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by raphlinus·5y ago·view on hn ↗
This is a good question and deserves serious thought, including real empirical data on what people believe, and TFA provides that. I also recommend more perspective from Ed Yong[1], which is empathetic towards the unvaccinated.

But I don't think it's super mysterious. The US is one of the few countries that has a major news network constantly pushing the antivax message (Russia being the other that comes to mind, and that strengthens my point). We also have an erosion of trust in institutions, the media, and authority that goes deeper than in most other places.

We also see evidence here on HN: every Covid thread has a significant number of antivax comments. They are also aggressive on Twitter, and even in the chat of TWiV livestreams.

There is some reason for optimism though. Very recently, there has been something of a turnaround in right-leaning news sources, where they are now advocating the vaccine. I'm not sure if that will hold up, but in any case I expect it will boost vax numbers considerably, and in the process save many thousands of lives.

A deeper question remains: what can we do toward having an information ecosystem that is not so terribly dysfunctional that antivax messages thrive in it?

[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/07/unvaccina...

1 comments
No, in Russia pro-vaccine propaganda is very high, everyone, absolutely everyone, even Navalny's officers are doing it. For the last half a year around 10 minutes in every evening news programme on major channels is about Sputnik V, shaming not vaccinated and so on. There are wonderful documentaries made by RT about hospitals, talking to lead doctors. There are vaccination centers in malls.

Russia's low rate of vaccination comes from three things:

1) Lack of incentive. Life was going as usual throughout Winter and Spring - everything was open, no one was enforcing masks. Moscow had the requirement to be vaccinated in order to enter restaurants for a few weeks in June-July, that forced people to go get vaccines.

2) Not many people were dying before Delta, so everyone thought it was fading away. And combined with the iron curtain situation between vaccines (Sputnik V not approved in EU and P/M/J&J/AZ not approved in Russia), people thought there was going to be some development, maybe new vaccines, and that it's worth waiting a bit.

3) Many people didn't trust some dying corrupt company to be able to make millions of doses out of nowhere and for it to be effective. It was just too suspicious to be true. But eventually Sputnik proved to work, so this went away.