Poll: 70 percent of unvaccinated Americans would quit their job over exemption-less vaccine mandate

About 70 percent of unvaccinated Americans who are not self-employed said they would likely quit their job if their employer mandated COVID-19 vaccines and did not grant religious or medical exemptions, a new Washington Post/ABC News poll found.
Those numbers don't suggest vaccine mandates would lead to a massive exodus from the workplace since a healthy majority of employees who are working at places that have yet to implement a mandate have already received their shots. But among the 30 percent or so who haven't, there is significant opposition. Only 16 percent from that group would comply with a mandate, while 35 percent said they would seek an exemption and 42 percent would leave. If there's no exemption, then 72 percent of those surveyed said they would quit.
Still, overall vaccine hesitancy has continued to decline, and the Post poll is the latest data set indicating more and more people are willing to get their shots, or have already done so. Mask and vaccine requirements are also favored by a majority of people.
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The Post/ABC poll was conducted by telephone between Aug. 20-Sept. 1 among 1,066 adults in the U.S. The margin of error is 3.5 percentage points. Read more at The Washington Post.
Correction: The headline for this article originally failed to clarify that the 70 percent figure applied specifically to unvaccinated people.
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Tim is a staff writer at The Week and has contributed to Bedford and Bowery and The New York Transatlantic. He is a graduate of Occidental College and NYU's journalism school. Tim enjoys writing about baseball, Europe, and extinct megafauna. He lives in New York City.
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