Time trends, factors associated with, and reasons for COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy: A massive online survey of US adults from January-May 2021

Importance COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy has become a leading barrier to increasing the US vaccination rate. Objective To evaluate time trends in COVID-19 vaccine intent during the US vaccine rollout, and identify key factors related to and self-reported reasons for COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy in May 2021. Design, participants and setting A COVID-19 survey was offered to US adult Facebook users in several languages yielding 5,088,772 qualifying responses from January 6 to May 31, 2021. Data was aggregated by month. Survey weights matched the sample to the age, gender, and state profile of the US population. Exposure Demographics, geographic factors, political/COVID-19 environment, health status, beliefs, and behaviors. Main outcome measures “If a vaccine to prevent COVID-19 were offered to you today, would you choose to get vaccinated.” Hesitant was defined as responding probably or definitely would not choose to get vaccinated (versus probably or definitely would, or already vaccinated). Results COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy decreased by one-third from 25.4% (95%CI, 25.3, 25.5) in January to 16.6% (95% CI, 16.4, 16.7) in May, with relatively large decreases among participants with Black, Pacific Islander or Hispanic race/ethnicity and ≤high school education. Independent risk factors for vaccine hesitancy in May (N = 525,644) included younger age, non-Asian race, < 4 year college degree, living in a more rural county, living in a county with higher Trump vote share in the 2020 election, lack of worry about COVID-19, working outside the home, never intentionally avoiding contact with others, and no past-year flu vaccine. Differences in hesitancy by race/ethnicity varied by age (e.g., Black adults more hesitant than White adults <35 years old, but less hesitant among adults ≥45 years old). Differences in hesitancy by age varied by race/ethnicity. Almost half of vaccine hesitant respondents reported fear of side effects (49.2% [95%CI, 48.7, 49.7]) and not trusting the COVID-19 vaccine (48.4% [95%CI, 48.0, 48.9]); over one-third reported not trusting the government, not needing the vaccine, and waiting to see if safe. Reasons differed by degree of vaccine intent and by race/ethnicity. Conclusion COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy varied by demographics, geography, beliefs, and behaviors, indicating a need for a range of messaging and policy options to target high-hesitancy groups.

The “Black Buddhism Plan”: Buddhism, Race, and Empire in the Early Twentieth Century

ABSTRACT This article traces the life of a single figure, Sufi Abdul Hamid, to bring into conversation the history of the transmission of Buddhism to the United States with the emergence of new Black religio-racial movements in the early twentieth century. It follows Hamid's activities in the 1930s to ask what Hamid's life reveals about the relationship between Buddhism and race in the United States. On the one hand, Hamid's own negotiation of his identity as a Black Orientalist illustrates the contentious process through which individuals negotiate their religio-racial identities in tension with hegemonic religio-racial frameworks. Hamid constructed a Black Orientalist identity that resignified Blackness while criticizing the racial injustice foundational to the American nation-state. His Black Orientalist identity at times resonated with global Orientalist discourses, even while being recalcitrant to the hegemonic religio-racial frameworks of white Orientalism. The subversive positioning of Hamid's Black Orientalist identity simultaneously lent itself to his racialization by others. This is illustrated through Hamid's posthumous implication in a conspiracy theory known as the “Black Buddhism Plan.” This theory drew on imaginations of a Black Pacific community formulated by both Black Americans and by government authorities who created Japanese Buddhists and new Black religio-racial movements as subjects of surveillance. The capacious nature of Hamid's religio-racial identity, on the one hand constructed and performed by Hamid himself, and on the other created in the shadow of the dominant discourses of a white racial state, demonstrates that Buddhism in the United States is always constituted by race.

