Unmasked by Emily Mendenhall

Author:Emily Mendenhall [Mendenhall, Emily]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

VACCINE HESITANCY

“YOU SHOULD STAY this year. Just put the girls in school at Spirit Lake,” my sister said.

I had just learned in late July that Georgetown University, where I am a professor, was going all virtual—that I would be teaching at least for the next semester completely online. Adam was also working full time from home because researchers at Johns Hopkins University were not allowed in the building (with the exception of those scientists actively working on developing the COVID-19 vaccine). My second grader’s class was also completely virtual. My sister had a point.

“Maybe,” I said, waffling because I really didn’t know what we should do. I was pulled to stay at the Lakes, in the comfort of my family. Yet, many of my students at Georgetown were headed back to campus and I hoped to social distance with those who needed to talk in person: my students lost jobs, family members, and a sense of place, and struggled with overwhelming anxiety. I also felt some uncertainty about sending my kids to my alma mater. I spent so much of the summer talking with people who doubted coronavirus was real and many people resisted masks for the upcoming school year. Would we be safe?

I first started asking about the strong anti-masking stance among some of my yoga friends and quickly realized that mutual friends who were anti-maskers were also anti-vaxxers.1 I spoke to a woman who knew some of the families driving vaccine hesitancy in the community who I will call Minnie. Minnie explained, “I seriously don’t even know how to begin talking about it but like they [the owners of a local business] don’t believe in masking. They’re anti-vaxxers, which should already tell you how they feel about modern medicine.”

I was not surprised to hear Minnie’s story, or the frustration she felt. Resistance to vaccination has long cultivated skepticism in what science does and how medicine acts. Vaccine hesitancy was rooted in conspiracy in Britain in the 1880s and came to the United States much later.2 More recent vaccine hesitancy has been linked to the conspiracy theories promoted by American celebrities that were linked to a debunked 1998 article by Andrew Wakefield and his colleagues published in the Lancet that warned the measles vaccine caused autism.3 This article spurred widespread fear of vaccines. (Although the journal rescinded it a decade later, it caused extraordinary harm and the deaths of multiple children due to measles.4)

Heidi Larson explains in her book Stuck: How Vaccine Rumors Start—and Why They Don’t Go Away that the greatest challenge is that it took so long for those working in health and immunization to realize how deeply rooted the beliefs of the doubting public had become. Larson argues “some of these views have hardened to the point of no return, further nursed by the broader societal and political polarization in which the vaccine debates are situated.”5 This polarization is in part behind the emergent trend that the anti-mask group became bound to the anti-vax group:

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