“Some Americans who are reluctant to get vaccinated believe they are living through a very different pandemic — one where the approved Covid-19 vaccines are ineffective and dangerous, and where a long list of “miracle cures,” ivermectin among them, are critical to patients’ health and safety.
From the outside, these positions can seem not just dangerous but incoherent. What would lead a person to say they won’t take a vaccine approved by federal regulators, then take an off-label medication because they read about it online?
Of course, not all Americans who are reluctant to get vaccinated have embraced supposed miracle cures: The reasons that people give for not getting a Covid-19 vaccine are varied and complex. But over the past year, among some refusers, a community of intense vaccine denialism has developed and created a sort of psychological scaffolding to support their views. As a group, the most fervent vaccine deniers construct and perpetuate an alternative narrative of the pandemic. And when inconvenient facts — from a news report to a friend’s or relative’s decision to get vaccinated — challenge that narrative, they give them a place to take refuge.
This phenomenon has its origins in America’s political polarization. One of the best predictors of whether someone is resistant to getting the Covid-19 vaccine is whether they identify as a Republican, and we know those partisan bonds are powerful. But they are not sufficient to explain the intransigence. Most Republicans have gotten the vaccine by now, but about 12 percent of Americans say they will never get vaccinated under any circumstances. (Roughly six in 10 of those people are Republicans, but a small minority of Democrats also say they won’t get the vaccine.)”
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““When you really want to believe something — like ‘you can’t trust the vaccines’ — you’ll come up with any number of rationalizations,” Van Bavel said. “It’s like whack-a-mole. You falsify one premise and they just create a new one.”
This is a well-documented social phenomenon. In a new book by Van Bavel and Lehigh psychology professor Dominic Packer, The Power of Us, the authors recount one controversial work of social science in the 1950s. Social psychologists infiltrated a doomsday cult to find out how the members would react when their promised date of salvation — the day that a UFO would come to Earth and take them away — came and went without the prophecy coming true.
The researchers found that when the prophecy failed, most people didn’t quit the cult. They didn’t discard their old beliefs, protest that they had been lied to, and desert the cult’s leader. Instead, the leader offered his followers a brand new narrative, which many of them accepted: Their fervent faith had been so powerful that the apocalypse had been averted.”