As the Covid vaccine campaign picks up steam, some good news -- more people in New Jersey say they will take it.
A poll commissioned by the Newark nonprofit Project Ready showed 71% of voters will get the shot, up from 60% in a similar poll in December. There was little change among Black voters though. That figure stayed at about 60%.
Shennell McCloud, CEO of Project Ready, said the trust problem persists. “The medical community needs to continue to work on building trust and the way to do that is not to wait for communities of color to come to them but for them to go to the community,” she said.
McCloud said the campaign used to get people to trust the census should be the model here. “We have to see a similar campaign, meeting people at their doorsteps and information broken down in layman’s terms, so that communities can understand what’s at stake and what’s not at stake if they take the vaccine,” she said. “They sent out mailers, social media posts, text messages, ads, you name it, they covered it, they even had people phone banking.”
Surprisingly, she said, 57% of Black voters gave good marks to the state’s rollout of the vaccine, while only 27% of white voters did. There was also a political split. Only 46% of Republicans said they would get the vaccine compared to 91% of Democrats.