When I’ve asked my Red Tribe friends their thoughts about the vaccines, they’ve generally given similar answers to your survey how they don’t trust the government, media, big pharma, etc. But I think the main underlying reason is just signaling which tribe they belong to. Early in the pandemic, Trump’s messaging was that covid was no big deal, just the flu, it will go away soon, etc. and this became the party line. For relatively young, healthy people, choosing to get the vaccine might be seen as disloyal to the tribe. So when they weighed these social costs against the seemingly negligible risk of death or serious illness, they chose their social identity over getting vaccinated. And as Matthew Barnett mentioned, they could easily come up with plausible sounding rationalizations like the ones from your survey.
When I’ve asked my Red Tribe friends their thoughts about the vaccines, they’ve generally given similar answers to your survey how they don’t trust the government, media, big pharma, etc. But I think the main underlying reason is just signaling which tribe they belong to. Early in the pandemic, Trump’s messaging was that covid was no big deal, just the flu, it will go away soon, etc. and this became the party line. For relatively young, healthy people, choosing to get the vaccine might be seen as disloyal to the tribe. So when they weighed these social costs against the seemingly negligible risk of death or serious illness, they chose their social identity over getting vaccinated. And as Matthew Barnett mentioned, they could easily come up with plausible sounding rationalizations like the ones from your survey.