The story on NPR about the low vaccination rate in Alabama made me realize there is probably another element to the resistance to get vaccinated: poor access to healthcare to begin with.
Suspicion about the vaccine and its "side effects" (infertility, etc.) probably come as much from lack of access to healthcare as from politics or ignorance (or Facebook; but I repeat myself). I have full access to a doctor; I see her twice a year for my chronic (but hardly life-threatening) conditions. It's one reason I'm at much lower risk for heart disease (prevelant in my family) or diabetes (ditto) or other conditions associated with "old age." I don't fear new vaccines (like a flu vaccine) because I trust my doctor and her recommendations. I trust the medical system, because it has served me well.
Of course, I've had health insurance since my late 20's (I'm literally old enough to remember when my GP had to hire more staff and take on another GP in his practice to start paying for the staff to handle health insurance claims. I'm probably the last generation to think of health insurance as hospital insurance, not something you needed to go to the doctor for a check up.), so of course I'm comfortable with the healthcare system. If I didn't have easy and frequent access to healthcare, if my access was limited to emergencies and crises and maybe an occassional DPT booster when I could get to the free clinic to get it (I've lived very close to that life at times; I know the demands on one's time that don't give much time to go to the doctor during the work week), I might well think very differently.
Which means, once again, we have met the enemy, and he is us. Our indifference to public health today is not a reflection of a decline in interest since I went to the school to get my polio vaccine in a sugar cube when I was 6. It is something we have enforced and ensured with our animosity toward caring for others (I responded to a comment on "Next Door" the other day about the county spending too much money on healthcare. I pointed out we could close the county hospitals (which hospitals used to be the norm in America; private hospitals were rare, or were run by religious institutions) and let people die in the streets, but what good would that do? Harris County has one of the premier hospitals in the country, a mainstay of the vaunted Texas Medical Center. But to some people, that's the problem.). That animosity, of course, walks hand in hand with racism, with recently reshaping society through law (primarily) to put non-whites side by side with whites. The "fear of a brown planet" is, as my regulars know too well, what I think is the primary motivating force in American culture and politics today.
And now it's affecting our public health; now it's making us sick, breaking the back of our healthcare system (in terms of people and stress and overwork and soon again, overcrowding) and literally killing us off. But while we're being slapped in the face with the consequences and reality of global warming, and we know basically why that's happening (i.e., the Industrial Revolution that made modern life possible is rapidly making it impossible), we don't yet recognize the consequences happening because of systemic racism.
It's like we're all going to die with a quizzical look frozen on our features, wondering why everything turned against us. I suspect the Israelites felt much the same way when they found themselves in Babylon, and Jerusalem was just a smoking ruin.
What's that old adage about those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it? Evangelicals love to say America is God's modern Israel, God's favored country. They overlook what happened to Israel ending, effectively, in the Babylonian Exile; or they blame the decline on others, and ignore the prophets who told the people of Israel exactly where the blame lay. Hint: it wasn't with Babylon, or God's fickleness or indifference. And the prophets suffered with the people; our modern day "prophets" just want to gloat, sure they will be spared the disaster they warn is coming.
The problem with learning from history is that history never repeats itself; but the same results do recur. We are rather short-sighted creatures, on the whole. We want the lesson to be obvious, plain, and simple.
And the one way history repeats itself, over and over again, is that we never want the lesson to apply to us, or to require anything of us. We just want to escape the consequences of our folly; and we're always surprised and upset when that never happens.
Covid-19 is not a nation ending cataclysm. But will it make us open our eyes and see that justice is about all of us, not just some of us? Or will it just make us screw our eyes shut even tighter, wishing all the bad things away, especially from us?
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