4 ms·

I think the issue of vaccine hesitancy is much more nuanced than this. For example, according to the CDC, the population least vaccinated in the US are black. h

by paul_f 5y ago

I think the issue of vaccine hesitancy is much more nuanced than this. For example, according to the CDC, the population least vaccinated in the US are black. https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/latest-data-on-covid-19-vaccinations-race-ethnicity/ https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/latest-...

xadhominemx 5y ago
Black people have their own idiosyncratic reasons for vaccine skepticism, unrelated to partisan politics. But anyway, Trump support is still a stronger correlation: https://mobile.twitter.com/gelliottmorris/status/1420745331868844032 https://mobile.twitter.com/gelliottmorris/status/14207453318...
- paul_f 5y ago
  We should stop with the "it's just the Trump supporters" thinking. Yes them, but various other groups including PhDs. A Carnegie Mellon study identified the groups with the most vaccine hesitancy. "independent hesitancy risk factors included younger age, non-Asian race, having a PhD or ≤high school education, living in a rural county, living in a county with higher 2020 Trump support, lack of worry about COVID-19, working outside the home, never intentionally avoiding contact with others, and no past-year flu vaccine. " https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.20.21260795v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.20.21260795v...
  - acdha 5y ago
    It’s definitely not just Republicans but note that they’re the only one of those groups with bullion-dollar companies pushing a constant stream of messages downplaying they risk of COVID and hyping any plausible concern about vaccination or masks. If Rubert Murdoch gave the word, the amount of energy pushing antivax messages would go down by an order of magnitude overnight.
    - rootusrootus 5y ago
      I'm not sure it's a guarantee that the power is flowing from the top down. It seems more likely that the big players are just going where the money is, i.e. where their voters already are.
      - acdha 5y ago
        It’s both: the big finders definitely will embrace any culture war issue which keeps people voting for the politicians who serve their interests but they also reliably push any issue which goes against certain topics relevant to their business. Even if something isn’t their industry they’ll push it if it cuts against the legitimacy of government regulations or is critical about science (e.g. the tobacco companies’ guys like Steven Milloy were trumping up those “DDT bans mean that millions of Africans die of malaria” stories a decade or so back because they wanted to lower trust in the same public health agencies who were leading anti-smoking campaigns).
  - snikeris 5y ago
    > having a PhD or ≤high school education This is interesting.
    - rcpt 5y ago
      Having a PhD seems like a sample size issue
      - calvinmorrison 5y ago
        More like a polling one. I routinely astroturf all surveys because I hate surveys. I am both a PhD holder, I am under 21 and I am LGBTQ, A veteran, and everything else at once
        s5300 5y ago
        Ahh, I bet you really think you're doing something to the system by being so cool. No lol, you're flagged and omitted. Do you think everybody is as dumb as you?
        calvinmorrison 5y ago
        good. I only do it for required surveys. I dont do other surveys
        tcmart14 5y ago
        Being a PhD and researcerh, dont you see surveys as a vital way of collecting data? So why would you intentionally throw off the data many researchers use to reach conclusions? People wonder why statistics can be so messed up. Some of it is lying with math. But statisticians can't also help when people are being malicious.
        ulucs 5y ago
        A vital way to collect bad data, as evidenced here. Why would you trust what people say anyway?
  - jonnycomputer 5y ago
    more than 93% of the faculty, staff and students at my research institute are vaccinated. Having a PhD is pretty conflated with both race and political affiliations. Who knows what the effect would be after attempting to control for those things.
  - tomtung 5y ago
    Anecdotally, my unvaccinated roommate is Chinese, holds a PhD degree in a very difficult field, and works as a researcher in a FAANG company. I was very surprised to learn that they were unwilling to get vaccinated. They are actually very worried about infection, and have been very careful with wearing masks, disinfecting things, and avoiding in-person contacts whenever possible. They explained that they were mostly worried about the unknown long-term side-effects of the vaccines. Maybe having a PhD degree is correlated with having this kind of caution.
    - dharma1 5y ago
      What's his endgame? Buy time until the the pandemic burns out (if it does)? Or until we have better therapeutics?
      - tomtung 5y ago
        > What's his endgame? Buy time until the the pandemic burns out (if it does)? Yep that's my understanding. Or if enough time has passed since vaccination to convince them that the vaccines are safe.
- tomcooks 5y ago
  Please can you explain a non-american what are those idiosyncratic reasons?
  - 542458 5y ago
    https://www.webmd.com/vaccines/covid-19-vaccine/news/20210202/black-vaccine-hesitancy-rooted-in-mistrust-doubts https://www.webmd.com/vaccines/covid-19-vaccine/news/2021020... There is a grim history of poor medical ethics surrounding the treatment of African Americans that has resulted in feelings of distrust from some. https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/history/40-years-human-experimentation-america-tuskegee-study https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/history/40-years-human-exp... https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2018/06/04/american-medicine-was-built-on-the-backs-of-slaves-and-it-still-affects-how-doctors-treat-patients-today/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2018/... Additionally, medical debt is such a massive burden to many lower income households that there’s this additional layer of distrust, a feeling that you should steer clear of any medical establishment otherwise they’ll try to pin something on you and charge you mountains of money (even though the vaccine is free).
  - kj4ips 5y ago
    We've done some pretty f'd up stuff to folks of color in the past. One of the most notable examples is that of the Tuskegee study on untreated syphilis, where we denied effective treatment w/o informed consent. PoC have higher infant mortality rates, and the myth that PoC have more tolerance to pain (and therefore require less anesthesia) is still quite prevalent. It was bad enough that we had to actually produce a report on what is considered the "bare minimum", but even that has not been totally effective. (https://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/regulations-and-policy/belmont-report/index.html https://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/regulations-and-policy/belmont-repo...)

