Choosing to Live in Pandemicland

Depending on how you count it, the United States (and much of the rest of the world) is entering either the fourth or fifth wave of COVID infections. New COVID cases are soaring in several states, especially Florida, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Missouri, where per-capita infection rates are rapidly approaching the pandemic peak from last December and January. Fortunately death rates are still well below what we saw at the start of COVID, thanks to a better understanding of how to treat the disease. The rapid growth in infections seems to be driven by a new variant of the virus, dubbed Delta, which is far more contagious than the earlier strains.

But this COVID wave is different from the three (or four) earlier waves in one very important way: Almost anyone in the United States 12 years old or older can get a vaccine, and nearly all the people getting COVID or dying of COVID are not vaccinated. One news report I saw recently said that in Texas hospitals today, 199 out of every 200 people hospitalized with COVID are unvaccinated. So while the vaccines aren’t perfect, they are pretty darn good.

This is a pandemic of the unvaccinated. That’s both a White House talking point, but also literally true. If everyone who could get a COVID shot actually got one, COVID would pretty much be gone from the United States.

Which means that this also an optional pandemic. We’ve been living in Pandemicland since March 2020—almost a year and a half—but getting the vaccine lets you move back to Normalland any time you want. To be fair, it’s more like Normal-ish land, since many places are still only gradually reopening, but if you get the shot you mostly don’t need to worry about getting seriously sick or dying from COVID.

Lots of people insist on living in Pandemicland, even at great personal cost. Health workers have been fired (correctly, in my view) for refusing vaccination. Parents have refused to get vaccinated, even after their children have become gravely ill. And of course every few weeks there’s another report of someone who loudly proclaimed they would never get vaccinated and subsequently died of COVID.

To those of us living in Normalland, this is a mystery. Why would someone choose to keep living in Pandemicland when it’s so easy to leave?

It’s very tempting to assume that people who haven’t gotten vaccinated, and especially people who adamantly refuse, are just stupid or misinformed. And while there’s certainly a lot of vaccine disinformation out there, I don’t really think people who are vaccine hesitant are generally less intelligent than the rest of us.

It’s also tempting to point fingers at the Republican party and the right-wing media ecosystem for opportunistically stirring up people’s fears in order to get votes or campaign donations (not necessarily in that priority order). I do think there’s some blame to be laid here. There are certainly prominent people who chose to knowingly spread lies about COVID and the vaccine and should have foreseen the public health consequences. Those people will not go down well in history.

Worse, the paranoid and vindictive style of Donald Trump and his presidency created an unhealthy dynamic where otherwise rational Republicans were forced to choose between promoting disinformation or having their careers destroyed. I have some sympathy for people put in that extremely difficult position, but not nearly enough of them chose the right path—and if more of them had chosen right, it might have made it safer for others to make better choices as well.

But I think we also need to look inside ourselves. Donald Trump and right wing media might have exploited disinformation for their political and financial gain, but it wouldn’t work if the seeds of mistrust weren’t already there, making it easier for lies and conspiracy theories to take root. Many people who refuse the vaccine express views that the vaccine doesn’t work or is dangerous, or that COVID isn’t actually all that bad despite the evidence all around them.

One of the smartest people I know decided that the COVID virus is man-made, because he examined the gene sequence and doesn’t think it could possibly have occurred naturally. This is, of course, nonsense, and this person is not an expert in virology or genomics. (To be clear—it is certainly possible, though unlikely, that the virus was manufactured, but the idea that a non-expert could just read the DNA and conclude it’s manmade is baloney unless he found an actual copyright notice encoded in the base pairs.)

A certain instinct to question authority is healthy, but it needs to be tempered by true open-mindedness and intellectual humility. Otherwise we risk being blinded by our own self-confidence, or manipulated by people with something to gain.

And that, I believe, is how we get to a world where so many people choose to live in Pandemicland, when it’s so easy to step through the door and return to a mostly-normal world.