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Understanding vaccine skepticism requires a look at the nature of health care and science in the U.S.<\/p>\n
The Capitol takeover in early January put American conspiracy theorists on the world stage. Though conspiracy theories have a long history in the United States\u00a0\u2014\u00a0on topics ranging from JFK\u2019s assassination to 9\/11\u00a0\u2014\u00a0they have never been as widespread or as dangerous as they are today. Most notable among this sector is the shadowy far-right movement known as QAnon, which combines\u00a0centuries-old anti-Semitic tropes<\/a>\u00a0with ideas of a global pedophilic cabal linked to the Clintons. Conspiracy theorists like QAnon have been arguing recently that the coronavirus pandemic is a hoax (or a \u201cplandemic\u201d) and that masks and vaccines are part of a secret plan to control the population. Though absurd, these ideas have severe consequences and threaten countless people.<\/p>\n Yet vaccine skepticism goes beyond fringe ideas promoted by the Far Right. Even before the pandemic, there was an \u201canti-vaxxer\u201d movement that held generally liberal views and that promoted \u201cnatural health\u201d practices\u00a0\u2014\u00a0some legitimately linked to better health, like organic eating and yoga, others completely spurious, like homeopathic medicine. It included figures like\u00a0Joseph Mercola<\/a>, a multimillionaire who built his fortune on vitamin supplements, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., son of RFK and environmental advocate. This sector is\u00a0generally white and well off<\/a>. They are more likely to send their children to\u00a0private schools<\/a>\u00a0and to live in\u00a0exclusive neighborhoods<\/a>. Troublingly, however, despite the difference in social compositions,\u00a0there is evidence<\/a>\u00a0that the ideas of the anti-vaxx sector are merging with those of QAnon and the Far Right.<\/p>\n But there other sectors whose skepticism should not be dismissed as based on pseudoscience or conspiratorial ideas.\u00a0Several<\/a>\u00a0surveys<\/a>\u00a0have shown that people of color are less likely to have confidence in Covid-19 vaccines because of their legitimate anger toward and mistrust of the American medical system. African Americans and Latinos have historically suffered neglect, mistreatment, and outright abuse by the health care industry. Among oppressed communities, vaccine reluctance is the logical outcome of a health care system that time and again has failed to meet their needs and those of the majority of the population. When official science continually puts forward inadequate solutions, dismisses the input of those most affected, and acts as a dutiful servant for big business, a lack of trust is the obvious result.<\/p>\n To understand how science has failed to live up to its promise, we must examine how science functions in society. The\u00a0Biden White House says<\/a>, \u201cAmerica deserves a response to the Covid-19 pandemic that is driven by science, data and public health\u00a0\u2014\u00a0not politics.\u201d The statement fits well with liberal ideology. \u201cScientists must rise above politics,\u201d as a 2019\u00a0Nature\u00a0<\/em>editorial<\/a>\u00a0put it. But contrary to this liberal worldview, politics cannot be separated from either science, data, or public health. It is politics\u00a0\u2014\u00a0or more specifically, political, social, and economic interests\u00a0\u2014\u00a0that determines what problems science investigates and what solutions are proposed, accepted, and rejected. For socialists, the key questions are what set of politics and whose interest guide the development of science.<\/p>\n The dialectical biologists Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin made the critical observation that\u00a0science reflects the conditions of its production and the viewpoints of its producers or owners. The agenda of science, the recruitment and training of some and the exclusion of others from being scientists, the strategies of research, the physical instruments of investigation, the intellectual framework in which problems are formulated and results interpreted, the criteria for a successful solution to a problem, and the conditions of application of scientific results are all very much a product of the history of the sciences and associated technologies and of the societies that form and own them. The pattern of knowledge and ignorance in science is not dictated by nature but is structured by interest and belief.1<\/sup><\/p>\n This is why, in spite of its advances, capitalist science has been so often incapable of preventing health crises. The CDC \u2014 ostensibly an agency run by scientists \u2014 declared masks to be unnecessary for more than a month after the coronavirus outbreak. Today, the same agency says it is \u201csafe\u201d to reopen schools without teachers or students fully vaccinated. And it\u2019s hardly the first time that official science has put forward \u201csolutions,\u201d that later proved disastrous for public health. Despite initial assurances of safety by scientists, the burning of coal , prescription opioids, and nuclear energy all led to\u00a0major<\/a>\u00a0health<\/a>\u00a0emergencies<\/a>\u00a0in the past century. It is not a matter of a few bad scientists. When science is so heavily influenced by the pressures of capitalism and the profit motive, such catastrophes are inevitable.