A new comprehensive study reveals discriminatory attitudes by the COVID-19 vaccinated population toward the unvaccinated population.
The study, published in Nature, spanned 21 countries and included over 15,000 respondents. The researchers’ findings were derived from three separate studies conducted between December 2021 and May 2022.
While calling the development, testing, approval, and mass production of vaccines against SARS-CoV-2, or COVID-19, in less than a year a “historical feat of science,” the researchers claim that finding willing recipients for vaccination was actually the “major challenge.”
As governments pushed vaccine mandates and widespread public health information campaigns, the two Danish authors of the study cited “pandemic fatigue” — which they defined as the public’s waning support for lifestyle and social restrictions and dwindling trust in authorities — as a leading cause for some individuals choosing to forego the vaccine altogether.
The study argues that “individuals who comply with the advice of health authorities morally condemn the unvaccinated” for what the former consider is a violation of “a social contract in the midst of a crisis.”
Meanwhile, “those who refuse vaccines report that they feel discriminated against and pressured against their will.”
To truly gauge the potential prejudice against unvaccinated people, the researchers asked 15,233 individuals how they would feel if a close relative decided to marry a vaccinated or unvaccinated person as part of a larger exercise.
Participants in the study were given profiles of two fictitious individuals that each had six attributes. Of the six, one was vaccination status, randomly assigning one of the two profiles with “fully vaccinated” and “unvaccinated.”
Among other attributes were age, occupation, hobbies, family background, nationality, and more. The study also included “immigrant from the Middle East” as an attribute for a point of comparison, as research shows “exclusionary attitudes” against this group in many countries.
In an effort to assess the attitudes of “both Western affluent and non-Western developing nations,” one of the studies was fielded in Germany, India, Indonesia, Morocco, South Africa, and the United Kingdom.
Amongst vaccinated participants, 14% indicated a dislike for the profiles of unvaccinated individuals, which is comparable to the 15% dislike rate for profiles that listed one of the attributes as drug addiction.
Disliking unvaccinated profiles came in significantly higher than profiles containing attributes including previous stints in prison, atheism, and a history of mental health issues.
Overall, across all three studies, 13% of vaccinated individuals disliked profiles containing unvaccinated individuals, which was two-and-a-half times greater than profiles containing the “immigrant from the Middle East” attribute.
“Unvaccinated targets face significantly more exclusionary reactions than immigrants in 11 out of 21 countries, while immigrants do not face significantly more exclusionary reactions in any of the countries,” the findings claimed.
The study also found that this prejudice toward the unvaccinated is essentially “one-sided,” citing that only in the United States and Germany did researchers “find that the unvaccinated feel some antipathy towards the vaccinated.”
However, the researchers argued that this aversion does not manifest in any statistically significant way or result in exclusionary attitudes by unvaccinated people toward the vaccinated.
Remarking on the findings of the study, one of the researchers, Alexander Bor, said, “The observation that vaccinated individuals discriminate against those who are unvaccinated, but that there is no evidence for the reverse, is consistent with work on the psychology of cooperation.”
“Indeed, vaccinated individuals in cultures with stronger cooperative norms are shown to react more negatively against those who are unvaccinated,” Bor concluded.