Sheep mentality versus herd immunity
The New York Times sent a reporter recently to rural Tennessee, an area where the population is predominantly white, Christian and Republican, and where the COVID-19 vaccine rate is very low.
The number of Americans who say they aren’t going to get vaccinated has become more and more concerning to public health officials.
The reporter described a scene in which a doctor – a man who nearly died after contracting the coronavirus – is speaking to an elderly unvaccinated patient.
The man says to the doctor, “How can we be sure there are no chips in the vaccine, like the things you put in your dog?”
“We can’t make microchips that small,” the doctor says.
“Well, it’s like a grain of rice,” says the patient.
The doctor tells him, “I couldn’t inject a grain of rice with a needle.”
The man, according to the report, won’t get the vaccine.
America’s giant pharmaceutical companies, with their tremendous resources and their armies of scientists, researchers and doctors, have come up with three effective vaccines for COVID-19. It was a scientific miracle for so short a time.
But there is no magic pill, no serum, no medicinal injection capable of warding off ignorance.
So it is unlikely the nation will achieve herd immunity.
A poll commissioned in February by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs found that as many as 44% of Republicans said they definitely or probably would not get vaccinated, as did 17% of Democrats.
And there is also the problem of those who might want the vaccine but for whom access is difficult. The homeless, for example.
Kavita Patel, a physician and health policy expert, said, “We could be sitting here in the winter-fall with an entirely different, scary version of the pandemic. One driven by a combination of variants and people who didn’t want to get vaccinated.”
There is an effort by some members of the Republican political elite to get their constituents vaccinated.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said recently, “I can say as a Republican man, as soon as it was my turn, I took the vaccine.”
But the death knell to herd immunity was the skepticism brought on by too many of us taking medical advice from conspiracy kooks, anti-vaxxers, misinformed commentators, and a former reality TV personality who resided for a time in the White House.
Back in January, by the way, the former president and the first lady, without a photographer present and without alerting the news media, very quietly got vaccinated.