Jennifer Aniston shared a personal decision to stop talking with family and loved ones who refuse to get the Covid-19 vaccine, virtually writing them off. For months she has tried to convince people about whom she cares to get the shot but to no avail. She’s stood strong on her conviction that the vaccine prevents the new virus from spreading and in turn fewer people will catch it, end up in the hospital or even die from the disease. But no more begging for the celebrity and well-known actress of Friends. She’s tired of the illogical circular arguments and heated fights, each side trying to convince the other whose truth is the real truth—dealing with people who distrust substantiated news based on nothing but the facts and instead stubbornly prefer media whose purpose is not to objectively report the news but to promote and foster conservative politics.
I know exactly how she feels.
Since the Covid-19 vaccine, every week I have asked my parents if they’ve gotten it yet. I am saddened to find their mindset remains with tens of millions of Americans who refuse and reject the vaccine, proclaiming their independence from a government mandate. My elderly parents have no intention of getting the Covid-19 vaccine. Out of the blue, they simply do not believe in this vaccine, remaining highly suspicious of one that was developed at lightning speed and miraculously has effectively kept the vast majority of vaccinated from getting the virus and dying from it.
Counting flowers on the wall
These are the same parents who during my childhood in the 1960s and ’70s made sure their children were up to date on all recommended immunizations. There was no debate or question about it. Vaccines were universally accepted. Parents didn’t have time to research every single childhood immunization. Schools insisted parents keep their children’s immunization records up to date. It was very serious business dealt every year before school started. In those days, too, there was no internet—although concerned parents could go to the library and research the science behind immunizations against a host of once deadly and miserable childhood diseases they faced and more likely their parents contracted. My grandmother talked about surviving yellow fever circa 1910. She was deathly ill for close to a year and lost all her hair. Somehow she survived, and in time her hair grew back.
My parents had practically every childhood disease of the first half of the 20th century. Vaccines were unheard of. They also could have contracted polio but fortunately for them, they didn’t.
The people who raised me understood vaccines, the science, the urgency, the importance, and therefore ensured the best modern medicine for my healthy childhood. I didn’t realize it as I do now: My parents provided those vaccines out of love for their children. Throughout the years, my parents were the type to get the annual flu vaccine and got the pneumonia vaccine when it was developed.
But that’s not who they are anymore.
It’s like invasion of the body snatchers. Something’s infiltrated their brains, their once reasonable thinking. And since they refuse to have a computer and the internet and do not subscribe to news journals or newspapers, all the information they know about Covid-19 and the vaccine come from one source: Fox. I won’t call it news because it’s not a news business. Look it up. It’s a conservative broadcast media network, specifically created to present news with a sharp political viewpoint, right of center. It literally was founded to counter the mainstream news for perceived hippie leftist pro-Democrat bias. The number of Americans who refuse the Covid-19 vaccine equal the same number of Fox fans and more than likely the same number who did not vote for President Biden.
And that’s the way it is
Just a few decades ago, we all got the same news even if covered by three different networks, dozens of major daily newspapers and radio stations and analyzed by monthly and weekly periodicals. The news was fact based, substantiated, serious, no kidding, sobering—and most importantly real.
Today with the internet’s plethora of ‘enter-newsment’ or ‘newsertainment’—stories that are not journalism and play fast and loose with the facts, if even that—half the country has become brain dead. They only read, hear and see what they want. And if the internet’s unregulated array of dubious news sources doesn’t reach everyone, Fox cable does. The format is nothing but Republican political opinion presented by the most attractive talking heads on the air. The other 24-hour cable news networks also are mostly political opinion but presented from real-deal reporters in a calm level-headed manner. That’s a welcome difference to me.
But Fox knows a lot of people prefer emotional appeal on every subject nowadays. How this century’s pandemic and vaccine have become an angry American political grudge match that has stressed and split families, friends and colleagues, not to mention doctors and their patients, beats me. I suspect the uproar is from trusting the wrong media: the one that routinely plays on human emotions like fear, confusion, distrust, anger, impatience, jealousy, prejudice and hate. Swirl in ignorance, and we all will remain in this real and deadly health crisis for a long time. The problem is millions of Americans think they are smarter than doctors, scientists, public health experts, pharmacists, biologists and virologists. And they all trust the same source for their information. Their defense against the vaccine is ‘This is America’ and they can believe anything they want. It’s dumbfounded.