Vaccine skepticism grows from gut
Instinct, not lack of knowledge, said to be behind wariness
For years, scientists and doctors have treated vaccine skepticism as a knowledge problem. If patients were hesitant to get vaccinated, the thinking went, they simply needed more information.
But as public health officials now work to convince Americans to get COVID19 vaccines as quickly as possible, new social science research suggests that a set of deeply held beliefs is at the heart of many people’s resistance, complicating efforts to bring the coronavirus pandemic under control.
“The instinct from the medical community was, ‘If only we could educate them,’ ” said Dr. Saad Omer, director of the Yale Institute for Global Health, who studies vaccine skepticism. “It was patronizing and, as it turns out, not true.”
About one-third of U.S. adults are still resisting vaccines. Polling shows that Republicans make up a substantial part of that group. Given how deeply the country is divided by politics, it is perhaps not surprising that they have dug in, particularly with a Democrat in the White House.
But political polarization is only part of the story.
In recent years, public health researchers have teamed with social psychologists to look more deeply into the “why” behind vaccine hesitancy. They wanted to find out whether there was anything that vaccine skeptics had in common, in order to better understand how to persuade them.
What they discovered was a clear set of psychological traits offering a new lens through which
to understand skepticism — and potentially new tools for public health officials scrambling to try to persuade people to get vaccinated.
Omer and a team of scientists found that skeptics were much more likely than nonskeptics to have a highly developed sensitivity for liberty — the rights of individuals — and to have less deference to those in positions of power.
Skeptics were also twice as likely to care a lot about the “purity” of their bodies and their minds. They disapprove of things they consider disgusting, and the mindset defies neat categorization: It could be religious — halal or kosher — or entirely secular, like people who care deeply about toxins in foods or in the environment.
Scientists have found
similar patterns among skeptics in Australia and Israel, and in a broad sample of vaccine-hesitant people in 24 countries in 2018.
“At the root are these moral intuitions — these gut feelings — and they are very strong,” said Jeff Huntsinger, a social psychologist at Loyola University Chicago who studies emotion and decision-making and collaborated with Omer’s team. “It’s very hard to override them with facts and information. You can’t reason with them in that way.”
These qualities tend to predominate among conservatives, but they are present among liberals too. They are also present among people with no politics at all.
Kasheem Delesbore, a warehouse worker in northeastern Pennsylvania, is neither conservative nor
liberal. He does not consider himself political and has never voted. But he is skeptical of the vaccines — along with many institutions of American power.
Delesbore, 26, has seen information online that a vaccine might harm his body. He is not sure what to make of it. But his faith in God gives him confidence: Whatever happens is God’s will. There is little he can do to influence it. (Manufacturers of the three vaccines approved for emergency use by the Food and Drug Administration say they are safe.)
The vaccines have also raised a fundamental question of power. There are many things in Delesbore’s life that he does not control. Not the schedule at the warehouse where he works. Or the way he is treated by the customers at his other
job, a Burger King. The decision about whether to get vaccinated, he believes, should be one of them.
“I have that choice to decide whether I put something in my own body,” Delesbore said. “Anybody should.”
Conspiratorial thinking is another predictor of vaccine hesitancy, according to the 2018 study. They are finding fertile ground because of a decadeslong decline in trust in government and a sharp rise in inequality that has led to a sense, among many Americans, that the government is no longer working on their behalf.
“There’s a whole world of secrets and stuff that we don’t see in our everyday lives,” Delesbore said. “It’s politics, it’s entertainment, it’s history. Everything is a facade.”
Branden Mirro, a Republican
in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, has been skeptical of nearly everything concerning the pandemic. He believes that mask requirements impinge on his rights and does not plan to get vaccinated. In fact, he sees the very timing of the virus as suspicious.
“This whole thing was a sham,” he said. “They planned it to cause mass panic and get (President Donald) Trump out of office.”
Mirro, who is 30, grew up in a large Italian American family in northeastern Pennsylvania. His father owned a landscaping business and later invested in real estate. His mother battled a yearslong addiction to methamphetamine. He said she died this year with fentanyl in her bloodstream.
Vaccine skeptics are sometimes just as wary of the medical establishment as they are about the government.
Brittany Richey, a tutor in Las Vegas, does not want to get one of the vaccines because she does not trust the drug companies that produced them. She pointed to studies that she said described pharmaceutical companies paying doctors to suppress unfavorable trial results. She keeps a folder on her computer of them.
Richey is also worried about the ingredients of the vaccines. She is trying to get pregnant, and she knows that pregnant women were excluded from vaccine trials. She does not want to risk it.
A portion of those who are hesitant will eventually get vaccinated. According to Drew Linzer, director of the polling firm Civiqs, fewer people are unsure about the vaccines now than in the fall, but the percentage of hard noes has remained fairly constant. As of last week, about 7% say they are unsure, he said, and about 24% say they will never take it.