Demonization of the 'Vaccine Hesitant'
Herd Panic Divides Us All
‘Vaccine hesitant’ is now a commonly used term.
Wonderful, isn’t it? Oh, I find it ever so grand! Don’t you?
First they miscategorize and ‘otherize’ people who do not want to take these covid-19 vaccines as ‘anti-vaxers’, shoving them into the same category as people who are against taking one or more particular vaccines, as people who are against taking all vaccines and as people who fall anywhere between.
Then they miscategorize and ‘otherize’ people who are unsure about these covid-19 vaccines as ‘vaccine hesitant’, shoving them into the same category as all of the above.
For example, in a recent study by the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Melon, people who responded “probably not” when asked “whether they would take a vaccine were it offered to them today” and people who responded “definitely not” to the same question “were considered to be vaccine hesitant.” [archive]
“Definitely not” is certain, not hesitant. It’s not the same as “probably not” which is hesitant. But the differences are supposed to make no difference. Those people are all the same.1 They are all the other and it’s us vs them. Us vs the other.
It’s anti-intellectual bigotry. It’s intentionally turning down the resolution so low that you don’t see the subtle shades. You see only in black and white. You are either good or bad. No shades between. You either trust and believe what you are told or you’re ‘vaccine hesitant’.
There are various factors that contribute to people being hesitant to take these vaccines. One of them is the very obvious fact that “they” lie to us about so much and do it so blatantly. Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, the ‘idea’ (that has murdered) called antifa, BLM, attempted murder via arson, successful murders, about Trump, about the Proud Boys, left-wing violence, the Covington Catholic School kids incident, what happened at the Capitol on January 6th, Jussie Smollett, Hunter Biden, the Ukraine Scandal, Hillary’s emails, the election, the genocide waged by the government of China, and on and on. (See hundreds of my videos and written reports, though most of those have been deleted by Wordpress long ago.) Those who tell us to lockdown and wear masks first are caught violating lockdown and not wearing masks and then they just flaunt it openly to all of us. They say that the riots are mostly peaceful protests that present no risk of covid-19 spread because they are left wing riots. They say that the mostly and entirely peaceful protests are violent insurrections and that peaceful people who exercise their Constitutional rights to protest the unconstitutional government’s unconstitutional lockdowns are terrorists and super-spreaders because they are right wing. They ignore the children shot and killed by their beloved mostly peaceful protests and call for the murder of these innocent Americans without trial and then presume to have some sort of moral high-ground.
As the Janes Addiction song Obvious goes…
And you make it so...
Make it so obvious...
Hey you! Fools don't fit in
The boots that I tread in,
But you just keep on looking at me down low.
We know they are lying. They know we know they are lying. They keep lying and they want us to trust them.
As Jason Garshfield wrote for Townhall (April 27, 2021),
Instead of the usual routine of sneering and finger-wagging, it would behoove our public health officials to ask themselves what they may have done to lose the trust of such a large slice of the public.
The plain fact of the matter is that top public health officials, most notably Dr. Anthony Fauci, have systematically deceived the American people over the past year. This is a matter of verifiable public record. As reported in The New York Times on December 24 of last year, Fauci boasted openly that he had “slowly but deliberately been moving the goal posts” on herd immunity numbers, “partly on his gut feeling that the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks.”
Furthermore, Fauci did this “because many Americans seemed hesitant about vaccines,” proving a willingness to mislead the general public specifically to encourage vaccination.
This is a clear and unequivocal admission of deceit, one which even Fauci’s defenders cannot explain away. These are not the words of a scientist changing his views as new information comes in. They are the words of a political actor cynically manipulating Americans into a preferred course of action via twisted truth and outright deception.
The same goes for the abrupt, jarring about-face on masks early in the pandemic. Here, too, the authorities went from discouraging masks to mandating them not as the result of new scientific research but as a matter of pragmatic expedience. They wanted to preserve masks for health care workers, to prevent the sort of mass panic-buying that they had seen with toilet paper and other goods.