<\/p>\n In the imperialist era, science has been one of the primary tools for the central countries to dominate the globe. New military, surveillance, and communications technologies\u00a0are used to subjugate the semicolonial world and plunder its resources. After the emergence of Sars-CoV-2, the development of a vaccine\u00a0\u2014\u00a0ostensibly a \u201cglobal public good\u201d\u00a0\u2014\u00a0took on major geopolitical implications. Contracts between vaccine manufacturers and the world\u2019s wealthiest nations replicated patterns of dependency for the peripheral countries. Israel has been widely lauded for vaccinating more than half its people\u00a0\u2014\u00a0but has\u00a0refused to deliver<\/a>\u00a0more than a scant number of vaccines to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, leaving the residents of these territories to die.<\/p>\n According to Oxfam,\u00a0nine out of 10 residents<\/a>\u00a0of the poorest nations will miss out on the vaccine in 2021, as the vast majority of Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are destined for the U.S. and other imperialist countries. As\u00a0Nina DeMeo writes<\/a>, \u201cRich countries with only 14 percent of the world\u2019s population have bought up 53 percent of the eight most promising vaccines.\u201d Canada has secured a supply sufficient to vaccinate its population four times over. Not only have the richest nations hoarded the vaccines for themselves, but they have often prevented poorer nations from accessing the science and technology used in vaccine development. Initiatives to pool technology and knowledge across borders for the development of Covid-19 vaccines were\u00a0widely supported<\/a>\u00a0by nations of the Global South. But the United States and the United Kingdom effectively killed these initiatives by refusing to take part, since doing so would encroach on the pharmaceutical giants\u2019 intellectual property.<\/p>\n How can we explain governments\u2019 lack of preparedness for a pandemic of this scale? Only by pointing to the inextricable link between science and politics. Ecological Marxists Rob Wallace and Mike Davis have\u00a0sounded<\/a>\u00a0the alarm<\/a>\u00a0for years over the threat of zoonotic diseases, which emerge directly from deforestation, factory farming, and other ecocidal practices. Yet these practices all continued with little concern from the establishment, even in the face of several outbreaks this century. When an industry is so immensely profitable, science rarely stands in the way.<\/p>\n In the face of science\u2019s inadequacies, bourgeois ideology offers two lines of critique. One is to dismiss science\u2019s objective basis and progressive potential. This is the postmodernist critique. The other, a liberal critique, claims that the progressive manifestations of science (medicine, material comforts, renewable energy) can be uncoupled from its oppressive manifestations (instruments of war, environmental degradation, factory farming) without overturning the capitalist system.<\/p>\n But Marxists understand that under capitalism the two sides of science cannot be separated. That\u2019s because capitalist science has a dual nature, both contributing to human misery and offering liberatory possibilities for longer, healthier lives, such as through new vaccines and virological research. In the first half of the 20th century, victory in the world wars required not only more deadly armaments and new military strategies but the development of new medical treatments, including vaccines against infectious diseases to minimize troop losses. World War I, for example, saw the creation of blood banks for the first time. Penicillin was first used in the interwar period. Chloroquine was administered as a malaria treatment during World War II. A polio vaccine emerged shortly after.<\/p>\n The dual nature of science is perfectly evident in the United States\u2019 so-called health care industry. The for-profit system leaves millions of people in the U.S. indebted each year, keeps millions more sick, and provide unequal care for people of color. Treatments and medicine are commodities; for those who can afford it, medical treatment is as advanced as it is in any other country.