You forgot a BIG one
- Libruls want me to and I want to stick it to the demoncrates. Har, har har.
This is just question-begging. Republicans wanna do some things and don’t wanna do others. Why?
From where I sit, it’s because they habitually act like small children who think only of themselves because they do not have the intelligence or emotional maturity to realize that they live in a structured society where we all rely on each other and must make compromises to get along.
They are all Id and no super Ego whatsoever.
There is no why, no because. This is not about reasons or motivation.
Actually the OP is pretty explicitly about motivation. And your comment really makes no sense. Are you suggesting Republicans are completely random? They just all happen to have trended antivax through luck? They didn’t want to? There is no reason why?
I know there’s a school of thought that regards it as a weakness to try to understand people you don’t agree with. I think it’s a pretty silly school of thought.
The difference with unvaxxed Republicans is that they think of “I don’t wanna” as a valid reason.
I didn’t really want to spend a few hours looking for a place with open appointments, I didn’t really want to get up early on my day off and drive a half hour to the nearest place with available vaccine appointments, then make the same drive two weeks later. I don’t fear needles, but I’m not a huge fan of them, and would rather not have them jabbed into me. I didn’t really want to be sick for a day and a half after my second shot.
But those wants, to me, were massively outweighed by my desire to protect not only myself, but others. For an anti-vaxxer Republican, those wants outweigh their desire to protect themselves and others.
The motivation of “I don’t wanna” is that there is nothing of greater import than your own personal desires.
Somehow, ‘I don’t wanna die’ never enters into their ‘thought’ process.
I find it a more common school of thought that when we try to understand people we don’t agree with, we must be as charitable as possible and/or take them at their word as much as possible. It is perfectly sensible to establish that if a person’s stated reasons for dismissing covid are irrational and contradictory (e.g. it is both a dangerous engineered bioweapon, and a hoax by the democrats to hurt Trump), then those are not their real reasons.
Most anti-vaxxers leave us with nothing left but to conclude that their real motivations are just visceral instincts and petty cultural memes.
Gerald Ford, seen here getting a vaccine fro Lt. Phillip Gerard…
Or to put it another way, they are stupid, obstinate assholes.
Robert Reich wrote this four hours ago on Facebook:
The biggest reason America isn’t back to pre-COVID normal is because so many Americans remain unvaccinated – the lowest rate of any advanced country.
Why is this?
It’s easy to blame red America. In October, 25 out of every 100,000 residents of counties Trump won by wide margins died from Covid. That’s more than three times higher than the rate in heavily Biden counties (7.8 per 100,000). Here’s something else: October was the fifth consecutive month that the percentage gap between the death rates in Trump counties and Biden counties widened. Counties where Trump received at least 70 percent of the vote have an even higher average Covid death toll than counties where Trump won at least 60 percent.
And why is this? Because Trump counties have the highest unvaccinated rates in the United States. Almost every reliably blue state now has a higher vaccination rate than almost every reliably red state.
There are some obvious reasons why Trump voters have been hesitant to get vaccinated. Trump politicized the issue – making the jab a hallmark of his peculiar form of rightwing populism. He and Fox News (and their social media outlets) also spread false rumors and conspiracy theories about the vaccine. (By the time Trump finally called on people to get vaccinated, the damage was already done.) In other words, the underlying problem is the same trifecta of rightwing media, inadequate education, and rejection of science that gave us Trump in the first place.
That sounds right to me. But I don’t think it’s the whole story.
In recent weeks I’ve discovered that several anti-vaxxers live around me – in the bluest region of the bluest county of the bluest state in America. I’ve known several of them for years. They are well-informed and well-educated. But they’re as opposed to getting a shot as any Trump anti-vaxxer.
Some are ex-hippies, now in their late 60s and early 70s, who regard their bodies as “sacred” and don’t want anything or anyone to “invade” it.
One, who grows her own food and lives by herself in a cabin not far from here told me she didn’t want anything going into her body that she didn’t control. (When I asked her whether she had been vaccinated against smallpox, measles, diphtheria, tetanus, and whooping cough, she told me she assumed so, but was too small to have had knowledge or control.)
Others – also in their late 60s and early 70s – don’t trust Big Pharma. They see Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson as greedy global corporations in search of people to exploit and tax havens to park their exorbitant profits. “Why in hell would I trust a fu*king thing Pfizer says or does?” one of them asked me.
None of these people trusts the government. Their generation (which is also mine) came to political consciousness during the Vietnam War – a time when the American flag became an emblem of fascism, particularly in lefty coastal enclaves. They now believe government has been so corrupted by big money that they don’t trust agencies charged with protecting the public.
