Throughout the pandemic, the media have often been hamstrung in efforts to convey the severe medical effects of COVID-19 by their inability to film actual patients in the last stages of infection. One of the barriers has been the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA),the national standard ensuring privacy of personal health information.
Nevertheless, some patients have provided the necessary permission to be videoed while still in the hospital. As a result we have seen some some dramatic patient care stories produced by news organizations intent on communicating to their readers and viewers the serious and potentially lethal nature of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and its subsequent mutations, even in its final stages.
Along those lines, The New York Times opinion video producer Alexander Stockton and senior video journalist Lucy King have created a short film. Titled “Dying in the Name of Vaccine Freedom,“ it explores how and why vaccine refusal and denialism have overwhelmed one area of the country. The Ozarks region of Arkansas has vaccination rates hovering around 36%, even as local hospitals fill up with unvaccinated COVID-19 patients. Stockton, who narrates the video, says he doesn’t feel that the vaccine refusal in the Ozarks region is being driven by conspiracy-addled QAnon theories. Rather, as demonstrated over and over in the video, he shows that the objections are invariably wedded to the rhetoric of personal “freedom” and “choice.”
The video is available on the Times’ Twitter, and has been posted on YouTube as well.
The seven-minute film profiles, among others, 53-year-old Christopher Green, who (between coughing spells) describes himself as “more of a libertarian” who doesn’t like being “told what I have to do.” At the time he was initially filmed, Green had not yet been attached to a ventilator. Green’s doctor candidly admits that if he received ventilator support she did not expect him to survive. Green died in the hospital, nine days after being interviewed.
Stockton and King also highlight the reasons used by residents of Arkansas towns like Mountain Home (pop. 12,500) to justify their vaccine refusal, despite the fact that nearly everyone who lives there knows someone who has died of COVID-19. While Stockton acknowledges that “misinformation certainly exists” and is influencing the residents of this region, the film attributes the main reason for vaccine refusal to individualistic “freedom” rhetoric.
The film also explores how the voices of pro-vaccine residents tend to be drowned out by that rhetoric, particularly when it is echoed by Republican political leaders such as Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson and others who emphasize, again and again, the voluntary nature of getting the vaccine. Leaders then compound the problem by signing laws banning local mask mandates and preemptively banning bogeymen like “vaccine passports.” Of course, this simply reinforces the inclination on the part of residents to refuse the vaccines. Stockton concludes, rather despairingly, that the best motivation for many of these people is being hospitalized themselves; several are depicted in hospital beds, expressing their sincere regrets about remaining unvaccinated.
One significant omission is the unmistakable role that social media, particularly Facebook, has played in fostering this deadly phenomenon of vaccine refusal, and thus prolonging the pandemic. The film begins with clips of adamant vaccine opponents loudly and boldly parroting false assertions that COVID-19 vaccines are “unproven,” “untested,” or otherwise ineffective, that they amount to a “poison” being forced into people, and that requiring children to wear masks in school is “detrimental to their health.” Nowhere is it suggested or even implied that any of these people have any scientific or medical expertise. It is clear that most have been inculcated into their anti-vaccine positions by conservative media—where this disinformation breeds and metastasizes—and most of them get that disinformation from Facebook and other social media, where feeds are conveniently, even automatically, tailored to their political and social interests. To the extent people really believe their freedoms and choice are impacted by getting vaccinated, it’s frankly hard to accept that these aren’t simply viewpoints they’ve been fed through social media, rather than having germinated in their own heads.
The COVID-19 pandemic, unlike prior pandemics, has the unique distinction of occurring in the era where people gravitate not to traditional news sources, but to social media for most of their information. Such alternative sources of “competing” facts simply weren’t available to prior generations at anywhere near the level that exists in the ubiquitous world of Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter today. In decades past, there was no easy way for such dangerous and inaccurate health information to propagate so freely and quickly, so you wouldn’t see whole swaths of the country being taken in by it. Now, all that’s required is a cleverly worded meme, a pseudo-scientific paper, or some cynical political stooge’s bloviation for millions of people of wildly varying degrees of intelligence to grow eager to believe, validate, and spread misinformation.
Had this country’s citizens evolved in terms of innate brainpower and critical thinking skills at the same speed as digital media have evolved, this wouldn’t be a problem. But when Americans rely on information from dubious, unverifiable sources—based mostly on what their close friends and neighbors “like” or “share” on Facebook or other platforms—the channels and outlets that have traditionally conveyed accurate and truthful information tend to be drowned out. When Green in the Times film refers to himself as “more of a libertarian,” for example, it’s more than likely he’s basing that assessment on something he saw on social media equating libertarianism with vaccine refusal. When a woman declaring that vaccines simply make people sicker makes her righteous, self-assured statements, she is echoing something she read, probably on Facebook, that was in turn read, approved, and urged on her by a friend. It made sense to her limited worldview, so it must be true.
The effect of this type of constant self-reinforcement through social media is to create a huge, bubble population of fairly ignorant people convinced of their own expertise in areas where they have no real knowledge or experience, based on sources that are created by people motivated by specific agendas but likewise with no real expertise. What social media (particularly Facebook) does is to reinforce—through “likes,” “shares,” and other reactions—a specific point of view or interpretation whose worth is not measured by its actual truth, but by the degree to catches on with like-minded individuals. In a population of Americans that, for the most part, has no more critical analytical skills than it did in 1918, for example, a constant reinforcement of one’s own “rightness” and “correctness” on any matter is practically irresistible. It caters to the most common human instinct—to be approved and validated by others—even when the information is intended only to feed into their political and social preconceptions. In reality, people absolutely crave that feeling of superiority to others; Facebook and social media provide millions of this country’s most undiscerning folks that opportunity. If it weren’t for Facebook and the feedback loop it and its competitors promote, there would be anti-vaxxers, but their numbers wouldn’t be close to what they are now.
Over the past few months we’ve seen story after story about vaccine refusers dying of COVID-19. Many of these stories include pictures of people before they contracted the virus, all with smug expressions on their faces. We know it all, those faces seemed to say, before they were whisked away into hospitals and placed on ventilators, just like Green in the Times video. As Stockton and King’s film shows, many think they do know it all, literally until their dying breaths. They can’t accept that their contrived notions of “freedom” and “choice” aren’t their own, but rather words that have been carefully drilled into their heads by people with political agendas who couldn’t care less about the real-life consequences, people who are amplified by social media platforms.
So contrary to Stockton and King’s title, these people aren’t getting
sick and dying “in the name of freedom,” and least of all in the name
of “choice.” They’re getting sick and dying in the name of something
they read and liked on Facebook or some other social media platform
because it made them feel good, and made them feel smart … even
though what they read and “liked” happened to be totally, grievously,
and even fatally wrong.
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