Second Associated Press story

Outreach workers are still scrambling to convince the unvaccinated to get their shots, and a long list of private businesses and government agencies have made it a condition of employment. But despite the pleas and the mandates, a significant group of Americans appears immune to persuasion.

Polling by the Kaiser Family Foundation shows that since the vaccines became widely available, about 15% of adults have said they will “definitely not” get one. The percentage has stayed constant even as the nation’s COVID-related death toll has swollen to more than 900,000.

The Biden administration, meanwhile, saw its vaccination mandate for large employers turned away by the U.S. Supreme Court. Some companies that imposed their own backtracked after states limited such protocols. And 21 plaintiffs fighting Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s mandate for school employees recently won a court victory when a judge granted their temporary restraining order.

That leaves researchers to ponder the resisters’ impact on the pandemic. Dr. Yonatan Grad, an immunologist at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, expects it will be straightforward.

“Until we see the spread of COVID-19 through that population so they get some degree of immunity from infection — though it’s better with vaccination — we’re going to see relatively higher numbers of (unvaccinated) people requiring hospitalization and all the impact that comes from that,” he said.