Facebook Survey Shows Arlington With Highest Vaccine Acceptance

VIRGINIA — Northern Virginia residents rank near the top of the list of Americans most likely to get the COVID-19 vaccine once it becomes available to them, with Arlington County rated as the county with the highest vaccine acceptance in the nation, according to the results of a Facebook survey.

As of Feb. 15, 96 percent of Arlington residents would "definitely" or "probably" get the vaccine once an appointment becomes available, the highest percentage in the nation, Facebook said.

The next highest jurisdiction in Northern Virginia is Fairfax County where 88 percent of residents indicated in the survey that they would definitely or probably get the vaccine, followed by Loudoun County at 87 percent and Prince William County at 79 percent.

"Arlington County has the highest vaccination acceptance of any county in the entire nation," Laura McGorman, public policy manager at Facebook’s Data For Good program, told Patch. "Part of what you're seeing in the Northern Virginia counties is a very, very high baseline level of vaccine acceptance compared to other parts of the United States."

Vaccine acceptance in the rest of the state looks good, but does not reach the high bar set by the Northern Virginia jurisdictions, McGorman said. "Any county by comparison to Northern Virginia will look low," she added.

About 69 percent of the residents in the city of Fredericksburg, for example, would definitely or probably choose to receive a COVID-19 vaccine if it were offered to them today, according to Facebook data. Fredericksburg's vaccine acceptance rate is just below the state average of 70 percent.

Using a survey platform created by Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Facebook is seeking new insights on vaccine attitudes in the United States in order to guide the distribution of the vaccine and increase immunization rates. The University of Maryland is partnering with Facebook to collect data from people in 200 other countries on COVID-19 and vaccination acceptance.

Facebook promotes the survey on a daily basis, while Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Maryland collect the data. The massive Facebook survey project has already received more than 50 million responses from people around the world, McGorman said.

Slow Vaccine Rollout Less Acceptable

With the slow rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine in Virginia, the main concern of the vast majority of residents has been the availability of vaccines, not whether a vaccine shot would be safe to get.

Prior to the release of the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines in mid-December, the Virginia Health Department, along with local departments, made communicating the safety of the vaccine a top priority. As it turned out, only a small percentage of residents in Northern Virginia were hesitant to get the vaccine. In more rural areas of the state, the vaccine acceptance rate drops off.

Due to the shortage of vaccines, only 4.2 percent of Virginians have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19 as of Feb. 17 as the nation enters the third month of the vaccination program.

In Virginia, the vaccine is currently available only to healthcare and front-line essential workers, residents of long-term care facilities, people age 65 and older, people age 16-64 with underlying medical conditions, and people living in correctional facilities, homeless shelters and migrant labor camps.

Data released in late January through the U.S. Census Bureau's Household Pulse Survey showed that about a third of respondents in some Southern, Midwest and Western states are not likely to get a vaccine when they are able. Forty percent of Louisiana residents said they would not likely get the vaccine when it becomes available to them, the highest rejection rate in the nation. Mississippi is next with 36 percent of its population unlikely to get the vaccine.

The Census Bureau’s survey data shows that while a majority of white (55.5 percent) respondents said they would definitely get the vaccine, those rates were much lower for Black (29.6 percent) and Latino (47.3 percent) respondents, according to the bureau.

In its own survey, Facebook found that 87 percent of Asian Americans across the country said they would definitely or probably get the vaccine if it were offered today, while only 59 percent of African Americans said they would definitely or probably get the vaccine.

Those percentages parallel the percentages of people getting the vaccine in high priority groups. About two-thirds of Asian American health care workers have already received the COVID-19 vaccine. But only one-third of African American health care workers who are eligible have chosen to get the vaccine, according to Facebook data.

Vaccine acceptance also goes up with age. "The closer you get to that target 65 and over population, the more you tend to want a vaccine if one were made available," McGorman said.

Facebook's collection of COVID-19 data started last April as part of the company's efforts to fight the pandemic. At the time, Carnegie Mellon University approached Facebook to do a survey on COVID-19 symptoms and promote it on the social media platform.

Over the past 10 months, the original survey has grown to include questions on whether people are wearing masks, whether people are physical distancing, and whether people have been tested, along with their views on getting the COVID-19 vaccine.

Facebook also is working to stop the spread of misinformation about vaccines. The social media company is removing vaccine misinformation posts that are widely debunked hoaxes. It is removing Facebook pages and groups that repeatedly share false COVID-19 conspiracy theories and other false vaccine claims.

"We expanded the type of information we're going to take down, which includes the widely debunked hoaxes, a list maintained by the World Health Organization," McGorman said. "But we acknowledge that there are still very real and very valid questions around the vaccine. Is it safe for children? Is it safe for pregnant women? Might I have an allergic reaction? All of those things are things that we would absolutely not only leave up but welcome people talking about on the platform if they have questions."