...Many Refuse To Take It?
The following is from Sarah Zhang writing in
The Atlantic:
...There is no COVID-19 vaccine, but there are already COVID-19 vaccine conspiracies. Even as vaccines for the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2 are being held up as the last hope for a return to normalcy, misinformation about them is spreading. A more fraught scenario for science communication is hard to imagine: a novel vaccine, probably fast-tracked, in the middle of a highly politicized and badly mishandled pandemic.
“I was initially optimistic that, when people felt the need for a COVID-19 vaccine, the anti-vaccination movement would undergo a period of retreat,” says Peter Hotez, a vaccine scientist at Baylor College of Medicine, who has himself become a frequent target of vaccine skeptics. “It’s actually had the effect of reinvigorating the anti-vaccine movement.”...
Now.
Like me until relatively recently, you may have thought that the anti-vaxxers are just a lunatic fringe group whose arguments do not really matter in the grand scheme of the thinking of the rational 'rest of us'.
Clinician-scientist David Gorski, who has bona-fides that I trust in this fight,
begs to differ:...I admire Dr. Hotez to death, but until recently he really was quite naïve about the antivaccine movement, as are many doctors and scientists. I even fell into that category several years ago, thinking that vaccines are the victims of their own success and that, because we don’t see the mass suffering now due to the diseases we now vaccinate against, the return of such an infectious disease (or diseases) would lead antivaxxers to reassess. However, this reaction of the antivaccine movement to COVID-19 should have been very predictable, just based on the experience from last year. As we saw then, with the return of measles in so many places due to low uptake of the MMR vaccine, the antivaccine movement was unmoved. In fact, it doubled down...So, why should we be concerned about these folks and and their conspiratorial spewing of demonstrable falsehoods?
Well, as Gorski explains, one reason to be concerned is the fact that they have become very good at disseminating their 'messages' in a highly transmissible, essentially viral, manner on social media platforms. Additionally, they are one of the few groups anywhere that managed to forge bipartisan political alliances that are now
beginning to tilt rightward:...Despite the image of antivaxxers being hippy dippy, granola crunching lefties, in fact, antivaccine views are roughly equally prevalent on the political right and the left, and this has been true for a long time. However, over the last decade (and in particular since the passage of SB 277 in California to outlaw nonmedical exemptions to school vaccine mandates), increasingly the antivaccine movement has been appealing to the right more than the left through the use of conservative-friendly rhetoric of “freedom”, “parental rights”, and the portrayal of school vaccine mandates as overweening government overreach...It's a very worrying situation, indeed.
And it would seem that the sooner it is dealt with effectively, the better.
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Kevin Roose also wrote an excellent Op-Ed piece on this topic recently in the New York Times.
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