Tempests and Teapots
Are we more divided on Seinfeld than vaccines?
I’ve been writing about our divisions, but whenever I get momentum carrying me one direction, I like to step back and try to find some perspective. Turning the division problem on its head, I found that it is more than possible—call it probable—that on vaccines, at least, we are not as divided as it seems.
There’s little doubt that we harbor a lot of squeaky wheels with oversize megaphones—cable TV opinion hosts and noisy Congressional backbenchers, I’m talking to you. The likes of Tucker Carlson on the Fox News Channel, Representative Paul Gosar (R-AZ) and Representative Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Mars) , to name a few, are of course, outliers. Carlson cozies up to dictators like Hungary’s Prime Minister, Viktor Orban for ratings and profit, while MTG has a less discreet approach: if it’s outrageous, like Jewish space lasers causing California wildfires, she’ll say it, get video of critics lambasting her, and raise a ton of money on the self-created controversy. Last week Gosar created an anime of himself killing Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-NY) with a sword, then turning his avatar’s blade on Joe Biden. It’s hard to say what his goals beyond fundraising might be; his family begs us to ignore him, and demands Republican leadership censure him. His sister rightly identifies him as a “sociopath.”
Make no doubt, these loud opportunists who care less about our country than their egos and pocketbooks are numerous and reach a lot of people through their elected offices, talk radio, podcasts, and cable TV, and because they’re loud and prominent, they inspire ugly and threatening antisocial behavior, most recently at county commission and school board meetings nationwide (not to mention deadly gatherings like the Charlottesville white supremacy march and the January 6th assault on the Capitol).
But the place where we’re not divided at all, even though it sounds and feels like it when you listen to the aforementioned attention addicts? Covid vaccines.
Here, from the research platform Civic Science, is a little perspective:
"Americans aren’t 'divided' over the COVID vaccine.
· They’re divided over Friends (50%) versus Seinfeld (50%).
· Or beer (51%) versus wine (49%).
· Or tucking in their top bed sheet (43%) or not (41%).
But not the vaccine. “By our latest count, 81% of U.S. adults have either received the COVID jab or plan to in the immediate future. Six percent remain on the fence. Just 13% are steadfastly against it (or can’t receive it).
“With over 300,000 different questions in our database, I’ll venture this ranks as one of the LEAST divided things we’ve ever studied. I can’t even tell you how rare it is when 67% of Republicans agree with 91% of Democrats. It’s top-percentile kind of stuff.
“The 13% of Americans who are anti-vax are equal to the percentage who don’t own a smartphone. It’s barely half the number who believe Bigfoot is real (26%) and nearly 50% smaller than the number who don’t believe in God (19%). It’s less common than brushing your teeth in the shower (17%) or not putting a top sheet on your bed at all (16%).
“If you subtract the people who have legitimate health reasons for not getting vaccinated, the number of conscientious anti-vaxxers dips below the percentage of Americans who don’t wear deodorant (11%).
“[We’re] not judging any of these things (at least not out loud), but, make no mistake, they are outlying, fringe, possibly even extreme behaviors – statistically speaking."
Still, as Wall Street Journal’s Jason Gay points out, “We are living in a golden age of amateur expertise and self-interest rebranded as personal liberty.”
He’s their sports columnist and was commenting on the Green Bay Packers’ quarterback, Aaron Rodgers, who lied about his vaccination status, and was rebuked for putting his teammates and coaches at risk (not to mention setting a horrible example).
Gay noted the dressing down Rodgers received on national television from Hall of Famer Terry Bradshaw and his co-hosts on Fox’s NFL Sunday broadcast. And more quietly, although with an equal amount of vitriol, from Dr. Myron Rolle, a former NFL player and global neurosurgery fellow at Harvard.
Gay went on, “This situation is bigger than Rodgers, or the Packers, or football, or me, or you, or any one person, and the path out of it is seeing ourselves as part of something bigger than ourselves. It isn’t hard to see a bright parallel to team sports, and that’s what cranks up Dr. Rolle and the Fox NFL guys. No one from Bart Starr to Vince Lombardi to Reggie White was able to do it by himself—success in football requires a full roster and a pathological commitment to sacrificing individual want for the good of the group.”
So, let’s replace vaccines with Seinfeld on the list of things that divide us.
©2021 Jon Sinton
Well said!