Vaccination status a sore subject with some friends, families this Thanksgiving
For the first time in two years, Tim Wyatt is hosting a Thanksgiving feast at his home in Birmingham, Alabama. Along with the traditional turkey, Wyatt will spend days preparing his slow-roasted pork shoulder with Alabama white sauce. His wife, Nancy Wyatt, will cook all of her enticing side dishes, like sour cream mini muffins and sweet potato casserole with sage butter.
Everyone from their extended family is invited. But Tim Wyatt has made a request: If you want to come by and eat his signature falloff-the-bone pork, you have to be vaccinated against the coronavirus.
“I felt responsible for myself, my wife and anybody else visiting my house that day,” said Wyatt, 72, who expects at least 15 guests.
Like Wyatt, many Americans thinking about hosting or attending a bigger Thanksgiving celebration this year are considering a question that has become sensitive and often polarizing: Will they and other guests be vaccinated?
The age-old wisdom about dinner conversation “is to avoid sex, death and politics,”
“We just kind of listen and silently disagree. No sense in arguing with people and making things unpleasant. We always get along at Thanksgiving.” – ELIZABETH BOSSERT, OF BRYAN-COLLEGE STATION, TEXAS
said Noel Brewer, a professor specializing in health behaviors at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Vaccinations have moved onto that list.”
Still, they threaten to complicate the holiday planning and the meal itself. “People who get vaccinated can also be self-righteous, and some people who haven’t been vaccinated can be belligerent,” Brewer said, adding, “That could really be a combustible mix.”
In interviews, many people — both vaccinated and unvaccinated — said they were planning to tiptoe around the subject, in some cases avoiding a meal with those they might disagree with. Others, who are immunocompromised or have children too young to be vaccinated, are grappling with how to decline invitations from unvaccinated relatives. And some hosts, worried about safety, are drawing a line.
Wyatt was talking on the phone with his sister last month about his Thanksgiving plans when he impulsively told her, “Tell your kids they can’t come unless they’re vaccinated.” Within a week, he received a text message from his sister, with a photo of his nephew at a pharmacy where he was getting his shot.
Wyatt forwarded the picture to his daughter, Emily Plumlee, 41, of Huntsville, Alabama. Her father’s vaccine mandate put her at ease about the get-together. “I’m relieved for a sense of normalcy,” she said.
Last year, the pre-Thanksgiving concerns centered on social distancing and taking risks with the coronavirus. This year, the focus is inoculation; more than 193 million Americans have been fully vaccinated, but that is only about 58% of the total population.
Those conversations are already happening as people send out invitations, said Richard M. Carpiano, a public-health scientist who studies vaccine hesitancy at the University of California, Riverside. “While lots of invitation lists are taken for granted every year, this year, it provides the opportunity for people to actually set parameters,” he said.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s guidance for the holiday season is that people should protect others ineligible for vaccines, such as young children, by getting inoculated and encouraging guests to be vaccinated. The CDC also advises that people gathering with others from multiple households in different parts of the country consider taking additional precautions, like getting a coronavirus test beforehand.
But many people oppose the vaccines, for various reasons. Some said that stance had alienated them from their families and friends.
In Honolulu, Rasa Fournier, a spokesperson for the Aloha Freedom Coalition — an organization formed in September 2020 to fight against stringent health mandates in the pandemic — said she had invited family and friends, both vaccinated and unvaccinated, for a vegan Thanksgiving.
“All of that fear and distancing is a really awful way to go,” said Fournier, 49, who is unvaccinated against the coronavirus because she believes the vaccines are not safe or effective, despite overwhelming evidence that they are. “We just want to live life normally, and with love, and with aloha.”
Fournier said the vaccine had been used as a way to divide people. “The vaccinated people will uninvite people, and it’s incredibly hurtful and sad,” she said, adding that she had lost many friends because of her beliefs.
Most Americans probably won’t argue about vaccines at the Thanksgiving table, because they normally gather with people they’re politically aligned with, said Yanna Krupnikov, a political-science professor at Stony Brook University and co-author of “Independent Politics: How American Disdain for Parties Leads to Political Inaction.”
All the same, Krupnikov said vaccines were a very personal matter for many people and could enter the holiday conversation. “Nobody would discuss the election or other political issues,” she said, but “they’re going to think about the vaccine.”
Even before the pandemic, Elizabeth Bossert, of Bryan-College Station, Texas, said vaccines were a sore subject for her family.
“We just kind of listen and silently disagree,” said Bossert, 36, who has been vaccinated and plans to observe the holiday at her sister’s home in Houston. “No sense in arguing with people and making things unpleasant. We always get along at Thanksgiving.”
But trying to avoid arguments completely can be foolish, said Abdullah Shihipar, a research associate at Brown University. “I’d rather have a conflict with a relative now and reconcile it later than have someone die,” he said.