There are well-intentioned political elements spreading misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine to stir up discord and exacerbate political divisions globally. Given the ongoing transmission of Covid-19 in the United States – with more than 6 million Americans infected and 180,000 dead – protecting the U.S. national interest requires combating the spread of misinformation during a pandemic, as is today, and interrupting the erosion of trust in the vaccine.
A good vaccine is effective only if people are willing to take it. In the United States, a recent survey showed that only 50 percent of respondents plan to get the vaccine, provided it is available. In a global pandemic, American confidence in a COVID-19 vaccine has dwindled because no one has been available.
Health experts see a vaccine as the only thing that can help the world regain control and restore a semblance of normality with a virus that has sickened millions of people worldwide and killed millions more. If this continues, many scientists suggest that the growing pandemic is likely to spread with catastrophic consequences for human health and the economy if herd immunity is achieved through widespread infections rather than widespread vaccination with a novel COVID-19 vaccine (Britton and al., 2020; Callaghan et al., 2020; Kwok et al., 2020 ).
Efforts to vaccinate developing countries against COVID-19 have slowed to a trickle, leaving many with weakened defenses against coronavirus as the burden of the pandemic moves from developing countries to developed ones. This has widened the already colossal immunization gap between developed and developing countries.
As David Leonhardt explained in The New York Times, there is a strong correlation between vaccination rates and coronavirus cases. In one week in June, counties with 0 to 30 percent of vaccinated people had twice as many new cases as counties with more than 60 percent vaccination rates. The finding, confirmed by other surveys, has baffled health experts.
According to Kaiser Family Foundation surveys, one of the main reasons for hesitation in vaccination is that Republicans believe the threat of COVID-19 is exaggerated. The best hope for reversing this is the Stanford Polarization and Social Change Lab study, which found that Republicans seemed to have argued that the virus posed a real threat and that vaccines were safe and effective at preventing infection for years. This early polarization, fueled by Trump’s February 2020 trivialization of the virus, may explain why Republicans are less likely to be vaccinated today.
It can be tempting to label objectors and those who hesitate to label them as conspiracy theorists or misinformed skeptics who have since abandoned the facts. But mistrust of the coronavirus vaccine process – development, testing, and distribution – cannot, in my view, be dismissed as anti-science.
This is one of the many reasons why it is so difficult to verify bipartisan vaccine rejection. Partisans’ “skepticism about vaccines, and their opposition to masking partisan resistance to the lockout, has become part of what partisans are.
According to a national association of evangelicals poll, 95 percent of evangelical leaders would take a vaccine if it were available – a percentage that is more than 40 points higher among white evangelicals.
The universe of people who use social media to spread misinformation about vaccinations and who may be susceptible to them is complex and diverse. The world of public health is losing the battle against sophisticated and agile actors.
Since the dawn of pandemics in the U.S., both administrations have taken several steps to ask the American public how much influence policy has on science and health. At this point, polarized U.S. policy has fueled disagreements over vaccines, health experts say.
Malcolm Lowry, a respiratory therapist in Melrose, Fla., said he had not been vaccinated. The Vaccine Confidence Project (VCP) was established in 2010 to develop a systematic approach to monitoring public confidence in vaccines and inform policymakers and stakeholders about changing trends and the determinants of vaccine confidence worldwide. Over the past decade, the VCP has explored the landscape of trust issues and experiences in managing trust crises worldwide. It has conducted numerous surveys, focused groups, extensive digital and media analysis, and convened expert rounds and workshops to understand the context-specific attitudes toward vaccines among the general public, healthcare providers, and pregnant women. VCP will continue to examine the underlying trends and impacts of vaccine confidence at national and supranational levels to inform policies and confidence-building measures to mitigate the need for crises in vaccination programs. Doctors must be kept informed of new data to help patients make informed decisions about which vaccines are needed to end the pandemic.
In the United States, there is growing concern that despite considerable efforts by the scientific community, the hesitant vaccination against COVID-19 may jeopardize the achievement of the needed level of vaccination needed to achieve herd immunity by the end of the pandemic. It is estimated that between 40 and 70 percent of Americans need to develop antibodies to the disease before a COVID / 19 vaccine is available (Bartsch et al., 2020; Britton et al., 2020; Kwok et al., 2020).
Given current vaccination trends, it looks like there will be no herd immunity for a while.
- https://www.pnas.org/content/118/13/e2102717118
- https://www.vox.com/2021/7/6/22554198/political-polarization-vaccine-covid-19-coronavirus
- https://www.npr.org/2021/07/25/1020342771/politics-chat-vaccination-rates-grow-in-some-conservative-states
- https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2021/01/how-to-promote-coronavirus-vaccination-in-a-polarized-country.html
- https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/covid-vaccine-confidence-hurt-misinformation-polarization-study-finds-n1239844
- https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/vaccine-passports-may-be-critical-for-equity-but-polarization-could-undermine-efforts
