I found Zeynep Tufekci’s New York Times piece on the people who are resisting being vaccinated against COVID-19 pretty good once you skip over the customary boilerplate. Here’s its essence:
All this may make it seem as if almost all the holdouts are conspiracy theorists and anti-science die-hards who think Covid is a hoax, or that there is nothing we can do to reach more people.
Real-life evidence, what there is, demonstrates that there’s much more to it.
In brief what she found tallied closely with what I’ve been saying: those resisting being vaccinated tend to be those who who distrust the government, the healthcare system, or both:
Some key research on the unvaccinated comes from the Covid States Project, an academic consortium that managed to scrape together resources for regular polling. It categorizes them as “vaccine-willing†and “vaccine-resistant,†and finds the groups almost equal in numbers among the remaining unvaccinated. (David Lazer, one of the principal investigators of the Covid States Project, told me that the research was done before the mandates, and that the consortium has limited funding, so they can only poll so often).
Furthermore, their research finds that the unvaccinated, overall, don’t have much trust in institutions and authorities, and even those they trust, they trust less: 71 percent of the vaccinated trust hospitals and doctors “a lot,†for example, while only 39 percent of the unvaccinated do.
Trust is difficult; it must be earned and it can be easily lost. My experience at least is that coercion and punishment are not generally effective ways of building trust.
I found this interesting:
Along with the recognition of greater risk, access to regular health care may be an important explanation of why those over 65 are the most-vaccinated demographic in the country. They have Medicare. That might have increased their immunity against the Fox News scare stories.
One reason for low vaccination rates in rural areas may be that they are “health care and media†deserts, as a recent NBC report on the crises put it, with few reliable local news outlets and the “implosion of the rural health care system†— too few hospitals, doctors and nurses.
Zeynep Tufekci is misinformed, as is usual for people imprisoned in our big city concentration camps.
It is interesting that after the better part of a year of pushing people hard to get vaccinated only 57% of Americans have done so. Also, there have been only 45 million cases in the US (14%) and 722 thousand deaths (0.2%) out of 333 million people. Both cases and deaths are likely over counts due to misattribution of causes.
I would agree that trust is the issue, and that the medical professional nowadays is actively distrusted by half the population. Distrust is worse for politicians and news media minions, but there has been a disastrous decline in respect for and trust in medical professionals. They earned it. Fauci is practically a curse word.
As to medical care, 91% of Americans have some sort of health insurance. Medicare actually covers only 18% of Americans, all elderly. There has been a significant increase of 85% to 91% in insurance coverage since the ACA was passed.
Moreover, not all rural areas are medical care deserts. In our small rural north-central Ohio town, the local county hospital is quite modern and provides advanced services like robotic surgery, heart surgery, cancer treatment… Bad cases are 30 minutes or so from Columbus by life flight helicopter. (The small town has 17,000 people, and the county has 62,000.)
MIT Study: Vaccine Hesitancy Is ‘Highly Informed, Scientifically Literate,’ And ‘Sophisticated’. This MIT was reported on in mid July of this year. Such an observation concurs with the conversations I have had with people not interested in taking the vaccine. They are informed about studies, statistics, the enormous number of physicians around the world questioning not only the efficacy but also the safety of these vaccines. Itâ€s people, relying solely on mainstream media factoids, Fauci and fear, who often seem like they are on the opposite side of truth, not looking seriously at a broader picture these vaccines are presenting to an unknowing public..
You can find the paper jan cites at the link. It helps to explain why it will be almost impossible to change minds. (I am sure jan didnt read this or she would not cite it.) The anti-mask, anti-vaccine effort is conducted by highly informed , literate people. Their methods are very sophisticated. This makes sense since they have spent many years and been well financed in their efforts. These are the same methods and sometimes the same people who have mastered sophisticated ways of presenting data, especially visualizations by chart, to support the tobacco industry. The same methods used by the evangelical movement to prove that science is wrong about evolution and support creationism. They rely a lot upon people not reading their stuff in detail and not noticing when they contradict each other.
