Why the Vaccinated Are Now Willing to Break COVID-19 Rules

Like everyone else, I’m exhausted by the pandemic: the endless variants, the stream of bad news, and the uncertainty of when this war against the virus will end. And while I have been a steadfast supporter of every public health measure, from social distancing and masking to mandatory vaccinations, I’m finally ready to say “enough,” even with the Omicron variant spreading quickly. I’m not saying this because I believe the pandemic is over for the unvaccinated, but because, as a social scientist, I believe that the medical sciences need to understand the harm that is now being done to our long-term resilience and confidence in public institutions if restrictions continue and people begin to incrementally break the rules.

A recently published paper in PLOS ONE by Sabina Kleitman and her team showed that in the middle of the pandemic, when vaccines were starting to roll out, approximately 90 percent of people across countries like the U.S., Canada, and Australia were willing to comply with public health measures, while just a small minority described themselves as non-compliant in an online survey. That was great news for public health, but it also reflected a level of anxiety that people were still largely defenseless against COVID-19. Things have changed significantly in the past year, and so, I suspect, have attitudes.

We need to return our society to a pre-pandemic normal, and we need to do it quickly, not because the pandemic is over, but because social science tells us it is time, even if medical science tells us we should wait.

I know it’s time because I had dinner with a nurse last week whose job is to swab people for the virus. She now spends her shifts watching Netflix movies. Very few of us are in a panic to document the spread of the virus anymore.

I know it’s time because the longer this goes on, even perfectly reasonable people are beginning to suspect that Big Pharma may be an unreliable bedfellow when it comes to recommending that more and more and more vaccines be administered more and more often. I don’t believe in such conspiracy theories, but they are moving from the fringe to the realm of everyday discourse.

And finally, and most importantly, I know it’s time because we have lost a sense of critical mission, the collective sense of common purpose, which is how wars are fought and won. Rather than a united populace willing to experience discomfort for the sake of the most vulnerable who need our help, I see everyone, from our politicians to our restaurant servers, feeling like compromise and disruption are no longer necessary. Put simply, the solution to the pandemic is already available (at least in high-income countries with stable health care systems).

The consequences of breaking the rules for individuals who are reasonably healthy and double vaccinated are now perceived as so inconsequential that the rules and sacrifices have become meaningless. We have shuttered our economy and put the quality of our lives at risk so that our hospitals will not become inundated with those who won’t vaccinate. Even though it is clear that those who are unvaccinated are likely to die at a rate of 1 in 3,000 if they contract the disease, they continue to refuse.

Far better for the government to relax the rules for the majority before that majority chooses non-compliance and, in the process, undermines the authority of the very institutions which are there to keep them safe.

I worry that our public health officials have chosen to protect a small minority while ignoring the long-term epidemic of mental health disorders that are emerging as rates of anxiety, depression, and addiction continue to rise, not to mention the threat posed by undiagnosed cancers and the lack of early detection of other diseases which is going to haunt us for years to come. What are we risking by creating policies that only address the needs of the unvaccinated rather than the population that believed in the common good and participated in the collective goal of herd immunity? Canceling holiday travel, for example, may ease the burden somewhat on our health care system during this next wave of infections, but in its wake, we are going to have a broken public health system rather than one which should have come out of this pandemic stronger and more trustworthy than ever before.

It has become almost impossible to separate fact from fiction, even if one consistently consumes the hard science. For example, holiday get-togethers are being canceled because of new limits on the size of public gatherings, with the worry that being in a large room together could become a super-spreader event for the Omicron variant. Somewhere in the hyperbole and my community’s decision to go back to tighter restrictions, we forgot that we have an incredibly high rate of vaccination (approaching 85 percent).

Furthermore, one can’t help wonder why there is so much worry when the likelihood of anyone who is vaccinated becoming seriously ill is very small, hospitalized even smaller, and dying as close to zero as can statistically be calculated. In other words, the only danger now is that increased numbers of cases will (1) affect the unvaccinated, and possibly in a few rare cases, those with other pre-existing conditions (much as a bad flu season affects those who are most vulnerable), and (2) result in some temporary strain on the health care system. In fact, despite the spiking numbers of cases now being recorded, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that our ICUs are being swamped with patients in numbers they can’t yet handle.

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The problem, I am arguing, is that the medical sciences have neglected to pay enough attention to the expertise of the social sciences, including psychology. It is the same mistake we made before the vaccines were ready. We ignored social science and imperiled our ability to fight the virus. Consider that a year before the vaccines were ready, we did little to nothing to convince people that vaccines were safe and that scientists were trustworthy. Instead, we ignored the phenomenon of vaccine hesitancy that was growing globally and blundered into a huge backlash against vaccines which have dramatically lowered their overall efficacy.

From a social science perspective, we shouldn’t make the same mistake again. We were told that if we reached 80 percent vaccination rates and herd immunity, we would have our lives back. In many corners of our country, this has been largely achieved, but the myth of danger persists, and with it, a wearying mistrust in those we should trust with our lives.

If this is now a disease of the unvaccinated, then is it so unthinkable to open COVID-19 wards in hospitals to ensure that other disorders have just as much access to care as COVID-19 patients? Is it so heartless to tell people who won’t vaccinate that they will need to wait for care because the patient requiring a lung transplant also deserves an ICU bed? There is a sociological reason for moving in this direction, even if it sets a dangerous ethical precedent. It reminds us that our society requires the fulfillment of a social contract. I’m expected to do my part for the collective good, and in return, the collective will look after me, and that includes my health care.

Medical science may be about saving everyone. Even by that measure, we are failing as the burden of untreated disease, and psychological strain accumulates. Even worse, though, we may be overlooking the long-term consequences when we fail to reward people for compliance with public health measures. Will they be willing to listen to the advice of scientists the next time there is an emergency? If they don’t, that will be the real cost of delaying the end of pandemic restrictions.