<\/p>\n These contradictions have become even more apparent in the Covid pandemic, in which over 450,000 Americans have already perished. This figure will surely rise significantly with the arrival of a new, more infectious strain of the virus. The staggering death toll, higher than in any other country, highlights the extreme injustices and inefficiencies of health care in the U.S. In Covid deaths per 100,000 people, the world\u2019s richest country ranks first among the larger countries. This is taking place in a country that spends more on\u00a0healthcare<\/a>\u00a0than any other\u00a0\u2014\u00a0equivalent to 17 percent of GDP.<\/p>\n This criminal neglect of public health has hit communities of color especially hard. Black, Latino, and Indigenous people are all more likely to be hospitalized, and they are two to three times more likely to die of the disease than their white counterparts. In Washington, DC, for example, Black residents represent less than half of the city\u2019s population but\u00a0account for 75 percent<\/a>\u00a0of Covid-19 deaths. It\u2019s no secret why these disparities exist. Across the United States, Black people and other people of color suffer from higher rates of comorbidities like heart disease. They are more likely to live in crowded housing and to be exposed to air pollution. They work more often in essential industries, where remote work is out of the question. They are more likely to be uninsured or underinsured, and they suffer inferior care in hospitals. In a\u00a0nationally reported case<\/a>, Dr. Susan Moore, a Black family physician, complained of racially motivated neglect in the Indianapolis hospital where she was being treated for Covid-19. She died two weeks after being sent home.<\/p>\n But these facts do not constitute a failure in the eyes of the health care industry, since the same pandemic has meant unprecedented profits. This is particularly true for vaccine manufacturers, which have secured multibillion-dollar contracts and stand to earn tens of billions more in sales. Pfizer alone has already secured over $4 billion in contracts with the federal government. The investment bank Morgan Stanley estimates that Pfizer will earn $19 billion from vaccine sales in 2021. Moderna, the second corporation to be approved for vaccine production, saw share prices increase by 700 percent in the past year. While hospitals have suffered because patients are putting off \u201celective\u201d medical treatments during the pandemic, insurance companies have also seen profits rise dramatically for the same reason.<\/p>\n The fact that tens of millions die around the world each year from a lack of affordable medicine is not a concern for Big Pharma. Instead, the industry is driven by pursuing so-called blockbuster drugs, that is, drugs that bring in $1 billion or more in annual revenue. Meanwhile, if drugs or vaccines are deemed unprofitable, they simply aren\u2019t developed. Mike Davis notes,<\/p>\n Of the 18 largest pharmaceutical companies, 15 have totally abandoned the field [of antivirals and vaccines]. Heart medicines, addictive tranquilizers and treatments for male impotence are profit leaders, not the defenses against hospital infections, emergent diseases and traditional tropical killers. A universal vaccine for influenza\u00a0\u2014\u00a0that is to say, a vaccine that targets the immutable parts of the virus\u2019s surface proteins\u00a0\u2014\u00a0has been a possibility for decades but never a profitable priority.2<\/sup><\/p>\n This means that knowledge of vital medicine simply does not advance. In this way, writes Davis, Big Pharma has become \u201ca fetter on the medical revolution and scientific revolution.\u201d<\/p>\n Further, the commoditized health care industry ignores the social causes of disease. Official science has nothing to say about overcrowded apartments caused by realty speculation. It says nothing about the prison system, which places thousands of Black and Latino people in the closest possible quarters. It will never advocate shutting down nonessential businesses while protecting workers\u2019 salaries and benefits. These areas are better left to the \u201cpolicy advocates,\u201d says science, even though these steps would have drastically reduced infections and deaths\u00a0\u2014\u00a0far more effectively than a vaccine.<\/p>\n Only in this context can we understand the puzzle of why tens of millions of Americans say they do not\u00a0want<\/em>\u00a0to be vaccinated. When it is clear to most people that the health care industry does not exist to protect their health but rather to increase shareholder value, mistrust toward the industry is the logical outcome. Indeed, according to\u00a0Gallup<\/a>, more than six in 10 Americans say the U.S. health care system is in \u201ccrisis\u201d or suffers from \u201cmajor\u201d problems. In the same poll, 49 percent of respondents said they had a \u201cvery negative\u201d or \u201csomewhat negative\u201d attitude toward the pharmaceutical industry.