So I totally agree that we should not call these people stupid. They do not live in information deserts. In fat they have their own sea of numbers, presented so that they will support what they want to believe. The level of disinformation is pretty sophisticated and makes use of lots of data and studies in the literature, but generally not peer reviewed studies that use controls.
http://vis.csail.mit.edu/covid-story/
Why is it that these people who so much do not trust medicine still show up in the ED in the middle of the night?
Steve
Steve, you are so enmeshed, in the studies and stats that validate your medical narrative, that rarely do you get off that intellectual high horse and even entertain other “scientific†stats, data, medical protocols that support an entirely different narrative. There have been long lines of well known physicians, infectious disease experts, cardiologists who have diagnosed this Fauci-organized epidemic, its media-fed “facts†as hyped, distorted, and prolonging COVID, as it destroys businesses and people’s lives.
Break throughs, in the meantime are increasing. Places like Taiwan are seeing more vaccinated deaths. Japan, India, Mexico are doing better on common repurposed anti vitals than vaccines, none of which have been FDA approved except for Pfizer’s comirnaty, a drug not even available in this country yet. The evidence keeps mounting, but is routinely censored and/or ignored. The only thing going on is a growing authoritarian global climate – stripping people of their jobs and needlessly jabbing people against their will. Time, however, is not on the side of these vaccines. Their short-lived efficacy, combined with being a dud in addressing variants, is more difficult to hide as time goes on.
BS, I read the stuff that you claim you read but don’t really read. Admit it, you didnt actually read the MIT paper did you? For you this is just all about talking points and owning the libs. For me, for a lot of docs who take care of covid pts it is about lives and long term care. So there isn’t time to read everything but there is time to read a lot and whenever someone claims to have a paper that proves what we are doing is wrong I make a point of reading it. I had already read the one you cited because another anti-vaxxer cited it, again not having read it.
So there is no evidence based approach for the kind of stuff you support. There is a small group of doctors and a lot of the ones you cite don’t actually take care of covid pts or no longer practice. They have no expertise. The papers they submit go to Medrix which means they have not been peer reviewed or published in a real journal. Most of them have no controls. (Do you even know what that means?) Do you even notice when I say that we tried the drugs you claim work and found no effect?
” Japan, India, Mexico are doing better on common repurposed anti vitals than vaccines”
Then actually cite me the papers and I will read them if I have not already. Just so you know the two most commonly cited papers from India claiming that ivermectin works have been retracted. Japan now has over 70% of its population vaccinated which is pretty good.
https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-maps/countries-and-territories/japan/
“none of which have been FDA approved”
We have already used tons of monoclonal antibody treatments. They are expensive and time consuming and they are not as effective as vaccines, but we use them. They do have approval from the FDA. Regeneron is now the preferred agent and I have not seen the numbers on how much of that we are using now.
Steve
There is an elephant in the room. Despite all the citations of all the studies, there are by definition no long term studies. So we just don’t know for sure how lasting a vaccine is, how effective it is at prevention and whether or not there are long term risks. My friend at Hopkins told me last week that in her clinical practice 43 of the 44 she has treated had been vaccinated. She herself had been vaccinated, but got it. This is not to say that it is still not a good bet, if only to reduce hospitalizations and mortality. But when it comes to trust, the vaccines have been wholly overhyped.
A second issue is this notion that its a bunch of MAGA slobbering fools who are refusing vaccination. First we have the issue with African Americans. Second we have no shows and quits among city and rural, pilots, nurses, well, workers of all stripes. The MAGA thing is a canard. Its primarily trust, which has not been earned by public health officials, politicians or media.
“There is a small group of doctors and a lot of the ones you cite don’t actually take care of covid pts or no longer practice.”
There are plenty of practicing physicians interested in prevention and therapeutics, including vitamin D, zinc, ivermectin and monoclonals. It is also true that many physicians don’t have real insight but are simply following published guidelines, in part because its a safe harbor position. I remember when standard wisdom was carbs and no fat. Not now. Or when the notion existed that if you ate eggs you surely would die of heart disease by age 50.
