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.
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.