COVID unvaccinated are targets of discrimination, anger and mistreatment

New Danish study worth attention

My view is that those who have chosen to reject COVID vaccination are some of the most informed people with courage and critical thinking skills. They have not become victims of massive propaganda.

Now we learn what many already experienced. Namely that the unvaccinated are receiving terrible treatment, including loss of fundamental rights.

Consider this: Many vaccinated people do not want close relatives to marry an unvaccinated person. They are also inclined to think that the unvaccinated are incompetent as well as untrustworthy, and they generally feel antipathy against them.

Part of the overall study looking solely in the United States showed that not only do vaccinated people harbor prejudice against the unvaccinated, but they also think they should be denied fundamental rights. For instance, the unvaccinated should not be allowed to move into the neighborhood or express their political views on social media freely, without fear of censorship.

“It is likely that we will encounter similar support for the restriction of rights in other countries, seeing as the prejudice and antipathy can be found across continents and cultures,” said co-author Michael Bang Petersen, who is a professor of political science at Aarhus University.

Here are excerpts of the new study titled “Discriminatory Attitudes Against the Unvaccinated During a Global Pandemic.”

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic sizeable groups of unvaccinated minorities persist even in countries with high vaccine access. Consequently, vaccination became a controversial subject of debate and even protest. Here, we assess whether people express discriminatory attitudes in the form of negative affect, stereotypes and exclusionary attitudes in family and political settings across groups defined by COVID-19 vaccination status. We quantify discriminatory attitudes between vaccinated and unvaccinated citizens in 21 countries, covering a diverse set of cultures across the world. Across three conjoint experimental studies (N=15,233), we demonstrate that vaccinated people express discriminatory attitudes towards the unvaccinated, as high as the discriminatory attitudes suffered by common targets like immigrant and minority populations. In contrast, there is an absence of evidence that unvaccinated individuals display discriminatory attitudes towards vaccinated people, except for the presence of negative affect in Germany and United States. We find evidence in support of discriminatory attitudes against the unvaccinated in all countries except Hungary and Romania and find that discriminatory attitudes are more strongly expressed in cultures with stronger cooperative norms. Prior research on the psychology of cooperation has shown that individuals react negatively against perceived free-riders, including in the domain of vaccinations. Consistent with this, the present findings suggest that contributors to the public good of epidemic control (i.e., the vaccinated) react with discriminatory attitudes against perceived free-riders (i.e., the unvaccinated). Elites and the vaccinated general public appealed to moral obligations to increase COVID-19 vaccine uptake but the present findings suggest that discriminatory attitudes including support for the removal of fundamental rights simultaneously emerged.