A few days ago I wrote a post about the American aversion to vaccines going back to World War II. Over at Science News, Tara Haelle has an excellent piece that goes back further and explains vaccine hesitancy from its very beginnings with Edward Jenner.
I highly recommend reading it. In fact, I recommend reading it first and then reading my piece for a closer focus on recent history. We need to treat vaccine hesitancy for what it is: a longstanding problem with multiple roots that has very little to do with the poisonous partisan politics of the current day.
Haelle's piece is here.
My piece is here.
LOL.
Vaccine hesitancy is only natural when looked at as a mass of people standing athwart forward motion yelling stop. It is obviously conservative, classic definition, but in the current period, when that old style resistance to change commingles with contemporary conservatism (which is more crank than curator), that's when you get the LIBERATE MICHIGAN rallies of unmasked professional protestors & QANON Shaman storming the Capitol to kill the vice president from one's own party in the name of perpetuating the party as head of a monopartisan pseudodemocratic autocracy.
Kevin thinks he has proven that vaccine hesitancy is not related to increase of partisanship, but that is not true. What he did show is that it is Democrats who became more accepting in the case of covid. If that is not partisan, what is?
The Haelle piece quotes an expert: “Vaccine hesitancy has less to do with misunderstanding the science and more to do with general mistrust of scientific institutions and government”, but that mistrust is what Trump and Republican politicians have been deliberately cultivating, both for some specificy reasons such as global warming and as a means of distracting from increasing economic inequality. There is good evidence that such general mistrust has increased among Republicans.
Again, in view of the remarkable efficacy of the mRNA vaccines and the great danger of the pandemic (nothing like it has been known in the US since the 1919 flu) the rational response has been to be more aware of the need for vaccination. ButTrump and Republicans have obviously been increasingly devoted to replacing rationality with partisanship. This has been going on for a long time but took big jump upward with Obama's election and then Trump's prominence.
If Kevin had shown that Democrats (or liberals in general) had reduced resistance to vaccination compared to conservatives in previous historical cases he would have something. Of course this is complicated by the fact that many of the Republicans who are opposing vaccination now were Democrats in 1919 (or their ancestors were).
Comparisons of Dem/GOP divides in 1918 would not be in any way relevant to today, since as you point out the parties were in completely different places then. If anything, I would expect Republicans of 1918 to be more accepting of new drugs as products of industrial capitalism.
Statistics may show that there has always been hesitancy for new vaccines, but it is a stretch to imply that our poisonous Republican politics had nothing to do with the current divide. In fact, the stats are quite clear that hesitancy is very directly related to the level of Trump support:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/5/20/2031409/-There-s-a-lot-of-reasons-for-vaccine-hesitancy-but-one-sure-seems-to-stand-out
Ah, the "credentialed" mind -- four years of tertiary education and all that sank in was "cherrypick the one or two facts that prove my point, and ignore the rest".
You can lead a donkey to college but you can't make him think.
We have ample historical data. We have information about vaccine hesitancy across the entire world. But no, let's ignore all that because bashing Trump is more important than actual knowledge...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshuacohen/2021/03/08/covid-19-vaccine-hesitancy-is-worse-in-eu-than-us/?sh=27fa1fa7611f
How exactly do you get off on feeling superior to the average republican when you behave in EXACTLY the same way, simply ignoring ANYTHING that doesn't fit a narrative that you've already constructed?
Marin County is famous for being liberal and vaccine hesitant. It even suffered a measles outbreak attributed to its vaccine hesitancy. And yet over 85%of its adult population has received at least one dose. Why would that be? I think it’s because unique to most diseases in the population’s lifetime, the disease has significantly affected their lives. The people are very scared of getting Covid and are thus motivated to get the vaccine to prevent the disease.
In contrast, if you were to look at the Trump supporting people of central California you would see very low vaccination rates. I think this is because they believe Fox News and Trump that the virus isn’t that bad and is overblown by the Republican hating MSM and child molesting elites.
Sure, there has always been vaccine hesitancy and that exists for a lot of reasons and is worldwide. But I’m convinced we would be able to achieve a 85% vaccinated rate if not for the lies being propagated by Trump and his sycophants.
If you look at the NON-Trump Supporting people of Central California (like Merced County) you will also see low vaccination rates.
It's almost as though rural living were a more important factor in the vaccination decision than political affiliation...
Like I said, cherry picking. If someone made a claim about, I don't now, say IQ, you'd be lecturing us on the essential importance of confounders and common factors and understanding all the details. But as soon as a factoid seems to point in the political direction you prefer, all that rigor goes out the window...
Yes, you can correlate lower rates of vaccination with Trump voters.
You can ALSO correlate them with high minority populations. But no-one wants to pull on *that* particular thread. (Not yet, anyway. I fully expect in ten years, once memories are no longer fresh, to be reading on the internet about how White America withheld vaccines from minorities as a matter of deliberate policy.)
So does this mean that you don’t think that a person who is hesitant might be persuaded to get vaccinated by someone they trust telling them it is a good thing? Or that a hesitant person might have their hesitancy affirmed by someone they trust telling them their hesitancy is justified?
Well, I will concede that the correlation could be related to a third factor - ignorance. Ignorant people are more likely to avoid the vaccine and are more likely to vote for Trump.
But yes I will bash Trump at every opportunity because he is a lying corrupt racist monster who has done more damage to the country I love than any other human being in history
You know what, though? I think mRNA delivery with CRISPR is a massive paradigm shift. And I know that sounds scary, but, we're going to be reaching a point where genetic defects and flaws will be fixed and people will be vaccinated against future viral threats *and* all forms of the common cold.
So, while there will always be groups of people vaccine and technology-resistant (Luddites!), everyone else will enjoy the benefits of switching genes on/off to regulate your cholesterol, body fat, cancers, etc.
What's a flaw? From personal experience, deaf people seem super proud they are deaf and I wouldn't be surprised if they fight gene editing to fix deafness.
Denmark was examined by the atlantic since it has universal down syndrome screening and liberal abortion laws. 18 children were born with it in 2019. While the state provides ample resources there are other complex issues with the siruation.
Your choice of flaws, not mine. I picked cholesterol regulation, body fat, and cancers.
A flaw is what you see as a flaw. In my case, I have poor vision (myopia and astigmatism) correctable with glasses, but in my own perception a flaw. If genetic engineering was proven, readily available, and reasonably priced, I would sign up to get my vision genes modified. While I was at it, I would also ask if they could do something about male pattern baldness.
Perhaps more to the point, potentially lethal genetic disorders like hemophilia, phenylketonuria, and type one diabetes are correctly perceived by the people that suffer from them as life-threatening flaws that they would be delighted to have a cure for.
It is entirely possible that the ability to repair genetic defects will be developed. Experiments along those lines have already been performed. However, it won't be done with mRNA, which does not and cannot alter your genotype in any way.
Don't forget the smallpox vaccinations. No, not that one--this one:
https://www.vox.com/identities/22278747/vaccine-who-invented-small-pox-onesimus-edward-jenner
Of course that was with, one hoped, effectively an attenuated virus...
Should note--the method of vaccination also makes a difference. Infecting the skin first, not the lungs, would probably lead to a less lethal infection. Ok that last bit is just conjecture.
Am reading “The British are Coming”. Numerous comments on vaccine hesitancy among the Americans. So you can trace it to new Englanders who did not want to challenge God’s plan. I am sure they are not the only original source!