Vaccine hesitancy rooted in failures

Ohio hit a record high in daily new COVID-19 cases last week according to a New York Times data base. At the same time, Ohio also had the nation’s highest, Covid-caused, hospitalization rate per capita

Most of those hospitalizations occur among Ohio residents who have chosen to not get vaccinated: vaccine hesitant or denying Ohioans.

I have helped develop biology standards and curricula for Ohio’s public school students from kindergarten through college. I have taught general biology courses to our undergraduates, including future biology teachers.

My colleagues and I have tried to promote science literacy among our students and, ultimately, the public.

Yet, some of those vaccine hesitant or denying Ohioans are our former students. Did we fail them? Probably, in some cases. But a recent New York Times opinion piece by a team researching vaccine denial suggests a more powerful influence than a few insufficient or ineffective general biology courses.

Anita Sreedhar and Anand Gopal research vaccine hesitancy and access around the world. They find “that people who reject vaccines are not necessarily less scientifically literate or less well-informed than those who don’t, … We can’t go on believing that the issue can be solved simply by … hectoring people to ‘believe in science.’”

Sreedhar and Gopal find that if you peel away the interconnected causes, e.g. socioeconomic status influences access to education, “…the real vaccination divide is class.”

When I was a child, there was no question my siblings and I would get a polio vaccine. It was patriotic and smart.

But that view fell out of favor. In his 1981 inaugural speech, President Ronald Regan declared “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

As Sreedhar and Gopal observe, resulting policy shifts have shrunk budgets for public health and other social safety net programs. Morning in America brought a new era of commercial, individualized, health care products, like gym memberships. Health care became a personal choice, a freedom if you could afford it.

But how do you eat a healthy diet if you live in a food desert and use public transportation to visit a grocery? How do you get a vaccine during a regular check-up when you have no health insurance for either?

Regan was right. Government is the problem for many on the wrong side of the income and wealth gap that has widened since the 1980s.

Why trust a government that you think hasn’t helped you much in the last 40 years when it suddenly tells you to get jabbed, masked, spaced, jabbed again, and boosted? Hesitancy and denial replaced trust for many.

Adding another required science course to curriculums won’t help this. Expanding access to government services including — but not limited to — public education might.

An accessible education, however, requires accessible curriculums and texts. What biology does a citizen need to know to trust a government campaign against a viral pandemic that has killed over 800,000 Americans?

Core insights from evolution, ecology, and cell biology come to mind. Few, if any of those, appear in syllabi for most high school and college general biology courses. Nonetheless, esoteric concepts like anaphase, prophase, and telophase stages of cell division still do.

When will they ever learn?

Steve Rissing is a professor emeritus in the Department of Evolution, Ecology, and Organismal Biology at Ohio State University.