We must convert vaccine resisters

QAnon zealots, Bible-waving charlatans, alt-right politicians, party-till-you-die (literally) college kids, disaffected Trumpsters, hoity-toity Hollywood antivaxxers, gun-toting anti-government insurrectionists, Russian bots, frothing commie-hating radio commentators, wild-eyed conspiracy peddlers: Medical science is up against a vast confederacy of pigheaded fabulists.

I wouldn’t much care — let the knuckleheads stew in their own self-inflicted vulnerabilities — except we can’t fend off COVID-19 without them.

Unless a substantial chunk of the obdurate and reluctant are vaccinated, we’ll remain in the throes of a pandemic that has already killed a half-million Americans, including 30,000 Floridians. Unless the doubters, deniers and dissemblers — along with the daunting percentage of immigrant and ethnic minority communities that harbor their own misgivings — embrace this public health initiative, it won’t work. If we don’t inoculate 70-to-80 percent of the population, there’ll be no herd immunity.

Unless we slow transmission — and quickly — the unimpeded virus will likely mutate into more virulent strains, like the British variant that’s maybe 60% more contagious than the COVID version that swept the globe last year. (Or the South African mutation, which a sobering report in the New England Journal of Medicine warned was resistant to the Moderna, Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines.)

Florida has reported 417 cases of the British variant (as of Wednesday), more than any other state, adding another level of urgency to the state’s vaccination campaign. We need to get shots in arms before these rapidly evolving bugs outflank the epidemiologists. All these purveyors of misinformation aren’t helping.

It’s as if society suffers a kind of collective split-personality disorder. Vaccine resisters, often the same folks who disdain masks and social distancing, inhabit the same universe where most folks who are eligible — and more than a few who aren’t — have struggled for weeks to snag vax appointments. On Saturday, I drove a friend to the Broward Health Department’s drive-through vaccination site at Markham Park in Sunrise where the wait lasted three tedious hours past her allotted appointment. But I saw no drivers abandon their coveted place in that long procession.

(At my own appointment on Monday, I was registered and vaccinated seven minutes after arriving at the Broward Health hospital system’s site at Lockhart Stadium. Perhaps Broward Health has better clocks.)

The urgent want for vaccinations among saner Floridians can be measured against the political calculations that warp the state’s distribution plans. Last week, Gov. Ron DeSantis, who can sense favorable demographics like an angler finding fishing holes, diverted 3,000 doses to a pop-up vaccination site in Manatee County reserved exclusively for residents of the county’s wealthier suburbs. The Tampa Bay Times noted that the two Manatee zip codes DeSantis chose for his vaccine largess had suffered much milder infection rates than less prosperous reaches of the county.

“For the life of me, I can’t understand why we would vaccinate the most affluent neighborhoods in the county ahead of everyone else, especially the underserved neighborhoods and large number of manufactured home parks in our community,” Manatee County Commissioner Misty Servia told the Bradenton Herald.

The prickly DeSantis abides no criticism of his plan for residents-only access at a rich, white, Republican enclave. He threatened to take his ball and go home. “If Manatee County doesn’t like us doing this, then we are totally fine putting this in counties that want it. We’re totally happy to do that,” DeSantis warned.

Apparently, vax-me-now desperation isn’t contagious. A poll conducted in mid-December among Panhandle residents by the Northwest Florida Daily News suggested that 52.8% of the respondents would outright refuse to be vaccinated. Maybe, 2 million Florida vaccinations later, attitudes have changed thereabouts, but the Panhandle remains very red, very Trumpy and very susceptible to the COVID-ain’t-no-big-deal misinformation spread by the former president.

A national poll released Jan. 21 by the Kaiser Family Foundation found only 32% of respondents who identified as Republican were amenable to vaccinations compared to 64% of Democrats. About 25% of Republicans put themselves in the “definitely not” category, compared to just 5% of Democrats. Findings were just as depressing on Feb. 10, when an AP poll indicated a third of Americans said they definitely or probably wouldn’t get jabbed.

At least in the Kaiser poll, 31% of Americans put themselves in the “wait and see” column. To subdue COVID-19 and its fearsome variants, we’ll need these Hamlet-like procrastinators — all of them — to roll up their sleeves and take a dose of reality. Sadly, that’s an unlikely prospect.