1y ago

The anti-vaccine movement is on the rise. The White House is at a loss over what to do about it.

www.politico.com The anti-vaccine movement is on the rise. The White House is at a loss over what to do about it.

“They keep just hoping it’ll go away.”

A Biden administration that vowed to restore Americans’ faith in public health has grown increasingly paralyzed over how to combat the resurgence in vaccine skepticism.

And internally, aides and advisers concede there is no comprehensive plan for countering a movement that’s steadily expanded its influence on the president’s watch.

The rising appeal of anti-vaccine activism has been underscored by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s insurgent presidential campaign and fueled by prominent factions of the GOP. The mainstreaming of a once-fringe movement has horrified federal health officials, who blame it for seeding dangerous conspiracy theories and bolstering a Covid-era backlash to the nation’s broader public health practices.

But as President Joe Biden ramps up a reelection campaign centered on his vision for a post-pandemic America, there’s little interest among his aides in courting a high-profile vaccine fight — and even less certainty of how to win.

“There’s a real challenge here,” said one senior official who’s worked on the Covid response and was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “But they keep just hoping it’ll go away.”

The White House’s reticence is compounded by legal and practical concerns that have cut off key avenues for repelling the anti-vaccine movement, according to interviews with eight current and former administration officials and others close to the process.

112 comments

skepticism
The media keeps using that word, I do not think it means what they think it means. These people aren't questioning, they're not doubtful; they're convinced. They are certain that their position is the correct one and no amount of new information will change their minds.
Stop calling this "skepticism"
- It should be called "vaccine cynicism"
  Get your flu and COVID shots this winter, please. Don't get yourself sick, and don't get other people sick.
- Similarly, I hate the term 'conspiracy theorist.' They're not coming up with theories, they're making up bullshit. I prefer 'conspiracy monger.'
- That's a very good point I had never though before
- We call those people wappies where I live. There's no reasoning with them. No one takes them seriously.

There’s a pragmatic solution here:
1). Make vaccines free. The government pays.
2). Require vaccines for participation in publicly funded social programs. Schools. Social Security. Etc.
3). Allow doctor authorized health waivers to number 2.
4). Wait.
Most people will get the free vaccines either because they’re reasonable people, because the vaccines are free, or because they want government services. Those that don’t will die earlier. Eventually even stupid people will notice or they’ll be dead.
- We are creatures of convenience, the way to make people do anything is by making it easier to comply than not to comply.
  
  I got my first COVID vaccine and the booster at a drive-through clinic. My favorite part was the vibe there. We could finally do something to fight to get things back to normal and everybody was stoked.
- 1, 2, & 3 have already been going on for a long time with public schools (immunization records) for the most part. The determined anti vax parents will just find a Dr who will sign a waiver for their child so they don't need to be vaccinated.
  The problem is so much of anti vax today people will hunker down on their opinion of antivax no matter the truth or information presented to them. It's the same reason people are supporting trump so much still bc they think it "triggers" the opposition so much.
  I'm not sure if there is a way to turn things around especially when you have multiple prominent media members questioning vaccines that is constantly being parroted.
  At this point anything tried they'll cry about information being suppressed or why is the government trying so hard to do this must mean bad things.
- If enough people don't get the vaccine then a lot more then non vaccinated people will die.
- Eventually even stupid people will notice or they’ll be dead.
  Apparently you haven't been paying attention to this whole COVID deal? And to the other comments point you need to meet a threshold in the population for a vaccine to do what's intended.
  
  Tbf, the majority of deaths were in red counties with far higher rates of antivaxers. The stupid people are dying at higher rates, but it's infuriating that they're taking smart people who are vaccine ineligible with them.
- And regulate misinformation and disinformation, make social media culpable, they'll quickly change their tune if $ are at stake. The current model wants engagement, and click bait misinformation does wonders for that.
  
