You know for a long time I've been arguing for more nuance in the discussion of all this stuff and the changing situation with the delta variant is exactly the kind of thing that has always motivated me to argue for calm discussion with as much information as possible.
Now that the delta variant has emerged, and is more infectious, and attacks a broader range of people, all kinds of people who last year could absolutely afford to wait and see, like I did, are going to be at substantially increased risk. But I think the refusal by a lot of sources to have a calm and information-rich discussion and the insistence on treating the whole covid situation as though no nuance was necessary actually makes it a lot harder to take people out of the vaccine-hesitant category, and put them in the vaccinated category.
I'm lucky in that by a sheer fluke of my working life I have this whole network of friends who are fairly highly placed people in critical positions in military, law enforcement, and medical fields. I myself am very lowly placed in the field of amateur boat construction, but work I used to do just happened to put me in these weird circles, and as such I got personal advice from people like, say, this one friend working in a related research role at a very large medical institution in the US, who would see lab numbers all the time from their on-site testing facility. It was that guy who warned me that the viral loads of delta were literally a thousand times what they'd seen on the original strain and he had the data to prove it and the knowledge to explain it and he's a friend of mine and I know he wouldn't twist the information or omit aspects with the intent to shape my behaviour. He just warned me, because the situation was, in his opinion, changing, and risk levels were really increasing. I have always taken his opinions seriously, so I went out and got vaccinated a couple of days later.
But the number of people who have a guy like that is really small, and to have several guys in my life like that is just really lucky, because I don't work in medicine or anything. So once things changed, I was easy to convince because I had trusted sources.
And this, I think, is the problem when the common sources - not the official sources, I'll say, because here in BC I haven't found them to be very alarmist or inclined to obfuscate, but the common sources, like the overwhelming majority of the media, don't allow for reasoned debate. I think by taking the approach of "we need to tell you what we need to tell you so you do what you're supposed to" you really erode trust not among the people who are naturally inclined to play ball, but among the naturally skeptical. Delta is different, and now, even if you're 25, or 35, or 45, and in good shape...there is a way higher chance than there used to be that you'll get really sick. You're actually at substantial risk. But how do you convince someone who is 35, in good health, and works somewhere that a bunch of people got the last round and nobody felt worse than the morning after a camping trip with the boys, but was told repeatedly that the last round was apocalyptic, that THIS time, they need to listen because THIS time, you're really telling them the truth?
Last fall, if you didn't have comorbidities, you weren't really old, you weren't vitamin D deficient, you were in good health...you know what? It was true that you had overwhelming odds of not getting very sick. That's true. There were occasional cases where really healthy people got extremely sick, but it was super rare. That's absolutely true.
This fall, I think it won't be that way. I think this season will be worse. I recommend vaccination to every adult because of the delta strain. But I think there's a serious consequence to telling people, who in many cases saw asymptomatic or barely symptomatic covid with their own eyes, that it wasn't primarily a disease of certain, already weakend groups. It really contributes to skepticism in subsequent rounds, because you've eroded your credibility. This is a classic public health mistake, actually: out of every field in medicine, public health is the most inclined to select behavioural results and tailor data to get the results they want. In fact that's basically the whole idea behind public health: we want you to wash your hands, so here's information we can put out that we discovered in testing makes people more likely to wash their hands. But nothing happens in a vaccuum. If you blow your handwashing load by putting out all the most gnarly, disgusting information early on, and only half the people who hear it start washing their hands...and then a bunch of the non-washers notice that they aren't really any sicker than the washers, now what? You have just created a group that is going to be both information-resistant if things change, and you-resistant if you come up with more ideas. I think that's a huge part of the bulk of vaccine-hesitant people. They were told it couldn't have come from a lab, and people who thought it did were conspiracy theorists. They were told masks don't help. They were told to stay inside. They were told that Sturgis would be a super-spreader event, but BLM protests were good for public health. They were told shutting down travel from China wouldn't help and was racist. Of course there's skepticism about the narrative. How does anybody square that stuff? Of course a bunch of it was wrong. None of that is from the BC CDC, of course: from day one I've said I thought Bonnie Henry was doing a great job and I'm a big fan of her approach and have a ton of respect for her. But if you're getting your news from most mainstream sources instead of just straight numbers from the CDC and doing your own risk math, and that's the overwhelming majority of people...you heard all that. That's the lack of vaccuum, right there. That's the environment you're working in when you have to convince people that this time, there's a very different risk and it's worse, a lot worse.
There will always be a hard core group of anti-vaxxers and you'll never crack that wall because you can't wake up a person who's pretending to be asleep. You can't talk to a person who refuses to hear you. But there's a much larger group of fence sitters and as I've said from the beginning of this whole mess, if you won't allow reasoned discussion about actual risk profiles and the only form of information transfer you'll accept is max volume warning sirens, that doesn't reach the people who heard the sirens, looked, and discovered the fire wasn't actually the way you said it was.
I think part of the reason it's easy to get to 70% but hard to get to 90% is that there are lots of naturally skeptical people, who have a not-totally-unwarranted distrust of authorities, of media, and of general herd mentality, and you can get to lots of them but not by screaming "hOrSE PasTE!" over them every time they start to ask a question, but by actually committing to an honest review of the information as it comes in. That's certainly the thing that worked for me: the conditions genuinely changed when delta emerged, I got good information about the new conditions, re-assessed my personal risk, and opted for the small theoretical risk of vaccine side effects over the (IMO) now much higher risk of covid.
I think a lot of people could be convinced in the same way and for the same reasons I was...but not without full and frank discussions, which will never happen on any platform that thrives on conflict to generate traffic. That's why I've been pretty active in this discussion all along, actually. It's somewhere that a lot of different opinions have been expressed, somewhere local where we might only be separated by one or two degrees of distance, and somewhere that's tolerated a lot of debate without devolving into total hostility.
So there you go, that's my summary: I totally understand the vaccine-hesitant, I totally agree that the mainstream narrative has been wrong most of the time, I totally agree that in general authorities can't be trusted, and I totally agree that this entire situation is almost certainly the result of really questionable research being carried out at the behest of the exact people now tasked with saving us and they're continuing to lie about their role in it and for a million reasons everyone should totally have their BS detector set to max.
BUT: on the basis of very good information from legitimate experts I personally know and trust - one of them was the only person I told when my wife was pregnant, I didn't even tell my family, I mean this is someone I trust absolutely - the situation HAS changed, it IS worse, delta IS different, and I really think being vaccinated heading into this fall and winter is STRONGLY advisable.
And anyone who wants to go back and look at my 9 million posts in this thread will agree, I haven't been cheerleading for vaccination. But when the risk changes, I change with it.