe that the CDC\u2019s official coronavirus death count, which now stands at about 94,000, is either accurate (19 percent) or lower than the real number of COVID-19 deaths (45 percent), the right does not: 52 percent of Trump voters and 55 percent of Fox News viewers insist it is too high. Trump often\u00a0says the same<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 even though many public health\u00a0experts<\/a>, including some within his administration, have been stressing that COVID-19\u00a0deaths<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0cases<\/a>\u00a0are almost certainly being\u00a0undercounted<\/a>.<\/p>\n A belief that deaths are being overcounted squares with assertions by Donald Trump Jr. and others in the Trump camp that Democrats are exaggerating the threat to hurt the president\u2019s reelection.<\/p>\n There is still some shared reality. Most Democrats, Republicans and independents say, for instance, that they will continue to practice social distancing even after official restrictions are lifted; most also characterize the CDC\u2019s recommendation that everyone wear a cloth mask or other face covering in public places where distancing is not possible as \u201cabout right\u201d in terms of strictness.<\/p>\n But views on reopening are starting to diverge as well. Asked in\u00a0previous Yahoo News\/YouGov polls<\/a>\u00a0whether stay-at-home orders were the only way to stop the spread of COVID-19 or whether \u201cthe cure is worse than the disease,\u201d majorities of Americans, both Democratic and Republican, said the former. Now for the first time, a majority of Republicans (53 percent) say the cure is worse. Among Trump voters and Fox News viewers, that number skyrockets to 59 percent and 66 percent, respectively.<\/p>\n On the right, nearly every question about reopening is trending in the same direction. Pluralities of Republicans (44 percent) and majorities of Trump voters (55 percent) and Fox News viewers (61 percent) now support the protesters demanding an end to lockdown measures. Wide majorities of these right-leaning groups also say they are more concerned about lifting restrictions too slowly than too quickly; most Americans \u2014 by a 61 percent to 39 percent margin \u2014 still say the opposite. And while 62 percent of Americans say they\u2019re more worried about the impact of the coronavirus on people\u2019s health than on the economy, the right disagrees: 63 percent of Republicans, 68 percent of Trump voters and 73 percent of Fox News viewers say they\u2019re more worried about the economy.<\/p>\n Similar percentages of these three groups say the economy should reopen \u201cas soon as possible to prevent further economic damage\u201d instead of \u201cwhen public health officials are fully able to test and trace new cases and outbreaks.\u201d Asked what\u2019s worse \u2014 200,000 more elderly Americans dying of COVID-19 over the next year or 30 million Americans being unemployed for the next year \u2014 73 percent of Trump voters say the latter. Overall, Americans disagree by a 55 percent to 45 percent margin.<\/p>\n These disputes are more matters of opinion than fact. But they could create challenges going forward. Fewer Americans say the U.S. is prepared (32 percent) to handle a second coronavirus outbreak if it occurs later this year than say the country is not prepared (43 percent), with 25 percent unsure. Yet Republicans are more optimistic, with 57 percent saying America is ready.<\/p>\n So while a majority of Americans want the government to continue enforcing social distancing measures (63 percent) and would favor resuming lockdowns in the event of a resurgence (66 percent), Republicans are divided on these questions, with only 49 percent backing more lockdowns if infections spike and a full 59 percent agreeing that \u201cpeople are practicing enough social distancing to keep coronavirus under control without strict government measures.\u201d<\/p>\n If and when the coronavirus comes back \u2014 Fauci, for one, has said a second wave is \u201cinevitable<\/a>\u201d \u2014 it could prove difficult to reach a broad consensus on the proper response.<\/p>\n _____<\/p>\n The Yahoo News survey was conducted by YouGov using a nationally representative sample of 1,640 U.S. adult residents interviewed online between May 20 and 21, 2020. This sample was weighted according to gender, age, race and education, as well as 2016 presidential vote, registration status and news interest. Respondents were selected from YouGov\u2019s opt-in panel to be representative of all U.S residents. The margin of error is approximately 3.0 percent.<\/em><\/p>\n