Manufacturing Dissent

A research letter in the Journal of the American Medical Association draws attention, not for the first time, to disparities in the attitudes of various racial groups in America toward vaccination against Covid-19.

The authors conducted a survey of the likelihood of vaccination of a sample of both health workers and the general population, divided by self-declared ethnicity: white, black, Hispanic, Asian, other, and mixed. As was to be expected, the health workers in all ethnic groups were more likely to accept vaccination than were the same groups in the general population, but large disparities nevertheless persisted, the largest being between whites and blacks.

Among the health workers, for example, about 35 percent of blacks said that they were not likely to accept the vaccine compared with about 10 percent of whites. The corresponding figures for the general population were about 60 percent and 24 percent, respectively. All other groups fell somewhere between blacks and whites.

Of course, there were many limitations in these data. Only 72 percent of the health care staff surveyed, and 80 percent of the general population, answered the questionnaires. Second, the respondents were all drawn from people who had already agreed for research purposes to be tested twice a month for Covid-19, and therefore were probably more trusting on average than the general population.

Third, the category of “Asian” cries out for disaggregation, though the numbers were too small to have allowed for it. And last, as opinion pollsters must know by now, stated intentions are not an infallible guide to actual behavior when the time comes.

The reasons given for mistrust of vaccination were disbelief in its efficacy, lack of confidence in the manufacturing companies, and too-rapid approval by the licensing authorities. The survey did not appear to have given a choice of other reasons for mistrust, which may, of course, have lain far deeper in the psyche and been less rational, or at any rate more emotional.

The conclusion of the research letter seems, only too predictably, to have agreed with these skeptical judgments, and it concludes:

But in Britain, with its system of universal health care, where every eligible household has received invitations to vaccination and organizational obstacles to vaccination have been minimal, the same or similar disparities exist.

Is it not at least possible that the institutionalized emphasis on past injustices is actually one of the reasons for the disparities in uptake—and that further emphasis will only increase them? A deputy editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association has been fired for daring to suggest as much, and the editor suspended for having allowed him to do so.

Land of the free, home of the brave?

(COMMENT, BELOW)

Theodore Dalrymple is a contributing editor of City Journal, where this first appeared, is the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and the author of many books, including Not with a Bang but a Whimper: The Politics and Culture of Decline.

Previously:
• 03/22/21: Montaigne's Humanity: The great essayist warns us against intellectual pride --- but also delights in the variety and contradictoriness of life
• 01/11/21: The Dystopian Imagination: Why did the twentieth century produce so many works of fiction depicting not an ideal future but a future as terrible as could be imagined?
• 11/30/20: The Age of Cant: These days, you must hold the right opinions and express none of the wrong ones --- or else
• 08/10/20: The Covid Occupation
• 07/13/20: Shakespeare's Richards: The Bard's two historical dramas offer contrasts between political pathologies
• 06/09/20: Call It Abuse: On bringing children to political protests
• 02/06/20: Recipe for Chaos: A disruptive 'ethical vegan' launches a religious-discrimination debate
• 01/06/20: No Final Victories
• 01/03/20: A Matter of Truth: On Ricky Gervais, J. K. Rowling, and speaking frankly
• 12/03/19: Deadly Superstitions in London: Another terrorist attack reveals Britain's delusions about rehabilitation
• 12/02/19: Labour's Lethal Manifesto
• 10/16/19: Deniable Dishonesty: Elites deride traditional views of marriage, while adhering to them in their own lives
• 10/07/19: European Gloom
• 08/06/19: Again, and Again: On mass shootings and the role of imitation
• 05/06/19: Every Pronoun Must Go: To root out gender inequity, we must search every corner
• 04/15/19: Just Deserts: To deny that some cases have more merit than others is to dehumanize life
• 03/18/19: Theresa May's Lucky Defeat
• 03/11/19: Where 'positive discrimination' keeps a qualified candidate off the police force
• 12/31/18: Because I Say So
• 12/17/18: Enforceable Subjectivity
• 12/06/18: Boiling Over in Paris
• 11/13/18: Psychiatrist, Heal Thyself
• 10/31/18: Rationalizing Ugliness: How the modern intellectual screens reality
• 08/18/18: Spelling That's Right for Moi
• 08/07/18: Any pol who lives by cleanliness dies by dirt
• 02/26/18: 'Steal what you like, but do not flaunt it'?
• 01/29/18: Human Condition Commission
• 12/21/17: O, Brave Old World!
• 11/30/17: Mugabism Without Mugabe
• 11/27/17: Trash Studies
• 10/24/17: The Devil's in the Diction: The vague terms that populate our political discourse encourage lazy and often deeply biased thinking
• 10/17/17: What Happened to Memoirs? An acerbic Gallic take on Hillary Clinton's book
• 10/09/17: The Unanswerable
• 09/26/17: Of Dotards and Dithyrambs: On learning English from the North Koreans
• 09/12/17: Freedom and Art: What paintings from Lenin's Russia and Depression America tell us about turbulent times
• 07/05/17: Rights: Health even for the dying? Or immortality, perhaps?
• 12/28/16: Like a Candle In Berlin: On the curious habits of the spiritual-but-not-religious