A movement with a distorted sense of individual rights that would seek to hamper vaccination in the midst of a global health crisis is reactionary to the core and hostile to human life itself. The dangerous rise of the anti-vax far-right is a symptom of a sickness in this society that we will still be confronting well after the last wave of the pandemic has finally receded.
When Jonas Salk made the Polio vaccine, conservatives whined that it hadn’t been tested and couldn’t be safe. So many people talked on every platform they had to decry the vaccine as “unsafe”, to the point that Salk had to make the statement “It is safe, and you can’t get safer than safe.”
Sixty-six years later, and conservatives still shout the same thing, this hasn’t been a “rise”. It’s been an awakening for those who didn’t realize the American right has always been anti-vax.
That’s a good point actually, and I’d like to emphasize/highlight it:
Conservatism, practically by definition, resists and rejects new things. Conservative means wanting things to stay the same, or go back to the way they used to be previously if they can make it happen. Any perceived change to the status quo is hostile. And what’s worse is, perceptions can be wrong. DRASTICALLY wrong. People are fallible, can be misled, our senses can even hallucinate. When someone thinks the only power they can exert is to dig in their heels and scream “NO!”, they’re gonna. And they’ll also use any emotional excuse they can justify it with. Fear and hate are a hell of a (proverbial) drug and easy to replicate in great quantities.
Conservatives reject blindly accepting new things, yes. That’s called looking before you leap and taking time to rationally weight the risks vs rewards.
Society is a complex machine. It’s impossible to gauge the effects of something like a vaccine in a few short lived lab tests. If we inject a vaccine into children, during their most formative years, how is that going to effect their development a decade from now? Is it going to stunt their growth? Increase their risk of cancer? Give them some other subtle illness years down the road? And for what benefit? All scientific evidence so far says that children have essentially no risk of being injured by Covid.
But asking such reasonable scientific questions gets you branded anti-vax and anti-science by people who understand neither.
We know the elderly with pre-existing conditions do have a substantial risk of being injured by Covid, and even if the vaccine has long-term health effects, that’s not something someone with an average 10 years of life left has to worry about. So that cost/benefit analysis makes sense for them to take the risk on a new vaccine.
Progressives are prone to blindly accept anything new for novelty’s sake, especially from government, which they use as a substitute religion. No one screaming for everyone to take the vaccine is doing so because they’re a scientist and have read peer-reviewed studies showing it’s safe. They’re doing it because it’s a change, which they love, ordered by their government masters, which they irrationally believe unconditionally.
And they were lying back then too. The Cutter incident involved a defective polio vaccine rollout from Cutter Labortories that resulted in 200,000 children being infected with live polio. Around 40,000 children would develop polio, with hundreds being permanently injured from it and some even dying from it.
Turns out the people working in government and scientific labs are, in fact, people, and therefore fallible. Blindly trusting them is a mistake. Trust is earned, and our government bureaucracy has done nothing to earn anyone’s trust in a very long time.
I’m old enough to remember a year ago, when multiple Democrats were saying the vaccine could not be trusted because Trump was endorsing it and, God forbid, even rushing it into production.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-biden/democrat-biden-warns-against-rushing-out-coronavirus-vaccine-says-trump-cannot-be-trusted-idUSKBN2671NW
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/05/kamala-harris-trump-coronavirus-vaccine-409320
I never realized what anti-vaxxers our glorious President and Vice President are. No wonder more people have allegedly died of Covid in 2021 than in 2020.