Up To Us recently partnered with INTRVL, the data science team that discovered the Red Mirage last fall, to determine reasons for vaccine hesitancy and resistance down to a county level. If you’re interested in learning more about their internal dimensions including income level, education, and political affiliation you can contact them at hello@uptous.org You can read more about their methodology below.


More than 8,000 survey responses were collected in two waves between July 27 and September 2, 2021, asking respondents a panel of questions about vaccine hesitancy. Demographic and geographic information were also collected from each respondent. To collect a representative sample, surveys were conducted using a number of modes, including live callers to cell phones and landlines, text-to-web messaging, and online survey panels.

Demographic and geographic characteristics were combined with 2019 ACS 5-year population estimates, CDC vaccination and COVID-19 data, and 2020 election data to perform a multilevel regression and poststratification (MRP) and generate population estimates specific to each demographic (gender, age, race) and geographic level (county, state). MRP is an established method for utilizing nationally representative polling to generate geographic and sub-population estimates and consistently outperforms disaggregation.

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