<\/p>\n The transparently profit-oriented health care system led many to turn away from scientific medicine altogether. One of the primary expressions of this was the conspiratorial anti-vaccine movement that arose in the late 1990s after the publication of a paper in the\u00a0Lancet<\/em>\u00a0by British ex-doctor Andrew Wakefield linking the MMR vaccine to autism. The paper lacked evidence, and the\u00a0Lancet<\/em>\u00a0later retracted it. But the claim caught on among conspiracy circles and continues to turn up in social media groups and Internet forums. This anti-vaxx movement fit well with liberal ideas about \u201cself-care.\u201d Rather than challenging the for-profit health care industry as a whole, it called for individual abstention from vaccines. Just as liberalism in general has no answer for capitalist brutality and inhumanity, liberal responses to the health crisis are equally impotent.<\/p>\n More recently, sectors of the Right have taken up the anti-vaxx banner. This is consistent with the populist distrust of the establishment, promoted by Trump and others, but it also reflects a general rejection of science in conservative circles. Science for this sector undermines obscurantist religious teachings, challenging, for example, the \u201cnatural\u201d basis for women\u2019s subjugation.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s pronouncements downplaying the virus and its effects played no small role either. Trump, of course, was motivated by the need to keep businesses open and maintain capital accumulation. To do this, he had to sow seeds of doubt about the danger of the virus. So for months, he promoted hydroxychloroquine as a simple and available treatment and refused to wear a mask. Anti-mask and anti-vaxx demonstrations now take place regularly around the country, from the liberal cities of Los Angeles and Santa Cruz to conservative strongholds like Arizona and Florida. Anti-vaxxers went so far as to\u00a0temporarily shut down<\/a>\u00a0LA\u2019s largest vaccination site at Dodger Stadium.<\/p>\n According to some polls,\u00a0as many as 40 percent<\/a>\u00a0of Americans say they are unlikely to accept the current Covid-19 vaccines. Among these, 20 percent say they definitely will not accept them.<\/p>\n This mistrust is apparently highest among sectors who are already most vulnerable to infection.\u00a0Anecdotal<\/a>\u00a0reports from various sources point to large numbers of health care workers refusing the vaccine. A poll conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation shows that\u00a023 percent of workers<\/a>\u00a0in the sector are \u201cvaccine hesitant.\u201d At the hospitals in New York City\u2019s Mount Sinai Health System, only somewhere\u00a0between 25 and 65 percent<\/a>\u00a0of their health care staff plan to be vaccinated.\u00a0In Ohio, only 40 percent of nursing home workers are accepting the vaccine.<\/a>\u00a0In long-term care facilities,\u00a0the lowest paid workers<\/a>\u00a0show the most vaccine reluctance.<\/p>\n People of color are also more hesitant to accept the coronavirus vaccine.Recent polls<\/a>\u00a0show that only 42 percent of African Americans are willing to be vaccinated, although this is up from 32 percent last September. Latinos show somewhat greater trust in the vaccine, but still just 36 percent say they will \u201cdefinitely\u201d get the vaccine if offered at no cost, compared with 46 percent of white respondents.<\/p>\n It should not be startling given the disparities affecting people of color in the health care system. More than seven in 10 Black people reported that the \u201chealth care system treats people unfairly based on their race or ethnic background\u201d \u201cvery often\u201d or \u201csomewhat often,\u201d according to a\u00a0Kaiser Family Foundation\/Undefeated poll<\/a>. Only four in 10 whites said the same. While 55 percent of white respondents said they trust the health care system to \u201cdo what is right for you or your community almost all or most of the time,\u201d just 44 percent of Black respondents said the same. Unequal care\u00a0\u2014\u00a0along with the daily stress of discrimination and hyperexploitation\u00a0\u2014\u00a0is considered a primary factor behind the\u00a0significantly higher rates of death during childbirth for Black mothers<\/a>.<\/p>\n But the mistrust of the medical establishment does not stem only from inadequate and inferior care. People of color have been subject to the most horrific forms of medical experimentation, often without their knowledge. In the most famous case, hundreds of Black people in Tuskegee, Alabama, were deliberately left to suffer from syphilis while treatments existed, ostensibly in order to study the long-term effects of the disease. Nurses kept registries of the men in the study and distributed their names to local clinics to explicitly prevent the men from receiving treatment.