Category Archives: Social Democracy and Trust

Low Vaccination Rates hide a profound social weakness

Social democracy, Social Democracy and Trust, Trust and Distrust

 

Anita Sreedhar is a primary care physician with a degree in public health and she works in the Bronx. Anand Gopal is a sociologist from my second favorite University, Arizona State University. He is also an excellent journalist who covers international conflicts such as the war in Afghanistan. They have conducted research for 5 years to learn to better understand vaccine resistance. Again, from before the arrival of Covid-19. This is what they discovered:

“We’ve found that people who reject vaccines are not necessarily less scientifically literate or less well-informed than those who don’t. Instead, hesitancy reflects a transformation of our core beliefs about what we owe one another.

Over the past four decades, governments have slashed budgets and privatized basic services. This has two important consequences for public health. First, people are unlikely to trust institutions that do little for them. And second, public health is no longer viewed as a collective endeavor, based on the principle of social solidarity and mutual obligation. People are conditioned to believe they’re on their own and responsible only for themselves. That means an important source of vaccine hesitancy is the erosion of the idea of a common good.”

 

People think they are on their own, because they have largely been left on their own. They know they can’t trust anyone else. It is all on them.

In the Unites States there has been a powerful anti-vaccine movement since long before Covid-19.

I remember one day I was at a conference at my beloved Arizona State University, and at dinner when I was chatting with the woman sitting beside my wife and I.  She seemed intelligent. After all she was an adult like me participating in a university conference with some of the top professors around the world. Both of us did not really belong there. We were ordinary citizens, but the university encouraged people like us to attend such conferences. That is why I like that university so much. I was surprised that she wanted to talk about vaccines which one of the professors had talked about as an aside. She told me she disagreed strongly with what he had said. She said  he was dead wrong when the professor said the vaccine myth that they caused autism had been debunked. (It had). But she strongly disagreed and assured me the science was firm that vaccines did in fact cause autism. (She was wrong).

 She was part of a growing movement of vaccine distrust that is particularly virulent in the US, but has reached as far as Canada, in particular, southern Manitoba.

Many reasons have been given for the anti-vaccine attitudes. Some have blamed online misinformation campaigns, others have blamed our tribal culture, and even fear of needles. Race has also been a factor. At first white Americans were twice as likely to get vaccinated in large part for historical reasons, such as the Tuskegee syphilis experiments on African Americans orchestrated by the government to their serious detriment. There was good reason for their suspicions and mistrust. Interestingly, that gap between whites and blacks has narrowed considerably since then. Many African Americans have been convinced to take the vaccines despite their suspicions.

All of these factors are significant, but Sreedhar and Gopal found a more significant factor. That was college attendance. “Those without a college degree were the most likely to go unvaccinated,” they said.  Why would that be. As the two said in their Times article, “Education is a reliable predictor of socioeconomic status, and other studies have similarly found a link between income and vaccination… It turns out that the real vaccination divide is class.”

Class is the culprit. And that makes a big difference as I shall try to show.

Hectoring does not work

Epidemics/Pandemics, Social Democracy and Trust, Trust and Distrust

Anita Sreedhar and Anand Gopal wrote an important article in the New York Times on the decades long shredding of trust in government among the lower classes in the United States. They started by talking about Robert Steed who lived in the South Bronx area of New York City. He lived in a public housing project where he had grown up, among poor people. During the pandemic the residential complex in which he lived was hit hard—very hard—by Covid.  Many of the people from that complex contracted Covid-19 and many suffered and died. There were posters plastered all over the complex urging the residents to get vaccinated.  You would think the sight of friends and neighbours being wheeled out in ambulances would have convinced all of the resident like Steed to get vaccinated. If you thought that you would be wrong. Steed would not touch the vaccines that could save is life or reduce the harm caused by the disease.

 

This is what he told his friends, after he contracted Covid: “I’m not going to do what the government says.” This was a simple but profound statement. He decided he would fight the government alone rather than with “help” from the government he did not trust. After all he was only 41 years old and healthy, had no underlying health conditions, and he could do his own research on the internet. He died a couple of days later in his apartment.

 

At his funeral all his friends said the same thing: they would not get vaccinated even though they had seen how quick their friend Steed died. They were shook up by his death but would not get vaccinated.

 

In the United States about 70% of Americans are now fully immunized compared to Canada, where about 80% have that status. In both countries there are stubborn pockets of vaccine resistance. No matter how often government officials tell them to get vaccinated or try to twist their arms to do that, they resist.

As Sreedhar and Gopal reported,

 

“In 2019, the World Health Organization declared vaccine hesitancy one of the 10 threats to global health. With persistent vaccine avoidance and unequal access to vaccines, unvaccinated pockets could act as reservoirs for the virus, allowing for the spread of new variants like Omicron.”

 

Please note this was before the onslaught of Covid.

