During four years of tyranny, anyone who posted a criticism of Donald Trump on Facebook or Twitter was boldly #Resisting. Example from my late friend Mike Hawley (the below was liked and loved 119 times by the righteous):
Successful alimony and child support plaintiffs relaxing in our old Maskachusetts neighborhood displayed lawn signs kind of like the below (“A Woman’s Place is in the Resistance”).
Before we moved to Florida, it was common to see cars with “RESIST” bumper stickers amidst the overall forest of social justice and political bumper stickers.
By contrast, how do we characterize those who refuse to follow orders from Dr. Joe Biden, M.D., and state governors to get vaccinated against COVID-19? In addition to being Deplorable (obviously), are these people bold examples of resistance? After all, those who merely disagreed with Donald Trump’s words were bravely resisting. Actually…. no. It seems that refusing to do what the government tells you to do is an example of weak hesitation. Google returns 152,000 results for “vaccine hesistant” within News and only 23,500 for “vaccine resistant” (most of which relate to the muscular SARS-CoV-2 virus itself, not to any humans).
Examples:
- “Here’s why the once vaccine hesitant are changing their minds” (CNN, 10/12): even sinners can find salvation
- “Vaccine hesitancy in pregnant people drives rise in Covid hospitalizations” (CNN, 10/13): Only 33% of pregnant people between 18-49 are fully vaccinated, according to CDC data from October 2, a figure dwarfed by rates seen in the rest of the population eligible for the vaccine.
- “Vaccine hesitant New Yorkers consider leaving the city as mandates take effect” (Guardian)
- “Why Some Health Care Workers Are Vaccine Hesitant Despite Their Medical Training” (Gothamist, 10/5) [note that it cannot be because of their medical training!]
- “Vaccine Hesitancy Higher in Wealthy Nations, Survey Shows” (US News, 9/30)
I guess vaccine resisters are labeled as conspiracy theorists or domestic terrorists, depending on the mood of the righteous decider.
They have been using that term “vaccine hesitant” for a long time now, and with great consistency. I wonder if it’s in an establishment style guide somewhere.
Anyway, some people are indeed hestitating until their livelihood is threatened–it’s a kind of hesitation, I suppose, to choose between starving to death and taking unwanted drugs. “I hestitated up until the point where they credibly threatened me with death or destitution.”
But there are definitely some people very seriously in the FAFO camp whose psychology the pantywaists on the left will simply never understand.
Everyone should be hesitant, syringe – happy should be rare. I was for sure hesitant although idiotic proclamations from current POTUS and my employer policy pushed me towards making a show of not-vaccinating. But at the end I had to weigh alternatives and lifestyle that I wanted and I chose a smaller evil, per info I had to compile, as real coronavirus data reporting has or at least had been taboo.
Even Trump was (and is) recommending the vaccine. So are those folks “weakly resisting” both Presidents? Do the deluded Trump followers dare defy their god?
Jim, you must be mixing skilled street smart good will Trump supporters, aka deplorables, with US “Democrats”. That’s the left who makes idols of their deficient politicians, Trump supporters tend to be believe in universal God, Creator and complete Master of the universe, who will rule always. Or at least rational agnostics. Not folks who inject themselves daily.
@jim Trump was recently booed at a rally for pushing the vax. As to name calling instead of ‘vaccine hesitant’ we prefer ‘vaccine hostile.’
Jim: Did Trump actually say that everyone from infancy to age 115 should rush down to CVS and get a COVID-19 vaccine? If not, I don’t think it is inconsistent for a young healthy person to (a) say that Trump was generally a better source of COVID advice than the typical government official, and (b) that he/she/ze/they prefers to leave the vaccine doses for the old and unhealthy. CVS is packed with great medicines (except for all of the bad ones; see https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2014/07/08/book-review-bad-pharma/ ). For each great medicine, however, there is usually only a subset of humanity that can benefit from it.
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#demographics shows that COVID-19 has killed 166 Americans aged 12-15 (compare to 170,000 COVID-tagged deaths among those 85+ in age). That 166 statistic includes 12-15-year-olds who were morbidly obese and/or extremely sick with non-COVID issues. Do you think a slender healthy Trump-supporting 12-year-old who resists (or “hesitates” since the government will eventually force him/her/zir/them) being injected with a new drug is “defying his/her/zir/their god”?
