The importance of civil liberties
Derek Thompson at the Atlantic sought out some vax-refuseniks to explain their thinking.
The people I spoke with were all under 50. A few of them self-identified as Republican, and none of them claimed the modern Democratic Party as their political home. Most said they weren’t against all vaccines; they were just a “no” on this vaccine. They were COVID-19 no-vaxxers, not overall anti-vaxxers.
Many people I spoke with said they trusted their immune system to protect them. “Nobody ever looks at it from the perspective of a guy who’s like me,” Bradley Baca, a 39-year-old truck driver in Colorado, told me. “As an essential worker, my life was never going to change in the pandemic, and I knew I was going to get COVID no matter what. Now I think I’ve got the antibodies, so why would I take a risk on the vaccine?”
Because thinking you’ve got the antibodies doesn’t sound like much of a magic protection? Because COVID is a bigger risk than the vaccine?
Many people said they had read up on the risk of COVID-19 to people under 50 and felt that the pandemic didn’t pose a particularly grave threat. “The chances of me dying from a car accident are higher than my dying of COVID,” said Michael Searle, a 36-year-old who owns a consulting firm in Austin, Texas. “But it’s not like I don’t get in my car.”
But there is no vaccine for a car crash. If there were, wouldn’t it make sense to get it?
And many others said that perceived liberal overreach had pushed them to the right. “Before March 2020, I was a solid progressive Democrat,” Jenin Younes, a 37-year-old attorney, said. “I am so disturbed by the Democrats’ failure to recognize the importance of civil liberties. I’ll vote for anyone who takes a strong stand for civil liberties and doesn’t permit the erosion of our fundamental rights that we are seeing now.” Baca, the Colorado truck driver, also told me he didn’t vote much before the pandemic, but the perception of liberal overreach had a strong politicizing effect. “When COVID hit, I saw rights being taken away. So in 2020, I voted for the first time in my life, and I voted all the way Republican down the ballot.”
Civil liberties are important, but you can’t exercise them if you’re dead, and they’re not so important that they override our duties to other people.
But the no-vaxxers I spoke with just don’t care. They’ve traveled, eaten in restaurants, gathered with friends inside, gotten COVID-19 or not gotten COVID-19, survived, and decided it was no big deal. What’s more, they’ve survived while flouting the advice of the CDC, the WHO, Anthony Fauci, Democratic lawmakers, and liberals, whom they don’t trust to give them straight answers on anything virus-related.
The no-vaxxers’ reasoning is motivated too. Specifically, they’re motivated to distrust public-health authorities who they’ve decided are a bunch of phony neurotics, and they’re motivated to see the vaccines as a risky pharmaceutical experiment, rather than as a clear breakthrough that might restore normal life (which, again, they barely stopped living). This is the no-vaxxer deep story in a nutshell: I trust my own cells more than I trust pharmaceutical goop; I trust my own mind more than I trust liberal elites.
The thing about one’s own mind is that it’s just one mind. Epidemiology is the work of many minds, part of whose job it is to check each other’s work. Do I trust my own mind on epidemiology more than I trust a whole institution of epidemiologists on epidemiology? The question answers itself. Institutions can get things wrong despite all the checking, of course, but so can individual minds.
When I was in my doctoral program, most of the people in the program were anti-vax, and they were all left wing. They were anti anything big-Pharma. They were mostly into herbals and alternative medicine. Except…those of us who were non-traditional students, Baby Boomers. Anyone younger than a Baby Boomer was not willing to put “chemicals” in their body. I once asked one of them what she ate. All natural foods, of course. Nothing GMO, for sure. So you eat from the wild? No, grocery store, Whole Foods, whatever, but not things that are modified, things that are ‘natural’. Um, you do realize that all or most of our agricultural products are heavily modified, right? Most of it done before the dawn of recorded history, so we think it’s ‘natural’ and ‘unchanged by human hands’, but no. And you do realize tofu is jam-packed with chemicals, right? That your body is made of nothing but chemicals? That water is a chemical? These were scientists. It was scary.
Ingredients: https://www.gocomics.com/peanuts/1966/04/07
I wonder how many of them have infected someone else who later died?
True, but….. anti-lock brakes, seatbelts, SRS (airbags), body crumple zones, retract-on-impact steering columns, laminated windshields, side windows that break into small fragments rather than sharp shards, and a thousand-and-one other safety features make surviving a crash far more likely.
I assume Michael Searle’s car has none of these features.
Back in the 90s I worked with a guy. Lab tech or the like. He claimed that AIDS wasn’t real, or wasn’t caused by HIV, or something. He pointed out that no one can demonstrate the virus, no one can demonstrate the antibodies, all anyone can show is a band on an electrophoresis gel representing a certain molecular weight for something in the patient’s blood, and then they claim that’s the antibody, and the whole thing is bogus.
I think part of this was motivated reasoning:like many people, he just couldn’t face the awfulness of HIV/AIDS.
But I also think part of it is that he was close enough to the tech to see how messy and uncertain much of it is, but he didn’t know enough science to ground any trust in the underlying chemistry and biology.
“The chances of me dying from a car accident are higher than my dying of COVID,”
2019 US car deaths: 16,988
2020 COVID deaths: 400,000
The mindset is actually remarkably similar to people complaining about recycling in a recent media article in my hometown.
Some people feel the downside of just throwing recycling in the trash just doesn’t affect them. They feel that the minute effort to change existing habits isn’t warranted or is onerous. They openly and proudly refuse to do something that some liberal greens bureaucrat wants them to do, because somehow that’s a virtue?
