For years, scientists and doctors have treated vaccine
skepticism as a knowledge problem. If patients were hesitant to get vaccinated,
the thinking went, they simply needed more information.
اضافة اعلان
But as public health officials now work to convince Americans to
get
COVID-19 vaccines as quickly as possible, new social science research
suggests that a set of deeply held beliefs is at the heart of many people’s
resistance, complicating efforts to bring the coronavirus pandemic under
control.
“The instinct from the medical community was, ‘If only we could
educate them,’” said Dr Saad Omer, director of the Yale Institute for Global
Health, who studies vaccine skepticism. “It was patronizing and, as it turns
out, not true.”
About one-third of US adults are still resisting vaccines.
Polling shows that Republicans make up a substantial part of that group. Given
how deeply the country is divided by politics, it is perhaps not surprising
that they have dug in, particularly with a Democrat in
the White House. But
political polarization is only part of the story.
In recent years, public health researchers have teamed with
social psychologists to look more deeply into the “why” behind vaccine
hesitancy. They wanted to find out whether there was anything that vaccine
skeptics had in common, in order to better understand how to persuade them.
They borrowed a concept from social psychology — the idea that a
small set of moral intuitions form the foundations upon which complex moral
worldviews are constructed — and applied it to their study of vaccine
skepticism.
What they discovered was a clear set of psychological traits
offering a new lens through which to understand skepticism — and potentially
new tools for public health officials scrambling to try to persuade people to
get vaccinated.
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 mindset 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.
Scientists have found similar patterns among skeptics in
Australia, and in a broad sample of vaccine-hesitant people in 24 countries in
2018.
“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 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.
Kasheem Delesbore, a warehouse worker in northeastern
Pennsylvania, is neither conservative nor liberal. He does not consider himself
political and has never voted. But he is skeptical of the vaccines — along with
many institutions of American power.
Delesbore, 26, has seen information online that a vaccine might
harm his body. He is not sure what to make of it. But his faith in God gives
him confidence: Whatever happens is God’s will. There is little he can do to
influence it. (Manufacturers of the three vaccines approved for emergency use
by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say they are safe.)
The vaccines have also raised a fundamental question of power.
There are many things in Delesbore’s life that he does not control. Not the
schedule at the warehouse where he works. Or the way he is treated by the
customers at his other job, a Burger King. The decision about whether to get
vaccinated, he believes, should be one of them.
“I have that choice to decide whether I put something in my own
body,” Delesbore said. “Anybody should.”
Delesbore has had many jobs, most of them through temporary agencies
— at a park concession stand, at an auto parts warehouse, at a
FedEx warehouse
and at a frozen food warehouse. He is sometimes overcome by a sense that he
will never be able to get beyond the stress of living paycheck to paycheck. He
remembers once breaking down to his parents.
“I told them, what am I supposed to do?” he said. “How are we
supposed to make a living? Buy a house and start a family? How?”
Like many people interviewed for this article, Delesbore spends
a lot of time online. He is hungry to make sense of the world, but it often
seems rigged, and it is hard to trust things. He is especially suspicious of
how fast the vaccines were developed. He used to work at a factory of the drug
company Sanofi, so he knows a bit about the process. He believes there is a lot
that Americans are not being told. Vaccines are just one small piece of the
picture.
Conspiratorial thinking is another predictor of vaccine
hesitancy, according to the 2018 study. Conspiracy theories can be comforting,
a way to get one’s bearings during rapid change in the culture or the economy,
by providing narratives that bring order. They are finding fertile ground
because of a decadeslong decline in trust in government and a sharp rise in
inequality that has led to a sense, among many Americans, that the government
is no longer working on their behalf.
“There’s a whole world of secrets and stuff that we don’t see in
our everyday lives,” Delesbore said. “It’s politics, it’s entertainment, it’s
history. Everything is a facade.”
The moral preference for liberty and individual rights that the
social psychologists found to be common among skeptics has been strengthened by
the country’s deepening political polarization. Branden Mirro, a Republican in
Nazareth, Pennsylvania, has been skeptical of nearly everything concerning the
pandemic. He believes that mask requirements impinge on his rights and does not
plan to get vaccinated. In fact, he sees the very timing of the virus as
suspicious.
“This whole thing was a sham,” he said. “They planned it to
cause mass panic and get Trump out of office.”
Mirro, who is 30, grew up in a large Italian American family in
northeastern Pennsylvania. His father owned a landscaping business and later
invested in real estate. His mother battled a yearslong addiction to
methamphetamine. He said she died this year with fentanyl in her bloodstream.
From an early age, politics was an outlet that brought meaning
and importance. He has volunteered for presidential campaigns, watched
inaugurations and gone to rallies for Donald Trump. He even went to Washington
on January 6, the day of the riot at the US Capitol.
He said that he went because he wanted to stand up for his
freedoms and that he did not go inside the Capitol or support the violence that
happened. He also said he believed that Democrats have been hypocritical in how
they responded to that event, compared with the unrest in cities last summer
following the murder of George Floyd.
Vaccine skeptics are sometimes just as wary of the medical
establishment as they are about the government.
Brittany Richey, a tutor in Las Vegas, does not want to get one
of the vaccines because she does not trust the drug companies that produced
them. She pointed to studies that she said described pharmaceutical companies
paying doctors to suppress unfavorable trial results. She keeps a folder on her
computer of them.
Richey said that when she was 19, she was put into a line of
girls waiting for the Human papillomavirus infection (HPV) vaccine, which
protects against cervical and other cancers, after a routine doctor’s
appointment. She said she did not fully understand what the shot was and why
she was being asked to get it.
“That’s not informed consent; that’s coercion,” said Richey, who
is now 33.
Richey is also worried about the ingredients of the vaccines.
She is trying to get pregnant, and she knows that pregnant women were excluded
from vaccine trials. She does not want to risk it.
A portion of those who are hesitant will eventually get
vaccinated. According to Drew Linzer, director of the polling firm Civiqs,
fewer people are unsure about the vaccines now than in the fall, but the
percentage of hard noes has remained fairly constant. As of last week, about 7
percent say they are unsure, he said, and about 24 percent say they will never
take it.
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