People of the Mangrove: A Lens into Socioecological Interactions in the Ecuadorian Black Pacific

Adapted to survive in the interface between land and sea, mangroves are highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. They are also highly adaptive to the imagination, with the theme of the mangrove being differently signified across texts, languages and communities as a place to find death in the tropics, a nature tourism destination, endangered environment, magical wood, refuge for maroons and revolutionaries, and source of livelihoods. The cultural malleability of mangroves mirrors their natural adaptability. It also echoes the varied and rhizomatic identities and imaginaries of the peoples of the tropical Americas. Relevant cultural texts produced in the region support experimentations with mangroves as a raw material susceptible to being worked in order to explain diverse realities. In order to highlight the relevance and malleability of mangrove ecosystems, this paper explores resignifications of socioecological interactions at the Ecological Mangrove Reserve Cayapas-Mataje in Ecuador through the lens of photographer Felipe Jácome. Jácome’s photographic essay Los Reyes del Manglar [The Kings of the Mangrove] provides rich material to study the rhizomatic evolution of the theme of the mangrove and its entanglements with people’s lives, cultures and histories. I argue that cultural representations of mangroves can go beyond their metaphorical recovery to support environmental justice. This essay is also informed by extant research on the important role of mangrove forests for carbon sequestration and climate change mitigation, which locates these socioecological systems at the centre of people’s struggle for climate justice.

Hawai'i Is My Haven

Hawaiʻi Is My Haven maps the context and contours of Black life in the Hawaiian Islands. This ethnography emerges from a decade of fieldwork with both Hawaiʻi-raised Black locals and Black transplants who moved to the Islands from North America, Africa, and the Caribbean. Nitasha Tamar Sharma highlights the paradox of Hawaiʻi as a multiracial paradise and site of unacknowledged antiBlack racism. While Black culture is ubiquitous here, African-descended people seem invisible. In this formerly sovereign nation structured neither by the US Black/White binary nor the one-drop rule, nonWhite multiracials, including Black Hawaiians and Black Koreans, illustrate the coarticulation and limits of race and the native/settler divide. Despite erasure and racism, nonmilitary Black residents consider Hawaiʻi their haven, describing it as a place to “breathe” that offers the possibility of becoming local. Sharma's analysis of race, indigeneity, and Asian settler colonialism shifts North American debates in Black and Native studies to the Black Pacific. Hawaiʻi Is My Haven illustrates what the Pacific offers members of the African diaspora and how they in turn illuminate race and racism in “paradise.”

Time trends and factors related to COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy from January-May 2021 among US adults: Findings from a large-scale national survey

Objective: To understand COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy. Methods: January 6 through May 31, 2021, 5,121,436 US adults completed an online COVID-19 survey. Weighted data was used to evaluate change in vaccine intent and correlates of May vaccine hesitancy. Results: COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy decreased by one-third from January to May, with relatively large decreases among participants with Black, Pacific Islander or Hispanic race/ethnicity and ≤high school education. In May, independent hesitancy risk factors included younger age, non-Asian race, having a PhD or ≤high school education, living in a rural county, living in a county with higher 2020 Trump support, lack of worry about COVID-19, working outside the home, never intentionally avoiding contact with others, and no past-year flu vaccine. Differences in hesitancy by race/ethnicity varied by age. Almost half of vaccine hesitant respondents reported fear of side effects and not trusting the COVID-19 vaccine; over one-third reported not trusting the government, not needing the vaccine, and waiting to see if safe. Reasons differed by degree of vaccine intent and by race/ethnicity. Conclusion: COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy varied by demographics, geography, beliefs, and behaviors.

The Black Pacific

Nitasha Sharma expands the focus on Black military connections to the Pacific, pointing to a wide catalog of Black diasporic encounters beyond of the context of US imperialism. Paying attention to both the longer history and contemporary lived experiences of nonmilitary Black civilians in Oceania can redirect colonial binaries of race (Black/White) and settler colonialism (native/settler) and address antiBlack racism in Pacific societies. Simeon Man provides a commentary on Sharma’s work, highlighting how it can turn our attention to the concrete and varied reasons for Black movement to and presence in the Pacific, as well as to the different relations of power and modes of anti-Blackness formed within colonized contexts.