Stop Calling It a "Pandemic of the Unvaccinated"

“Your refusal has cost all of us,” President Joe Biden said to 
unvaccinated people last week, as he announced a new COVID-
vaccine mandate for all workers at private companies with more 
than 100 employees. The vaccinated, he said, are angry and 
frustrated with the nearly 80 million people who still haven’t 
received a vaccine, and their patience “is wearing thin.”

He’s not wrong about that. For people who understand that 
widespread vaccination is our best strategy for beating the 
pandemic, the 25 percent of Americans who still haven’t received 
a single shot are a barrier to freedom. Their exasperation is 
warranted.

But bullying the unvaccinated into getting their shots isn’t 
going to work in the long run.

Read: America is getting unvaccinated people all wrong

Yes, vaccine mandates increase vaccination rates. The White 
House reported 4 million more first doses in August than in 
July, after Biden announced his first mandate, for federal 
workers. And the number of shots administered daily jumped 80 
percent from mid-July to the end of August. But the way the 
mandates are being presented is driving a wedge between the 
vaccinated and the unvaccinated. If the goal is to inoculate 
enough people to reach herd immunity, this approach may 
eventually backfire.

“If you get into these scenarios where you start pitting one 
group against another, you create tension, you create 
resistance,” says Simon Bacon, a behavioral scientist at 
Concordia University, in Montreal. “What you really need to do 
is totally deflate that.”

Bacon is a principal investigator of iCARE, an ongoing 
international study of attitudes toward COVID-19 public-health 
policies. In a small, recent survey, 30 percent of respondents 
(which included unvaccinated and partially or fully vaccinated 
people) said that introducing a vaccine passport would make them 
more likely to get vaccinated. Sixty-three percent said that it 
would have no impact, and 4 percent said that it would make them 
less likely to get a shot. These data are preliminary, but they 
point to the polarizing potential of passports. Like vaccine 
mandates, vaccine passports can be considered “coercive” methods 
for increasing vaccination rates. Neither addresses the key 
reasons people are hesitant. “If you’re worried about safety and 
efficacy, a vaccine passport or lottery doesn’t affect that,” 
Bacon told me. This was one concern raised about Israel’s “green 
pass” vaccine passport, which, after it was rolled out in 
February, had at best a minimal impact on vaccine uptake. It was 
discontinued in June. (The program was partially reinstated in 
late July in response to the Delta surge.)

It’s important to differentiate between the vaccine hesitant, 
who are on the fence for legitimate reasons, and the vaccine 
resistant, who flat-out don’t support vaccines. By one estimate, 
8 percent of the U.S. population consistently identifies as anti-
vaxxers. Bacon said there’s no use trying to persuade them. It’s 
the former group we should be careful not to push away with 
divisive policies, because they are key to getting the pandemic 
under control.

Be like that stupid fuck Gavin Newsom in California.  Order a 
mask mandate when it's proven masks don't do shit.  Everyone is 
ignoring him anyway.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/persuade-
unvaccinated-protect-unvaccinated/620091/