Who are they, and what drives them?
Distrust and suspicion feature prominently
Who are the people dead-set against COVID-19 vaccination, and who are the hesitant?
There’s no clear profile, of either group, though polls suggest that together they account for roughly 20 per cent of Canada’s adult population.
Vaccine acceptance runs the gamut, from “accept all with utter confidence” to “refuse all with absolute conviction” and the reasons why people fall where they do are complex and vary, though emerging research from Canada, the U.S. and the United Kingdom suggests the COVID-19 vaccine-hesitant and resistors share some psychological characteristics.
The hesitant tend to struggle more with concerns about the safety and the newness of the vaccines, concerns about future unknown effects and confusing and conflicting messages from authority figures.
But for both the hesitant and refusers, much comes down to trust, or lack of it. Low trust in scientists, the health-care system and the state; distrust of political leaders and “Big Pharma.” The dead-set against vaccination are just more suspicious still.
According to some samples, they also express higher levels of paranoia, higher levels of social dominance, higher levels of neuroticism and higher levels of conspiratorial beliefs. Believers in COVID conspiracy theories, according to the French authors of a recent commentary in The Lancet, “have been found to be primarily concerned by their own safety rather than the safety of others.”
In a newly published analysis of 614 vaxx-hesitant tweets from Twitter users in Canada, nearly half were related to safety, and worry vaccines were rushed. About a third involved political skepticism and conspiracy theories about the COVID vaccines “being a vehicle for exerting political control over citizens.”
Other sampling has found resistors have higher levels of religious beliefs than the vaccine accepting; they’re more likely to be devout. They’re also more likely to be female, with kids at home, younger than 65 and living in big cities or the suburbs than rural areas. They tend to be more impulsive in their thinking and are “more likely to believe that their lives are primarily under their own control.” They also have a higher aversion to needles and injections.
Racialized and Black people have indicated a lower willingness to be vaccinated, because of lived experiences of stigma and discrimination in the health-care system, and historic experiences of medical experimentation. With some convincing from community leaders and groups like the Canadian South Asian COVID-19 Task Force, they have come around, said Maya Goldenberg, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Guelph, and author of Vaccine Hesitancy: Public Trust, Expertise and the War on Science. “But they started from a position of, ‘no way. Why should I trust the government now, after they virtually abandoned my community and me during COVID by not protecting us in our essential workplaces, in our communities and in our living situations? They haven’t taken care of me before. Why should I trust them with this vaccine?’ But these are the people who stand to benefit the most from vaccination, because their communities are so hard hit.”
Both the hesitant and the no’s have declared preferences to “develop a natural immunity” by getting infected with the coronavirus itself, though the immune response induced by current shots against SARSCOV-2 is highly targeted to crucial components of the virus. Natural infection has
THEY HAVEN’T TAKEN CARE OF ME BEFORE. WHY SHOULD I TRUST THEM WITH THIS VACCINE?
also resulted in “off target” autoantibodies in some cases, according to the British Society of Immunology, “which could be detrimental to health.”
“There are people who say, aha! The speed (of vaccine development.) That tells me something is wrong,’” Goldenberg said.
“But these MRNA platforms (used for Pfizer-biontech and Moderna vaccines) were already in the works, we built on old platforms, we streamlined the bureaucracy and we still tested as rigorously as we did before. And the mistrusting people say, ‘I don’t believe you. I just don’t believe you that you’ve done all the things as carefully as you say you have.’”
Exactly who’s saying it, “I don’t think we have that kind of information yet,” Goldenberg said. For now, some of the “hesitancy” might be muddled in simply getting access to the vaccines.
However, according to the University of Toronto-based Media Ecosystem Observatory, which has been tracking the willingness of Canadians to take a COVID-19 shot since last June, a willingness that is rising, with vaccination becoming the social norm, “Those who are set against a vaccine have a larger set of reasons for their resistance, while those who are unsure appear more genuinely uncertain about the reasons for their opposition.”