Individuals who have been vaccinated against COVID-19 harbor a strong, “one-sided” prejudice against those who have not, believing them to be dangerous, stupid, and untrustworthy, according to a new study from Denmark’s Aarhus University.
Researchers Alexander Bor, Frederik Jørgensen, and Michael Bang Petersen surveyed 10,740 people in 21 countries, asking them if they would “be unhappy” if a hypothetical individual randomly described as either “fully vaccinated” or “unvaccinated” were to marry one of their “close relatives.” (“Exclusion from family relationships,” they explain, is “a standard measure in studies of prejudice.”) They also asked whether the respondent feared becoming infected with COVID-19 as a result of mingling with the hypothetical individual and whether the respondent considered the individual “unintelligent” or “untrustworthy.”
The researchers found that “vaccinated people have high antipathy towards unvaccinated individuals…. On average they are 13 … percentage points more unhappy, when presented [with] an unvaccinated (versus fully vaccinated) target.” In addition, vaccinated people are significantly more afraid of being infected by unvaccinated people than by vaccinated people even though the latter can also be quite contagious. Moreover, they perceive the unvaccinated as both incompetent (perhaps “for believing false information regarding vaccinations”) and untrustworthy (possibly “for their failure to contribute to the collective good of increased epidemic control”).
“Unvaccinated people,” by contrast, “do not exhibit antipathy towards vaccinated individuals,” nor do they think vaccinated people are incompetent or untrustworthy, the authors write. “If anything, they fear getting infected with corona by vaccinated people slightly less than by unvaccinated people.”
To put things in perspective, the researchers compared respondents’ antipathy toward the vaccinated or unvaccinated to their antipathy toward immigrants from the Middle East. “Middle Eastern immigrants,” they contend, “serve as an excellent benchmark as widespread prejudice against them has been widely documented.”
“Strikingly, antipathy towards the unvaccinated among vaccinated people … is two and a half times the size of antipathy towards Middle Eastern immigrants,” they report. On the other hand, “we find no asymmetry in antipathy towards immigrants between the vaccinated and unvaccinated, indicating that asymmetry in vaccination antipathy cannot be easily explained by omitted variables or design effects.” In other words, their conclusions are highly likely to be correct.
Another interesting finding is that “countries that managed to keep the death toll of the coronavirus low … show very strong antipathy towards the unvaccinated,” while those with higher death tolls do not. They attribute this to the willingness of the citizenry in the former countries to implement various restrictions — never mind whether those restrictions actually work — and to “condemn[] acts of norm-breaking.” Furthermore, countries with a high degree of social trust also have a high degree of prejudice against the unvaccinated, again probably because more-trusting societies tend to enforce “social norms.”
While both vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals may have some reasonable cause for thinking as they do, the researchers concluded that uninformed prejudice, especially toward the unvaccinated, is widespread. In fact, they likened the antipathy toward the unvaccinated to “the stigma of other deviant groups” such as “substance abusers, promiscuous females, atheists, and the mentally ill.”
Despite their findings, the researchers cannot be dismissed as “vaccine deniers.” They launched their study expecting to find similar levels of prejudice among both the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. They laud the development of the “highly effective vaccines” as “a historical feat of science” and worry that prejudice against the unvaccinated may make convincing them to take the jab more difficult by “exacerbat[ing] the very factors that led to vaccine refusal in the first place.”
Indeed, they are very concerned about both the short- and long-term effects of this prejudice. “People’s vaccination status,” they write, “has become a socio-political cleavage” that threatens to tear societies apart, leaving them “more divided” after the pandemic “than they entered it.”
They do, however, have hope: “Prior work has shown that intolerance across political divides decreases when negative metaperceptions about the other group are corrected. In this light, the public recognition of the present finding of only one-sided antipathy may hopefully temper the strongest manifestations of the prejudice against [the] unvaccinated.”
Unfortunately, given the mainstream media’s and Big Tech’s total devotion to the prevailing pandemic narrative, “public recognition” of this study is unlikely to be forthcoming.
