Oh, I don’t think anyone should go around calling people that refuse to get vaccinated “bad” or “evil”, either. It’s not productive. Neither is the anger.
But, I also think that’s a claim that’s been highly amplified by the anti-vax crowd, who love to claim to be persecuted - you know, the ones that equate vaccine mandates with Nazi extermination camps. Talking about “a pandemic of the unvaccinated” is not the same as saying that unvaccinated people are bad and evil. Saying that unvaccinated people spread disease at a higher rate is not the same as saying they are bad or evil. Saying that you think it’s OK if unvaccinated people get fired for refusing the vaccine is not the same as saying that they are bad or evil.
Yet I have heard right wing media cite these points as examples of anti-vax shaming. I’m not saying that anti-vax shaming doesn’t happen but it’s highly amplified by people with a persecution complex.
Also, I don’t believe for one second that anti-vax shaming has anything to do with vaccine refusal. I think it’s bullshit.
It’s an abuser tactic writ large. The victim asks the abuser to do something perfectly reasonable, and he refuses. They concede that request is reasonable, but they refuse based on the way they were asked. They didn’t like your “tone”. They saw you roll your eyes. You shamed them with their attitude.
In short, they are refusing to do this perfectly reasonable thing because of something YOU did wrong.
Now most of this comes from the top, the right-wing and anti-science influencers that are propagating the anti-vax skepticism. In many ways, your average vaccine refusing individual is just the victim of bad information, bad information that also encourages a willful refusal to listen to good information.
I’m not sure how we combat that.
I agree fully with you that we shouldn’t expect people to get vaccinated just because the CDC says they should. If that were the situation I have a lot more sympathy. But there is a lot of other information, widely available information, that strongly supports getting this vaccine other than the CDC recommendation. I’m not expecting people to get vaccinated based on the CDC recommendation, I’m expecting them to do it based on the totally of the available information.