They are a political wedge issue because some want them to be policy.
Anything that is policy -- taxes, marriage, controlled substances, international trade -- is political.
And always someone says "why is policy X political?" without realizing what "politics" is. Usually, they mean to say "why doesn't everyone agree with me?"
This issue was then weaponized for political purposes, and people got militant about it.
But governments have consistently lied/been wrong about this virus, so there is no trust either in their messaging about this crisis.
There’s a Supreme Court decision[0] about whether states can mandate a vaccine (they can).
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobson_v._Massachusetts
> should
This. Feels like the future depends on identifying the root cause of these issues and working to overcome them.
This seems disingenuous. We eradicated smallpox and scientific literacy just as low then. Why is it different this time?
Because public trust in institutions has been destroyed. It's also a main reason why Trump was elected. The people in charge of these institutions destroyed this trust over decades, and they have continued to do so throughout the pandemic.
We must encourage discussions that move beyond overly-simplistic dualistic framing such as "vax versus anti-vax", "individual choice versus public health", etc.
Looking back through human history we can find numerous examples where scientific consensus was wrong, or where we created powerful new tools that backfired in unexpected ways. Diversity in opinion and choice is natures way of arriving at optimal decisions. Although it feels like friction and divisive arguments to us now, these are critical discussions that help expand everyone's knowledge and awareness.
At one level it appears to be chaos, but at a higher level it appears as harmony. We are now living in the age of the super-organism. The age where we all must become acutely aware that the separation between you and I - the separation between self and other - must be dissolved and reformulated, for the survival of our species and our planet.