  Skip the fines entirely and introduce criminal charges for executives of platforms that host anti-vaxx content. Have a complaint about the contents or safety of a vaccine? Feel free to submit your study to a peer-reviewed journal, or shut the fuck up.
- The antivax base are billionaires though, who can afford to fund their poorer devotees through the worst of their government service martyrdom
- Are vaccines (at least important ones) not free in some countries? WTF.
- Think about the optics though: if the vaccines are free, WHY are they free?
  The answer that group will give: Bill Gates is subsidizing his microchips so we will all be infected with them.
  
  There's no reasoning with anti-vaxxers, though. So why worry about how it looks to crazy people?
  
  This is not an optics play, it's a power play. When mandates were first issued to a lot of cops their conservative asses talked a big game about mass resignations and chaos in the streets, then the due date came and went and most just got vaccinated.
- Eventually even stupid people will notice or they’ll be dead.
  Doesn't work. Did early deaths stop all the smokers?
  is a problem, because it gives the government more reach to damage people with mistakes. What if the republicans (whom, I assume, you think evil) get in? How much of their policy detail would you like mandated ("for the public interest!") and would you prefer to be able to say, I believe that's harmful in my situation, so I chose to do differently. IMHO that sort of requirement that you've suggested should be very rare indeed - if ever. And wrt COVID specifically, retrospectively the vaccine results were much more muddy than we'd hoped, rather (in my eyes) proving the point.
  I like, and 3) whenever something approaching 2) is implemented.
- If it's more convenient for them to do otherwise, you'll end up with a large base of angry, disenfranchised and unvaccinated people that blames all their problems to the other part of the population.
  Given how much weapon hoarders tend to fit in that category already, I would advocate towards a more soft approach.
- Yeah forcing mandatory injections is definitely a really cool thing for a government to do. Can't wait to see where that goes.
  
  We already do it for school children
- Find prominent anti-vaxxers
  Kill them
  That's it you're done.
  Obviously this isn't ethical or practical, but it would result in net fewer deaths than doing nothing.
  
  Something something slippery slope something something life starts at conception something something all life has value something something murder bad.
  
  15% of US adults are unvaccinated. No, killing them all would not result in fewer deaths. You are a crazy person.

Lies on social media kill people. I know of one guy who believed the lies and died of covid.
- Herman Cain?
  
  No he is still twitting
- It boggles my mind that willfully hosting CSAM is (rightfully) illegal, but willfully hosting anti-vaxx content that definitely leads to the deaths of children is a-okay.
  
  Bet you felt real smart typing this.

The media: Here's 72 hours of conspiracy theorists and coverage about how some people are upset with medical experts.
Also the media: Why are anti-vax conspiracy theories getting so much attention? Here's why the people trying to fix the problem are at fault and why you should probably hate them.
Also also the media: Polls show people don't trust the person we blamed for everything.
- "The Media" isn't some unified being.

Of course the government can't do mych. In the eye of anti vaxxers the government is the problem. In fact any expert or authority will be distrusted because they are an expert or authority figure.
- And you have an extremely large and trusted group GOP, actively discrediting vaccines every chance they get.
  
  While all being vaccinated, themselves.
  A fact that their supporters gleefully ignore.
  Hell, I heard something earlier in covid about hospitals and clincs setting up private back door entrances so antivaxers could get vaccinated without anyone knowing. Its ridiculous.

Maybe if the entire medical industry wasn't already shady and deplorable enough we wouldn't have these vaccine skeptics. The biden administration needs to focus on fixing the medical industry if they want these people to trust it.
- Nah, it's not that it's that one asshole who decided to write an article about how "Vaccines cause autism." That's how the whole anti-vaxxer movement came to be.
- Except it has nothing to do with the medical industry being shady or not. The big recent hullaballoo started because Andrew Wakefield lied to everyone. But that largely only affected the crunchy New Age mom types at the time.
  The big explosion of right wing idiots being anti-vaxxers simply has to do with Republican politicians and Fox News repeatedly claiming all scientists and experts on topics are lying (to make money somehow, despite that money never materializing). They started making such anti-science claims with climate change and just expanded it to everything else.
  
