I suggest that fear is a reason why some people hesitate to take the covid vaccine. It's not the only reason, and even those who fear may have additional reasons or incentives for hesitating. But in this blog post, I focus on fear. I suggest that those of us who are not vaccine hesitant might be able to understand, or come close to understanding, those who are hesitant.
Fear is incommensurate
Fear is incommensurate. By incommensurate, I mean one person's fear cannot be compared against another person's fear, at least not easily. There is something about fear that is so personal and felt at such a deep level that it cannot be truly known by someone else.
Someone fears death from covid. Another person fears side effects the vaccine. At first glance, the second fear seems lesser than the first. Dying is a worse outcome than what appear to be the most common side effects of the covid vaccine. The risk of dying from covid seems to be greater than the risk of dying from the vaccine. The dynamic is similar if you compare the risks of severe complications from covid against the risks of severe complications from the vaccine.
But those are risks, and approaching those points as "risks" is part of a rational process.
Fear is irrational, or at least non-rational. It is, I suggest, not even expressible. If you fear something, it's hard to find words to describe it. It's seems almost always the case that any words, any metaphor, any analogy you choose to describe any specific fear will either trivialize it or exaggerate it.
A thought experiment
I have a fear of nosebleeds. If you insist that fear needs justification, it's difficult to justify that particular fear. I've never had a nosebleed so severe that I had to go to the hospital. I have, to my knowledge, no bleeding disorder that makes nosebleeds particularly dangerous for me. I'm not on blood thinning medication.
And yet my fear of nosebleeds is pretty strong. Maybe it's not quite a phobia, and my fear almost never prevents me from doing things I want to. But the fear is either always there, or in the background, something I'm vaguely aware of.
Now, let's assume that the covid vaccines had the known side effect of making it much more likely to have nosebleeds for a few weeks after getting the shot. Not emergency-room serious nosebleeds, but serious enough that it would take, say, 10 or 15 minutes to stop and that bleeding could recur at any point, say, whenever you sneeze or lie down.
You bet I would "hesitate" in that situation. I might hesitate for a long while. Maybe in the end I would choose the vaccine, but I'd still hesitate.
Logic would go only so far in convincing me not to hesitate. You might point out, for example, that one known complication for many people who get covid--the actual disease--is blood clots. A common treatment for blood clots is blood thinning medication, which either helps cause nosebleeds or makes them a big deal. The nosebleed-causing vaccine, however distressful, is better than getting the disease and still getting nosebleeds anyway.
That argument isn't quite as convincing as it might seem. The odds are probably low--not trivially low, but low nonetheless--that I would get blood clots should I contract covid. And if I'm careful, I might be able to guard against covid even without a vaccine. That may be motivated reasoning, but it's not fallacious reasoning.
True, the reason the reasoning is so "motivated" would be my fear. I said above that fear is "non-rational," but it does inform how we "rationally" weigh risk.
At any rate, I suspect that I would probably opt to get the vaccine even if it had that particular side effect. It would take a while, though. And I'd be very nervous.
Does my thought experiment scale?
My thought experiment may not mean much to you if you don't fear nosebleeds as I do. And maybe you have no great "fears" that make you tremble even as they are less than justified from a purely rational point of view. If so, then good for you.
But maybe there's an opportunity to consider why some people might hesitate. I suspect fear of some sort motivates a number of the hesitant. The fear may be discrete and identifiable (like my nosebleed example), or it may be inchoate. The hesitant may not acknowledge or even be fully aware of their fears. Yet I suspect the fears mix in weird ways with, say, the conspiracy theories that suggest covid is a hoax. (I may write more about conspiracy theories later.)
Maybe it doesn't scale. Maybe a too large number of the hesitant are motivated by ignorance or worse, some kind of malice. I doubt it, but who knows? And I'm not sure how to measure that. And consider this point from Alan Jacobs, not a person inclined to belittle people simply because he disagrees with them. When he speaks with the vaccine hesitant he finds that they are:
- They are openly and intensely angry
- They declaim their beliefs like people reciting a creed, never — and I mean never — asking what my views are or even giving me a chance to state those views should I want to.
Sendoff
Jacobs actually has more observations, and his post is worth reading in full. I cite just that one part, though, to acknowledge that fear might not be the only issue involved and that simply trying to "understand" might not yield the results I want.
As I've said before, if you have declined to take the vaccine, I urge you to reconsider. I urge you to balance the harms, both known and hypothetical, against the known benefits. While I disagree with facile attempts to demonize you as "anti-vaxxers," I also differ with you on the value of vaccine hesitancy.
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