The unvaccinated stories that don't need to be told
Clickbait-y stories are not a tool well-designed to fight COVID-19 and likely won't convince the unvaccinated to just get the damn shot.
Stephen Harmon made news this past weekend for dying from COVID-19 after being vocally — and that’s putting it nicely — against vaccinations. His social media postings, notably the tweet from earlier this month, “IF YOU’RE HAVING EMAIL PROBLEMS, I FEEL BAD FOR YOU, SON. I GOT 99 PROBLEMS BUT A VAX AIN’T ONE!” were outrageously misinformed. That tweet led to an easy headline, one that surely generated tons of page views for sites like The Daily Beast and the New York Post. Another story, on CBS News, welcomed viewers inside a hospital room where a man who almost died from coronavirus said he still wasn’t going to get the vaccine.
What is the purpose of stories like this other than to generate clicks and shares?
Whether deceased or alive, the narratives of unvaccinated citizens who have been led astray and are less willing to lose their ego than they are their life will play little to no role in changing the minds of the large swath of the U.S. that has still not received a shot.
When a public figure, say, a control-hungry politician, becomes gravely ill or dies from COVID, that’s a news story. They had the ability, and in almost all cases the foreknowledge, to share vital information with their communities and chose a path that put not only their lives but the lives of countless others in danger. Herman Cain’s death was newsworthy because it showed just how far ostensibly well-informed politicians will go to stay in Donald Trump’s good graces. Cain literally died for the cause. If there was any posthumous mockery at Cain’s expense, it was well-deserved, especially since his family kept tweeting lies about COVID-19 from his account after his death.
In the case of Harmon, some have expressed that covering the death of a normal citizen, whose main identifying characteristic was that he was a church congregant who touted the word of the Bible over the gospel of Anthony Fauci, is “unnecessary.” And it is, but not for the reasons many claim. Someone who uses their personal platform to spread lies before succumbing to the disease themselves don’t deserve negative press nor positive press. It’s like covering daily victims of gun violence without acknowledging the root causes.
The responsibility to save lives falls on the policymakers and leadership figures in their respective communities who know better. When Republican politicians who are only now coming out boldly in support of vaccines — if only to save a substantial portion of their delta variant-afflicted electorate — still say vaccine passports (read “immunization records”) are unconstitutional, they are taking an anti-vax stance. This hypocrisy should be covered and contextualized.
Alabama Governor Kay Ivey, for instance, wants the responsibility to fall on the citizens she has had a hand in misinforming who remain unvaxxed rather than herself for failing to enforce mask mandates and COVID-19 immunization records. The media can’t follow suit and assume that profiling the “vaccine hesitant” will provide any new answers on why vaccination rates remain low. They are being fed lies that inundate their information intake with such velocity that it leads to them justifying the blatant disregard for their and their loved ones’ personal health.
Outlets like the New York Post thrive on clickbait at the expense of human decency, which is why a photo of Harmon on his death bed went viral on social media. Journalistic enterprises are supposed to hold people accountable. The people most accountable for the rising death toll from the delta variant aren’t the ones dying who have been brainwashed by the lies; the ones most responsible for mass death are the purveyors of propaganda. They are the Republicans claiming to be pro-vax while simultaneously slamming “Faucism.” They are the preachers who long refused to use their pulpit to urge their parishioners to get the vaccine, and are only now relenting under uncompromising data. They are the ones in charge who only feel compelled to act when they might have something to lose.
The worst part of the stories about unvaccinated folks getting sick and dying isn’t that they’re part of a “gotcha” scheme; it’s that we know their names at all. They are in need neither of sympathy nor attention. The media would be best served by focusing less attention on the actions and beliefs of the ordinary science deniers and devoting more space to parsing the lies and opportunistic flip-flopping of those in power playing with the lives of the people who listen to them.