CNN’s New Day Shows ‘Very Revealing’ Data Connecting Fox News Viewers to Vaccine Hesitancy

CNN Senior Data Reporter Harry Enten turned his analysis to the resurging Covid pandemic and compared the demographic make-up of vaccine-hesitant Americans by media diet.

The segment came in the context of the recent surge in hospitalizations across several states brought about by the delta variant of the potentially deadly pathogen. The states seeing the rise in infections and deaths also have among the lowest percentage of citizens who have been vaccinated. As CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said recently, the pandemic is currently occurring almost exclusively for the unvaccinated in the country.

Enten opened the segment by noting some encouraging news. There is a slight uptick in daily vaccinations across the country. Four states with the lowest percentage of vaccination shots (Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri, and Mississippi) are now in the top ten of daily vaccinations over the latest week.

Co-anchor John Berman pivoted to Fox News, saying, “you don’t have to work hard there to find people dissing on vaccines until recently,” before allowing that “some of their people started suggesting, ‘hey, science works, vaccines work.'”

Enten then showed a chart of adults with at least one covid vaccine dose divvied up by their main news source. “Just 62% of people who use Fox News as their main news source have at least one dose,” he noted, compared to people who get their news from network news (ABC, CBS, NBC) which is 79%. Viewers of CNN and MSNBC came in at 83%. “What we see is about 20 points less of the Fox News audience has been vaccinated compared to the people who get their news from say, some other television outlet,” he added.

He then turned to the trend line of vaccinations from mid-April to mid-June, which he called “very revealing.” While viewers of CNN and MSNBC saw 74% get vaccinated, Fox News viewers only moved from 61% to 62% over the same time. “Barely a move at all over the last month and a half,” he said, before comparing it to those who get their news from ABC, CBS, NBC crowd a four-point jump from 75 to 79.

“Here is why it matters,” Enten concluded. “Look at the average age of the Fox News audience. It’s 55, well above all adults just at 48.” He then explained while younger people now are now starting to make up a larger share of the deaths, it’s still overwhelmingly old folks. The proportion of June Covid deaths for people over 50 still represents 8 in 10 citizens.

“When you have an older audience, it’s so important they get vaccinated because they’re the ones who have the most danger, unfortunately from Covid,” Enten concluded.

Watch above via CNN.