 There is no one size fits all reason for vaccine hesitancy. There is a basket of reasons.  What we have been doing so far, is very unlikely to sway the opinions of these last remaining vaccine resisters. They have doubled down in their resistance with every effort to persuade them. By now those positions are so entrenched they are like religious convictions. As Anita Sreedhar and Anand Gopal said,

 The world needs to address the root causes of vaccine hesitancy. We can’t go on believing that the issue can be solved simply by flooding skeptical communities with public service announcements or hectoring people to “believe in science.”

No hectoring does not work. We need a better approach, but how do we find one?  I am not sure how we do, but I think it might help if we understand where these resisters, or at least many of them, are coming from.

Sreedhar Anand Gopal discovered some very interesting things about why people resisted. I will continue commenting on this article in my next post.

 

Rational Distrust

Epidemics/Pandemics, Social Democracy and Trust

 

I said in my last post that during a pandemic it was vitally important that people trust their governments and their leaders.  The failure to have that has caused enormous harm. A lack of trust means public policy will not be effective and that can have immense harm. A very good example was the failure to get enough people to take vaccines, much of which was caused by people not trusting government ,health officials, corporations, or scientists.

Let me be clear about one thing, I am all in favour of distrust. After all, governments, businesses, academics, media, courts, and leaders of all sorts have done much to earn some real distrust.

You would have to be out of your mind not to distrust our leaders and institutions. Take corporations for example, when corporations pay scientists, spin doctors and ad agencies to sow distrust of science in order to slow the spread of  public policies, as corporations in the energy sector did in the case of climate change, robust distrust is entirely warranted. These corporations successfully managed to manufacture doubt in good science so that they could continue to earn profits for longer than they should have, while millions of people around the world were harmed by the delays. Those industries through their leaders’ behaviours, have earned distrust for businesses not only inside their sector, but actually, corporations in general.

Tobacco companies did exactly the same thing, by knowingly denying that their products were deadly, so that their profits could continue a little longer while people around the world were harmed as a result of their deceptions. Again, this was egregiously bad behaviour with which the public largely acquiesced.

Then there were the corporations that hid the addictive nature of the opioids they produced or were selling  for years so that they could continue to be sold while people around the world got seriously sick. Those leaders were guilty of serious malfeasance.

All of these were shockingly bad corporate citizens. There were many such loathsome campaigns. They brought all of capitalism into disrepute to such an extent that legitimate capitalist achievements have been smeared.  They have earned all the distrust they attract.

Governments have also participated in serious harms. For example, their acquiescence around the world in failing to seriously pursue corporations and individuals that hid their wealth and income in offshore accounts, thus robbing  government around the world of money they could have used to achieve their social goals, while at the same those same people often paid professionals to white wash or green wash their slimy business practices or persuade ordinary citizens to abandon worthwhile social goals.  When governments for decades granted massive subsidies to industries such as the energy sector, to inflict harm on society, or when they also for decades granted excessive and entirely unjustifiable tax breaks to the rich while vigorously squeezing the poor for every penny owed, they have earned distrust.  When governments or political leaders lied about the reality of the wars they started the way the American government did during the Vietnam, while young men and women sacrificed their lives or suffered horrendous injuries, government were rightfully entitled to all the distrust and disrespect they got.

All of these things and many more that could be mentioned, have ensured that distrust is genuinely justified—in some cases.

While I endorse distrust,  the lack of trust be rational. Not every action by every government or corporation should be distrusted blindly. I don’t support ludicrous versions of the truth such as absurd claims that there is an international cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who are drinking the blood of children. When the oppositional narrative of the distrusters reaches the levels of idiocy as it has done in the United States, we must categorically reject it. Distrust must be grounded on evidence, serious claims, and critical analysis. Rebels may criticize but blanket distrust is as blind as blind trust.

Distrust (just like trust) must be rational.

St. Ronny and the rise of neo-liberalism

Epidemics/Pandemics, Social Democracy and Trust

 

Ever since a client of mine told me earlier in the summer that he did not trust government issued vaccines I have been mulling over why that was the case. Why did he distrust government so much and stuff he learned from his friends or by doing “private research” online so little? I think that is a very important question. It is actually a much bigger question than I realized before I started looking at this issue.

 

Louis Menand wrote a fascinating article in the New Yorker about why people had lost their faith in government. Specifically, he wondered if liberals or conservatives were at fault. He noted that both liberals and conservatives in the US distrusted government:

“December, 1958, by pollsters from a center now called the American National Election Studies, at the University of Michigan, seventy-three per cent said yes, they had confidence in the government to do the right thing either almost all the time or most of the time. Six years later, they were asked basically the same question, and seventy-seven per cent said yes.

 

Pollsters ask the question regularly. In a Pew survey from April, 2021, only twenty-four per cent of respondents said yes. And that represented an uptick. During Obama’s and Trump’s Presidencies, the figure was sometimes as low as seventeen per cent. Sixty years ago, an overwhelming majority of Americans said they had faith in the government. Today, an overwhelming majority say they don’t. Who is to blame?”