It may be argued that these were necessary deceptions; it cannot be argued that they were not deceptions. Those same figures who demand we “trust the science” have done a great deal to undermine that selfsame trust. While accusing lockdown opponents of peddling “misinformation,” public health officials have themselves been the largest-scale purveyors of misinformation this past year.
In light of this, is it inconceivable that we may learn, a few years from now, that the vaccines had serious potential side effects which the CDC knew of, but did not inform the public about, so as to decrease vaccine hesitancy? Hardly; in fact, I would say this is an uncomfortably plausible scenario.
There are other legitimate reasons for vaccine hesitancy. For one, there is the discouraging messaging on what people can do after being vaccinated. Per CDC guidelines, vaccinated persons must still wear masks, social distance, and avoid large gatherings. Meanwhile, we are told of a “permanent pandemic,” of future booster shots, of face masks into 2022 and for years to come. People can only be bait-and-switched for long before growing fed up with the game.
And lastly, there is the overriding sense of compulsion. When private and public forces (most recently the California public university system) come together to mandate vaccination as a prerequisite for participation in society, then this takes on the air of blackmail. It sows doubts about the efficacy of the vaccine – would they really have to push it this hard if it was so great? – and makes getting vaccinated into a symbol of cooperation, a mark of implicit consent to the current system.
Above it all, however, hangs the track record of government deception.
When the government misinforms the public, it never ends well. After the Bush administration’s claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were proven false, for instance, faith in American institutions decreased. We all pay the price for this loss of faith, because while it is good for citizens to be skeptical of their politicians, there must be a certain base level of trust for the system to work at all.
Hopefully, coronavirus vaccines are indeed as safe and effective as we have been told. If they are, and if vaccine-hesitant Americans end up dying of the virus unnecessarily, then the brunt of the blame should lie with those bureaucrats who have betrayed the trust we have vested in them. This trust will not be regained without a public reckoning for Fauci and his ilk, a reckoning that, under the current administration, is unlikely to come.
[archive]
As I have demonstrated in past reports, the death counts are based on lies, the lockdowns are counter-effective, the masks don’t work and the vaccines are dubious. See here, here, here, here, here, here, and so on.
Are you a good socially responsible member of the sheep herd that trusts those who lead the herd to be fleeced or slaughtered? Or are you one of the others?
The other category will expand to contain more and more people as the vaccines pushed on them are multiplied. Many people who were ok with one or two may not be ok with 3 or 4 or 12. Thus they are suddenly in the ‘vaccine hesitant’ category, they are the other.
Hopefully I need not mention how this process of expanding the category of the other came to include millions of others in Soviet Russia, Maoist China, Nazi Germany and so on and on. This otherization was also key to the witch hunts, the Inquisition, the Red Scare, the Satanic Panic, Trump Derangement Syndrome and so on.
The study by the University of Pittsburgh mentioned earlier suggests that ‘vaccine hesitancy’ correlates with high education.
The largest decrease in hesitancy between January and May by education group was in those with a high school education or less. Hesitancy held constant in the most educated group (those with a Ph.D.); by May Ph.D.’s were the most hesitant group.
This may bring to mind the recent study that suggests that so-called “anti-maskers” are more familiar with the science involved than so-called “maskers”. I discussed that study in “MIT Admits Anti-Maskers are Right (& Complains About Independent-Minded & Rational Americans)!” [archive] and “Maskers are an Anti-Science Cult” [archive]. But I digress
I just wanted to note that the more educated, both formally and informally, have a tendency to be otherized in this whole covid circus.
Let’s face it, despite expressing vaccine hesitancy in the past2 (and then changing position due to politics, not science), people like the “pseudoscientific”3 Joe Biden4, Kamala Harris5, and Mario Cuomo, and democrats in congress are not besmirched with the ‘vaccine hesitant’ stigma because we live in a carnival of hypocrisy.
To some extent, it is natural for humans to place themselves in a group, a tribe, and to be hostile towards the opposing tribe. It has been called the ‘ingroup/outgroup effect’ by researchers.6 But what is natural is not necessarily what is right, good or wise. Furthermore, as humans, we have the capacity to overcome unconscious and automatic7 division of all people into being with us or against us.
