The New York Times posted a short video about vaccine hesitancy in Arkansas where COVID is spreading quickly and hospitals are getting overwhelmed. There are a lot of reasons people shun the vaccine, but they have a common thread of misinformation combined with selfishness disguised as personal choice. People don’t want to be told what to do and they believe that either the vaccine isn’t necessary or the disease isn’t that deadly. 

A quick look around social media revealed the ignorance leading to the vaccine resistance. One friend posted a graphic showing  that more than 90% of the hospitalizations in her area were among unvaccinated people. Then the comments came in. One woman said that “her nurse” told her that they were getting flooded with COVID patients but that vaccinated people are listed as pneumonia to skew the statistics. Another said that vaccinated people were getting the virus multiple times so it clearly didn’t work. Fortunately, people pushed back against the disinformation in the comments. 

In another thread, a man posted a tick-tok video of a “doctor” claiming that everyone who takes the shot will die in between six months and three years. The video has 1.9 million likes. Another tik-tok claimed that the “dark web” had discovered the database of everyone who was vaccinated and that the Russians were monitoring us through micro-chips inserted with the vaccine. That video was removed by this morning, but, still, people are believing that shit. 

The saddest story, though, comes in a series of posts from eastern North Carolina.  In the earliest post, a woman shows her teenaged son in the hospital with COVID. He’s got an oxygen tube attached to his nose. She asks for prayers and a host of responses complies. “Prayers up!” “Praying!” The prayer icon is common. The next post shows the same kid, but this time he’s on a ventilator, lying face down. Again, lots of prayers and people thanking God that he’s been saved, but no one, not one, mentions vaccines. Luckily, the final photo is the boy sitting up in bed, oxygen in his nose, but off of the ventilator. His mother praises God and thanks doctors but never mentions vaccines. 

These people have been primed for decades by Fox News and talk radio to believe that the mainstream media is lying to them and that they can’t trust authorities in government. Instead, they believe hucksters like Alex Jones, Sean Hannity, and Tucker Carlson. These people are literally dying and still believing the people who are sending them down the road to sickness and death. 

The conservative media is hell bent on bashing mask mandates, vaccine passports, and people like Anthony Fauci instead of promoting the type of public health measures that could get us out of this mess. In the NYT’s video, people are scared to let their neighbors know they are vaccinated because vaccines are socially unacceptable. By refusing the vaccine because it’s an individual’s choice, they want personal freedom without personal responsibility. And they are literally killing people, including themselves.