(Stats from the UK are less tainted by incompetence and fraud, I think. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-57766717 Out of 12 million children in the UK, among those with no underlying conditions there were 6 deaths tagged to COVID-19 in the first year of COVID. Including children with “life-limiting” conditions and “complex neuro-disabilities”, the total count of deaths was 25.)
All I know is that Trump definitely recommends the vaccine. Is that false? I never heard or read that he excludes any group in his endorsement. “If’s” and “maybe’s” are meaningless…and useless.
@Jim Yes Trump has pushed the vax, point is he got booed for it by people that are big enough Trump supporters to go to a rally. Trump followers are not mindless NPCs that go along with whatever he suggests. And for NPC lefties that is hard to understand or terrifying if they do.
According to scientists at CMU, broken down by education, the population most reluctant to get the COVID shot is those with PhDs: 23.9% don’t want the shot, compared to 11% with a bachelors degree. Is it telling that people who have actually done science and peer review for other scientists are most skeptical of Science when it tells them to shut up and get the shot?
Actually I’m surprised that it’s only 23.9%. It’s an interesting case of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. People will tear apart published papers in their field, tear apart people (scientists) in their field for producing crap studies and doing sketchy data analyses to get the elusive p<0.05, will talk about all the terrible incentives in the research process… and then will gladly parrot that the #ScienceIsSettled in a field other than their own and that Science must not be questioned. Very curious.
RS: I’m not surprised that most PhDs want a vaccine. Most PhDs are pretty old. Median age of a new humanities PhD is 34 (see https://www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators/higher-education/age-new-humanities-phds ). 33 might might be the average across fields (see https://www.cbsnews.com/news/12-reasons-not-to-get-a-phd/ ). so “PhDs only” excludes under-30s. I have plenty of doctor friends who say that they wouldn’t give or recommend the vaccine to patients younger than 30, but the 60- and 70-year-old docs want it for themselves.
Good point, I’d love to see the same education breakdown for the survey “are you hesitant to give your child the COVID vaccine.” The most interesting result in the CMU study to me was that the least reluctant group were those with a Masters – only 8.3%. My interpretation of the jump from 8.3% with Masters to 23.9% with PhD is that with a M.S. you get to the cutting edge of science and discover the really cool exciting things you can do. Then when you do a Ph.D. and are tasked with creating new science, you really see how the sausage is made, and that provides a significant dose of cynicism around the whole process. For instance, over the last year I have frequently seen media articles treat “peer reviewed” as meaning that a result is true and cannot be questioned, while “not peer reviewed” means it should be assumed false. A person with a PhD who participates in the publication and peer review system will understand that papers that have been peer reviewed should probably also be assumed to have exaggerated results in some way.
Prior to COVID, it was considered OK to recognize that fact and try to do something about it: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16060722/
RS: Aside from vaccine effectiveness, the big current question on exaggerated results is this latest Merck drug. The company says it is 50 percent effective (https://www.merck.com/news/merck-and-ridgebacks-investigational-oral-antiviral-molnupiravir-reduced-the-risk-of-hospitalization-or-death-by-approximately-50-percent-compared-to-placebo-for-patients-with-mild-or-moderat/ ).
But, as pointed out in the (great) book Bad Pharma, #Science says the typical drug is most effective on the day it is released. Every subsequent study (more #Science) finds less effectiveness. We would hardly have any depressed people in our midst if Prozac actually worked as well it was initially claimed to work.
See also
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/10/mercks-thor-inspired-covid-treatment-hammered-for-700-price-a-46x-markup/
(Merck is selling back to Medicare/Medicaid (the U.S. government, in other words) a drug that the U.S. government actually paid to develop!)
Propaganda is such transparent propaganda… they really do consider people to be complete idiots, which may be accurate depiction of a Democrat voter, after all.
That said, my preferred way of describing my position is not “anti-vaccines”, and not “vaccine hesitant”, but rather “vaccine realist”. After all, I do know a lot more about the vaccines, the virus, and molecular biology involved than your average MD or a public “expert” (I had an unsettling experience of explaining the significance of the furin cleavage site on S-protein to my PCP… he was listening quite attentively, as it was mostly news to him. So was the explanation of PCR as a cascade of noisy amplifiers interposed with filters (i.e. SARS2 sequence-specific primers) and why amplifying filtered noise repeatedly is guaranteed to produce really poor S/N ratio.