"For some of those who have not been vaccinated, the message from conservative leaders like Abbott and DeSantis about choice and liberty resonates, despite public health guidance on how to prevent seri-ous illness and death from the coronavirus. "Somehow it has morphed into not getting the vaccine as a way to defend their freedom and resist this 'tyranny,' " said Ken Resnicow, a professor in the school of public health at the University of Michigan. "There's not many countries that have this dy-namic." Resnicow referenced a study on which he was the lead author that found a correlation between a person's belief in conspiracy theories and the apocalypse, and their willingness to actively prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Particularly among self-identified evangelicals, Resnicow has found a distinct rejection of the coronavirus vaccine, which he said has made vaccine hesitancy especially difficult to address. "There's a sensitive issue — that it's conflated with religion and evangelicalism, and people are scared to touch that third rail. And I think we have to confront how religion and science are now at loggerheads, and that wasn't always the case," he said. "There's this 30% of evangelicals for whom science is almost the enemy.""