Over the past two years, many people who refused to take the COVID-19 vaccine have experienced discrimination due to their choice to remain unvaccinated. A new global study from Aarhus University in Denmark published in the journal Nature shows that the injustice they experienced was real.
The research covers 21 countries with various cultural backgrounds and demonstrates that
vaccinated people express discriminatory attitudes towards the unvaccinated, as high as the discriminatory attitudes suffered by common targets like immigrant and minority populations.The study finds that this behavior is mainly caused by the perception of the unvaccinated as being “free-riders,” which has led to even the emergence of “support for the removal of fundamental rights” of the unvaccinated.
In contrast to these findings, the study shows that—with the exception of the United States and Germany, where such “negative affects” are present—there is an “absence of evidence that unvaccinated individuals display discriminatory attitudes towards vaccinated people.” On the other hand, the only countries in which the unvaccinated were not discriminated against were Hungary and Romania.
Discrimination against the unvaccinated is especially high in “cultures with stronger cooperative norms,” the paper claims, which supports notions that the management of the pandemic has increased overall skepticism towards individual freedom of choice.
Alexander Bor, the lead author of the study, said:
The conflict between those who are vaccinated against COVID-19 and those who are not threatens societal cohesion as a new socio-political cleavage, and the vaccinated clearly seem to be the ones deepening this rift.
In many cases, vaccinated people did not want close relatives to marry an unvaccinated person, and considered the unvaccinated to be incompetent and untrustworthy.
In the United States, vaccinated people even pleaded for the denial of fundamental rights of unvaccinated people, going as far as demanding segregation by keeping unvaccinated people from moving into their neighborhood or keeping them from expressing their political views on social media without censorship.
The level of discrimination expressed towards the unvaccinated, the study finds, thus even exceeds the amount of prejudice directed towards other common targets of prejudice, such as immigrants, drug addicts, and ex-convicts.
But this kind of discrimination against the unvaccinated is not a matter of the past, another study shows. The American Journal of Medicine published research by Canadian scientists that claims unvaccinated people are 72% more likely to be involved in a severe traffic accident, which the researchers speculate may be an indicator that people who resist public health recommendations might also “neglect basic road safety guidelines” caused by a general “antipathy toward regulation.”
Because of this, the authors suggest first responders should consider taking precautions to protect themselves from COVID when responding to traffic accidents, as the researchers apparently still believe the unvaccinated are more likely to transmit the virus than the vaccinated. The Canadian scientists also recommend insurance companies to charge unvaccinated drivers higher premiums, which in turn confirms the findings of the Danish study.
