Angelica Puzio writes:

For months, local, state and federal officials have been consumed with how to persuade Americans who are wary of the COVID-19 vaccine to get the shot anyway. The conversation has focused in large part on specific demographic groups and how to overcome certain cultural factors to get the vaccines into people’s arms. Experts worried about low turnout among women, who reported significantly more vaccination hesitancy than men prior to the vaccine rollout. And public health officials warned that non-Hispanic Black Americans would be more hesitant than other racial groups because of the historical abuses and exclusion they’ve experienced at the hands of medical professionals and researchers.

But the data on actual gender differences in vaccination rates veered in an unexpected direction, leaving an entire group of vaccine-hesitant Americans largely untargeted: men.

As of Monday morning, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that nearly 9.5 million more women than men have been vaccinated in the U.S., and in the 42 states that collect gender data, a greater share of women are getting the vaccine as well. The magnitude of the gender gap varies from state to state but has hovered just below 10 percentage points on average over the past month. [Continue reading…]