Smarty-Pants Sociologist Tries and Fails to Justify Vax Hesitancy
The other day I ran across this opinion piece in The Guardian. In it a Columbia sociologist tries to explain why it's perfectly understandable that people would resist vaccinations against COVID-19.
He repeatedly refers to "Left-leaning people" and "progressives," and practices whataboutism with respect to T****'s mishandling of the pandemic. So he has a right-wing agenda. Another thing that makes me think that is the tone of the piece, which is condescending and smarty-pants.
He gives 13 reasons in all why people might reasonably resist vaccines. I won't go through these one by one, but rather address three categories into which they fall.
Several points focus on the novelty and speed of production of the vaccines. Several more focus on side-effects of the vaccines. While these might have been reasonable concerns a year ago, today they are nothing short of ridiculous.
Bloomberg estimates that more then 10.4 billion doses of the vaccines have been administered worldwide. More than a half-billion have been administered in the U.S. If the development process produced dangerous vaccines with dire side effects, we would have known about it long ago.
A second category contains claims that the vaccines did not live up to optimistic predictions about effectiveness. You know, you need multiple shots because protection wanes, there are breakthrough infections, and so on.
These things are true but they don't mean the vaccines aren't effective. Statistics show that up to September of last year, 85% of the people who were hospitalized for COVID-19 were not fully vaccinated. Also people who were fully vaccinated and were admitted anyway were older.
The third category of claims are variations on the theme: you can't trust the government or Big Pharma. Fauci lies, Big Pharma makes money from vaccines, government officials are influenced by them, etc. Those things may be true, but they have exactly zero bearing on whether the vaccines are good at preventing infection, severe disease, and death. They are good at all those things.
The essay then meanders into more general complaints about the way the pandemic was handled, including the lab leak theory, models being wrong, blah, blah. While these claims flog right-wing grievances, they don't make his case.
The bottom line is this: There is no longer any sound reason for refusing to get vaccinated. People who refuse are costing our health care system billions of dollars for treatment of preventable illness. And essays like this one make them feel validated.
