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Dan Diamond, a health reporter for the Washington Post, recently noticed some polls that showed how white Republicans are more likely to say yes refuse a vaccine. At the moment, the best protection against the coronavirus virus is the vaccine, and it turns out that the people who are most opposed to the injection are in this group. Diamond has been talking to these vaccine skeptics to try to find out what kinds of messages can reach them – but even if they can be influenced, will the government be able to reach them in time to establish collective immunity? I spoke with Diamond about the myriad of problems posed by this skepticism in Wednesday’s episode of What Next. Our conversation was edited and condensed for clarity.
Mary Harris: I think it’s important for us to recognize how important Trump is to most of the people you’ve talked to, and how your own comings and goings about vaccines may have confused your supporters. He talked about a link between autism and vaccines before he was president, which, of course, was refuted. And once COVID happened, he would say it wasn’t serious, it’s just a flu – and then he caught COVID himself, went to the hospital, but then left and said: I’m stronger for this.
Dan Diamond: I think “coming and going” is almost generous to him. I was talking to some former employees who worked closely with him, and they emphasized that just getting him to get the flu vaccine, which has been around for decades, was a real effort. Trump is a guy who is not easily convinced that vaccines are necessary. The incredible irony is that perhaps the most hesitant vaccine president we’ve ever had is the president who was in charge of this discovery and launch of the vaccine. But with Trump, talking about the vaccine was not a public health problem for him. It was really in the context of, look at that political victory.
You mentioned that when you spoke to one of these hesitant Trump voters with the vaccine and mentioned that Trump helped develop the vaccine, it didn’t seem to mess with her. Why not?
I talked about it with all the voters I talked to. Some were more receptive than others to Trump’s involvement. A gentleman said to me, “Well, that makes me think twice now that you’ve brought it up.” But the lady you are referring to said that Trump did not develop the vaccine, that scientists did it and that Joe Biden did not do it. It exists in this strange space. Trump’s supporters think he was wronged by the media, not only in relation to the coronavirus, but also in the way the pandemic was portrayed. Many of them believe that the pandemic was used in a way to politically harm Trump. With vaccines, Trump is not getting the credit he may deserve, but the vaccine itself is not Trump’s creation. And several people told me that he should get the vaccine. He’s out there with all that risky behavior. He doesn’t wear a mask. One guy told me: Trump needs a vaccine, I’m going to stay home and do everything I have to to avoid the coronavirus. It worked for a year. Why do I need to be the first or third of mine or 10º in line to get the vaccine? Maybe I will go in a year.
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I was impressed by the fact that many of the Republicans you spoke to had a kind of individualistic and overwhelmed response to this vaccine. They did their own research and found they doubted the vaccine, or some of them even had COVID and didn’t think it was that bad. These were the reactions of people who are simply making the decision for themselves, and it made me wonder if the message around the vaccine needed to change.
There was a campaign released a few weeks ago by the private sector, led by a group called the Ad Council, which is the industry consortium that makes public health announcements that date back decades. If you know Smokey Bear, “Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Drunk”, these were the creations of the Ad Council. The campaign they launched for COVID is called “It’s up to you”, which I initially understood as an appeal to individual responsibility. But when I asked about it, they said, no, the goal is not to convince people that it is their responsibility. They are trying to recognize the hesitation.
Researcher Frank Luntz is doing a lot of research now to get the right message about COVID vaccines.
Luntz and his team found that saying “emergency use authorization” – the technical term for what the Food and Drug Administration decided to do with vaccines, instead of “approving them” – alarms Americans.
I was impressed with the fact that he is finding all these corners to understand how people want to talk about the vaccine that I hadn’t even thought of, as if people preferred the word vaccine for punch.
The message that Luntz found is centered on things like “if you get the photo, you can spend more time with your family”. Making things personal is much more important than giving the economy a chance to return.
Can the United States achieve collective immunity without these groups of white Republicans being vaccinated?
There are a few ways to achieve collective immunity. One is that everyone gets sick. Another is that everyone is vaccinated. I think a third is that some people get sick and get immunity that way and others get vaccinated and we get to a level of immunity that makes the virus difficult to spread.
But can we get to a place where public health experts want us to arrive? Tony Fauci said that we may need almost 90% of the vaccinated population. If I’m doing unpredictable accounts, Donald Trump got almost 75 million votes. If about a third of adult Republicans do not want to be vaccinated, there are 25 million. And that does not necessarily include communities of color where the vaccine is still hesitant. Therefore, perhaps 10 percent of all adults in the country can fall into this bucket of not wanting a vaccine. We could still get collective immunity with enough people being vaccinated as people who are not vaccinated? This is less ideal, because the more people become ill with the coronavirus, the more likely it is that mutant forms of the coronavirus will appear. If I am sick and have not had the vaccine and have had COVID in my system for days or weeks, the virus can develop mutations that can arise and make it more difficult for circulating vaccines to prevent the spread of the mutated form.
I think it worries me that we may end up having herd immunity in some places and not in others. And those people who are vaccinated, who feel safe, are traveling. So you go somewhere, maybe you get a mutant version of the coronavirus and then there’s something that is more difficult to stop.
I think this is the fear of public health experts as well.
And we may have to continue being vaccinated. That’s what I keep thinking about. We have these new variants. We may have to take booster doses. This may be something that we will have to keep messages for a while. And I think you can think about it this way: We will have more opportunities to convince people and show how things work. But there are also more opportunities for things to get lost.
Right. And some of the Republican voters I spoke to even claimed that they heard that we might need to be vaccinated every year, like a flu shot. So, several of them said, why should I be first in line to get this COVID vaccine when I have to come back in six months, nine months, next year? Why don’t I wait until next year? Therefore, the reality of needing to be vaccinated regularly against COVID, which appears to be where we are going, is being used by some resistant people as a reason not to be vaccinated at all.
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