>>20072224 The Unvaccinated Were Scapegoated for Failure of COVID Vaccines - Journal of Medical Ethics studyPN
Pdfs attached, astoundingly long, study and the definition of Propaganda
Implications for medical ethics, science communications and ideological divisions
Humans often react to threats by applying generalisations driven by a miscalibration of risks, selective information retrieval or the unwillingness to update beliefs based on new information.14 56 Our data provide evidence that these processes led some people to use a single piece of information—vaccination status—as a heuristic for making judgements about the culpability of individuals, regardless of whether or not they are statistically at risk of needing care, pose a grave threat to others, have recovered from the virus and whether the vaccinated individuals have not been boosted for many months. These overgeneralisations and the resulting scapegoating are not without social and ethical implications.
One social consequence is that scapegoating can subject people to ostracism, discrimination and, in extreme cases, even violence and persecution.10 11 13 63 64 While we did not seek to document these consequences in our studies, scapegoating risks reinforcing public attitudes that may be based as a justification for discrimination. For instance, multiple policies were implemented in the USA to pressure individuals to get vaccinated, including employer mandates and vaccine passports. Although widely supported,49 these policies did not consider the protective effects of prior infection or the age-based risk distribution of severe disease outcomes. There is some evidence that they generated adverse societal consequences, such as reactance, and increased vaccine scepticism and social polarisation,6 among others. Therefore, because the C19 pandemic showed how the public’s understanding of health information could impact social cohesion, we strongly recommend that the medical community considers the downstream and negative impacts of presumptively well-intentioned guidelines.
Second, scapegoating implies that the blame is either undeserved or disproportional. Thus, we encourage public health researchers, practitioners and science communicators to consider the implications of relying primarily on fear-based approaches to mitigating the harms caused by C19.65 For example, if 35% of US adults believed that at least half of C19 infections require hospitalisation,18 it suggests a significant health communication failure. A result is that it can lead people to turn against and blame each other when doing so is not justified by available facts, which may not have been adequately presented to the public. We submit that a relevant ethical question that public health officials should debate is whether it is morally obligatory for them to correct misinformation regardless of whether it overestimates or underestimates of C19 risk.
Third, our findings also show the impact of citizens’ political ideology on scapegoating. We did not test the sources of liberals’ greater likelihood to scapegoat the unvaccinated individuals, but we encourage further investigation of whether media exposure could be a contributing factor. Just as conservative media and politicians are culpable for misinformation leading people to underestimate certain C19 risks,66 67 it is possible that liberal outlets introduced misinformation in the opposite direction. For instance, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC, an outlet with a decidedly liberal audience,68 noted in March 2021: ‘Now we know that the vaccines work well enough that the virus stops with every vaccinated person.’69 However, this claim was not possible to make at that time,70 nor was it true. The original clinical trials did not test for effectiveness on transmission.71 Early evidence, and reasonable deduction from the research in vaccinology and virology, suggested that the vaccines would not fully stop transmission. By April 2021, more than 10 000 vaccine breakthrough infections had been officially reported across the USA (a substantial undercounting), 10% of which had been hospitalised and 2% of which had died.72 An outbreak investigation by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in July 2021 found that 74% of cases linked to a summer event in Massachusetts were vaccinated and most were symptomatic.73 Therefore, we argue that it is important to correct the dubious claims made by both sides of the political spectrum, as both may distort risk and fuel polarisation…
https://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2023/06/09/jme-2022-108825