  Fox News: "THE VACCINE IS A SCAM! VACCINES DONT WORK!"
  Also Fox News: You can not enter this building unless your are vaccinated.
  
  What I'm trying to say is that if the medical industry wasn't filled with liars to begin with then there wouldn't be as big of an issue.
  If you are already untrustworthy to begin with it's going to be really easy to convince someone that you did something else wrong.
  I could very easily convince many people that Andrew Tate said that a woman should never be a CEO of a company because it sounds like something he would say and he already says plenty of other sexist shit.
- Alternatively I think we need to remind these people how far from experts they are.

I find the phrasing throughout this highly annoying. It implies that the Biden admin is somehow at fault for 1) people misunderstanding the initial instructions, 2) using that and strawman to undermine that public confidence, and 3) then doubled down on the stupidity seemingly out of spite.
Simultaneously, these assholes sued and said that the admin over stepped by asking, strongly, for social media to stop overt lies from being spread on their platforms.
We always blame those trying for not succeeding and give a pass to the idiots operating in bad faith.

I support conservatives in their personal choice to suffer and die.
- Suffer, spread, and die though?
  
  I mean, at this point, we should just be avoiding conservatives. They are plague rats.
  
  Suffer, mutate, spread, and die. Oh, also the innocent children and whatnot.

I don't really worry for me (I'm vaccinated), I just worry for those who cannot take the vaccine. Those who don't want to be protected from a potentially deadly disease, well, they can rot. No issues.

In Australia, I'd suggest that anyone that isn't vaccinated and is hospitalised because of it should pay out of pocket and spare the tax payer. But as usual, they're all anti vax and anti science/medicine until they're dying then they're making a scene in the hospital demanding everyone's attention.
- In Australia we have significant consequences for being antivax.
  You don't get the childcare subsidy, and good luck finding a childcare that will take your kids.
  You can't work in healthcare, aged care, childcare and many other sectors and it's been validated in court that employers can dismiss employees who don't reasonably get vaccinated when required.
  Additionally, during the pandemic antivaxxers were essentially excluded from pretty much all public life and the Australian public was perfectly content with that. The Australian population was 95% vaccinated at the peak, you can't get 90% of Australians to agree on anything, if 60% of the population supported not eating shit 40% of the population would start eating shit but we all agreed that antivaxxers can get fucked.
- "I was alive and breathing before I came here, and now you're telling me I'm dying and my lungs are filling/filled with fluid?!"

eh I spent ages arguing with antivax cookers during the pandemic.
they are too stupid to reason with, but fun to tease them to ramble their stupid shit, they can't help but jump on their soapboxes.
but you never win. fuck em, let em die out

We put Typhoid Mary on an island all by herself. If we do it to these fools, at least they'll have company. May I suggest Guantanamo Bay?
- Make them eat some e coli pie.

Deny them access to health services until they get the vaccine and get social services involved if they have any children
And make them sign a waiver that legally says they they acknowledge that it's their own fault for not getting vaccinated and we can't help you if you refuse to get help

Once more Republicans twiddle their thumbs as right wing conspiracy needlessly kills their base. It seems they've learned nothing at all, which I suppose shouldn't be a surprise.

The easiest and most effective solution would be to just get Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter/X to crack down harder on misinformation.
Optimally, there should even be a sort of "social reputation ranking" system in place to disincentivize online misinformation and hate speech by tying it to real-life ramifications. We sort of already have something like that for job applications, and I'm proud of that, but if we could extend the enforcement and implementation of this kind of thing to, say, transportation, real estate, or banking, that would certainly be a commendable step in the right direction. Ranted about the mask and vaccine mandates in 2020? Good luck buying that car.
Too bad an increasing and worrisome number of these platforms are being owned by right-wing shrinks. Heil Spez and Heil Musk.
- I know the CCP in China is way ahead of you. They already have a social credit system. You wanted a passport? Maybe you shouldn't have spoken out against government policy.
  It doesn't sound authoritarian at all /s
- How does this work if you're smart enough to not post under your full legal name and photo?