Most of the people who are strong diet activists are not actually doctors. The more appropriate analogy is tobacco. There were doctors advocating for tobacco for quite a while, just like you now have doctors advocating for HCQ and ivermectin along with doctors selling Covid treatment packs for hundreds of dollars that include Viagra, a well known anti-viral. So just like tobacco there are a bunch of grifters. Just like tobacco there is an industry that is well financed and sophisticated in its media presentations pushing misinformation. So the percentage of doctors who support using HCQ and Ivermectin is very small. Because there are a lot of doctors there are quite a few. BTW, we all support the development of anti-virals but we think there should be some proof that they work.
As i keep telling you we used HCQ extensively early on because we were trying everything. It became clear pretty early it didnt do anything. We also tried Ivermectin later on and didnt see much effect, though we gave up that one sooner probably because we felt burned over HCQ. To be fair we were aware of the lab data which showed that ivermectin worked at concentrations that would kill people. However, if a pt requests it we still order HCQ or ivermectin (after trying totally them out of it).
“A second issue is this notion that its a bunch of MAGA slobbering fools who are refusing vaccination.”
Know you took math courses. Blacks are a much smaller group, and their numbers of unvaccinated are decreasing. What we see in essentially every survey is that the refusal to get vaccinated is very strongly correlated with political affiliation, especially Trump support. Just a fact.
“Second we have no shows and quits among city and rural, pilots, nurses, well, workers of all stripes.”
Yes, a lot of those people are Republicans and/or Trump supporters.
” My friend at Hopkins told me last week that in her clinical practice 43 of the 44 she has treated had been vaccinated.”
How many in the ICU? About 95% of our hospitalized pts are not vaccinated. For ICU admissions it has varied between 94%-98%. We have a 34 y/o who was unvaccinated on a vent right now for whom we are exploring the possibility of a lung transplant since the fibrosis is getting worse. Only co-morbidity was diabetes. Anyway, if all of your pts are vaccinated then you will only see breakthroughs. Again, its math.
Havd the vaccines been over hyped? That is harder for me to say since I mostly read medical sources. The vaccines have behave exactly as described. They were tested before the delta variant so that has changed things just a bit but not that much. They are reducing serious illness as advertised.
Steve
Let me just add something that I think is obvious but I guess non-medial might not. The ivermectin advocates are pushing literature that claims 86% success rates for ivermectin. Do you have any idea what that means for an anti-viral drug of any kind let alone any other drug treatment? That means it would be an absolute miracle drug. We just dont see drugs that work that well very often. If it really worked that we we would notice. Oh, and costs. The “we do our own research people” claim we dont like ivermeting since it is cheap. Dexamethasone, the steroid we us eis just as cheap.
Steve
Another nurse and myself were talking about the censorship of information dealing with the deaths and side effects of these vaccines. We also discussed the effectiveness, in the early application of antivirals, such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, in the treatment of COVID. usually accompanied by a media black-out in reporting any favorable results achieved by repurposing these common, inexpensive, but effective drugs. Her response was that only alternative media seemed interested in relaying a fuller picture of COVID – including safety, remedies, and more accurate data.
For instance, in California’s Imperial Valley, Doctors Brian Tyson/George Fareed have treated over 6000 patients with anti-vitals like ivermectin, having over a 99% success rate and no deaths. In an interview taped by Dr. Robert Malone (known around the world for his research and creation of Messenger RNA vaccines) stated unequivocally that 450,000 people needlessly died because of being denied the use of ivermectin type medications.
Yes, Steve, to many ivermectin is almost like a miracle drug (when used at the onset of the virus), in it’s speed of halting the spread of symptoms and keeping hospitalizations and death at bay.
Here’s one of those alternative publications that delivers a truer scope of what medical route works the best:
https://www.christophernunn.net/post/you-are-not-being-told-about-the-success-of-ivermectin-use-in-india