The anger I feel toward vaccine-hesitant people becomes a more complicated emotion when I witness them reckoning with their choices. Many of the unvaccinated people I’ve talked with are hard-working, loving individuals struggling to catch a break in a life that hasn’t been fair. They’re unmoored and don’t know what to believe when truth itself has supply-chain problems and the health care system has been letting them down for years.
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Many leading organizations believe we must target misinformation about Covid-19 vaccines by focusing our attention on debunking myths and improving science communication.
Stories can be more powerful than data. To persuade people, to get them to think, you must first get them to feel. Stories move people emotionally, and the best stories reveal how people face, cope, surmount, and succumb to the obstacles in their lives and make their way in a world we all share.
Let’s tone down the rhetoric and create opportunities whose purpose isn’t to convince people with contrary opinions that they’re behaving irresponsibly, but to invite them into our lives and appreciate why each of us might feel morally injured.
