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.
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.