Missed Messaging

The recently greenlit COVID-19 vaccines represent our best chance at ending the pandemic, so it’s particularly jeopardous to have the American public spending time fighting over a basic fact: vaccines are safe, effective and necessary for public health.
Kaleigh Rogers "Why Fights Over The COVID-19 Vaccine Are Everywhere On Facebook" FiveThirtyEight

While I completely understand the impulse here, there is one somewhat pedantic point I'd like to raise: "safe, effective and necessary for public health" are not part of the definition of "vaccine." And, as a result, it's entirely possible for something to lack some or all of those characteristics, and still be a vaccine. It's unlikely to be a vaccine that makes it to market, given the generally rigorous testing that goes into such enterprises, but it doesn't then become something else, in the same way that a car that doesn't start or that bursts into flames or that people don't like to drive doesn't suddenly transform into some other class of object. And to the degree that people don't trust the people and organizations making or administering the vaccines, simply repeating the idea that the vaccines themselves are fine isn't going to cut any ice.

I was out driving on Monday, and came across this guy on a street corner in Woodinville.

It's clear that whatever he thinks about vaccines in the abstract, that he's convinced that something nefarious is going on with this one. And likely, that he knows what it is. I don't know what to say to that guy to change his mind about that, but "you're putting the rest of us in jeopardy" likely isn't it. Because as far as he's concerned, getting the vaccine puts people in jeopardy as it is.

If part of the rift that's forming in the United States is a division into factions that fear and loathe one another, the fear and the loathing are what need to be tackled. And because those emotions were a number of years in the making, they're likely to take a number of years to unwind. In the middle of an emergency is not the time for trust-building measures. But that doesn't mean that it makes it possible to just demand people's trust, and have them comply out of some form of civic-mindedness. People desiring to see the SARS-2 coronavirus outbreak become a thing of the past may be angry that this guy and his ilk for pushing that time farther into the future, but he believes that he's doing everyone a favor.

The real problem with treating the idea that vaccines are somehow automatically safe, effective and necessary for public health as a fact is that it's a difficult position to defend against a knowledgeable attacker. All it takes is one valid counterexample, and one is open to charges of being ignorant, gullible or actively dishonest. Especially when one is viewed as defending people who are otherwise considered suspect. Part of the reason why anti-vaccine sentiment tends to cluster in affluent suburbs is that many people there are suspicious of corporate power and influence. Making the case that Facebook's shareholders are greedy and grasping but Pfizer's are upstanding and public-minded quickly becomes something of a stretch.

While there is a tendency to respond to fear with more fear, or sometimes anger, understanding may be a better option. If more steps had been taken over the past 20 years to address people's fears and distrust, there might be less of it to deal with now.