vaccine 2021 :: Article CreatorMore Americans Report Getting A Flu Shot Than The Updated COVID-19 Vaccine Since August
More U.S. Adults say they've gotten the updated flu shot than the updated COVID-19 shot (42% vs. 27%) since the two vaccines became available in the United States last summer, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. This is similar to levels of uptake measured for last year's versions of these vaccines.
The current flu season has seen high numbers of hospitalizations and deaths from the disease. At the same time, COVID-19 continues to take a serious health toll on some Americans, though to a much lesser extent than in previous years.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends getting both the flu shot and the updated COVID-19 vaccine to protect against severe illness from both diseases. They add that these vaccines are especially important for groups of people at high risk of severe complications from flu and COVID-19, such as adults ages 65 and older.
How we did this
Pew Research Center conducted this analysis to determine the share of Americans who say they have gotten the flu shot and updated COVID-19 vaccine. We surveyed 5,123 U.S. Adults from Feb. 24 to March 2, 2025.
Everyone who took part in the survey is a member of the Center's American Trends Panel (ATP), a group of people recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses who have agreed to take surveys regularly. This kind of recruitment gives nearly all U.S. Adults a chance of selection. Interviews were conducted either online or by telephone with a live interviewer. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. Adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP's methodology.
Here are the questions used for this analysis, the topline and the survey methodology.
Many Americans have not gotten either a flu shot or updated COVID-19 vaccine
Just over half of U.S. Adults (53%) say they've gotten neither the flu shot nor the updated COVID-19 vaccine since last August. By comparison, a far smaller share (22%) say they've gotten both these vaccines.
One-in-five adults report getting a flu shot but not the updated COVID-19 shot. And a very small share report the opposite behavior: Just 5% of Americans say they've gotten the updated COVID-19 vaccine but not the flu shot.
Democrats are far more likely than Republicans to get each vaccine
Democrats and independents who lean to the Democratic Party are more likely than Republicans and Republican leaners to say they've gotten the flu shot (53% vs. 32%). Democrats also are more likely than Republicans to report getting the updated COVID-19 vaccine (42% vs. 12%).
Partisan differences across age groups
Age also matters when it comes to getting these shots. In both parties, adults ages 65 and older are more likely than their younger counterparts to get each shot. Still, in every age group, Democrats are more likely than Republicans to report getting each vaccine.
The gap between Democrats and Republicans is especially wide when looking at COVID-19 vaccine uptake among Americans 65 and older, a group at high risk for severe illness. Among Americans 65 and older, 69% of Democrats say they've gotten the updated COVID-19 vaccine, compared with just 23% of Republicans. This 46 percentage point gap is comparable to the one we observed last year, but much larger than the one for the first coronavirus vaccines in 2021.
There's also a partisan gap among those ages 65 and older when it comes to flu shot uptake, though it's not as wide. A majority of Republicans in this age group (56%) say they have gotten a flu shot; an even larger share of Democrats 65 and older say the same (78%).
Uptake of COVID-19 vaccines since 2021
The share of Americans who say they've gotten the updated COVID-19 vaccine is largely unchanged from a year ago (27% today vs. 28% then). These levels are much lower than vaccine uptake at other moments of the pandemic.
For instance, 69% of U.S. Adults said they were fully vaccinated in August 2021, months after the first round of COVID-19 vaccines became widely available to Americans.
As newer versions of COVID-19 vaccines have become available, a declining share of Americans have chosen to get the most up-to-date shots. Americans have also become less likely to view COVID-19 as a major health threat, and rates of hospitalizations and deaths from the disease have fallen.
For more information about uptake of this year's flu shot and updated COVID-19 vaccine, refer to this chart for flu shot uptake and this chart for updated COVID-19 uptake.
Note: Here are the questions used for this analysis, the topline and the survey methodology.
The Pandemic Led To Increased Vaccine Hesitancy. Now, Fewer K-12 Students Are Getting Vaccinated
In September 2021, health care workers and vaccine skeptics protested outside Broadlawns Medical Center in Des Moines to air concerns about COVID vaccine mandates from their employers.
"What do we want? Medical freedom! When do we want it? Now!" they chanted.
The mandates came after the Food and Drug Administration gave the vaccine Emergency Use Authorization, a special measure that the FDA can use to approve unauthorized medical products in an emergency. This caused some people to question whether the COVID vaccine was safe.
Protests erupted across the country. It was an unusual time for state and county public health officials.
Danielle Pettit-Majewski, Johnson County's public health director, said scientists were tasked with supplying the public with new information about the virus while trying to dispel online misinformation at the same time.
"We're not used to seeing the scientific method in action. We're used to something being researched and developed and tested for years and years, and then being rolled out," she said.
