In this interview Dr. Arthur Caplan, Professor of Bioethics at New York University’s (NYU) Langone Medical Center and the founding director of the Division of Medical Ethics, touches on the question of "vaccine hesitancy" and the anti-vaxxer movement.An interview with Dr. Arthur Caplan, professor of bioethics at New York University, on the COVID-19 pandemic
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The WSWS had an opportunity to speak earlier this month on the COVID-19 pandemic with Dr. Arthur Caplan, the Drs. William F. and Virginia Connolly Mitty Professor of Bioethics at New York University’s (NYU) Langone Medical Center and the founding director of the Division of Medical Ethics. Born and raised in Framingham, Massachusetts, Caplan received his Ph.D. in the history and philosophy of science at Columbia University in 1979.BM: Regarding the pandemic, which is probably on everybody’s mind in your department and specifically the vaccines that have come out, how do you explain the vaccine hesitancy that we are seeing among health care workers? What is driving that issue?
.AC: It is a big issue. I recently heard from a friend of mine in the Cleveland area that refusal rates among nursing home staff might be as high as 60 percent. It is just off the chart and nobody thought things were going to be that big. So, refusal is causing real problems.
In surveying people who refusing to take the vaccine, it seems people are worried that the vaccines were rushed, and that Trump pushed them through for political reasons and that the data on their safety is not very good. I do not think that is true, but I think it is their concern.
.Now, I think the data is rather good. I think Trump did try to rush them, but that is not why they got approved. They got approved because the data looked good. But he, in his inimitable fashion, caused more harm because he basically kept saying, you have got to get these things through and arm-twisting the FDA and things like that, which make people nervous.
BM: Where does the anti-vaxxer movement, which is different from the COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy, come from? In your surveys and your evaluation of the anti-science behavior, what have you discovered about these movements?
.AC: Some of that comes from libertarian thinking, which is, “I don’t trust what experts say. I’m my best judge of what’s good for me.” It is sort of a disrespect of experts and expertise. We started with the mask wearing where people were running around saying, “COVID is a hoax. You do not need a mask. It’s all nonsense.”
.Some of it comes from long-standing American skepticism in many circles about science, frequently, people who are religious. In America, as a lot of religious people are, they are not gung-ho or as convinced about science, as you might see in some other cultures and countries. Ironically, support for vaccines is very high in places like Africa, where they see the benefits of vaccination. Here you do not see the benefits right away of measles or tetanus vaccination because those diseases were tamped down. So, then people started to turn to skepticism, as they say, “you keep telling us we need vaccines, but I don’t see any disease around.” Whereas in Africa, people say, “thank goodness we vaccinated because three years ago, everybody in the village got measles and now it’s gone.”
.I would say too, that science has its own problem, which is it does not have good communicators. It tends not to do a good job talking to the public. Everybody is always praising Tony Fauci or maybe somebody like Paul Offit, who is a senior researcher at Children’s Hospital [in Philadelphia], but I could probably name all the people who show up in the media from the science and medical realms. And it is not a long list. That is a self-inflicted wound.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/01/27/capl-j27.html