I’m sympathetic to their distrust of both Big Pharma and Big Government. But this doesn’t mean the science is wrong.
One of them referred me to a 2017 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association which found that about a third of the drugs approved by the FDA between 2001 and 2010 had safety problems after reaching the market. I checked and he’s correct. But he left out a critical fact: as soon as the FDA discovered the problems it forced manufacturers to pull the drugs or issue warnings.
Deep down, I think these blue anti-vaxxers are motivated by something different from mere distrust. When I pointed out that they could well be endangering others (including me), they remained unmoved. When I suggested that their concerns, however valid, had to be weighed against the public’s overall interest in conquering this epidemic, they said they didn’t care.
My conclusion: They’re infected, not by COVID but by a narcissism that refuses even to consider the risks and costs they’re imposing on others. I can’t say for sure that Trump anti-vaxxers share this narcissism, although the leader of their cult – Donald Trump – surely does. (And, of course, my sample size was so small I can’t even generalize to all blue anti-vaxxers.)
It seems to me that in our haste to blame Trump and the culture that produced him for why the rate of vaccinations in America trails every other wealthy country, we’re missing a character trait that may offer a fuller explanation. This trait is found among Democrats and Independents in blue America as well as Republicans in Trumpland. In fact, I think it’s been near the core of the American personality since before the founding of the nation — a stubborn, selfish individualism.
While I would agree that that trait can be found among any political cohort, I would argue, and the vax results would tend to support, that it is much, much greater among the MAGA crowd.
A.K.A. “I don’t wanna”
There is nothing more.
People are horrible at evaluating risk.
Too many people reduce a 1 in a 100 risk, a 1 in a 1000 risk and a 1 in a million risk down to the same “It’s probably not going to happen to me.”, without absorbing the vast differences in magnitude.
I’ve heard too many people, even people without a political axe to grind that should know better, opine that since you only have a one in two hundred or so chance of dying from COVID, it’s therefore not that bad and we’re making too big a deal of it.
I think the particular scale of this risk, with its 1 in 200 or so fatality rate, is particularly tricky -because even though the risk to any particular individual may be small, the societal impact is going to be huge if large numbers of people are affected.
I’ve started asking people that minimize the risk from COVID to imagine a virus that affected airplanes instead of people, causing 1 in 200 flights to crash and burn.
Would we keep the planes flying because of the economic impact of grounding all air traffic for a long and undetermined amount of time?
Would we accuse the people that avoided flying of “living in fear”?
Would we think the government was overreaching if they tried to fix the problem?
Would people refuse to carry a parachute while flying for political reasons?
In short, I think vaccine refusal is strongly connected to COVID minimization and denialism, and that’s largely due to people that are bad at assessing risk.
Or, they hear about a 1-in-100,000 chance of a strong adverse effect to a vaccine, and assume it’s going to happen to them, never weighing that risk against the risk of not getting vaccinated.
I agree and I think this is key. It’s easy to minimalize and deny COVID-19 because people have gotten it and survived (albeit, a lot have continued issues) and appear no worse for wear. Unless you are in health care, you are probably not seeing what COVID-19 deaths look like. If COVID-19 were maiming survivors in ways like polio or smallpox, it would be a lot harder to minimalize and deny. The risk would be visibly evident and I bet a lot less people would have difficulty getting on-board with the program.
Maybe something like “Scared Straight” or those gruesome videos we saw in high school of car accident victims would drive the point home better, but with pictures of what COVID-19 does to the human body.
A co-worker and very smart guy (I’d put him at the brilliant level) now has a breakthrough case (he is vaxed). His son that can’t get vaccinated now has it too.
I haven’t seen this person since… July. So I’m good. I work from home but still have to go to the store and stuff.
I DO think that a lot of anti-vaxers are trying to ‘stick it to the libruls’. 99% of them have certainly been vaccinated against other things.
Looking like we will see a million total deaths in the US by next spring. We are now at 758,000 deaths.
The Republicans that I know who are unvaxxed are primarily young, healthy and convinced they will not die even if they get it. So my answer to the OP is that they don’t do it because they are selfish and don’t give a shit about anyone but themselves.
I don’t know. Putting your own interests above everyone else’s interests certainly explains a lot of right wing behavior.
But refusing to accept a free vaccination for a lethal and contagious disease? That’s not the act of somebody who’s looking out for number one.
Yes, a rational and completely selfish person would get the COVID vaccine. They might not get all vaccines–I think of my annual flu shot as a public service more than something I really need–but they’d get this one. A lot of Republican politicians who have cynically exploited anti-vax sentiment for their own gain are themselves vaccinated.