My first gut response to this is, "start relentlessly and uncompromisingly telling the truth". I mean, in the attempt to help the public to do the healthy thing and accept vaccinations, there's been a lot of pro-vaccine bigotry. But when you're bigoted, even for the (approximate) truth, who do you convert? Like-minded bigots and weak-willed people-pleasers.
Mixed in with the good efforts for public and individual health are some very sad failures, plus corruption and conflict of interest, and so on. If you want an authoritative body (e.g. CDC, NHS, governing party (haha!)) to be trusted, they have to show themselves trustworthy with the truth.
Sometimes I've seen that done by the officially-promoted medical bodies... sometimes not. And when the tow-the-pro-vaccine-line bigotry shows through, I can't blame people for not buying it, and sticking to their community's narrative, no matter how unfounded: because why should they trust the people mocking them, any more than 'internet majority' trusts the American government to sincerely look after the poor.
Sorry for the rant. Tl;dr, beware of acting like an ad company if you want to be trusted.

Let them get sick and die, then. Win-win

Let the problem solve itself.

Let darwinism happen.

Oh well. I guess just let them die out then
¯(ツ)_/¯
- The problem here if the breaking of herd immunity that protects those that can't have vaccens e.g. immunocompromised
  
  Right. Back during the early days of the MMR vaccine refusals, it wasn't a big problem. Vaccine deniers were few and far between so they didn't break herd immunity.
  Then more people saw that you could skip the MMR vaccine and have nothing bad happen to you. So they skipped the vaccine for their children. Herd immunity weakened and now we're getting measles outbreaks.
  It was virtually wiped out, but it's making a comeback now thanks to people believing Facebook posts saying "the measles vaccine injected chemicals into my son and turned him autistic!"
- Problem is, they act like a reservoir for the virus to mutate into a form that can thwart vaccines. And then they scream that vaccines don't work because of new strains.

This is a self solving problem.
- That's unfortunately not how vaccines work. You need a certain threshold of participants.

They can't figure out a winning strategy because their position on the issue is very dicey. Their credibility has been eroded with that particular audience, and without the credibility to really speak to them, all they can really do is make things worse.
Since the anti-vaxxers have lost trust in establishments and given their trust to individuals instead, it becomes only individuals operating outside of an established structure that have any real chance of possibly getting through to them.
In other words, since it's randos online causing the problem, there's really only one group that can effectively combat it--other randos online. Offline we'd call this grassroots. Now though, welcome to the Information Age.
- The problem is that the anti-vaxxers aren't just believing any individual, they're believing a conspiracy theory. Anyone with evidence showing that their conspiracy theory is false is told that they are either part of the conspiracy or are a sheep falling for the conspiracy.
  You can't just talk people out of this. If there's a pile of 100 points in favor of a vaccine and 1 point against it, they'll ignore the 100 in favor, focus on the 1 against, add 20 more points that have been debunked repeatedly but still circulate on Facebook, and declare the vaccine too dangerous to use.
  I don't have a solution because "force everyone to say X online under penalty of law" is NOT a good solution. At the very least, imagine what another administration might do if that was the law. What other topics would we be forced to repeat the "official government sanctioned view" on? I don't think this is a problem with an easy solution.
  
