The thing that really hammers home that there's something to study here is that we basically eliminated polio through vaccination campaigns, and we did this in my lifetime. The Global Polio Eradication Initiative was launched in 1988 (one year after I was launched), and since then the number of annual cases has dropped by 99.9%, from 350/year to a handful. 2% of the people that contracted polio suffered paralysis, which would necessitate living in an iron lung to keep breathing.

Before last year, I would have said that the clear and obvious harms of polio were the reason so many people got vaccinated that polio is basically eradicated. But since the start of COVID, over 10 million humans have died miserable deaths from COVID, yet so many people reject the vaccine.

There's an extremely grave threat, but there's also an easy way to gain near complete invincibility to that threat, but tens of millions of people in just the US are refusing invincibility to COVID. 99.2% of US COVID deaths now are among the unvaccinated [0]! 99.2%!!! Clearly there's something going on to make so many people make such an irrational choice, and that's worth studying, as the benefit of getting a few more people to embrace invulnerability is worth so much more than the cost of funding some research and outreach.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jul/08/fears-of-new...