I’ve been thinking about the people who are refusing the COVID-19 vaccine based on a lack of trust in the US government or government in general. Clearly, these people are not well educated in the areas of molecular biology, immunology, etc. Which is fine, as that shouldn’t be something most people should be expected to have in depth knowledge of. What I don’t get is why those same people don’t trust the experts. The question up for debate is this. What are some of the things done by the US government which justify a lack of trust in them? For this particular discussion, let’s ignore all the shit that went down during the Trump years. Let’s also try to keep things to things that have happened in living memory. FDR locking up Japanese-Americans during WWII isn’t what I’m looking for.
Off the top of my head, here are the few obvious examples I can think of.
Obama stating that nobody would lose their current medical insurance coverage should Obamacare pass.
Bush Jr. lying about why we invaded Iraq, specifically the WMD excuse.
Clinton and his affair with Lewinsky.
Bush Sr. and his “no new taxes” pledge.
Reagan and the Iran-Contra affair.
Nixon and Watergate.
IMHO 2, 5, and 6 are the only really bad ones. That averages out to one major lie every 20 years or so. One every decade if you include the other three.
IMHO the vast majority of what is brought up in such discussions has more to do not with promises that are made and then broken, but rather promises that weren’t able to be kept due to opposition from the other party.
What am I missing here? Where all these things the government has done to lose the trust of the people? Since the trigger for this topic is COVID-19 vaccines, I wonder in particular about the lack of trust in Anthony Fauci, but I don’t want to limit it to just Fauci. Again, for obvious reasons I’m excluding Trump and his plethora of shitstorms.
Honestly there are a lot, even if you just stay in health-related areas:
The war on drugs
The response to HIV
OxyContin (particularly how the FDA failed to regulate it and the subsequent lack of consequences)
The tuskeegee syphillis experiment (which went on until 1972!)
I don’t think the vast majority of anti-vaxxers are motivated by this, especially now that we’ve seen what the vaccines actual effects are in the real world, but the US government sadly has ton a lot to shake people’s confidence.
Are you kidding???
Did you forget that Obama once wore a tan suit?? Or that he apologized for an action of the United States? How can we trust a government that would even nomionate his Vice President?? That is what gave him the opportunity to rig the election and steal the presidency from its rightful recipient.
You are assuming there was a rational debate in the minds of anti-vaxxers and a decision was made. That has never been the case in my experience. Even back during the 2008 election cycle (when I was still a sincere believer and routinely attended church every Sunday) I would withness someone walking in with a newspaper and saying verbally: “Obama is at it again!” We hate it, it will never pass, the very nerve of that man; now what did he propose?
I just this morning remembered and related a story about a minister friend of mine I had lunch with about a decade ago. He was so upset that Obama’s administration was demonizing some good, white, Christians just for taking over federal land being terrorists!! The “Governmental Overreach” was to him a thing he could not fathom any decent man doing. There is a very simple solution to all politicalm or moral questions: If Democrats want it- it must be bad, if Republicans want it (real true Trump supporting Republicans) it must be good.
The short answer is identity politics, pure and simple.
(Like the people who practice them! Well at least simple, but they believe they are also pure.)
Only one of these is “recent” by my definition, but your point is a good one. The U.S. government has a long history of misusing trust in medical fields. I will add the recent VA scandal and Agent Orange and other substances in Vietnam.
Just to clarify what this conversation is, are you suggesting that the three you’ve identified are the only three “really bad” deceptions you believe anyone with substantial authority in the US government has engaged in since the early 1970s?
You wouldn’t include, for example, like every day at the CIA?
I wonder if the lack of trust in government stems more from what it hasn’t done. It’s pro global economy policies and failure to protect American workers and American manufacturing being the key gripe. I realize that being isolationist is a problematic and unrealistic economic trade policy, but people who have suffered the most from a changing economy from manufacturing to knowledge based, only know that they have suffered economically while China has thrived and finance and banking industry has raked in profits hand over fist.
My assumption is that there are two separate debates. One, on the actual merits of the vaccine, and which would require knowledge of how these vaccines work and thus whether or not they are likely to be harmful. This isn’t the level I’m asking about.
The second debate is whether or not to trust the government when they say that taking the vaccine is the right thing to do. This level of the debate doesn’t require an education in molecular genetics or cellular biology. All it requires is having trust in someone like Anthony Fauci and the US government in general. That’s the part of the debate that is presumably done rationally, given that it doesn’t require specialized knowledge.
The CIA doesn’t typically recommend things to the general public. Their job involves covert actions, espionage, and things of that sort. They aren’t who I think of when I think of the public facing part of the US government. Which isn’t to excuse the evil shit they’ve done over the years.
IMHO this is a huge part of the issue. Of course I also think many of those things that haven’t been done, but were promised by the elected officials, are due mostly to partisan gridlock rather than the government lying.
