And NPR poll found this depressing number:
Among Republican men, 49% said they did not plan to get the shot, compared with just 6% of Democratic men who said the same. Among 2020 Trump supporters, 47% said they did not plan to get a vaccine compared with just 10% of Biden supporters.
Once everyone who wants to get vaccinated gets their shot, it’s tempting to say that they can just take their chances. But they can still spread it to people who can’t take the vaccine and also serve as hosts for the virus to further mutate. It’s a very bad idea.
Frank Luntz has been testing messages among Trump supporting focus groups:
Be honest that scientists don’t have all the answers. Tout the number of people who got the vaccines in trials. And don’t show pro-vaccine ads with politicians — not even ones with Donald Trump. That’s what a focus group of vaccine-hesitant Trump voters insisted to politicians and pollsters this weekend, as public health leaders rush to win over the tens of millions of Republicans who say they don’t plan to get a coronavirus shot. If those voters follow through, it would imperil efforts to achieve the high levels of immunity needed to stopthe virus’s spread in the United States, experts fear
[…]
Participants were adamant: They all believed the coronavirus threat was real, with many having contracted it themselves or aware of critically ill friends and family, and they didn’t want to be condemned as “anti-vaxxers” who opposed all vaccines. Instead, they blamed their hesitation on factors like the unknown long-term effects of new vaccines, even though scientists have stressed their confidence in the products. They also accused politicians and government scientists of repeatedly misleading them this past year — often echoing Trump’s charges that Democrats used the virus as an election-year weapon and overhyped its dangers.
Several said that recent political appeals to get the shot were only hardening their opposition. “We want to be educated, not indoctrinated,” said a man identified as Adam from New York, who praised the vaccines as a “miracle, albeit suspicious.”
[…]
Speaking of indoctrinated:
The group panned a public service announcement released last week, for instance, featuring former presidents Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter. One attendee called the ad “propaganda,” and another said the former presidents were “bad actors.”
“It actually kind of annoys me,” said a voter named Debbie from Georgia.
The group also condemned Anthony S. Fauci — the government infectious-disease specialist relentlessly attacked by Trump and conservative media for the past year — as a “liar,” “flip-flopper” and “opportunistic.”
This is good though:
Luntz says that the best messengers are people in their own communities like their doctor. But really, there is something else that’s causing the problem and it’s a big one. I don’t see how we fix this problem as long as these nihilistic assholes are pushing this propaganda:
It’s a death cult.
And as Susie Madrak at C&L points out, it’s not going to be easy to shake a lot of these people out of their delusions:
Anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories have been around for years, and in 2018, the Russians saw the potential for societal chaos and set their trolls to work. They succeeded! And there are so many people pushing misinformation from so many different directions, it’s hard to identify all the vectors.
Take former NYT reporter and Bill Maher fave Alex Berenson, who is considered an “expert” now by people who would ordinarily never credit anything from the New York Times:
Facebook makes a fortune off this trash, although today they announced they would at least label vaccine misinformation. Yay, I guess?
The journal Nature published this last month, “Measuring the impact of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation on vaccination intent in the UK and USA.”
Here we show that in both countries—as of September 2020—fewer people would ‘definitely’ take a vaccine than is likely required for herd immunity, and that, relative to factual information, recent misinformation induced a decline in intent of 6.2 percentage points (95th percentile interval 3.9 to 8.5) in the UK and 6.4 percentage points (95th percentile interval 4.0 to 8.8) in the USA among those who stated that they would definitely accept a vaccine. We also find that some sociodemographic groups are differentially impacted by exposure to misinformation. Finally, we show that scientific-sounding misinformation is more strongly associated with declines in vaccination intent.
(Remember “Plandemic,” the anti-vaxxer conspiracy “documentary” presented by A Real Doctor? Millions of people saw it before Facebook grudgingly agreed to take it down.)
This kind of misinformation plays on emotions. People who spend a lot of time on social media and Facebook groups will find it injected everywhere, including non-political topics. I have a liberal friend who is constantly sending me wild conspiracy links, asking me if it’s true. I’ve tried to tell her that if these crazy stories were true, they’d be on the front page of the newspaper, not passed around on Facebook, and it calms her down for a while — until the next conspiracy.
We had better hope that someone can get to enough of these people to get us to some kind of herd immunity. But it’s not going to be easy.