Vaccine hesitance can be rooted in reasonable concerns, says Jha. Were the new vaccines rushed to market too quickly?
Did the Trump administration’s overt politicization corrupt the approval process? Are side effects severe?
Will our notoriously racist health system prioritize and safeguard communities of color that have been hardest hit by the pandemic? “We win no battles by minimizing” these worries, Jha says, “or suggesting that those people are being unreasonable or anti-science or anti-vaxxers.
They’re raising legitimate concerns that should be addressed.”
But for millions of others, dread about vaccines defies logic or reason, and bleeds instead into belief systems of what Zuckerman has dubbed “the unreal” — that we’re pawns in a diabolical global game run by ruthless elites and that vaccines are somehow not medicine but poison.
“Concerns about -safety have been absorbed into this other way of viewing the world,” says Jack Bratich, a Rutgers professor and author of Conspiracy Panics. “It’s about a plan to inject people with controlling substances.
That’s where QAnon overlaps with the anti-vax movement.”
As demonstrated by the January 6th stormingof the Capitol, perpetrated by many Americans immersed in the QAnon cult, this red-pilling can have deadly, destabilizing consequences, and not just for conspiracy-theory believers. “This may be the most important public-health issue of our time — misinformation, disinformation,” Jha insists.
And unlike the coronavirus, the contagion of conspiracy theory is one against which we’re largely defenseless. “We have been blindsided,” he says. “We as public-health people have to figure out how to counter it in a way that’s effective. And we don’t have the tools.”
Exploring conspiracy theories and mass delusion can inadvertently popularize misinformation.
So inoculate yourself with facts: The novel vaccines produced by Pfizer and Moderna are revolutionary and take advantage of our own cellular machinery to safeguard recipients against future coronavirus infection.
If you’ve seen computer renderings of the coronavirus, you know its surface is covered by spike proteins that create the “crown” that gives corona virusestheir name. Humans get infected with Covid-19 when these spike proteins pierce healthy cells, allowing the virus to invade, infect, and begin replicating.