<\/p>\n The Tuskegee case is not isolated. As Stephen and Hillary Rose note in their important work\u00a0Genes, Cells, and Brains<\/em>, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission deliberately exposed native Alaskan people\u00a0\u2014\u00a0alongside learning-disabled children, pregnant women, prisoners, and psychiatric patients\u00a0\u2014\u00a0to radiation for over three decades beginning in the 1940s. Working in Guatemala, the U.S. Health Service infected hundreds of Guatemalan prisoners with syphilis by bringing infected sex workers into prisons. A recent investigation found that during World War II, the Department of Defense\u00a0deliberately exposed<\/a>tens of thousands of Black, Puerto Rican, and Japanese American soldiers to chemical agents such as mustard gas. These are not just phenomena of the past. Last year, migrant women in U.S. detention centers reported being\u00a0unknowingly sterilized by doctors<\/a>. These cases have justifiably undermined trust in both science and medicine.<\/p>\n The for-profit health care industry, which fails to offer real health solutions, fuels anti-vaccine attitudes. When it is clear to so many that science and health care do not provide for the well-being of the majority, a rejection of these institutions is predictable. Some people will respond in a progressive way, seeing that science and health care, once the profit motive is removed, could be radically transformed. Others will be entirely retrograde, turning against modern medicine altogether. It is our responsibility therefore to challenge anti-vaxx ideas without ignoring the criminal actions of the pharmaceutical and health care industries. We must fight for universal health care, a national health service, and vaccine development under public control.<\/p>\n It is already evident that the private sector is unnecessary. After all, while private vaccine manufacturers are securing multibillion-dollar contracts and taking in record-breaking revenue, the vaccines produced by Pfizer and Moderna rely on science and technology made possible by public funding. The mRNA modification technology used in both vaccines was in fact first developed by the National Institutes of Health and by scientists working at the University of Pennsylvania. Only afterward was it acquired by private corporations and put toward creating a Covid-19 vaccine.<\/p>\n A democratization of science and health care systems must not be restricted to the specialists employed by multinational corporations and elite academic institutions. It must take into account the knowledge of its practitioners and the public. Nurses and other frontline health care workers are the ones who know best how to care for patients. But hospital bureaucracies routinely ignore their opinions on crucial issues, from PPE to safe staffing practices. It is no wonder that many nurses themselves have become skeptical of the solutions put forward by the health care conglomerates. As\u00a0one Florida pediatrician<\/a>\u00a0put it, \u201cEven people who want to weigh the pros versus cons\u00a0\u2014\u00a0we\u2019re not being able to do that because of the lack of data and transparency.\u201d Frontline workers and the public must have access to the full range of data accessible to the scientists, corporate executives, and state agencies if we want them to support vaccination efforts.<\/p>\n Anti-science attitudes can be combated by democratizing science and putting science in the service of the majority. We can build on the model of Science for the People, a grassroots organization built in the 1970s, which campaigned against ecological destruction, war, racism and sexism and sought to involve people of all social classes and educational backgrounds, not just scientists, in the development and communication of science. But to truly rescue science, it must be brought under public control and made part of a planned economy, that is to say, a socialist society. Only then can the full possibilities of science be unlocked. We will marvel at what we can do.<\/p>\n \u21911 Richard C. Lewontin and Richard Levins, \u201cTen Propositions on Science and Antiscience,\u201d in\u00a0Biology under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on the Ecology, Agriculture, and Health<\/cite>\u00a0(New York: Monthly Review Press, 2007), 90.<\/p>\n \u21912 Mike Davis,\u00a0\u201cWho Gets Forgotten in a Pandemic,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0The Nation<\/cite>, March 13, 2020.<\/p>\n 7th February 2021<\/p>\n This article was first posted at:- Science, Profit, and Anti-Vaxxers also see:-<\/p>\n 1. HERD IMMUNITY – MYTH AND REALITY, Socialist Democracy (Ireland)<\/a><\/p>\n http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/2021\/02\/14\/covid-19-social-murder-they-wrote-elected-unaccountable-and-unrepentant\/<\/a><\/p>\n 3. CAPITALISM IS A VIRUS – VALUE\u00a0CHAINS, Left Voice (USA)<\/a><\/p>\n 4. CAPITALISM AND WORKERS\u2019 HEALTH \u2013 PLUS CA CAHANGE, Karl Marx<\/a><\/p>\n 5. IDEOLOGY AND SCIENCE \u2013 Socialist Democracy (Ireland)<\/a><\/p>\nDriven by Science?<\/h3>\n
Science\u2019s Dual Nature<\/h3>\n
The Two Sides of the Health Care Industry<\/h3>\n
Increasing Anti-vaccine Attitudes<\/h3>\n
Healthcare, Science, and the Oppressed<\/h3>\n
Science and Health Care Systems for the People<\/h3>\n
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