Red and Blue Americans are baffled by each other. Each tends to characterize the other as a monolith. But we both share something bigger than ourselves: A government that we have little faith in. The two sides blame each other for this state of affairs, but we shouldn’t “underplay the extent to which the American political system was designed by people who were distrustful of government.”
“Lack of trust does not correlate with apathy.” In fact, “[h]ighly educated people count skepticism a virtue. They typically would not report that they trust government, or any social institution, “most of the time.” What seems to make educated people uncomfortable, though, is the idea that the mass public shares this skepticism.“
That mass includes the religious right, “Christians [who] have not been taught to think of God working through secular institutions,” which is one of the reasons parables of the drowning man have not been a particularly effective tool for convincing unvaxxed Christian sceptics to get vaxxed. But not all of the anti-vaxxers are religious. Those who lack faith in government, sometimes also lack faith in government-backed science:
In March longtime Republican pollster Frank Luntz led a focus group with Trump voters. Many of them stressed that they were not “anti-vaxxers” who opposed all vaccines. Nor were they “COVID deniers.” They acknowledged that the disease was real; many had family and friends who had had it, and some had been ill themselves. But they were suspicious of the federal government and had a sense that science was often oversold.
Finally, there are those without access: to Google, to healthcare, to childcare, to an easily accessible vaccination site. But one of the founders of the national vax outreach campaign The Conversation, in which Black and Latino health-care workers provide information (and dispel misinformation) about the vaccines, told Ed Yong in America Is Getting Unvaccinated People All Wrong that we ought to have more faith. “Often, I see an entire family on the other side of the screen—kids and grandparents. People come. They come in groups. They’re willing to be vulnerable. They have questions. And their questions are all ones we have answers for. It’s not undoable.”