There are a great many stupid and depressing things about the US response to the Covid pandemic, of which the resistance to vaccines may be the stupidest and most depressing. This has, of course, led to the creation of numerous memes, because 2021, including this one that I ran across on Facebook that’s made me rethink my position on the state of vaccinations:
(I don’t know the original source of this; reverse Google search turns up a bazillion people using it in Reddit threads and the like, but none of the ones I saw were obviously the first use.)
There’s a real “if anybody needs me, I’ll be over in the corner crumbling into dust” element to this, because I’m old enough to remember seat belt laws coming into effect. That’s also why I said “rethink my position” above, because while this is almost certainly some well-intentioned Zoomer attempting satire, it’s also not that far off what actually happened when seatbelt laws were introduced.
I mean, some of the phrasing there is specific to 2021— “live in fear sheep” and “medical exemption” aren’t things that you would’ve heard in the 1980’s— but the core arguments are pretty much what was there. It also misses some specific-to-seatbelts details, like the concept of being “thrown clear.” (The idea, for those who postdate the Reagan era, is that you were better off going through the windshield and ending up on the ground outside the car than being trapped inside the car by the seatbelt.) When I took Driver Ed in the summer of 1988 or thereabouts, we had to watch multiple videos (on VHS— ask your grandparents, kids) debunking dumb arguments against wearing seat belts in ways that alternated between incredibly tedious and disturbingly graphic.
So the position I changed isn’t anything to do with the vaccines themselves— they’re safe, they’re effective, and the 5G reception is incredible, get your shots— but rather the idea that there’s anything uniquely stupid about the current moment in history. More and more, I’m coming back around to the position that what we’re seeing is just The Way These Things Go.
I say “back around,” because this is where I was in December and January when people were freaking out about the slow pace of the vaccine rollout, because we weren’t going to hit the optimistic projections for the number of shots that would be given out by the end of 2020. My reaction then was that this didn’t seem much different than any other large-scale program rollout: the initial projections are always too optimistic and there are early glitches. But the next stage of the usual trajectory is that once we get the early glitches sorted, later stages actually exceed expectations, and in fact that’s what happened in the US. (And of course, once it did, we didn’t spend nearly enough time on the positive accomplishment; the same people who were freaking out about the slow initial stages just changed subject and moved on to freaking out about something else…)
I moved off that relatively sanguine position in June or so, when the pace of vaccinations really slowed, and organized resistance to vaccines really started to get media play. That genuinely seemed like a uniquely stupid aspect of our current moment, rather than The Way These Things Go.
The seatbelt analogy is making me reconsider that a bit, though, and pushing me back toward my original opinion. That is, I suspect that a lot of the current opposition to vaccines is not as specific and dug in as it’s sometimes made to seem, but is largely just the same nonsense we always go through when changes driven by public safety come in. The other big one I remember was when laws banning smoking in public started to be passed, which were noisily objected to at the time but today seem like just common sense that it would be ridiculous to oppose. (Helmet laws for motorcycles mostly weren’t relevant to me, so I’m less familiar with that trajectory, but my vague impression is that it’s similar.)
In which case, the solution to the problem is pretty much as it was with seat belt laws and smoking bans: pass the laws and impose the mandates that will benefit public health and basically ignore the brief period of furious yapping that will ensue. And within a surprisingly short time most of those noisy opponents will just go along with the rule, and it will become the new normal.
(I’m at least partly on board with Matt Yglesias’s suggestion that a lot of vaccine hesitancy is driven by people who just don’t like needles, more than any deep principle or partisan craziness. Those people will grumble, but get the shot if they need to in order to do stuff.)
There are obviously some complications that are specific to the current moment— the capture of some state governments by people with partisan reasons to oppose vaccines is a major logistical problem (though some of the same states that oppose vaccines held out against seat belt laws, too). You’re not going to get a statewide mandate for vaccines in schools in Florida or Texas, which means you sort of have to do an end run around the GOP by having private companies impose rules of their own, but that’s starting to happen. And you’re always going to have a small corps of crazies who absolutely refuse; but then, there are still people refusing to wear seat belts and motorcycle helmets.
So, I’m moving back toward thinking that we’ll get to where we need to be, after all. I think there are some encouraging signs in recent polling about vaccination and the upward trend we see in the vaccine trackers. I’d like to see the improvement happening faster (and I’d love to see them approve the goddamn shots for younger kids, already…), but it is happening, and that’s good.
Another plausible explanation for this shift in my opinion is just mean-reversion; I tend to be a glass-half-full (or maybe “the glass is twice as big as we expected”) kind of guy. Anyway, if that’s a perspective you’d like more of, here’s a button:
and if you’d like to pass this to someone else, here’s a different button:
If you want to just say “OK, Boomer,” in hopes that I will literally crumble to dust, well, the comments are open.