Thread by @GreyCityUS

My take on vaccine hesitancy:
1/ Remember those apocalyptic books and films about killer viruses threatening the survival of humanity? Those stories always end with the discovery of a cure that saves a grateful world. Real life with COVID doesn’t always imitate art. #COVID

2/ None of us have really experienced small pox or polio. Kids today don’t know what it means to get mumps, measles or chicken pox. So the vaccines for those diseases don’t trigger a visceral response, and when our doctor prescribes them, we take them.

3/ Also, their parents and grandparents DO remember suffering through those diseases, so a vaccine seems like a great idea to protect their offspring.

4/ We all are living through the horrors of a COVID pandemic. The lockdowns, the loss of income and security, the illness symptoms, the loss of friends and loved ones, the separations, the clear and present threat of a horrible death.

5/ The threat of the COVID disease triggers the flight reaction in all of us and, for most of us, the vaccine is the solution to getting back to normal. Those who can’t tolerate that flight tension deny the disease is real. That’s another issue.

6/ The trauma of this past year has jumbled up their cognitive response. Demagogues and right wing media grifters play upon their fears, telling them what they want to hear and giving them permission to resist public health measures.

7/ That’s why rational arguments don’t work for those vaccine deniers. They are not competent to make a decision concerning their own well-being.

8/ Before the vaccine, I used to tell people refusing masks that by going out unmasked and not social distancing they were “surrendering” to the disease. That didn’t work as a call to “fight” COVID with the only tools we had at the time, but I chalked it up to partisan postering.

9/ However, since the vaccines have become available, the inability of the COVID deniers to reverse course, even when a solution is so easy, free & readily available made me consider that maybe a mixed-up “flight” response was really motivating their counter-productive behavior.

10/ We can’t reason with them, bribe them or shame them. Mandates with real penalties to show proof of vaccination or a negative test seems to be the only alternative. A mandate gives them permission finally to disobey their demagogues and overcome their flight response.

11/ It’s an interesting education in responding to cultish behavior during a pandemic
Now to write up my screenplay about people refusing a life-saving pandemic cure.