When friends or family resist COVID shot, persist gently
Mary Murtaugh is a recently retired nurse who says she has never been shy about promoting good health. She wasn’t shy the day she asked her favorite grocery store cashier if she’d been vaccinated. The cashier was emphatic.
No. And she wasn’t going to be.
After listening to the cashier explain that she’d had a bad reaction to a flu shot, Murtaugh persisted.
“I told her that I would be worried if she contracted COVID,” Murtaugh says, and the clerk promised to think about it.
Promising to think about something is often no more than a polite deflection. But the cashier did think about it. She later reported she’d gotten two doses of the Pfizer vaccine and thanked Murtaugh for the “gentle push.”
“Sometimes,” Murtaugh says, “all you need to do is plant a seed.”
Planting seeds in people reluctant to get a vaccine can be like trying to garden in the Sahara. When I asked people on Facebook how they’ve handled vaccine resistance among their friends and family, they cataloged the pushback they’d received, a mishmash of fear and fantasy: Needles hurt.
COVID-19 is a Democratic hoax.
The vaccines are a government conspiracy. They’re made of synthetic materials and we shouldn’t put synthetic materials into our bodies. The government is using vaccines to insert nanoprobes into our arms.
Dragana Laky’s dad didn’t fall into a neat category either.
“To my great and unpleasant surprise,” Laky says, “my father said he wouldn’t want to get one until later, presumably to see how others are faring, preferring anecdotal evidence to clinical trials.”
Her father is 77, and she describes him as stubborn, “although, or because, he’s extremely smart.” He’s married to a physician. One of his daughters is a physician. Eventually, after Laky, her mother and sister talked to him separately, he relented.
“He got his first Pfizer shot the other day,” she says. “I think the key was toning down our outrage and blame game and going the ‘you’re a wise man and we love you but you may be overcautious here’ route.”
Once again, persistence beat resistance. Most of the people I’m close to have been eager for a vaccine. The exception was my youngest sister, Gina. Gina lives alone. She doesn’t use a computer or watch TV, and while that spares her a lot of misinformation, it also limits her access to good information.
But I and a few others persisted. We talked about how excited we were by our own vaccines, the renewed liberty it would afford her after a year isolated in her house. She finally agreed and is excited to have an appointment this month.
“I hate needles,” she said, in a pithy summary of her decision, “but it’s better than being dead.”
COVID-19 cases are rising again in many places. It’s in our collective interest to keep trying to persuade the vaccine hesitant. None of us can do it alone, but these stories suggest how we might help change one mind at a time.
Lead by example. Persist, gently. Plant the seed. Mary Schmich is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Contact her at mschmich@chicagotribune.com. You can follow her on twitter.com/maryschmich.