In sociology and social psychology, the terms ingroup and outgroup are used. It’s the same thing. Sometimes it is necessary, good, and/or wise to make distinctions. If a merchant gives their product to everyone who wants it, rather than just to those who pay for it, they will not be very successful. A soldier who doesn’t discriminate between ally and enemy soldier is not likely to be victorious. When WHO and CDC guidelines direct professionals to not make the distinction between those who die from covid-19 and those who die without ever contracting, death certificates will be wrong, the statistics will be inaccurate and there will be a false impression of how many people die from covid-19. However, it is not wise to divide people with things like vaccine passports and to violate the rights of people you put into the outgroup out of panic driven by lies.
At any rate, natural or not, we should not allow this drive to divide everyone into ingroup and outgroup to spin out of control as it has in the past so disastrously. Our empathy towards others is turned into antipathy. We no longer think of the as humans. It becomes easy to hate them. Harming them no longer seems wrong. Violence towards them is no longer repugnant. It is desired. It starts with antipathy towards the most different. It expands to include antipathy towards the moderately different. It continues to expand to include antipathy towards the slightly different. It ends with becoming a stranger to oneself. If we are not wary, the division can tear in half our world right down to a rip through the center of our self.
∴ Liberty my right ∴ Truth my sword ∴
∴ Laughter my shield ∴ Knowledge my steed ∴
∴ Love my solace ∴ Honor my reward ∴
“People often demonstrate the outgroup homogeneity bias (see Haslam et al., 1996) when making judgments about people from some other group. It's like, "We are all different from one another. But them? They are all the same!”” - Glenn Geher Ph.D., “The Psychology of 'Othering'". Psychology Today, April 6, 2019. This is also called the out-group homogeneity effect.
In trying to deny their past vaccine hesitancy, so-called ‘fact checkers’ like Politifact help to confirm it.
I am quoting Tarl Warwick (AKA Styxhexenhammer666) from his article here on Substack, “Joe Bidens' Ship of State Has No Rudder”. He “compiled a top five failure list for Biden” and for the fifth, he wrote, “COVID: Bidens COVID response so far is to threaten states standing against his pseudoscientific reliance on masking.” It is from this line that I quoted “pseudoscientific” both because it was very fitting and I because hope this will lead a few more people to subscribe to my Substack!
On a video streamed live on August 6th, 2020, Joe Biden said starting 14:23,
If if and when the vaccine comes, it’s not likely go through all the testi - and the trials that are needing to be done and the question is his he gonna seek emergency move. Well I I I…
July 28, 2020, Joe Biden said,
How are you going to distribute the vaccine when it arrives, when it arrives, when it’s there? And the question of whether it’s real, when it’s there, that requires enormous transparency. You’ve got to make all of it available to other experts across the nation, so they can look and see, so there’s consensus this is a safe vaccine. Because already you have, what percent is American people saying if the vaccine were there tomorrow, they wouldn’t take it? And it’s not the usual anti-vaccine crowd. It’s beyond that because people are losing faith in what the president says. Think about it.
See ‘I’m not taking it’: Joe Biden, Kamala Harris led Covid vaccine skepticism parade before election by Vivek Saxena BPR, July 18, 2021 [archive]
See “Social categorization and similarity in intergroup behaviour” by Billing and Tajfel, 1973
See the Righteous Mind - Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt, Vintage Books, 2013 for discussion of scientific research that supports the view that we divide people into us vs them instantly, automatically and unconsciously. For example, in a summary of part 1 of the book, the author writes (pages xx-xxi),
…the first principle: Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second, Moral intuitions arise automatically and almost instantaneously, long before moral reasoning has a chance to get started, and those first intuitions tend to drive our later reasoning. If you think that moral reasoning is something we do to figure out the truth, you’ll be constantly frustrated by how foolish, biased and illogical people become when they disagree with you. But if you think about moral reasoning as a skill we humans evolved to further our social agendas - to justify our own actions and to defend the teams we belong to - then things will make a lot more sense. Keep your eye on the intuitions, and don’t take people’s moral arguments at face value. They’re mostly post hoc constructions made up on the fly, crafted to advance one or more strategic objectives.