Covid Is a Dangerous Disease. Why Do So Many Americans Say They’re More Afraid of Vaccines?

European Union officials announced today that 70 per cent of the adults in the E.U. have now been fully vaccinated, confirming what’s been clear for a while now: after a very slow start, Europe has done a much better job of vaccinating its people than the U.S. has. (Just 63.4% of American adults are fully vaccinated, and Europe has also vaccinated a higher percentage of its total population.)

While the U.S. managed to vaccinate a big chunk of its population (including a big chunk of senior citizens, who are most vulnerable to Covid) in the first half of the year, the pace of vaccination slowed dramatically at the beginning of the summer. And though it’s picked up of late, in large part because the spread of the Delta virus and the concomitant steep rise in hospitalizations and deaths has pushed vaccine-hesitant people to take action, in much of the country (especially the South) vaccination rates remain well below fifty per cent, which is startlingly low.

One potentially hopeful sign is that the percentage of people who say they are flat-out unwilling to get vaccinated has fallen over time, albeit slowly, and in recent polls, only about 20% of the population says they will not get vaccinated. That’s still problematic, especially for red states, where that opposition is concentrated. But it does suggest that there are millions of Americans who might be willing to get vaccinated. So what’s stopping them?

Obviously, there’s no one answer to this. (Some of it is just an insistence on doing the opposite of whatever “the libs” are doing.) But a recent Kaiser survey suggests that one of the, if not the, main drivers of vaccine hesitancy is the fact that most unvaccinated adults believe that getting vaccinated is actually riskier than being infected with Covid. On the face of it, this seems very peculiar, given that Covid has killed more than 600,000 Americans and put more than six million into the hospital.

If you ask unvaccinated people to explain what they’re afraid of, they will often say that we have no idea what the long-term side effects of the new mRNA vaccines will be. But even if you set aside the fact that it’s very unusual for vaccines to have long-term side effects, it’s not as if we have a clear handle on the long-term side effects of Covid. Yet most unvaccinated people nonetheless say it would be better to be infected with a novel virus over being injected with an FDA-approved vaccine.

Of course, many of these people who are convinced of the vaccines’ dangers have undoubtedly been strongly influenced by what I think of as the antivax industrial complex — the collection of bloggers, radio hosts, social-media influencers, and TV pundits who downplay the effectiveness of the vaccines, and spread misinformation about the vaccines’ dangers. (In the next couple of weeks, I’ll have a lot more to say about how, exactly, this antivax industrial complex manipulates data and information to sow fear and uncertainty about the vaccines.) Even so, it’s interesting to think about why people find these arguments against vaccination convincing, particularly when the evidence of Covid’s risks is hard to ignore.

If the only group choosing not to get vaccinated were young people, for whom the risks of Covid are much smaller (though still much greater than the risks of getting vaccinated), it would be one thing. But it isn’t just younger people. Many states still have 15–20% of their senior citizens unvaccinated, and a high percentage of people over the age of 50 who have still not gotten the shot. And there’s no good argument for that.

If the conviction that getting vaccinated is riskier for a 50-year-old (let alone a 65-year-old) than getting infected is not actually supported by any evidence, there are clearly deeper social psychological beliefs that are shaping the way a lot of people see the vaccines. The first, which is generally unexpressed, is the familiar sense that acts of commission are worse than acts of omission. In other words, if you choose to get vaccinated — or get your child vaccinated — and something goes wrong, you have more responsibility for that than if you do nothing and happen to catch Covid. The former is something you’ve done to yourself. The latter is something that simply happens to you.

Loosely connected to this is a kind of odd trust in the natural over the synthetic or man-made, even when the natural thing we’re talking about is a virus. In conversations with vaccine skeptics, and in the antivax literature, they make regular recourse to the image of sinister public-health officials and sinister Big Pharma, with scientists playing God, tinkering with things that may end up doing God knows what. Covid may do damage, the argument goes, but at least we’re familiar with coronaviruses. We have no familiarity at all with mRNA vaccines.

The oddity of this argument, of course, is that lots of natural things (measles, malaria, poisonous snakes, and so on) are very bad for you, while lots of artificial things (eyeglasses, hearing aids, artificial knees) are very good for you. But the fear of the lab, as it were, is real, and has, arguably, been exacerbated by the speed with which the vaccines were developed. From my perspective, the fact that we went from nothing to having safe, effective Covid vaccines in the space of a year is one of the great scientific triumphs in recent history. For vax skeptics, it’s just more reason to doubt.

And that distrust of the establishment is, of course, at the root of this distrust of the vaccines. After all, while vaccine-hesitant people may be leery of making a bad decision, that hasn’t stopped many of them from taking ivermectin by ingesting horse dewormer. And why do they love ivermectin? Because they’re convinced that the establishment has tried to quash it and hide its true value.

The embrace of ivermectin — which, if not necessarily a quack Covid remedy, is at the very least an untested one — when free vaccines are easily available is deeply weird. (The similar embrace of hydroxychloroquine at least happened at a time when there weren’t good treatments of Covid.) But I’s driven by the conviction that the medical and scientific establishments (who, to be fair, have often done a poor job of messaging and communicating around Covid) are not to be trusted, and that there are cheap and easy solutions they are deliberately ignoring in order to pad Big Pharma’s profits and serve their own purposes. In the eyes of vaccine skeptics, the experts’ disdain for ivermectin, paradoxically, is the best demonstration that it’s actually valuable.

The challenge of vaccine hesitancy, then, is that it isn’t just about giving people access to the right information, or even of combating misinformation. That can help. But many of the unvaccinated distrust the vaccines because they distrust the whole system that made the vaccines possible. And that may be a problem that can’t really be solved, which is one obvious reason why our future may be one not of public-persuasion campaigns but of vaccine mandates and passports.