Who’d have thunk it?
Who’d have thunk it?
T he New York Times has long struggled with the question of whether or not its news pages should report facts that undermine the claims made by its opinion writers and their allies. Sometimes, the answer is no. But when the answer is yes — when the Times’ news reporters tell the truth — we get what James Taranto used to call “two papers in one.” So it is with Saturday’s Times report on unvaccinated Americans.
The current ideological push from the left is to paint skepticism of and resistance to the COVID vaccines as overwhelmingly a right-wing phenomenon, concentrated among the Trumpiest precincts of the Republican base. That is illustrated by the conspiracy theory I discussed Friday, as well as by the furious response to Michael Brendan Dougherty’s column on persuading the unvaccinated. As Ross Douthat summed up that response in his own Times column, many journalists regard
the great mass of the unvaccinated as victims of deliberately manufactured paranoia, the blame for which can be laid partly on their own partisan self-delusion and partly on wicked actors in the right-wing media complex — from conspiracy theorists flourishing online to vaccine skeptics interviewed by Tucker Carlson to Republican politicians who have pandered to vaccine resistance.
Thus, you have people such as Times political writer Reid Epstein contrasting “my Washington neighborhood, which has among the highest vaccination rates in the city and voted 92 percent for Mr. Biden” with “places like Arkansas,” and claiming that “it is Republicans and Republican-run states that have emerged as the biggest hurdle in America’s vaccination efforts.”
That brings us to Saturday’s heavily reported piece, “Who Are the Unvaccinated in America? There’s No One Answer.” Bylined by four reporters (Julie Bosman, Jan Hoffman, Margot Sanger-Katz, and Tim Arango) and reflecting “interviews this past week with dozens of people in 17 states,” it paints a picture that acknowledges the existence of a hard core of MAGA-hat-wearing never-vaxxers, but it goes well beyond them. We meet Democrats, independents, and libertarians who offer a variety of estimations of their own risks and their own rights. And the data tell the same story:
Though some states like Missouri and Arkansas have significantly lagged the nation in vaccination rates, unvaccinated Americans are, to varying degrees, everywhere: In Cook County, Ill., which includes Chicago, 51 percent of residents are fully vaccinated. Los Angeles County is barely higher, at 53 percent. In Wake County, N.C., part of the liberal, high-tech Research Triangle area, the vaccination rate is 55 percent.
Of course, overall vaccination rates can be somewhat misleading. Children under twelve are not allowed to be vaccinated, and they make up 15 percent of the population. Even many adults who have been vaccinated are hesitant to vaccinate children in the 12–15 age range, who became eligible for vaccination only very late in the process. (Then again, the young are at far less risk than older Americans.)
Still, even looking at the Times’ map, one of the most-vaccinated places in the country is Hamilton County in upstate New York, with a 75 percent vaccination rate. Trump won Hamilton County by 30 points. Another is McKinley County, N.M., which is 90 percent vaccinated and 75 percent Native American. Much of South Florida is heavily vaccinated, as are several other parts of the state.
The national map looks less like a red–blue map than like a voter-turnout map; places that have historically had high levels of public participation in elections and public trust in institutions — e.g., certain corners of New England and the Upper Midwest — are the most heavily vaccinated. But there are exceptions: The heavily Hispanic, working-class border regions of Texas are ahead of the national average, for example, despite a history of low voter-participation rates. Maps of New York City’s vaccination patterns look more like a map of the city’s class divide than its partisanship, with high levels of vaccination in the lower two-thirds of Manhattan and the northeast of Queens, the pace of vaccination in South Brooklyn and the South Bronx lagging behind, and Staten Island’s vaccination rate squarely in the middle. Then again, vaccine resistance is clearly higher in rural areas in the center and west of the country’s interior, where people simply have a lower expectation of being in regular close quarters with strangers.
One thing that is quite clear from nearly all reporting on this topic is that a significant reason cited for hesitation is that the FDA has granted only emergency-use authorization and not formal approval to the vaccines. In a sense, this is irrational; we have already used the vaccines on 164 million Americans, many multiples of the number of subjects typically used to study drugs in FDA trials. Never in human history have so many people in the world been given the same medications in such a short span of time. While it is impossible to study every possible long-term effect, FDA trials typically cannot do that, either. A full green light from the FDA is probably one of the few public steps that could make a dent in public opinion.