Posted on: Monday, April 8th 2024 at 3:00 am
They were called selfish, dangerous, even murderous. Their choices were labeled as ignorant, reckless, a threat to public health. But now, emerging research suggests that those who declined the COVID-19 vaccines may have been unfairly scapegoated for the pandemic's toll. A new study reveals how this discrimination was fueled by political polarization and inflated risk perceptions rather than science.
When the COVID-19 vaccines were first introduced, they were hailed by many as the key to ending the pandemic. Public health messaging strongly encouraged vaccination, framing it as a moral and civic duty.1 This narrative left little room for hesitancy or dissent. Those who remained unvaccinated, whether due to medical concerns, personal beliefs, or mistrust in the pharmaceutical industry, often found themselves on the receiving end of intense social condemnation.2
A new study published in the Journal of Medical Ethics titled, Blaming the unvaccinated during the COVID-19 pandemic: the roles of political ideology and risk perceptions in the USA, suggests that this condemnation crossed the line into unjustified scapegoating and discrimination.3 The research, led by psychologist Maja Graso, examined public attitudes towards unvaccinated individuals using fictitious scenarios. Participants were presented with characters of varying COVID-19 risk profiles based on age and health status, with their vaccination status manipulated.
Across multiple experiments with over 1,000 total participants, the researchers found that people consistently judged the unvaccinated characters more harshly. Compared to their vaccinated counterparts, the unvaccinated were seen as more blameworthy for issues like hospital strain, prolonged restrictions, and pandemic deaths--regardless of their personal COVID risk or whether they had already recovered from the virus. In other words, vaccination status was treated as a marker of social responsibility, overriding other medically relevant factors.
Interestingly, this scapegoating effect was largely driven by participants' political leanings. Those who identified as more liberal were significantly more likely to attribute blame to the unvaccinated, whereas conservatives showed little difference in their judgments of unvaccinated versus vaccinated individuals.
The study authors propose that this ideological pattern may be rooted in divergent perceptions of COVID-19 risk. Drawing on polling data from the pandemic's early phases, they note that liberals were more prone to overestimating hospitalization and mortality risks compared to conservatives.4 These exaggerated fears, in turn, predicted harsher moral outrage towards those not following vaccination guidelines.
However, the actual data on COVID risks tells a different story. The researchers emphasize that for many low-risk adults, the chances of severe illness or death if infected were quite low even before widespread vaccination--often under 1%.5 While vaccines do offer important protection, their efficacy in preventing transmission wanes over time,6 and prior infection also confers a robust immune defense.7 The study argues that scapegoating the unvaccinated as a homogeneous group was thus disproportionate to the true threat they posed.
For those who experienced such stigma firsthand, these findings may offer a grim sense of vindication. Many unvaccinated individuals faced social exclusion, job loss, and even health care denials,8 while being bombarded by media narratives painting them as ignorant or selfish. In retrospect, it seems these punitive attitudes were fueled more by groupthink and political tribalism than a rational weighing of the evidence.
Unvaccinated people had many reasons for their hesitance. Some had medical conditions that made vaccination risky; others were young and healthy and had concerns about still-emerging side effect profiles. Many were low income or minorities with a historically grounded wariness of medical exploitation.9 Lumping all of these groups together under the label of "anti-vaxxer" denied the nuance and legitimacy of their concerns.
Perhaps this study can serve as a cautionary tale about the dangers of moralizing public health. In a rush to achieve vaccination targets, it seems authorities and citizens alike were quick to vilify those who did not comply, creating an "us versus them" dynamic. Unvaccinated people became an all-purpose scapegoat for pandemic frustrations, their individual situations flattened into a one-dimensional caricature.
Ironically, these stigmatizing attitudes likely undermined some of the very goals they sought to achieve. Research has shown that trying to shame or pressure people into health behaviors can backfire, increasing resistance and mistrust.10 Empathy, open dialogue, and respect for bodily autonomy tend to be more effective at building public cooperation.
It's natural to seek someone to blame in times of crisis, and the declared COVID-19 pandemic has been a source of immense collective trauma. But as this study illuminates, such blame is often misplaced, colored more by fear and political bias than facts. Many unvaccinated people had valid reasons for their choices, and did not deserve the level of antipathy they received.
Moving forward, there are lessons to be learned about the importance of combating inflated risk perceptions that cast the unvaccinated as public enemy number one. Only by grounding our public health policies and attitudes in accurate, evidence-based assessments (which include accurate representation of the risks of mRNA jabs) can we hope to minimize unnecessary harms and maximize public wellbeing.
For those who chose not to get vaccinated and faced backlash for it, this study offers some moral clarity: You are not crazy, and you did not deserve to be so ruthlessly scapegoated. Your concerns were not inherently anti-science, and your individual risk/benefit calculation deserves respect. Ultimately, history may come to show that you were on the right side of the bodily autonomy debate, even as you bore the brunt of society's anxieties. While the declared pandemic laid bare many of our collective weaknesses, hopefully we can emerge with a strengthened commitment to public health policies guided by ethics and evidence, not ingroup ideology.
References
1. Jorgensen F, Bor A, Petersen MB. Increased pressure leads to decreased trust: A COVID-19 case. Polit Psychol. 2021;42(5):881-896. doi:10.1111/pops.12772
2. Kampf G. COVID-19: Stigmatising the unvaccinated is not justified. The Lancet. 2021;398(10314):1871. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(21)
3. Graso M, Aquino K, Chen FX, Bardosh K. Blaming the unvaccinated during the COVID-19 pandemic: the roles of political ideology and risk perceptions in the USA. J Med Ethics. Published online June 9, 2023. doi:10.1136/jme-2022-108825
4. Rothwell J, Desai S. How misinformation is distorting covid policies and behaviors. Brookings Institution. Published December 22, 2020. Accessed June 28, 2023. https://www.brookings.edu/
5. Ioannidis JPA, Axfors C, Contopoulos-Ioannidis DG. Population-level COVID-19 mortality risk for non-elderly individuals overall and for non-elderly individuals without underlying diseases in pandemic epicenters. Environ Res. 2020;188:109890. doi:10.1016/j.envres.2020.
6. Ferdinands JM, Rao S, Dixon BE, et al. Waning 2-dose and 3-dose effectiveness of mrna vaccines against COVID-19-associated emergency department and urgent care encounters and hospitalizations among adults during periods of Delta and Omicron variant predominance - VISION Network, 10 States, August 2021-January 2022. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep. 2022;71(7):255-263. doi:10.15585/mmwr.mm7107e2
7. Block J. Vaccinating people who have had covid-19: Why doesn't natural immunity count in the US? BMJ. 2021;374:n2101. doi:10.1136/bmj.n2101
8. Savulescu J, Giubilini A. Shaming unvaccinated people has to stop. We've turned into an angry mob and it's getting ugly. The Conversation. Published October 25, 2021. Accessed June 28, 2023. https://theconversation.com/
9. Bogart LM, Ojikutu BO, Tyagi K, et al. COVID-19 Related Medical Mistrust, Health Impacts, and Potential Vaccine Hesitancy Among Black Americans Living With HIV. J Acquir Immune Defic Syndr. 2021;86(2):200-207. doi:10.1097/QAI.
10. Dai H, Saccardo S, Han MA, et al. Behavioural nudges increase COVID-19 vaccinations. Nature. 2021;597(7876):404-409. doi:10.1038/s41586-021-03843-2
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