ANTI-VAXXERS
YOU HAVE TO BREATHE TO LIVE
Alex Henderson, AlterNet
August 24, 2021
Depiction of a COVID-19 patient in the hospital. (Shutterstock.com)
Although the COVID-19 Delta variant is potentially deadly all over the United States, the areas that are being hit especially hard tend to be Republican-leaning areas with low vaccination rates — areas like the one that New York Times reporter Alexander Stockton examines in a video that has been posted on YouTube.
The Ozarks, Stockton notes in the video, has some of the United States' lowest COVID-19 vaccination rates as well as what the reporter describes as "one of the worst COVID case rates in the country."
"I wanted to find out why residents here aren't getting vaccinated," Stockton explains.
The video shows Ozark residents expressing anti-vaxxer views as well as unvaccinated patients who have been hospitalized with COVID-19. One of them, 53-year-old Christopher Green, is "fighting for his life," Stockton notes. And Green is hardly unique in that regard.
"Like 90% of the patients in this packed hospital, he's unvaccinated," Stockton reports.
Asked why he refused to be vaccinated for COVID-19, Green — obviously struggling to breathe — told Stockton, "I'm more of a libertarian, and I don't like being told what I have to do." Green died 9 days after the interview, at age 53, the video explained.
The COVID-19 vaccinate rate is so low in Mountain Home, Arkansas, Stockton reports, that at a local hospital — Baxter Regional Medical Center — only half of the staff has been vaccinated.
A nurse working in that hospital, interviewed by Stockton, laments, "There are just a lot of people that you cannot convince to get vaccinated: patients, employees. It's very frustrating."
Watch the video below:
Dying in the Name of Vaccine Freedom | NYT Opinion
Individualistic COVID-19 vaccine messages
had best effect in US study
PULLMAN, Wash. – Emphasizing individual rather than community health risks from COVID-19, appeared to create more vaccine acceptance among participants in a study led by Washington State University researcher Porismita Borah.
The study, published in the Journal of Health Communication, tested messages on nearly 400 participants from across the United States in July 2020 before COVID-19 vaccines were available—and before misinformation on them was widespread. The researchers also found that “loss” framing, highlighting the potential health problems from not getting a vaccine, was slightly more effective than the positive “gain” framing that stresses the benefits.
“It's really interesting to see that individual frames were more persuasive,” said Borah, an associate professor in WSU’s Murrow College of Communications. “It’s hard to say exactly why, but it's possible that it is because culturally the United States is more individualistic in nature. It's also possible that because this pandemic situation is unprecedented, people were more concerned about individual consequences.”
The study showed that the wording of the content matters, Borah said and advised that public officials should pay attention to the content and use many different messages.
“There should not be just one type of message for promoting COVID-19 vaccines because again and again, we see that different messages resonate with different people,” said Borah. “At this point in time, with the dire situation we are in, we really need people to be vaccinated, and a variety of messages to reach specific groups of people could be beneficial.”
For this study, Borah tested four messages on equal sized groups of about 100 participants each, who were recruited through Amazon’s crowdsourcing site Mechanical Turk. The average age of the participants was 37; 57% were male; and 66.7% were white with 47.5% identifying as politically conservative.
The participants were first asked questions about how they felt about the benefits of vaccines, and then exposed to one of four screenshots of messages made to look like real Facebook posts from the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention.
The message that had an “individual loss framing,” wording that emphasized the potential personal health problems of not getting a COVID-19 vaccine, appeared to resonate the most. The findings were moderated by the participants’ perceptions of vaccine benefits. In other words, if their prior notions of vaccines were already positive, the more likely they were to be positively impacted by the messages.
This study was conducted before misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines had started circulating widely, and Borah is currently investigating how vaccine messaging might have an impact in this misinformation-filled environment.
“Now that there is so much misinformation particularly about the COVID-19 vaccines, it’s important to see how messaging interacts with people who hold those misperceptions – if they perceive these messages differently or if the messages resonate with them at all,” she said.
JOURNAL
Journal of Health Communication
METHOD OF RESEARCH
Experimental study
SUBJECT OF RESEARCH
People
ARTICLE TITLE
COVID-19 Vaccination Attitudes and Intention: Message Framing and the Moderating Role of Perceived Vaccine Benefits
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
23-Aug-2021
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