Does Policy Uncertainty Boost Vaccine Hesitancy? Political Controversy, the FDA and COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy in Fall 2020.

Context: Vaccine hesitancy is associated with political and institutional distrust, but there is little research on how people's trust responds to political events. We revisit the fall of 2020 when evaluation of new COVID-19 vaccines collided with an impending national election. Drawing on a political Bayesian perspective, we assess abrupt changes in attention to political events and test hypotheses on subpopulation response: (1) partisan, (2) educational, and (3) ethnic and racial.