Except the anti-vax propaganda campaign is visible and prominent, so I’m not sure why someone would dance around and not just say – people are spreading lies and there’s no proper vaccine drive to counter it.
The entire op-ed completely avoids even mentioning the pervasive and widespread anti-vax disinformation and propaganda that is everywhere and well funded. They don’t mention that the government is not doing its part to promote the vaccine. They just make it seem like this anti-vax sentiment has materialized organically out of thin air, and then proceed to hand wring about not having an answer to “vaccine hesitancy” and the “heebie jeebies” that patients have from the intense propaganda campaign.
The response has been almost like clockwork, at nearly every medical visit in the last few weeks. “It’s time for the flu shot,” I’ll say to my patients, “plus the updated Covid vaccine.” And that’s when the groans start.
In the past, the flu shot elicited the most resistance. The patients at my New York City practice would take their other vaccinations without a second thought but balk at the flu shot — because their sister is allergic to eggs, or because they’re sure that the flu shot always gives them the flu or because they just “don’t do” flu shots. Now, though, the majority of my patients respond along the lines of, “Fine to do the flu shot” — sheepishly pause, then say — “but not the Covid.”
When I ask my patients if they have any concerns or questions about the Covid vaccine, hardly any do. Practically no one asks me about safety data or how effective it is at preventing viral transmission, hospitalization and death. Almost no one asks me about current case counts or masking or Paxlovid. There’s just a vague hedge, or an abashed, “I don’t know, I just don’t.” As I try to suss out what’s on my patients’ minds, I can feel their own slight sense of surprise that there is no specific issue causing their discomfort about getting the updated Covid vaccine. It’s as though they have a communal case of the heebie-jeebies.
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Moreover, these patients are not anti-vaxxers; they take their shingles vaccines and tetanus shots with hardly a shrug. Nearly all received the initial Covid vaccine series, and fully remember the urgency of getting those hard-to-find vaccination slots in the early days. Nor do they seem to be science deniers; they embrace standard medical treatments for most of their other health conditions.
Yes, this is exactly what propaganda does. It attaches a stink to things. That’s a major tactic of disinformation — to just apply negative emotions to something. People are not rational actors, so emotional manipulation works. And there’s a whole ecosystem and economic system around anti-vax, where people pushing this are motivated to make it part of the manufactured culture wars. But also, others are motivated because they wish to sell people alternative faux cures and unproven preventatives. These pseudoscience product purveyors moved in as soon as the pandemic set in, and they like people to refuse the vaccine because it ups the desire for “alternative” medicine.
The op-ed ends by telling reader patients to just put aside their heebie jeebies and get their vaccination. No call for a vaccine drive. No call for naming and shaming disinformation purveyors. Yet we know how change happens. And we know how “vaccine hesitancy” was overcome in the past. Nothing will change if we keep listening to op-eds from the New York Times tell us there’s no way out but individualism.