“American Loneliness” (EW 9/16) eventually gets to the point that shaming only generates shame, which creates loneliness, and can move some folks into really weird corners. I agree; voicing contempt for vaccine resisters will not get the desired results, but neither is it the real problem or the solution.

This challenge verges on poor mental health at best and willful ignorance at worst. There is a large cultural, social, educational, social media misinformation, mental health complex going on here. It’s not entirely new; a similar, illogical “us/them” developed in 1918 and as far back as the Black Death in 1349, when every Jewish citizen of Frankfurt was annihilated to fallaciously prevent spread of the disease.

It’s now 2021, we do have real science, analytics, medicine and vaccines that work, and yet folks opt for the use of farm animal medications and such. Or worse, they turn to monoclonal antibodies that are far more costly than vaccines, clog the hospital systems, were laboratory-created a year ago and no less experimental than the vax.

Sitting down with these folks and telling them their ideas are fascinating may be helpful. But we are not all Heidi Larsons, and the rest of us folks find this behavior, well, crazy, and destructive to the resistor as well as the rest of us. These many voices of contempt are folks that are angry about the hypocrisy, the costs to our health care system, the devastated (for many) economy and the wasted political capital. They have a very clear right to be angry.

Timothy Gardner

Eugene

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