In many parts of Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, hesitancy, misinformation on social media, and lack of adequate institutions is now more of a hindrance than getting shipments.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/01/world/africa/coranavirus-...
These people were considered heroes last year (and overwhelmingly exposed to this virus while everyone else stayed at home). Now their judgment is in question because they won't follow the herd, with all of their medical experience/expertise being rejected or discredited. The inconsistency is a work of art.
Everyone should read this: https://www.amazon.com/Rape-Mind-Psychology-Menticide-Brainw... — you will find an alarming number of parallels to our current situation.
It's not a "hasty generalization."
> Now their judgment is in question
> These people = doctors, nurses, etc (medical professionals).
Those professions were considered heroic, not every single person individually. Yes, many that served those positions well were individually celebrated too. The ones that didn't, and there were plenty, had their judgment heavily questioned, even last year.
Drawing conclusions about an individual based on a broad category they happen to fall into is "hasty generalization", by the book.
Most footsoldiers who die in a war are considered heroes, and people can consider them that without holding in their heads at the same time the idea those soldiers would have made good generals.
For thousands of years, privileged citizens of empires have gotten more rights and better treatment than non-citizens and foreigners. Some humans are just born into a position where they don't need to fear for their life or fight to survive. This is true even in the US; all over the country, in the same square mile, you will find people starving, and people throwing away good food; people rejecting a vaccine just to exercise their personal power, and people waiting 8 hours outside in freezing cold to get one. Our societies seem destined for injustice.
The vast majority of doctors get themselves vaccinated, whereas a large portion of nurses only get vaccinated as needed legally.
Are these people performing treatments on patients that they do not believe work?
The mind boggles.
Or... the people who know the most about the tradeoffs and benefits of this particular vaccine have done a cost/benefit analysis and rejected it? I'd be curious to see if they're rejecting this particular (experimental, rushed, based-on-unproven-mRNA technology) vaccine but not, say, the mumps or rubella vaccines.
And, of course, others who are also in that better position evaluate the evidence differently.
One could draw two conclusions from this: "People are idiots", or "the evidence is not as clear-cut as we're being told".
(Edit: although it is plausible that this is due to some bias in the statistics - e.g. medical workers are expected to be working age adults (who are statistically more likely to be vaccinated anyway), and the general population is obviously a wider range)
So does this suggest that those in the know are more likely to be vaccinated? Or that those in the know are taking a wait-and-see approach?
My... estimate? Gut feel? I do not have data... is that medical workers are at least no less likely than others of their same age group to get vaccinated. They may well be more likely to get vaccinated.
But there are holdouts by the thousands, some of whom are willing to quit their high-paying jobs in order to avoid the vaccine. I don't think they're all just stubborn idiots. I think that at least many of them have done their own risk assessment, and decided that it wasn't worth it.
On the other hand, others have gotten vaccinated, by the tens or hundreds of thousands, and they aren't all idiots or sheep, either.
So... my read of the behavior of the people in the field is that the evidence leads toward the vaccines being worth it, but it's not as clear-cut as the media tells us. But I'm trying to use psychology to judge a matter of medical technology, and who knows if that approach is even halfway valid...