Are Harmful Effects of The Vaccine Being Hidden from The Public? 28 percent of Americans Believe So

By Prattiba JaiSri On Nov 24, 2021

A new study by the YouGov-Cambridge Globalism Project showed significant findings about Americans’ viewpoint on the COVID-19 vaccine.

In the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020, an “infodemic” of misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories about the origins of the new coronavirus, how to treat it, and whether it was even real began spreading simultaneously around the world.

Recently, a survey shared by Yahoo! news show the following findings;

“Taken together, these findings emphasize the extent to which conspiracism has entered the mainstream politics of numerous electorates around the world,” Dr. Joel Rogers de Waal, YouGov’s academic director, said in a statement.

“The same research also points to a new and deeper form of partisan antipathy, where people are divided not merely by policy preference or political identity but also by their fundamental perceptions of reality.

Overall, 43 percent of adults surveyed in the U.S. said they did not believe that “the harmful effects of vaccines” were being withheld from the public.”

They also found that “Nearly all countries demonstrated significantly lower willingness to believe that COVID is a myth than to believe in a cover-up about vaccines in general.”

The YouGov-Cambridge Globalism Project surveys were carried out online between Aug. 4 and Sept. 21 among representative samples of between 1,000 and 1,400 adults over age 18 in 23 countries.

People in Denmark were the least likely to believe that the public is being deliberately misled about the harmful effects of vaccines, with just 10 percent of Danish respondents saying they think this is true, followed by 13 percent in Great Britain and 15 percent of those polled in Sweden.

The country with the highest percentage of citizens expressing vaccine skepticism was Kenya, with 54 percent of respondents saying they believe the statement about the harmful effects of vaccines being hidden from the public.

Nigeria came in second place, with 50 percent of respondents saying they think this is true, followed by 49 percent in South Africa and 41 percent in India.

These findings are in line with the overall conclusions of the study, which found that Western countries generally demonstrated less of a tendency to believe conspiracy theories, “with Britain, Japan and the Scandinavian countries being among the least likely to entertain them,” while India and the African countries were home to “markedly large numbers of conspiracists.”

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