The most common comment that I hear now from democrats and the vaccinated is how people who won’t get vaccinated are dumb or stupid. And, full disclosure, I’ve said the same thing a few times when I haven’t been feeling as cautious. It can be very frustrating to watch a group of people make the absolutely terrible decisions that they are making today on the vaccines, and after so long in this pandemic, the early vaccinators like me and the ones watching the public health and epidemiology sectors closely (also like me), cannot help but be exasperated.
But stupidity doesn’t capture what this is, at least not in the sense of general stupidity or an overall lack of awareness about the world. I personally know and regularly engage with plenty of people who are in this block of voters who are the hardest to vaccinate. Living in Seattle it can be very hard to meet these people, because the unvaccinated certainly aren’t saying so in the public health atmosphere here. But people I know and like from the upper midwest, where I grew up, and people I know and like NOT from the cities in the pacific northwest and New England, are in this group. These are intelligent, good and capable people, broadly speaking.
As a child and a younger person, I often wondered how exactly it was that so many Germans went along with Hitler. Hitler took a very long time to get to his final solutions, and the German people did nothing about it for almost 15 years. It is an incredible mass delusion. Was it stupidity? Nope, the German people were among the most educated people on earth at the time. Did they not understand? Nope. They knew they were othering the jews and other nations, and were fine with it, or went along with it.
During this time of Trump and the vaccines, I now feel that I have a lot more insight into this, because of all these people that I know and like that have flipped to anti-vax. And I think it’s pure tribalism and defensiveness.
The best way I have found to recently think about this is to think about all those democrats and manhattanites in November 2016, and how they reacted (and are still reacting) when Trump won. It literally did not matter what Trump said or did from that point forward. Trump was to be opposed at all costs. This way of thinking was a form of self-blinding and being unwilling to look at the facts. It simply did not matter that Trump actually had several very good ideas wrapped up in that terrible mind of his. Decreasing government regulation. Lowering taxes on the middle class. Being firm at the border. Defending our police departments when they are under siege (though actually attacking them later was fine). Having unconditional talks with terrible world leaders. Looking past the worst behaviors in dictators if you can move them to sanity. All of these ideas are legitimate good policy platforms that make a ton of sense. But none of them were worthy of consideration, at all.
So these anti-vax, anti-government republicans today aren’t really anti-vax and anti-government. You can see this in the fact that they regularly embrace all kinds of vaccines and even this one, eventually. They are anti-Biden. When you see all those American flags and MAGA hats, those people actually believe in big large government, just a form of it that isn’t there currently. They are anti-Biden and anti-Washington DC culture. And both of those things are legitimate actual ideas that have a lot of merit.
So are they stupid? Yes, when it comes to this very specific issue of doing the right thing for themselves and their community on the vaccines and mandates to protect public health. But generally? Absolutely not. They are a tribe who have decided to oppose everything about Biden and the public health establishment, particularly Fauci.
Where do I find hope? In the seemingly inexorable daily vaccination rate, where 1 in 1000 Americans gets vaccinated every single day, and that pace has been continuing for months now. Every single day, 1 formerly politicized “antivax anti-government” American in 1000 gets vaccinated. At this point, 77.1% of all American adults have sought the protection of the vaccines. That’s a majority of the most Trumpian of Trumpies, and every single day another Trumpie gives up the ghost on getting vaccinated.
As with the lockdowns, where people marched with their feet and said they simply were not going to take it, people on vaccines are making their own decisions (correctly) over time saying they will get the vaccines. At some point, we will get down to the hardened core of antivax Trumpies who simply will not take the shot whether they die or not, and those people will continue to get sick and die from COVID and suffer the worst effects of the disease at great expense and public health insanity for the rest of us. And the population will turn on them, as they have with the original very liberal anti-vax community.