 

I know I have been quick to blame Ronald Reagan and his coterie of conservatives. Now I realize the blame can be spread much more widely, though this is certainly part of the problem. Let’s start with Ronald Reagan. Reagan became wildly popular when he said “the 11 most scary words in the English language were, ‘I am from the government and I am here to help.’ ” He also made the following statement in his inaugural address “In this present crisis,” Reagan said in his Inaugural Address, “government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” People began to think that governments were inherently bad and  untrusworthy.

I am not saying Reagan caused the problem, but the neo-liberal ideology was given a big push by him in the US,  Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Brian Mulroney in Canada. At about that time a serious decline in trust in government began.

Yet as Menand pointed out, Reagan a very popular President, one of the most popular ever and who later became an icon of conservatism in America, did not remove one major government program! Why? Because people realized government delivered some pretty good and important things and programs. Really until then most people understood the benefits of public health care as we have in Canada and to a more limited extent in the United States, and understood the importance of schools, libraries, armed forces, police forces, fire fighters, social assistance to the needy, public parks and many other public goods. It was difficult to persuade people to believe that government is all bad.

But things have changed Bigly. Now they have more trust in Amazon, or Facebook, Wal-Mart, Canadian Tire, ExxonMobil, Safeway, or any other company than the government? How can that be?

Even during the 8 years that Reagan was President of the United States the trust index for government never rose above 45%. In the last 14 years it has never been higher than 30%. That is not a lot of trust!

How is this significant? The absence of trust in government has been disastrous during the pandemic.  During a pandemic if public health officials are not trusted, people won’t follow their instructions and we will all suffer. That is the problem.  And, as we have seen, it is a big problem. That is why it is so important to look at this issue.

Why do so many people distrust government and what is the significance of that?

 

Trust, Mistrust and a Monstrous God

Epidemics/Pandemics, Evangelical Christianity, Politics & Religion, Social democracy, Social Democracy and Trust, The Sleep of Reason

 

One of the things that is so interesting about this pandemic is the astonishing fact that so many people mistrust so many so deeply. The distrust is virtually unshakeable. I am trying to understand why that happens. And it happens a lot where I live, in Southern Manitoba.

This has caught me by surprise. Or at least it once did. After nearly 2 years of this pandemic, it no longer surprises me. I expect it. I am surprised when someone demonstrates trust.  I think it has something to do with the deeply felt religious beliefs in our community, but that still does not explain it.

Here is what Winnipeg Free Press reporter Dylan Robertson said about exactly this issue:

“Manitoba children could qualify for COVID-19 vaccines within weeks, but evangelical parents might not let their kids roll up their sleeves.

In a recent Probe Research survey shared with the Free Press, two-thirds of evangelical Manitobans said they “worry about the long-term effects of COVID-19 vaccinations in children,” compared with 41 per cent of overall respondents.

In addition, 49 per cent of those identifying as evangelical said COVID-19 as an issue was “overblown,” compared with 28 per cent of the overall population.”

 

What would lead Manitoba parents to distrust government or the authorities so much that they would put the lives of their children in danger when the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence, and by now, real life experiences, make it so clear that not taking vaccines is a dangerous choice?

The Free Press  interviewed Rick Hiemstra, research director of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada and this is what he said, “A lack of trust and polarization have come home to roost.” So many of these evangelicals now identify with their group—Christians who don’t trust vaccines. They don’t trust  scientists. No matter how many of them. They don’t trust the government. Instead, they trust what other members of their tribe has told them or trust what they have “learned” from their own “research” on the Internet. And they do while they put the lives of their children in danger.

Here is what a local theologian said as reported by the Winnipeg Free Press,

“Evangelical scholar Nicholas Greco said numerous factors cause that gap, from a desire to rely on God for healing, to science clashing with creationism, to general skepticism of media and government.

Evangelicals often are reflective of a social and political conservatism, which calls for smaller governments (and) personal autonomy, but also tends to lead to a mistrust of government,” said Greco, who is provost of Providence University College in Otterburne.

Greco, a long-time communications professor, said there’s a perception the government wants to control everyone, and that the media is overhyping the virus as part of some sort of conspiracy.

“The rhetoric I hear from many of my colleagues… is that we don’t want the government to have further control, because if they do, we will lose our freedoms,” he said.

The evangelicals believe conspiracy theories rather than scientists and they believe it so strongly they put the lives of their children in danger. It is like an article of their faith that vaccines are untrustworthy, and no reasoning, no data, or no actual experiences will shake them from their convictions.

Here is what the Free Press reported, “At a recent panel, one congregant said everyone who got the vaccine is going to die within a few years, and that they’ll all go to hell.”

As an aside, think for a moment about what a monstrous God this person believed in—a god who would punish someone for eternity for doing what our scientists have strongly recommended.

It is as if denial of vaccine efficacy has become part of their religious faith.