In a lengthy WaPo article about the low covid vaccination rates among members of the U.S. armed forces, there is not a single quote by anyone who refuses to be vaccinated and not a single reason offered as to why many military personnel object to being vaccinated. It’s as if the reporter – and the reporter’s editor – have no interest in knowing why so many enlisted men and women are reluctant or resistant to getting anti-covid shots. Maybe the WaPo people assume that they already know, that everyone knows, or that people’s reasons for their actions are of no interest to the reading public.
But if we want more people to get vaccinated – and I certainly do want to see that – then it behooves us to understand why so many people don’t get vaccinated, and it behooves the military not only to understand the resistance that’s out there but also to address the reasons for the opposition to getting vaccinated. Perhaps the mindset of our military leaders is that they don’t have to persuade or offer reasons. They can simply issue orders. But that’s a mistake. If there are compelling reasons for healthy young men and women in the military to get vaccinated against covid, then those reasons ought to be given, widely disseminated, and presented repeatedly to our military personnel. Objections to being vaccinated should be addressed fully and logically, with data to back up the arguments in favor of vaccination. If our soldiers are not getting vaccinated, that’s a failure of our military leadership to communicate effectively – both to listen and to respond.
I suspect that the WaPo reporter and his editors, along with many of our military leaders, think so little of our soldiers who are reluctant to receive covid vaccinations that they just assume those soldiers are stupid – not ignorant, but stupid. I don’t believe that’s the case. They may be misinformed, but then again, our civilian leaders have repeatedly changed their story about the coronavirus and what to do about it. To some extent that’s excusable because we are all learning about covid as we go. But what is inexcusable is a failure to update the information with the public as we learn more about the virus and how it spreads.
The WaPo reporter seems to lack all curiosity about the resistance to vaccination. He also seems to be uninterested in any statistics that might show a lower risk that young, healthy members of the military might have serious health repercussions from contracting the virus. The article tells us that 62 service members have died due to covid-19. It also tells us that 40% of these deaths occurred among the 522,000 soldiers of the Army Guard and Reserve. But we’re not given mortality rates either among this group of soldiers or the general population. We’re also told that “about a quarter-million service members have been infected with the virus…including more than 2,000 who were hospitalized.” That seems to me like a very low level of hospitalization, and the number of military deaths from covid also seems very low, though I’m no expert on the subject. Also, I can’t tell from the article how many of those hospitalized died. Are healthy young soldiers significantly less likely to contract covid than are members of the general public? And if they contract it, are they much less likely to succumb from the infection?
Is there any logical reason for the reluctance of our military personnel to get vaccinated? I wish that the Washington Post and other news organizations would do a much better job of reporting the views of the vaccine resisters, both in and out of our military. Not to call them names or vilify them, but to try to understand their concerns so that we can all address them.