People Aren't Vaccinating, and It's Our Fault
We Cried Wolf, and the Chickens Are Coming Home to Roost
Telling the truth can be tricky. We’re often in a situation where we cannot see the immediate or practical advantages of doing so. And I’m not talking about telling the truth when a murderer knocks on your door and asks if your daughter is home. We are under no obligation to be truthful under physically coercive circumstances. I’m referring to the type of truth we expect from our institutions.
We often worry about what people will do with that truth so we tell them what we think they need to know in order for them to do what we think they should do. But what happens when the truth, the whole truth, comes out? Because it always does.
Masking, whether indoors or outdoors, for vaccinated or non-vaccinated people as a measure against COVID has become a political lightning rod when it should be a matter of empiricism. Does it help and how exactly does it help? But instead of simply telling the truth, a decision was made to tell people what they need to know in order for them to do what it was thought they should be doing. How did that work out? The truth came out and made things even worse. A similar thing happened with the origins of the pandemic.
The origins of this pandemic’s virus could be an incredibly important key to understanding how to fight it and future pandemics. So why are we not only lying about the possibility of it coming from a lab, but calling anyone who follows that line of reasoning a conspiracy theorists? Facebook even banned the discussion of a lab leak hypothesis before finally reversing it as more evidence surfaced. Not only was the idea derided but the largest social media company did not permit people to even discuss it.
Why would these organizations do that? Oh yeah. Because a highly polarizing president suggested it came from a lab, and the only right thing to think is the opposite of your political opponents. Fortunately, that is not how the scientific process or reality in general works.
Again, the truth comes out and it made things worse.
Now we are faced with a new dilemma. There is a great solution to ending this pandemic in what is akin to a scientific miracle. We have a vaccine that is incredibly effective and widely available. So why, as of August 1st, 2021, are only fifty-percent of people vaccinated? Why have we thrown out more than 180,000 doses? Why don’t they trust us?! “It’s because I’m smart and they’re stupid!”
If this was a relationship between two people, we’d call it emotionally abusive.
Well, why should people be trusting? This past year and a half has shown them that we do not respect them. That we operate on what’s practical and not what is principled. That we tell them what we think they need to know in order to do what we think they should do. We don’t simply tell them the nuanced truth, allowing them to make their own well-informed decisions. And I understand why.
After watching a bunch of crazy people stock up on toilet paper of all things, it can be easy to throw up our hands and simply decide that everyone is stupid. That smart people need to craft messages based on the behavior they expect. But over and over, we have seen the results of that short-sighted tactic: the truth comes out and we then have explaining to do. So what to do?
Telling the truth takes what some may call a leap of faith. We have to understand, to believe, that doing so will always be the best option under all circumstances. It sometimes requires a leap of faith because we cannot see the long-term good that will come, and are clouded by our short-term concerns. But we see what happens when we do the opposite. And we’ve known this for thousands of years.
Some time around 600 BCE, there was a man named Aesop who lived in Greece, and is famous for what we now refer to as Aesop’s Fables. One of his most famous tales is about a boy who cried wolf. In the Oxford Dictionary, “crying wolf” is defined as “to make false claims, with the result that subsequent true claims are disbelieved.”
They don’t believe because they don’t trust. They don’t trust because they have not been given a reason to trust. The saddest thing for me is that I don’t see any change. Instead of acknowledging the bad faith tactics, all I see now is gaslighting and more blame. People are mad at those not getting vaccinated and blaming them for any pandemic related restrictions, with zero accountability for the environment that in part created that sense of hesitancy.
And now you’re starting to get upset. You feel a bit of a sting and don’t want to believe that their hesitancy has anything to do with mistakes we have made. That’s because many of us have a personal identity tied up in a binary war of vaccinated vs. unvaccinated. They’re stupid and I’m smart. I follow the science and they are deniers. But it’s never that easy and that is not helping whatsoever.
My hope is that we start to learn from these mistakes in messaging, and move towards simple truth, knowing that the alternative is always worse. If we don’t, when we do have the truth on our side, and when it matters, nobody will believe us.