I don’t think the reason is all that different from most conspiratorial mindsets.
The world is a complex and scary place and it’s comforting to have the illusion of control rather than accept that you don’t have much of a choice but to trust a three letter agency making a best guess with what information it has.
I will say again that I believe this all boils down to identity politics and no other consideration need be consulted. D’s are pushing it so- bad. R’s are opposing so- bad. Easiest decision ever.
But to go further, I do believe relying upon the effectiveness of the vaccine is the stronger argument. There are reasons for those across the political spectrum to distrust the U.S.Government. But the fact that 95% of cases are among the unvaccinated, and only about 0.05% of deaths are among those who have received the vaccine does not require any great deal of biological knowledge. Fifth or sixth grade arithmetic should suffice. Maybe younger kids could follow that reasoning, I don’t recall when percentages are brought into the curriculum.
That holds true for the safety of the vaccines also. In one of the many threads where Christendom and elections are overlapping, I posted an article an ex-girlfriend sent me claiming the vaccine was causing the deaths!! Since then experience has shown us that could not be the case. Like a Hundred Sixty Million have been vaccinated and none of us have grown a third arm or anything.
For all I know far right wing outlets may still be making claims (I have severed contact with those who are observably - - delusional might be the right word).
They hate Fauci because Dems like him. The sense of identity is so strong they will die before admitting they were wrong.
I don’t think it’s that simple. The vaccination rate for black and Hispanic Americans is way down compared to white people, even though cases for those groups are disproportionately higher. It seems unlikely that this is because the former groups are much more wedded to the Republican party’s identity politics, given that the reverse is generally true. If anything, if it were solely explained by identity politics, these groups would be disproportionately likely to be vaccinated.
Ok. I admit that it could very well be that the second level decision making I hypothesized is also not being approached in in a systematic way. If you are correct, and I admit that there is a good possibility that you are, then approaching the subject rationally won’t help.
It’s not just false or conflicting statements that destroy trust in government institutions; it’s their failure to deliver the goods that ultimately kills trust. When a company makes ordinary people feel the weight of the law but can’t find a single person to prosecute when industrial scale mortgage lending crushes the economy as it did in 2008, people lose faith, not just in their elected leaders but the entire system of governance itself. We lose faith in globalized economics when that happens, and we were already starting to question it after 9/11. It’s a failure of administration to safeguard most of us from the greed, excess, and recklessness of the few.
Sometimes scientists are wrong, or screw up the messaging, which we saw a lot of during the COVID-19 pandemic. Do you wear masks if you’re vaccinated, or not? Apparently yes? Did this increase trust in scientists? I doubt it. These are essentially government-employed scientists.
The US was “authorized” to go to war in Iraq (2003) because large numbers of Democratic politicians (as well as large numbers of Republican politicians) voted in favor. I could tell right away that the reasons were ridiculous, so how can I trust any politician who voted in favor, even if they’re a Democrat? Wasn’t that most Democratic politicians?
In the mostly white suburban neighborhoods where I experience most of my life, it does almost exclusively boil down to that point. In addition, I have never had any luck using rational arguments. (That applies to both vaccines, and support of Trump.) However . . .
Again, Jimmy_Chitwood makes a good point. For minorities, it could very well boil down to mistrust of not so much “government” as White Society. Beside the Tuskegee experiment, there is also the fact that tobacco advertising (on billboards specifically) is (or at least was) allowed in minority neighborhoods but not in mostly white neighborhoods. Distrust in minority neighborhoods makes sense due to what asahi is getting at in his post.
I can add this datum point that muddles the waters further: The Navajo Nation is reportedly 90% vaccinated and they DO mostly identify as Democratic.
I guess I should amend my response with this qualifier:
For the White, Christian, Republicans that make up the entire anti-vaxx population in my personal experience, Identity Politics (and Religion) are the sole driving factor. (Their soul seems be the driving factor from their point of view!)
The thing is, this is how science works. There’s an initial working hypothesis, and if data comes in that shows the hypothesis to be incorrect, the scientists come up with a new hypothesis. Lather, rinse, repeat, as more data becomes available. That’s not a flaw in the system, that’s a feature.
I agree with you, but it’s a very bad form of risk communication. This wasn’t so much science as the intersection between science and policy.
The environmental movement has a similar problem. Some environmental scientists keep putting out very specific predictions which don’t come to pass. Yes, the environment is getting worse, but stop saying things like
I think in the cases of blacks, its at least as much distrust of the medical establishment as it is of the government. There have been many cases where Blacks had bad experiences with doctors. In addition to the Tuskegee experiment mentioned above, there is an utterly unfounded widely held belief among medical students that blacks have naturally thicker skin and are naturally more resistant to pain than whites, also the widely publicized exploitation of the HeLa cell line without the donor’s permission (which wasn’t required at the time.)