by paul_f 5y ago

xadhominemx 5y ago

Black people have their own idiosyncratic reasons for vaccine skepticism, unrelated to partisan politics. But anyway, Trump support is still a stronger correlation: https://mobile.twitter.com/gelliottmorris/status/1420745331868844032 https://mobile.twitter.com/gelliottmorris/status/14207453318...

paul_f 5y ago
We should stop with the "it's just the Trump supporters" thinking. Yes them, but various other groups including PhDs. A Carnegie Mellon study identified the groups with the most vaccine hesitancy. "independent hesitancy risk factors included younger age, non-Asian race, having a PhD or ≤high school education, living in a rural county, living in a county with higher 2020 Trump support, lack of worry about COVID-19, working outside the home, never intentionally avoiding contact with others, and no past-year flu vaccine. " https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.20.21260795v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.20.21260795v...
- acdha 5y ago
  It’s definitely not just Republicans but note that they’re the only one of those groups with bullion-dollar companies pushing a constant stream of messages downplaying they risk of COVID and hyping any plausible concern about vaccination or masks. If Rubert Murdoch gave the word, the amount of energy pushing antivax messages would go down by an order of magnitude overnight.
  - rootusrootus 5y ago
    I'm not sure it's a guarantee that the power is flowing from the top down. It seems more likely that the big players are just going where the money is, i.e. where their voters already are.
    - acdha 5y ago
      It’s both: the big finders definitely will embrace any culture war issue which keeps people voting for the politicians who serve their interests but they also reliably push any issue which goes against certain topics relevant to their business. Even if something isn’t their industry they’ll push it if it cuts against the legitimacy of government regulations or is critical about science (e.g. the tobacco companies’ guys like Steven Milloy were trumping up those “DDT bans mean that millions of Africans die of malaria” stories a decade or so back because they wanted to lower trust in the same public health agencies who were leading anti-smoking campaigns).
- snikeris 5y ago
  > having a PhD or ≤high school education This is interesting.
  - rcpt 5y ago
    Having a PhD seems like a sample size issue
    - calvinmorrison 5y ago
      More like a polling one. I routinely astroturf all surveys because I hate surveys. I am both a PhD holder, I am under 21 and I am LGBTQ, A veteran, and everything else at once
      - s5300 5y ago
        Ahh, I bet you really think you're doing something to the system by being so cool. No lol, you're flagged and omitted. Do you think everybody is as dumb as you?
        calvinmorrison 5y ago
        good. I only do it for required surveys. I dont do other surveys
        tcmart14 5y ago
        Being a PhD and researcerh, dont you see surveys as a vital way of collecting data? So why would you intentionally throw off the data many researchers use to reach conclusions? People wonder why statistics can be so messed up. Some of it is lying with math. But statisticians can't also help when people are being malicious.
        ulucs 5y ago
        A vital way to collect bad data, as evidenced here. Why would you trust what people say anyway?
- jonnycomputer 5y ago
  more than 93% of the faculty, staff and students at my research institute are vaccinated. Having a PhD is pretty conflated with both race and political affiliations. Who knows what the effect would be after attempting to control for those things.
- tomtung 5y ago
  Anecdotally, my unvaccinated roommate is Chinese, holds a PhD degree in a very difficult field, and works as a researcher in a FAANG company. I was very surprised to learn that they were unwilling to get vaccinated. They are actually very worried about infection, and have been very careful with wearing masks, disinfecting things, and avoiding in-person contacts whenever possible. They explained that they were mostly worried about the unknown long-term side-effects of the vaccines. Maybe having a PhD degree is correlated with having this kind of caution.
  - dharma1 5y ago
    What's his endgame? Buy time until the the pandemic burns out (if it does)? Or until we have better therapeutics?
    - tomtung 5y ago
      > What's his endgame? Buy time until the the pandemic burns out (if it does)? Yep that's my understanding. Or if enough time has passed since vaccination to convince them that the vaccines are safe.
tomcooks 5y ago
Please can you explain a non-american what are those idiosyncratic reasons?
- 542458 5y ago
  https://www.webmd.com/vaccines/covid-19-vaccine/news/20210202/black-vaccine-hesitancy-rooted-in-mistrust-doubts https://www.webmd.com/vaccines/covid-19-vaccine/news/2021020... There is a grim history of poor medical ethics surrounding the treatment of African Americans that has resulted in feelings of distrust from some. https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/history/40-years-human-experimentation-america-tuskegee-study https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/history/40-years-human-exp... https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2018/06/04/american-medicine-was-built-on-the-backs-of-slaves-and-it-still-affects-how-doctors-treat-patients-today/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2018/... Additionally, medical debt is such a massive burden to many lower income households that there’s this additional layer of distrust, a feeling that you should steer clear of any medical establishment otherwise they’ll try to pin something on you and charge you mountains of money (even though the vaccine is free).
- kj4ips 5y ago
  We've done some pretty f'd up stuff to folks of color in the past. One of the most notable examples is that of the Tuskegee study on untreated syphilis, where we denied effective treatment w/o informed consent. PoC have higher infant mortality rates, and the myth that PoC have more tolerance to pain (and therefore require less anesthesia) is still quite prevalent. It was bad enough that we had to actually produce a report on what is considered the "bare minimum", but even that has not been totally effective. (https://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/regulations-and-policy/belmont-report/index.html https://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/regulations-and-policy/belmont-repo...)