Giving Up Our Shot: Dealing With the Unvaccinated

Vaccinated America has had enough.

As infections and hospitalizations from the Delta variant of COVID-19 grow, a number of writers are expressing their anger against the unvaccinated. Vaccine passports now! No traveling on planes or busses! Government mandates! Make their lives a living hell until they get their shot!

I’m not sympathetic towards anti-vaxers and those like Alex Berenson who spread lies about COVID and the vaccines. But are we misunderstanding why people aren’t vaccinated?

The way that writers like former New York Times reporter Donald McNeil write about the unvaccinated, they are an odd bunch that needs the stick to force them to get the shot.

Now that most employers and retailers recognize the danger, we could be easily blocking the unvaccinated at the doorways to stores, restaurants, bars, theaters, airplanes, buses, subways, hotels, schools and other venues just as easily as Walmart and Target were eventually able to compel their customers to don masks. The vast majority of Americans have cellphones that could display something like New York’s Excelsior passport.

Yes, there will be statehouse demonstrations. And screaming matches and, sadly, even some shootings. Some people don’t like to wear masks or seatbelts; some don’t like gun background checks or paying taxes. But this is why we have store security guards, the police and the highway patrol, the I.R.S., A.T.F. and F.B.I. — and why every state passed quarantine laws back in the 19th century. Sometimes the unwilling must be given a stark choice: whether you are suffering from a sense of murderous rage or from a communicable disease, you can either abide by the law meant to protect your fellow citizens from you — or you can stay in your house. If you do come out and endanger others, you go to jail.

Instead, we’re on the honor system.

For David Frum, the pandemic would be over if not for Trump supporters who reject the vaccine and COVID:

In the United States, this pandemic could’ve been over by now, and certainly would’ve been by Labor Day. If the pace of vaccination through the summer had been anything like the pace in April and May, the country would be nearing herd immunity. With most adults immunized, new and more infectious coronavirus variants would have nowhere to spread. Life could return nearly to normal.

Experts list many reasons for the vaccine slump, but one big reason stands out: vaccine resistance among conservative, evangelical, and rural Americans. Pro-Trump America has decided that vaccine refusal is a statement of identity and a test of loyalty.

Will Leitch says it’s fine if you don’t want to get vaccinated, but life’s gonna be a bitch until you do. That and he’s done listening to the excuses:

No one is going to make you get vaccinated. But we’re sure going to make certain your life sucks until you do. This sounds harsh … but only to the 30 percent who are holding the other 70 percent hostage. The 70 percent of us who have been vaccinated know that 30 percent of the adult population is being absurd, for whatever personal, strange reasons they’re being absurd: After all, we are all vaccinated, and have been for a while, and we are not magnetic, or growing a third eye out of our back, or being tracked through our microchips by Bill Gates or something. (We are being tracked by those phones that 30 percent is reading ludicrous anti-vaccination disinformation on, however.) We know it’s fine. Science has proven it is fine. This is only being debated by people who have every incentive to come up with an excuse for their irresponsibility: Whatever reason they’re coming up with now, when you refute that one, they’ll come up with another one. This is what happens when you keep giving them leeway: They keep using it.

Now, none of this means that governments shouldn’t use more forceful methods during pandemics. Indeed, in times of public health emergencies, governments are usually given wide latitude in safeguarding the wider public. The problem with the “stick approach” to vaccinations is that it misses the complexity of the population that hasn’t yet been vaccinated. In our polarized republic, many of us have come to see the unvaccinated as anti-vaxers. But that approach is shortsighted. The unvaccinated are a diverse population of people who have many reasons for not getting the jab. The anti-vaxer is a smaller subset of this larger group. One group needs just the stick. The larger group needs carrots and sticks. Our political climate has made this a black and white issue, but as a medical issue, there is a whole lot of grey.

Rhea Boyd is an African American physician the Bay Area who is trying to reach the unvaccinated through reasoning. Her work has taught her that the unvaccinated aren’t simply a mass of Trump supporters defying authority. Instead, race, poverty and other factors might be keeping people from getting vaccinated. In an interview with Ed Yong from the Atlantic, she explains that part of the problem stems from health disparities. “Black folks are one of the least vaccinated groups, in part because they have the least access to preventive health-care services,” she said. Boyd adds that our broken health care system has made it hard for certain populations to get even the most basic care. “How do we make sense of the fact that some people won’t get critical medications, like their diabetes medications? Or that some people forgo necessary medical care even as they experience complications from chronic illness? It’s not that those individuals don’t want basic medical care! It’s that groups face structural barriers to accessing that care, including rural folks, underinsured folks, and Black folks in particular. Those structural barriers are likely at play for vaccinations too.”

For scientist Michael Siegel, social media and television have magnified the anti-vaxers and have distorted who makes up the unvaccinated. “One of the problems with the internet and the news cycle we have is that small, loud voices get amplified and there are anti-vaxers on tv and on the internet and so forth, but I think a lot of people are just vaccine-hesitant,” he said in a recent podcast interview. He says persuasion can help people make the decision to get vaccinated. “There is a growing body of evidence that it that if you go and talk to people and answer their questions…and I know personally have persuaded a couple of vaccine-hesitant people to get the vaccine because I basically talk to them and I say, ‘All right well, what are your concerns?”

Boyd is part of an effort to reach out to African American and Latino populations in order to get the shot. “We’ve talked to virtual faith-based groups on Sundays. We’ve talked to barbershops, after-school organizations, and boys’ and girls’ clubs. Some of these groups are small — hundreds of people, or sometimes just 20,” she says.

The rise in COVID infections has encouraged people in some hotspots to go and get their shot. There is still a long way to go, but it is a start.

For those of us who are vaccinated, it can be frustrating to see us going back to wearing masks indoors and hearing on social media why some yahoo won’t get a shot. We think this is all about Donald Trump and his supporters and yes, they have made this pandemic worse than it could have been. But even though politics has been shot through COVID-19, there are nonpolitical reasons someone living in Missouri or Louisiana hasn’t gone down to Walmart to get vaccinated. For that reason, governments and community organizations should favor persuasion over punitive techniques. While strong-arming people is within a government’s purview, focusing exclusively on the stick might prolong the pandemic instead of shortening it.

Crossposted at Medium