The pace of the vaccine rollout led to questions about both the efficacy of the vaccine and the expertise of public health officials.
Religious exemptions to immunizations have nearly doubled since 2020.
"Because this was a novel virus, we kept learning more, and as we kept learning more, we would give people new information," Pettit-Majewski said.
Natoshia Askelson, an associate professor of public health at the University of Iowa, said online misinformation amplified people's distrust in the vaccine.
"All of this kind of contributed to the distrust in our public health system, the rhetoric from people like RFK [Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] around what they call 'Big Pharma,'" Askelson said. "Anyone who's concerned about their health or their children's health might begin to be concerned."
The idea that the COVID vaccine may not be safe translated to declining vaccination rates for other vaccines on Iowa's recommended schedule, like the whooping cough and polio vaccines.
The number of under-vaccinated children in the state's school system has continued to climb since COVID, according to this year's school audit by the Iowa Department of Health and Human Services. In five years, that number has grown by nearly 3 percentage points to 7.1% — a difference of roughly 14,000 kids.
Iowa Department of Health and Human Services
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Bureau of Immunization and Tuberculosis, 2024-25 School Immunization Audit
The map shows the percentage of Iowa students who are under-vaccinated or unvaccinated for the 2024-2025 broken down by county.
Askelson said recent legislation also makes it easier for families to get around vaccine requirements for whooping cough and polio.
"Previously, for children to get an exemption from school, you had to have a religious exemption that was notarized, and that changed last year," Askelson said.
Now, in many cases, she said it's easier to get an exemption than to get a vaccine. Religious exemptions to immunizations have nearly doubled since 2020. The largest increase happened since the notary signature requirement was removed in 2024.
Iowa Department of Health and Human Services
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Bureau of Immunization and Tuberculosis, 2024-25 School Immunization Audit
The number of under-vaccinated children in the Iowa's K-12 school system has continued to climb since the 2020-2021 school year.
Vince Hassel is a chiropractor in Clive, a suburb of Des Moines. His four kids are all unvaccinated. They are now in their 20's, and he says the religious exemptions were never that hard to get.
"I would just take my card to the bank and anybody that's a notary can notarize it," Hassel said. "They weren't notarizing anybody's beliefs or anything else — they're just notarizing the signature on the card, which is the parent's signature."
According to Iowa state code, there is no option to obtain a philosophical exemption. However, getting a religious exemption means saying that the immunization conflicts with a "genuine and sincere" religious belief.
Hassel said he was especially vocal online during the pandemic — or as he calls it, the "scam-demic."
"I never realized until the pandemic how political health was in these health decisions. It's crazy, I had no idea," Hassel said.
Not all families with religious exemptions are vaccine hesitant, however. Elizabeth Faber, coalition director of Iowa Immunizes, says some file an exemption because it's easier and then get the vaccines later.
"We know that sickness doesn't stop at state lines, and so we're definitely concerned that, if we have these pockets of unvaccinated kids, those exemptions don't protect them."
Elizabeth Faber, coalition director of Iowa Immunizes
But Faber says over time, as vaccine rates fall, long-eradicated diseases could return. The recent measles outbreak in Texas is an example of this.
"We know that sickness doesn't stop at state lines, and so we're definitely concerned that, if we have these pockets of unvaccinated kids, those exemptions don't protect them," Faber said.
She said most Iowans do vaccinate their children and themselves according to the recommended schedule. But five years after the global pandemic, she's still reminding people that vaccines are well-tested and protect vulnerable populations.
Five Years Into COVID, More Texans Are Avoiding Vaccines – For Everything
Round Rock family physician Dr. Tina Philip keeps having the same conversation with patients these days. She encourages them to get vaccinated for COVID and flu. They say no.
"I've even had patients that, you know, previously would get the flu vaccine every year, and then now they're like, 'Nah, I'm just not going to do any of that anymore,'" Philip said.
At the end of 2021, 77% of Travis County residents aged 5 and up had gotten at least one dose of the COVID vaccine — many of them after eagerly waiting in line for a shot that could bring a bit of normalcy back to their lives. But as of this month, only 23% of adults had received the latest shot, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Likewise, the CDC reports, flu vaccination rates have tracked steadily downward since 2019.
More kindergartners are opting out of school vaccine requirements, and state lawmakers are trying to make it even easier to do so.
Dr. Claire Bocchini, an infectious disease specialist with Texas Children's Hospital, said vaccine hesitancy was rising even before COVID-19 emerged – but the pandemic exacerbated the trend.
"With the COVID vaccine generating so much media attention and misinformation online via social media, I think that we did see a rise of vaccine hesitancy in general," Bocchini said.
