Yes sure. This is the community, the medical community, that has been absolutely outrageous in its behavior over the past year and a half and must attract our ire in these discussions. We have a really awful medical community (as confirmed by your father) - How do we appropriately censure this absolutely outrageous behavior. I am at loss for words!
Intersectional thinking is killing people!
Do people who do this genuinely believe they are helping to encourage people to vaccinate? My impression is that they just want to feel smug.
But in an intersectional analysis, “non-college rural whites” is near the top of the “oppressor” hierarchy. I think that causes people to perceive their attacks as “punching up” against more powerful people who are being willfully malicious.
You still haven't said who these public health people are, publicly berating the white, less educated rural people for not being vaccinated.
Right now it sounds a lot more like you're summing up someone's twitter trending section, not public health officials, so I'll throw up the old [Citation needed].
And I feel the need to mention, intersectionality does not itself create an “oppressor hierarchy.” Intersectionality is just a way of describing how people can be vulnerable to to subjugation in some ways while having the power to subjugate other people in other ways. This is a good thing, specifically for reasons you identify! Just because you’re white in America and are less likely to be killed at a traffic stop than a black person, does not mean that you have enough money to live comfortably or have adequate access to healthcare, or are abled or have no criminal record and so on. You are arguably making an intersectional argument when you talk about the specific needs of low-information white people in rural areas.
It could be that lower educational level is merely coincidental, and that the relevant characteristic is, instead, an insecure-but-obstinate egoism whose Prime Directive is, "You're not the boss of me!" If that's true, then:
1. scorn, mockery, and threats seem just about as likely to convert obstinate anti-vaxxers — EDIT: that is to say, not likely at all — as any other approach, because by this point in a pandemic, there's little hope that anything will convince stubborn contrarians that they should get vaccinated, not even the deathbed pleas of their fellow contrarians who realize too late that they fatally screwed the pooch; but
2. for the vaccinated, public mockery of anti-vaxxers could help to reinforce their sense of community with other vaccinated folks — and, more generally, with community-minded folks, as opposed to selfish individualists — by evoking primitive us-versus-them feelings, with "them" being the insecure-but-obstinate egoists. That could be socially useful, in a backhanded sort of way.
EDIT: We've seen this kind of behavior before in die-hard (so to speak) smokers; cf. the anti-smoking public service announcements by former smokers such as Leonard Nimoy, who died of COPD after smoking for years. [0]
And if blue-tribe attacks on anti-vaxxers help to increase blue-tribe and independents' vaccination rates, then net-net the attacks are a good thing from an overall-vax-rate perspective, because (again, by hypothesis) the blue-tribe attacks won't decrease the anti-vaxxers' vaccination rates, which are already at or near zero, and nothing will increase those rates.
EDIT: There's also a question of patience (an exhaustible resource) and cost-effectiveness: when dealing with a toddler screaming for candy in the grocery store, at some point you stop trying to reason with them and just physically remove them from the store. Likewise with anti-vaxxers: At some point the rest of us are going to lose patience and stop being willing to incur costs in terms of dollars, unavailability of ICU beds for other patients, and needless deaths and long-haul illnesses. Personally, I'd be OK with putting voluntary anti-vaxxers under house arrest, akin to being locked up for contempt of court: The key to your cell is in your own hands.
EDIT 2: You persist in labeling the blue-tribe attacks as being on less-educated and rural people. From where I sit, the attacks are on pig-headed voluntary anti-vaxxers — some of whom are well-educated city-dwellers such as the commenters on Fox News (some of them doubtless being vaccinated themselves).
Please re-read that part of my comment: you and I are in agreement.
I'm sorry, but I think today's partisan politics are clouding your memory. There's been multiple points in history where poltically left leaning professionals were systematically kicked out of their jobs and blacklisted from their careers.
> berate the white ones for not being vaccinated, and then ignore the lack of vaccination among the non-white ones.
People around me are being given like $100 and a pat on the back when they get vaccinated around here. Antivaxxers are idiots, but people getting vaccinated are having the gold carpet rolled out to them.
Also it doesn't look good to repeat a racist fox news soundbite that's already been debunked about how the blacks are invading our cities and spreading covid [1].
[1] https://abc7chicago.com/dan-patrick-texas-lt-governor-blames...
This is a strawman argument. The OP proposed that on average whites are more vaccinated than blacks, which your citation supports. So vaccine marketing should target the biggest vaccine skeptics, otherwise the racially inequal outcomes will only grow.
B) There are more white people in America than black people. So, while in relative terms there may be less vaccinated black than white people, in absolute terms, there are more unvaccinated white than black people.
The vaccines don't care about the proportion of various demographic groups. The community benefits from there being more vaccinated people overall.
Careful, you might pull something with those mental gymnastics.
You’re right that more vaccinated people is what matters so everyone should do their part. That means per capita should be the same across all demographics. Any group that has a lower per capita is dragging covid progress, regardless of how large or small the group is.
However, if you look at the cross tabs of opinion polling, supporters of a particular party are much more hesitant to get the vaccine.
Well, communists right? Literal sympathizers with the US' greatest geopolitical foe?
> Also it doesn't look good to repeat a racist fox news [blah blah blah fox news..]
Wait are the vaccination rates between whites and blacks actually substantially equal? And your link is just playing the trick of swapping out percentages for absolute numbers to make a tendentious argument.
Vaccination rates for whites is 10-15 points higher than for Black people in blue states, but about the same in the poorest and most rural states.
That’s my point—what you’re looking at is low vaccination rates among disadvantaged groups. Public health officials have just forgotten that non-college rural whites are one of those groups.
...you're really going to lead with this?
> The behavior of the medical community during the pandemic has been outrageous. My dad has done public health for 30 years in the developing world. You don’t get vaccine-skeptical people in rural Bangladesh to get vaccinated by telling them they’re idiots and making threats. Yet that’s been the main game plan with less educated rural people here in the US
What part of the medical community, specifically, are you talking about here? What concerted pattern, explicitly planned or not, are you referring to here?
It honestly seems more like you're giving a take on popular discourse, with more than a little generalizing.
What I do see is many many medical professionals trying to counsel their patients and communities, finding out Fox News and Facebook have gotten there first, and still trying to do their jobs, sometimes in the face of a lot of abuse.
> berate the white ones for not being vaccinated, and then ignore the lack of vaccination among the non-white ones
Well, first, we know about racial disparities in vaccination rates because it's been measured and reported on as concerning well before people turned it into a talking point.
But I hope this isn't a reference to the Texas Lt Governor's comment, because not only is he stupidly wrong and his comment is a huge distraction for public health efforts and discourse, but he's the one who trotted out relative vaccination rates in different groups out of the blue in an interview that was about (wait for it) public health policy. Can't blame the medical community for that one.
And he's not remotely a millennial.
The behavior of the medical community during the pandemic has been outrageous. My dad has done public health for 30 years in the developing world. You don’t get vaccine-skeptical people in rural Bangladesh to get vaccinated by telling them they’re idiots and making threats. Yet that’s been the main game plan with less educated rural people here in the US: berate the white ones for not being vaccinated, and then ignore the lack of vaccination among the non-white ones. That’s a profound failure to understand the profession’s role relative to the rest of society.