Pinch and a Poke

According to a survey taken in late November, by the Pew Research Center, about 42% of Black people surveyed said that "they would definitely/probably get a vaccine for COVID-19 if one were available today." FiveThirtyEight's Perry Bacon, Jr. notes this fact in his article on the groups in the United States that have said they were less likely to request a vaccine.

A lot is made of this reticence on the part of the Black American community, given that it doesn't lend itself to the factors that prompt other groups to opt out. As Mr. Bacon notes: "Instead, experts say there is long-standing mistreatment of Black Americans in U.S. health care research and lingering suspicion from that mistreatment about how the American health care system treats them." This is worth mentioning, because many of these articles are about the vaccine specifically. Women might worry that the vaccine isn't "safe" and people with less education might not have the same sense as others that vaccines will protect the population at large, but those are different concerns than the idea that the people whose job it would be to administer the vaccine aren't on your side. After all, whether the vaccine is safe and effective doesn't really matter if I'm given a placebo because someone at the CDC wants to collect data on how the disease impacts untreated populations over the long term...

There is a tendency to want to boil things down as far as possible, and then deal with the broad swaths. There was an article in The Atlantic that pretty much lumped all of the United States into vaccine supporters, vaccine skeptics and those who could use some persuading. That's likely not a useful level of granularity. People who are dubious about the vaccine itself are different than people who are dubious about the people and the systems that will administer the vaccine. That's an important distinction to make, again, because it doesn't do any good to convince someone that the vaccine will do the job asked of it, if their concern is that they won't be allowed to access it. Not going to the doctor to obtain the vaccine is different than not going out of a conviction they they won't provide it.

And this is the problem with waiting for a crisis to deal with what has been a festering problem of social trust. The need to gain trust quickly leads to an impulse to look for shortcuts. And flattening a myriad of different concerns into the catch-all of "vaccine hesitancy" is just such a shortcut. But a shortcut that doesn't actually get one to the destination isn't useful.