Anti-vaxxers are part of a tribe.
Opposition to vaccinations isn't about health risks. It is a tribal marker.
A comment posted by Portland resident John Flenniken yesterday put into place something so obvious that I hadn't noticed it.
That is the nature of category errors. In category errors one misunderstands the entire nature of something, like mistaking a family gathering for a wedding instead of a funeral. Like the CDC and most Democratic governors, I thought the data of health outcomes was overwhelming and therefore would be persuasive to the vaccine resistant. Get vaccinated and live. We have charts that show it. Public service ads show doctors and nurses talking about crowded hospitals. Vaccinations make sense. Simple.
Not simple. Vaccinations aren't about health. They are about tribe. Much of what the pro-vaccination health care establishment does is worse than irrelevant. It backfires. Pleading hardens opposition. Mandates create martyrs.
John Flenniken is a retired safety engineer for an electric utility, Pacific Power, a job he took because he could not support his family as a high school chemistry teacher. He observed:
Denying the COVID vaccine has become a rite, akin to bra and draft card burning. It is a way to identify yourself to the group you most admire and relate.
You spout the tribal gospel and repeat the mantra to yourself and others. You proselytize your belief. To prove your faith in this new belief, you abandon caution and meet in groups for hours, maskless and unvaccinated. You validate your faith in being unvaccinated by hearing about the masses of infected and dying but you're fine and healthy they were masked and maybe vaccinated. You scoff and ridicule the masked populous. Like handling a poisonous viper and not getting bite you demonstrate your faith and cement your place in the tribe. That someone from outside your tribe may smile or chuckle at a death in your group does not resonate. You are a true believer.
As the whole world around you tells you to get vaccinated and wear a mask the more militant you become. It's now about freedom akin to religious liberty. You are now ready to fight.
I should have noticed a tribal marker. I was young in the late 1960s. I've been there. I was part of the tribe of long-haired youthful student radicals.
I did not need to be a hippy to be part of the tribe. By the fashion of the time, I was "clean for Gene" but guys wore their hair long and shaggy. Girls wore it long and parted in the middle, like Joan Baez. I didn't support fellow students occupying college buildings, but I was forced to look a part and choose a tribe. I could be part of an unthinkable tribe--the people directly or indirectly supporting the war in Vietnam--or the tribe of people who opposed it. I didn't agree with my tribe, but I knew what I opposed and I knew the tribal markers. I had shaggy hair.
Trump leads a tribe. He understood Republicans better than does Romney, Ryan, McConnell, or the Bush family. He made an early decision to downplay COVID. He could have gone the other way, called it a War on COVID, and unified Americans under that banner. It was a fatal miscalculation for him politically and for his team now, as they die disproportionately from COVID. He defines and enforces the boundaries of the team's membership and thought. Resistance to the CDC, Anthony Fauci, vaccinations, and masks became markers for the team long before Biden was elected.
GOP gathering. No masks, hospital full.
Nothing Richard Nixon might have said could get me to trim my hair shorter. Only leaders within the anti-vaccination team can move the needle much farther on vaccinations. Trump would need to give full-throated persistent support to vaccination and compliance with indoor mask-wearing. I am imagining an alternative past. Had the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Crosby, Stills, and Nash, Jefferson Airplane, and a dozen other people of prominence and credibility, cut their hair and made some other conspicuous marker, maybe wore black tee shirts instead of tie-dye and bell bottoms, maybe we all would have moved on. The tribe is more persistent than its uniform.
Agreed. Hence the high proportion of anti-vaxers in Ashland.