"I had a slight fever of 99.5 for a day and a half. I don’t think it was the boogeyman they made it out to be.”
Steve, 43, Republican, quoted in Washington Post
"Peter, don't try to convince Republican vaccine refuse-niks. They won't listen to you, and that just means more vaccine faster for Democrats. That's OK with me."
Bob, 93, Democrats, email written to me
Half of men who voted for Trump say they won't take the COVID vaccine.
Pollster and focus group leader Frank Luntz gathered a group of Republican voters who said they did not plan to get the vaccine. He wondered what might persuade them. Republican politicians urging them to get the vaccine didn't work; he tried that on them. Possibly they were persuadable, eventually, he concluded, but only in response to a slow drip of medical facts presented by people's own physicians. The group didn't trust politicians, the CDC, the media, pharmaceutical companies, or the medical community at large. They didn't trust authorities.
His observations are consistent with other public polling. A Kaiser Family Foundation poll showed 28% of Republicans "definitely would not" get the vaccine and another 18% said they were wait-and-see. An AP poll just released reported that 42% of Republicans would not or probably would not get the vaccine, versus 18% of Democrats. Click A CBS poll found similar results. Most Democrats are going to get the vaccine; many Republicans are not.
Certainly within my own peer group of 71-year-olds, everyone is eager to get the vaccination and people are careful about wearing masks, which suggests I must primarily know Democrats.
People have their reasons for refusing the vaccination. They say it is untested, that they worry about side effects, that they simply don't trust drug companies. There are conspiracy theories swirling within conservative social media of mind control, of the virus, vaccine, and the whole COVID/CDC response having been concocted intentionally for some mix of financial reasons and social control of the "frightened sheep" American. It was all a big Democratic hoax to trip up Donald Trump. The disease is no big deal, the response was overblown, and that getting a vaccination is succumbing to the big establishment mind-game designed to empower the old establishment power structure, both political and corporate. Democrats win, Bill Gates wins, Jeff Bezos wins, and the nanny-state worry-warts win. They get us to wear uncomfortable "face diapers," they destroy small businesses, and then they want to invade our personal space by getting us to line up to get an untested vaccination.
That appears to be the thinking.
The CDC says, as public health policy, it would be better if nearly everyone got vaccinated.
That statement embeds assumptions that the vaccinations in fact work and continue to work for a while. It assumes there isn't some time-bomb side effect waiting to be revealed, as in the Thalidomide case. It assumes that on the whole it is not safer for people to get the virus and perhaps have much better long-term immunity than the immunity gained from vaccination. No one knows for sure. It is not irrational to think this way.
Vaccination proponents observe that the more people who are unvaccinated, the more people will be around getting the disease and exposing others--a danger in itself. There is evidence that some immune-compromised patients who get aggressive treatment with established therapies including plasma survive long enough to create new variants of the virus. A Cambridge University medical team led by Ravindra Gupta reported on a patient who likely became the source of the UK variant, as first reported in Nature Magazine.
Analysis of samples from the patient showed that the virus evolved rapidly after the plasma therapy, developing mutations that changed how it could infect cells and resist antibodies. The conditions turned out to be ripe for viral evolution. “This is a blueprint for how variants emerge,” Gupta says.
The bigger the herd of infected people, the more opportunities for the virus to break out into new variants. It is not irrational to worry about that, either.
What will cause Trump voters to get the vaccination? Probably nothing. Most people survive COVID, just as most people survive riding fast on a motorcycle. There is a matter of pride at not being "pushed around" by the dominant culture. Saying no to masks and no to the vaccination is a little bit like digging in ones heels at being bullied into politically correct thought and action. It is the Gadsden Flag response: Don't tread on me. Trump and Fox News encouraged that kind of thinking. South Dakota's Governor Kristi Noem voices it perfectly.
Bob, quoted above, is probably correct. Trump voters are unlikely to change their minds, and the effects of the virus will play out as it will. Democrats would be foolish to push on this. It would just confirm the notion that they are know-it-all busy-bodies trying to tell others how to live. The harder they would try, the more push-back they would get.
Leave refuse-niks alone.
10 comments:
Completely disagree.
Vaccinations should be mandated for all citizens, with stiff penalties for refusal. I'd start with requiring a tattoo on one's forehead "No Vaxxer".
But that's just me...
OK, maybe not a tattoo...
My guess is that vax paranoia will eventually sift down to the hard core 30% who seem to oppose just about everything. And guess what? They are mostly Republican.
The pharmaceutical companies were going to develop the vaccine regardless, but Republicans, led by You Know Who, decided after they lost the election that to make actually getting vaccinated political. Recently we had the ludicrous statement from El Señor taking credit for the vaccine, while Republicans are simultaneously discouraging people to get vaccinated, and opening up their states.
What happened to "Warp Speed"? It ran out of gas on Nov. 3rd.
Here’s a plan. If people don’t want the vaccine, they sign a waiver saying they will not be entitled to medical care for the disease. That’s freedom, isn’t it?
Up to the present time (the Age of Covid) there has been no means by which the science naysayers could be weeded from the herd. Perhaps these hardheaded skeptics, who mask their suicidal inferiority complexes with an overwhelming distrust of almost everything in the universe will only admit to their pervicacious ignorance after a few needless deaths occur to people close and dear to them. The recent election of someone so spectacularly unsuited to the presidency of the United States was an early warning call that the idiots in the Republican Party would countenance any outrage to seize power, even to the point of insurrection. Meanwhile, I applaud the principled rejection of the Covid vaccine by the ignorant, our nation harbors far too many of them. They will not be missed and more importantly they will not be around to spread bigotry, racism and treason.
Bob Warren
Ya know, taking the risk of a nasty side effect is pretty darn patriotic if you ask me.
pervicacious! Love it!
Yeah, I guess a waiver is a better idea than a tattoo...still...
I have a different idea. If you want to travel by plane, train, or bus, before you board, you must show your vaccination card with both vaccines administered. That would show you are probably safe from infecting other people. If you don't show your card, then you can't get on.
That might encourage a few more people to get it done.
It would be almost like a passport, only within the United States.
Israel already has what they call a “green pass“ program. When you get vaccinated, you get a green pass app on your phone, which allows you to get into restaurants, concerts, movies, etc.
No green pass? No access.
I like both Rick's Tattoo and Art Badens Waiver of Treatment plan. Why should a vacant bed be taken up by somebody who refused the slightest precautions ? These are the same types who squeal about having to wear a motorcycle helmet, popularly known by ER Staff as "Organ Donors".
It seems to be what you value. The case of Minot ND where bodies that piled up did not deter the hard-core anti-maskers from opposing all restrictions. They didn't deny Covid's existence or deadliness; they were just willing to pay the ultimate price for personal "freedom".
Peter: stop making it about Ds vs. Rs. That is myopic. I know many progressive anti-vaxxers in Ashland who think that Covid is a hoax. My Republican friend doesn’t say “never,“ just “wait-and-see.“ He figures that when 40% of the population is vaccinated, herd immunity kicks in, and he won’t have to risk the side effects. The ages of Steve and Bob, quoted above, are much more informative. At 93, Bob is at much greater risk. It would be better to see this as a conflict between bodily integrity (looking at you, Rick) and harm reduction values, al la Jonathan Haidt. The problem with politics is that no one is ever allowed to see shades of gray.
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