On Friday, the Supreme Court will hear challenges to two vaccine mandates authorized by the Biden Administration – the vaccine mandate for health-care workers and the mandate for companies with 100 or more employees.
The latest YouGov Daily Agenda survey finds a majority in support of one of Biden’s vaccine mandates, while opinion on the other is more split but also leans pro-mandate. A survey this week of more than 6,000 American adults found that they support the federal government mandating vaccines for health-care workers by 53% to 35%, and the one for workers at larger businesses by 48% to 38%.
Americans are divided on vaccine mandates by party identification – as they have been for months. Less than one-third of Republicans (31%) support a vaccine mandate for health care workers, and just 24% support a mandate for all businesses with 100 or more employees.
Partisan differences are large when it comes to how many Americans don’t plan to get vaccinated. In the latest Economist/YouGov Poll, conducted last weekend, 33% of Republicans said that they will not get vaccinated against COVID-19, compared to just 4% of Democrats.
Asked about the general principle of whether the federal government should be able to mandate COVID-19 vaccines, Americans’ responded with a similar level of support as they did to the question of mandates for large businesses: 47% say the federal government should be allowed to mandate vaccines for certain groups of people, while 38% disagree.
There is more support for employers being able to mandate masks for their workers than there is for the government mandating vaccines for workers. In the latest Economist/YouGov Poll, 59% of U.S. adult citizens support employers being able to set mask mandates for employees; just 30% oppose. Even more Americans support airlines being able to require masks for passengers (65%) and health-care providers being able to require that patients wear masks (64%).
See the crosstabs from this YouGov Poll
Methodology: YouGov surveyed 6,046 U.S. adults for a poll on January 5 - 6, 2022. The samples were weighted to be representative of the U.S. population, based on gender, age, race, education, U.S. census region, and political party.
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