What's Behind Vaccine Skepticism

 

As we just passed the 100 million Americans fully vaccinated threshhold, the public health community is facing the challenge of a significant number of Americans skeptical or hostile about getting a COVID vaccination.  At first, they believed it would just be a matter of educating them as to the extremely safe, highly effective vaccines that would save lives and allow us to get back to "normal" again.  But, those who've been studying the vaccine skeptic problem have found out that it's not something that reasoning and presenting facts will necessarily overcome.

Dr. Saad Omer, Director of the Yale Institute for Public Health points out the problems:

Dr. Omer and a team of scientists found that skeptics were much more likely than nonskeptics to have a highly developed sensitivity for liberty — the rights of individuals — and to have less deference to those in positions of power.

Skeptics were also twice as likely to care a lot about the “purity” of their bodies and their minds. They disapprove of things they consider disgusting, and the mind-set defies neat categorization: It could be religious — halal or kosher — or entirely secular, like people who care deeply about toxins in foods or in the environment.

These are "gut" feelings that have developed around political divisions, distrust of government or pharmaceutical companies, as well as conspiratorial thinking about vaccinations in general that's been amplified by social media.

“At the root are these moral intuitions — these gut feelings — and they are very strong,” said Jeff Huntsinger, a social psychologist at Loyola University Chicago who studies emotion and decision-making and collaborated with Dr. Omer’s team. “It’s very hard to override them with facts and information. You can’t reason with them in that way.”

These qualities tend to predominate among conservatives but they are present among liberals too. They are also present among people with no politics at all.

Eventually, some of the skepticism will wear off as time passes and the safety and efficacy of the vaccines becomes even more apparent.  But in the meantime, it's a challenge (to say the least) if we're to get enough people immunized to be able to protect ourselves and our country.

The entire article is worth a read to get more perspective on the problem.