What's driving hesitancy?
KUT News received more than 200 responses to a survey this month about attitudes toward vaccines. Many respondents said their education about the COVID-19 vaccine had reinforced the importance of immunizations to protect themselves and the community.
But others, like Austin resident Alicia Giangiacomo, said they had become more skeptical following the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine.
Giangiacomo said she never got the vaccine, partly because she was never required to, and partly because she was nervous about how quickly it was developed.
"I would like to believe that our health organizations and pharmaceutical companies would put in the due diligence to make a vaccine that is safe," she said. "However, I don't think that they are putting in that kind of effort."
In fact, although the first vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna were fast-tracked under the Trump administration's "Project Warp Speed," they were developed from a decade of existing research and were tested in large clinical trials before they were approved for emergency use in the U.S.
Gabriel C. Pérez
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KUT News
People wait in line to get the COVID-19 vaccination at a walk-in clinic in Austin on March 27, 2021.
Giangiacomo also said she was disappointed the vaccine did not prevent transmission of the virus. She said health leaders were misleading about that.
Ahead of the vaccine's first release, however, experts said they weren't sure if the vaccine would prevent transmission. But they were clear it would prevent severe cases of the disease and keep folks out of the hospital — and that was true.
"From my standpoint as an infectious disease specialist, this vaccine really did make an impact in being able to have people get COVID and still do well, without being in the hospital, without dying from the infection," Bocchini said. "It made a huge difference in my job."
But most people aren't infectious disease specialists, and don't get to see what Bocchini sees every day.
Dr. Mark Escott served as Austin's top public health official through the height of COVID. Now, he's chief medical officer for the City of Austin. Looking back, he said, health leaders could have done a better job of communicating to the public how vaccines work – of letting them know, for instance, that some types of vaccines wane in effectiveness over time and require regular boosters – like flu shots, and now, like COVID vaccines.
"I think one of the lessons learned is that we have to ensure that the public understands it like we do," he said. "We don't want to oversell something to try to reach a public health goal."
The role of misinformation
As Bocchini pointed out, there was also significant misinformation about vaccines that circulated during the pandemic. There continues to be – and not just with COVID. Bocchini said parents who come to her practice often incorrectly believe there's a risk their child will develop autism if they get the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella. That theory has been repeatedly debunked.
"Vaccines don't cause autism," she said. "Vaccines can have some very minor side effects, but they're very safe."
"Vaccines don't cause autism. Vaccines can have some very minor side effects, but they're very safe." Dr. Claire Bocchini, infectious disease specialist with Texas Children's Hospital
When fewer people are vaccinated for contagious diseases like measles, the stakes are high. Dropping vaccination rates have led to resurgences of the once-eliminated disease. One child and one adult have died amid an outbreak in West Texas and New Mexico; dozens have been hospitalized.
Meanwhile, America's highest-ranking health official, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has downplayed the severity of measles and repeated misinformation about vaccines.
Escott said he hopes outbreaks like the one in Texas will remind people how dangerous measles can be; it commonly leads to complications like pneumonia, and occasionally causes swelling of the brain and other life-threatening or disabling conditions.
"That may be enough to push people over the line to say, 'You know what, there wasn't a threat before, but there is now. So maybe now is the right time to get my child vaccinated,'" he said.
Giangiacomo said she is paying attention to the latest measles outbreak and that it reminds her vaccines have importance. In the past, she made sure her daughter received standard childhood vaccines, and she is now considering whether she would vaccinate any future kids she may have.
"We've been vaccinating [for diseases like measles] for decades. They obviously work at eradicating these diseases within our community," she said. "That's a pretty big deal, and I do stand behind that."
Breaking through the noise
With the rise of social media, Escott said the public has to field a lot more information these days — which makes how scientists communicate even more important.
"Public health is used to communicating science and charts and graphs," he said. "We have to understand how people think and how they process information."
For some people, public health messaging has broken through the noise – even during the continuous years of the pandemic.
Take Cecilia Mireles. The 46-year-old Austin jewelry maker grew up in a family that was skeptical of Western medicine. Before the pandemic, she didn't see a general practitioner, refused vaccines and avoided medications.
"When COVID happened, and it seemed like vaccines might be the only way out of it, I tried to have an open mind about possibly taking a vaccine," she said.
After tuning into reporting on the vaccine's development and researching vaccine risks, Mireles said she discovered that some of her beliefs about vaccines were unfounded, like the myth that vaccines can cause autism. She decided to get the COVID shot — and then some other shots, too.
"I have gotten every vaccine out there," she said, laughing. "I did such a 180."
Copyright 2025 KUT 90.5
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