One of the patterns I’ve noticed in the ongoing COVID-19 debates is a resistance to preventative measures and a desperate desire for post-illness treatments. (I have no professional background, but I think this would be a “therapeutic” — something that treats the disease in a remedial way.) You see this in the folks who don’t want to wear a mask or take a vaccine but would rather glom on to hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin or whatever the snake oil of the day comes along. They much prefer a pound of cure to an ounce of prevention. The psychology behind this is interesting to me. I guess it has something to do with humans being generally poor at risk assessment. The masks and social distancing are inconvenient — they impose a cost that you can feel and see. The vaccine has a risk that you are choosing to submit to. Voluntarily submitting to risk, cost, and inconvenience is psychologically uncomfortable. These are probably limbic system reactions. Meanwhile, it’s up to the less visceral, rational part of your brain to understand that there exists in the world a risk of catching COVID and that the impact of having the disease is likely to be greater than the risks of the vaccine or the costs of the other mitigation strategies. That rational understanding of risk is even more attenuated when you’re talking about the idea that you might be a vector of COVID that harms other people.
And so the limbic system conjures up all kinds of reasons not to listen to the neocortex. Masks make you breathe poison. The vaccine isn’t FDA approved. Etc. But when it’s demonstrated that masks don’t cause you to breathe poison and the FDA does give full, final approval for the vaccine, you’ll see these folks shift their reasons. The limbic system doesn’t really care. It’ll come up with new reasons to ignore the neocortex. And these folks will continue to be vectors of COVID and incubators for further mutations.
“These folks will continue to be vectors of COVID and incubators for further mutations..” This statement scares me, what happens if the virus mutates and the vaccines no longer work and we are all at risk again thanks to these idiots.
I have a book of Indianapolis News front pages going back to the 1800’s. Every county in Indiana expect two were in favor of the polio vaccine shots. The two county’s were held up by doctors who wanted all the kids to come to their offices to get the shot. Wow we used to be a country that cared about all kids.
Talked to my friend Joe who works at a Jacksonville FL hospital and they are calling Governor Ron DeSantis, ‘The Governor of Death’, The Murderer DeSantis’ and other nasty names. Joe has gone up to the ICU and the covid wing and told me it was so sad to see all the younger aged (50 and under) people on ventilators. He said if you somehow could get all the anti-vaccine deniers to walk thru the rooms and the ICU they might change their minds. Nothing like seeing people on oxygen gasping for breath close up, it might wake these people up. He said seeing it on TV doesn’t come close to seeing it in person.
The problem is that people can’t distinguish between the credibility of various sources. If the CDC says something, and some yahoo “doctor” says something that contradicts what the CDC is saying, those positions are taken at equal value. And it’s not just medical information. People can’t distinguish between good news sources and bad sources. The New York Times and the Gateway Pundit are treated as equally credible. Some Trumpers might actually give the Gateway Pundit even more credibility, despite the fact the website often just makes stuff up.”
Trump’s fake news attack on the NY Times and Washington Post is disingenuous since both newspapers employ right wing columnist who supported Trump and the Republican party. I never could not understand why neither newspaper never came out and stated that fact. You will never see these columnist on FOX or any other right wing television network. If they did show up it would have made a mockery of Trumps fake news lies.
Can’t or won’t distinguish between good news sources and bad sources. My college-educated brother admitted to knowing better, but kept right on parroting the wingnut baloney. It made no sense. “If you know better, why are you calling me with this stuff?” I stopped taking his calls.
It’s hard to sell prevention as the risk needs to be understood in the abstract (it may not happen, the odds are that it won’t happen to me, and I don’t even REALLY know what ‘it’ is), whereas it’s easy to sell a cure (i’ll take it if/when I need to, and until then it doesn’t cost me a cent or a minute or a care).
Of course this is true for so many people in so many ways (exercising and eating well vs heart disease and diabetes etc).
The real difference here with COVID is that inaction on the prevention front is likely to put many more people (not just the mask and vax hesitant themselves) at severe risk of long-term harm or death. It’s one thing if an individual chooses not to live a healthy lifestyle, but would be another entirely if they stopped their whole family, neighbourhood, city, state from being able to make their own choices about their health, or worse, through their inaction purposely and knowingly made the lives of those around them extremely unhealthy.