#readwise # Why Your Uncle Isn’t Going to Get Vaccinated ![rw-book-cover](https://readwise-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/static/images/article4.6bc1851654a0.png) ## Metadata - Full Title: Why Your Uncle Isn’t Going to Get Vaccinated - URL: https://skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/why-your-uncle-isnt-going-to-get-vaccinated/ ## Highlights - The psychology of vaccine hesitancy was a topic of research before the SARS-CoV-2 virus appeared, and I am sure health policy researchers are busy working on this topic as we speak. But **there are some features of this wave of vaccine rejection that are quite different from earlier vaccine hesitancy movements**. ### 1. Your Uncle Is a **Donald Trump Supporter** - To the extent that **earlier versions of the anti-vaccination movement** were politically motivated, they **were more likely to come from the left. In recent years, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a democrat who has built a reputation as an environmentalist, emerged as a major anti-vaccination spokesperson, promoting the discredited idea that childhood vaccines cause autism**. In a rare example of bipartisanship, he has since embraced the largely conservative anti-COVID-19 vaccine movement and, as a result, has been banned from Instagram for spreading false information (Chappell 2021). The previous anti-vaccination movement was not strictly liberal. Recall that candidate Donald Trump alluded to the debunked claims of a vaccination-autism connection in the 2016 campaign (Lerer 2021), **but in the case of COVID-19 vaccine rejection, it is now an overwhelmingly Republican phenomenon.** - **Being a Trump supporter is not really a reason to reject vaccination, but it appears to be one of the strongest predictors of your vaccination status.** - One of the lowest levels of vaccination in the NBC poll was among respondents who voted for Trump in 2020: 50 percent, as compared to 87 percent among Biden voters. - Note: Todd, Chuck, Mark Murray, and Ben Kamisar. 2021. NBC News poll shows demographic breakdown of the vaccinated in the U.S. WPMI (August 24). Available online at https://mynbc15.com/news/coronavirus/nbc-news-poll-shows-demographic-breakdown-of-the-vaccinated-in-the-us. ### 2. Your Uncle Wants to Avoid **Cognitive Dissonance** - in the months since vaccines became widely available, the adults like your uncle who have not yet been vaccinated have had hundreds of conversations with their friends and families and have heard themselves justify their decisions over and over. **Once vaccine rejection became a fixed idea, going against that decision would produce cognitive dissonance—an unpleasant motivational state created when our actions conflict with our stated beliefs or values.** When the stakes are low, the conflict is sometimes resolved by changing one’s beliefs or attitudes, but when the beliefs are more central, the solution is often to remain loyal to your beliefs and avoid those actions that would create dissonance. To suddenly get vaccinated now, without other provocation, would be difficult for vaccine rejectors to justify. ### 3. Your Uncle Thinks COVID Isn’t That Serious - **Concern about the pandemic might be greater if the disease were more visible. The great global pandemics of the past were both more deadly and easier to see.** - **unlike COVID-19, which has its worst effects on older patients, the Spanish Flu was most deadly for the very old and the very young. Dying children tend to evoke more sympathy and concern than death among the elderly.** Although recent headlines touted that U.S. COVID-19 deaths have now surpassed the U.S. deaths from the Spanish Flu, for a variety of reasons—the most obvious being that the U.S. population was one third the size it is now—the 1918 H1N1 flu virus was still more deadly (Kaul 2021). - In contrast, **whenever anyone begins to show symptoms or tests positive for the coronavirus, they immediately quarantine themselves and disappear. It occurs to me that the probability of seeing anyone cough in public is now at its lowest point in my lifetime. We all have learned a lot about how to avoid infection, and one result of that knowledge is that we rarely see sick people.** - over 90 percent of the people hospitalized with COVID-19 are unvaccinated (Rosenberg et al. 2021). These people don’t trust the medical establishment enough to get vaccinated, but they head to the hospital when they get really sick. Once in the hospital, they are protected by medical privacy laws, and only the healthcare workers see the scope of problem. In our everyday lives, we see little evidence of sickness, despite living through the largest pandemic in a century. ### 4. Your Uncle **Values His Freedom More Than His Health** and That of Those around Him - **A 2017 study of the moral values favored by vaccine-hesitant parents found they were significantly more concerned about purity and liberty than they were about harm and fairness** (Amin et al. 2017) - Pro-gun advocates frequently cite their Second Amendment individual right to own firearms, but for several decades there has been good evidence that bringing a firearm into your house increases the likelihood of homicide in your home (Vyse 2015). - Note: Vyse, Stuart. 2015. Guns: Feeling safe does not equal being safe. Skeptical Inquirer Online (December 16). Available online at https://skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/guns-feeling-safe-does-not-equal-being-safe/. - As the research suggests, many people with a strong commitment to their individual freedoms either deny that their actions cause harm or are willing to accept those harms for themselves and others. - From a psychological point of view, mandates also provide a hedge against cognitive dissonance. The person who responds to a mandate can claim they still maintain their same beliefs and values about vaccines, but they submitted in response to an outside force. “I had to do it for work.”