American voters believe that people who were fired for not getting vaccinated during the Covid pandemic should be rehired, outnumbering those who disagree by a two-to-one margin, according to a new survey from the Republican polling firm WPA Intelligence. The poll of 1,000 registered voters, which was conducted October 6–10 and provided exclusively to National Review, found that a clear majority (57 percent) of respondents believed “that people who were fired for not getting a vaccination should be rehired,” whereas less than half that number (28 percent) disagreed.
Among Republicans, 79 percent of respondents agreed that workers who were terminated for their vaccination status should be rehired, whereas just 16 percent disagreed. Among independents, 58 percent agreed, whereas 26 percent disagreed. Only among Democrats did more respondents think that workers who were fired for being unvaccinated should not be rehired: 35 percent of Democrats supported rehiring, whereas 43 percent were opposed.
The question of the relationship between vaccination status and employment termination was a fraught issue throughout the pandemic and marked a major division between blue- and red-state governance. Republican governors such as Florida’s Ron DeSantis signed legislation barring private employers from firing employees for being unvaccinated and levied fines on any local and municipal government that “forces a vaccine as a condition of employment” for public employees. (In August 2021, the Atlantic reported that “about 20 Republican-controlled states have barred private businesses from requiring proof of vaccination. Seven Republican-controlled states have barred employers from requiring their workers to obtain a COVID-19 vaccine, and other red states are considering similar proposals.”) Democratic officials, ranging from city and state leaders to President Biden himself, moved to implement sweeping vaccine mandates for public employees, from military service-members to public-school teachers and government workers, as well as some private businesses. California mandated vaccines for “employees of hospitals, nursing homes, doctors’ offices, clinics and other medical facilities,” and the Biden administration sought to impose vaccine mandates on large private employers.
The most far-reaching of those mandates have run into trouble in the courts: In January, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate for federal workers. And earlier this week, a New York State judge ruled that “a group of sanitation workers who were fired for refusing to comply with New York City’s coronavirus vaccine mandate for government employees should be given back their jobs, as well as retroactive pay.” For most of the pandemic, polling consistently showed broad-based majority support for government vaccine mandates — even in red states like Texas. But as Americans increasingly move on from the pandemic, public sentiment appears to be shifting in the opposite direction.