Your statistic is not relevant, because it misses the selfishness that is the fundamental premise: the chances of ME dying. The 36-year old is probably correct in terms of assessing his personal risk of receiving harm, and evidently has no concern for his risk of causing harm.
AoS @ 4 – I thought of that too, and considered saying it, but decided to keep the focus narrow instead. That’s one reason comments add so much value.
One more angle: SUVs are safer for their occupants than smaller cars, but they’re much more dangerous for people in smaller cars. The ratcheting upward of cars built like tanks for the past 30 years or so is infuriating.
I’m betting Colin’s statistic would look different if broken down by age.
If the risk is “dying of COVID”, the vaccines from what we’ve seen so far reduce that risk to nearly zero. With most people having side effects similar to the annual flu shot (varying from none at all to feeling like crap the next day).
I wish there was some sort of vaccine that did the same thing for dying in car crashes…
Funny that no one complains that the government is forcing you to buy cars with standard safety features, even though each of these things are regulated by the federal government.
Except the seatbelt, of course, because you actually have to take the responsibility to put that on yourself, and no one likes the evil government telling you to take responsibility for yourself or for others (by lowering their insurance costs).
Why do I doubt this? Why does this sound like a Conversion narrative, or Witnessing and Testimony from a Believer?
Yes. In my neck of the woods, the variants of concern are spreading more quickly among younger people than among geezers like me. Not sure of the case fatality rate with VOC, but It’s not a risk I’d want to be taking.
Yes, think of the government overreach that imposes all those onerous regulations and all that red tape on auto makers, that forces them to build cars that don’t impale drivers on steering columns, or explode on impact. Fascists.
ARC @12, Seat belt use is mandatory under the law, oddly in all but New Hampshire (for adults only), so even if it’s not a passive measure, there are penalties for not using them.
Getting vaccinated for Covid is not a law, and there are no legal consequences for not getting it. There are only incentives, and the fact that they will help protect others more than yourself tells me something about the people who are against them, even if that isn’t the reason they give when asked. The reasons I have heard personally were political, having to do with “papers” and “communism” and some kind of record keeping by the government that violates their supposed autonomy or freedom. I know it’s BS, but it seems to be a combination of established political views and confirmation bias. They haven’t thought it through or don’t care, which describes a lot of people on a lot of issues. I hate to be dismissive, but I find it easier every day.
@4 and others–I was about to write that as well. And I’ll just add: road design (requiring a lot of engineer training and design time and work, as well as the additional land required to make wider curves/wider lanes/turnout lanes/safety spaces/etc.), policing, driver training and testing, vehicle inspection and certification, emergency response and medical services…when you think about it, an astonishingly high percentage of economic activity goes into keeping people from getting killed by cars.
It’s worth remembering that in the UK in the 70s there was a lot of whining about seatbelts. My parents always insisted we fasten them (although as the youngest, I always had to ride the boot* of the (estate**) car, which was hardly safe) but a lot of people called it government overreach and there were anti-seatbelt campaigns lasting decades. In retrospect, it might not have helped that the voice and face of the UK pro-seatbelt campaign was Jimmy Savile, possibly the most prolific paedophile the world has ever seen.
I wasn’t sure when seatbelt-wearing became compulsory here, so I looked it up. Front seatbelts were not compulsory until 1983 and rear seatbelts (you know, that bit of the car where the children sit) not until 1991 (I know there are issues with kids and seatbelts without booster seats, but we didn’t know that then.)
It sounds insane now, although I know someone who still refuses to wear a seatbelt.
* ** I know this will read as satanic mumbo-jumbo to Americans and I don’t care. In fact, I did it on purpose.
Well, clearly, he trusts his body’s physics more than that human-made mechanical goop.
And now we know where Fortran got her devil-may-care attitude.
Try visiting the Midwest. Their attitudes are much like latsot describes for the UK. My parents rarely had a car with seatbelts until I was a teen and they were standard, required equipment. Everyone around me complained like murder just about having seatbelts in every car. There wasn’t even a seatbelt law then, just a law that they had to be in the car.
There are penalties, but I’ve never lived in a place where cops pull you over for not having a seatbelt on (unless you’re black or Hispanic). It was occasionally the case where they would add an extra bit to a ticket for not wearing a seatbelt, but it was usually enforced only against people they wanted to stop or harass for some other reason. I don’t know a single person in my circle who ever got a citation for failure to wear a seatbelt, though wearing one was, at least a while back, somewhat uncommon. The only implications I have seen from it was when one of our school clubs was doing seatbelt awareness, and when you pulled up the stop sign, they popped over to your car and gave you candy. If you were wearing a seatbelt, they gave you Smarties; if you weren’t, they gave you a Dum Dum.
Some people can complain about anything if they think it will get them attention and give them something to be miserable about.
Steven #2: Now that’s funny: I see the cartoon is dated 1966. But the punchline appeared in Tove Jansson’s book Farlig midsommar (Moominsummer Madness), written in 1954. Maybe Charles Shulz had been reading the book to his kids, and took the quote from there. It is certainly memorable; I still remember it, from my mother reading the book to me and my siblings fifty-some years ago.
(No wait, it was more like 60 years ago. How time flies.)
Ikn @19 I have been pulled over, and cited, for not wearing a seat belt, but only once. There was no other reason for the stop. It was many years ago when they were enforcing the law more stringently, but in California they can pull you over for not wearing one. I don’t think they enforce it as much anymore, and there are some states that only enforce it as a secondary violation, but the fine was not cheap as I recall.
@twiliter #14
New Hampshire doesn’t have a mandatory-seat belt-law? May as well change the state motto to Live Free and Die!