  Certainly. I'd also depart from the evidence-based approach. Evidence-based approaches only work on people that believe in evidence-based approaches. If this was believed in, then the problem would not exist in the first place. Evidence-based approaches are a prevention method, not a treatment method. Once illness is established, they become useless for treatment.
  Fortunately, the evidence-based toolbox is just one of many that people have access to. It's just that being trained to prefer the evidence-based one makes the others unpalatable. They can, however, get results where evidence and rationality fail.
  edit: I think the most powerful, reliable toolbox is humor, incidentally. Being able to make people laugh is frankly a superpower sometimes. But people have different senses of humor, so it's never easy, comedian is just a tough job. Much easier to be a scientist, and have a reliable, proven methodology to work with imo.
- The problem is the instant someone disagrees with them they ignore everything they say. If one of their own changes their mind even a little, they ostracize them. It's a self-reinforcing delusion which are really hard to break people out of.
  
  Harder than really hard, nigh-impossible usually.
  That's better than legit-impossible though, which is the odds all major establishment sources get. If you've been taught that doctors, politicians, educators and media are all lying to you, who is left remaining?
- I’ll do my part.
  The vaccine is good. Get the vaccine.
  Hopefully this helps. :/
  
  When the vaccine became a litmus test for ideologies you know that folks who would gain from fewer constituents would go full bore in denialism… got my shots and standing on the balcony watching the pure bloods choke on their sputum and succumbing to Darwin’s kiss
  
  If only it was that easy. Life, unfortunately, is much harder than that though, and if someone says its supposed to be easy, they're selling something.

1). Arrest
2). Force vaccinate via tranq dart guns
3). Keep in jail until they have stayed long enough to get their 2nd dose.
4). Release them to a re-education camp
- This place is filled to the brim with authoritarians
  
  Not really. I'm the type of liberal who was raised a republican. Taught how to hate by republican parents. Taught how as a white Christian conservative, I was somehow a victim because someone said Happy Holiday's instead of Merry Christmas. Told that gays getting married was again victimizing me, because it's against their version of God. Told by conservative republican parents that seat belt laws were taking my rights away. Taught that corporal punishment is correct parenting, etc etc.
  Then, seeing the real world, and getting exposed to multiple cultures, countries, and faiths, and people of all kinds I discover... huh... Conservatives really are just assholes. So over time, issue by issue, I became a liberal Democrat. But you know what didn't change? Knowing how to hate. Republicans and the church taught me that. Being an asshole and liking to see some people suffer. Republicans and the church taught me that.
  Congratulations conservatives! You created a Democrat who can both hate and be an asshole like you! Only now, all conservatives are the target of those skills. I hate you like you hate the LGBTQ+ community, like you hate minorities, like you hate the poor, like you hate equal rights, like you hate democracy. That makes the asshole you bastards formed me into want to see you forced into doing the things that decent human beings would do.
  Buckle up, MF'ers
  Support minorities equal rights
  Support LGBTQ+ equal rights
  Vaccinate yourselves for the good of everyone
  Learn the history of white oppression on every type of minority
  Be pro union
  Fund your dang schools
  And more. And if we have to drag you to a prison cell and reprogram your fricken brains to make you into decent human beings, then I say do it! Because you republican / conservative / christo-fascist a-holes have it coming. The only extinction I want is that of conservatism / fascism, if only so you stop hurting everyone else.

what is the problem really? who is losing what here? i dont mean hurt feelings but what would we as a planet lose?
- Herd immunity protects us all. Believe me, if it were just the stupid people dying, then this would be an entirely different problem, one we might be able to ignore.
  But Covid doesn't kill fast enough or frequently enough. It lingers, and it might kill you, but it's more likely to just reproduce like crazy, mutate, and infect people around you. The longer we tolerate anti-vaxxers walking around coughing on people, the more likely we are to see yet another vaccine-resistant variant.
  
  the downvotes in this community tell me this is not up for discussion. c-sections in sweden ...give factfullness by hans rosling a try. i do not see where this would be an overall loss.
- If we could get the anti-vaxxers away from everyone else, then it wouldn't be as much of a problem. They could die of diseases off in a corner.
  But the issue is that they are still in society, being vectors for these diseases and causing new outbreaks.
  
  round the cookers up and ship em off somewhere then. they can all be terminally online together on some island

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