Good morning. Welcome to Axios today. It's Friday, December 18th. I'm Erica Pandey filling in for Nialaboodoo. Here's how we're making you smarter today. The state of play on stimulus negotiations,

plus the massive Russian hack that's roiling the government.

First though, today's one big thing. Vice President Mike Pence is getting the coronavirus vaccine.

It's been a week since the FDA granted emergency authorization to Pfizer's vaccine and the Moderna vaccine

is slated to get that same go-ahead today. But as we reported earlier this week

there's still a significant share of Americans who don't trust the vaccines.

Top government and health officials have been doing their best to change those minds.

Well this morning, Vice President Mike Pence will receive the Pfizer vaccine on live TV.

He'll be the highest-ranking official to do so so far.

Margaret Taliv is the White House editor at Axios. So Margaret, you've been

reporting on American's confidence levels regarding this vaccine.

And one of the key groups that doesn't feel as confident about it is Republicans.

Will this work in changing those skeptical minds?

This is a fascinating question and the Exos-Ipsos-Curonovirus poll that we do every

week has already begun to show a real movement on this.

There is an increased comfort with the idea of taking the vaccine as soon as it's

available. This is happening with this group of Republicans. We saw Democrats

willingness to take an early most available form of the vaccine doubling,

but we saw it tripling among Republicans.

It was originally 9%, it's up to 25% now, one out of four Republicans saying they would take this as soon as it's possible.

And so a real question is, is Vice President Pence trying to expand that trend or is he trying

to jump onto it?

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