Hello and welcome to my channel Medicine with Dr Moran. Have the unvaccinated been
discriminated against during the Covid-19 pandemic? Today I'm going to report on a
recently published peer review study in Nature which addresses the attitudes that people have
towards the unvaccinated during our current global pandemic. There's a link to the study
in the description below as always. The study authors are from Denmark and Hungary and they
talk about vaccine mandates, the passports, the massive information campaigns, but they point
out that despite this some people in countries around the world chose not to get vaccinated.
They point out that some politicians have attempted to justify strict policies against the
unvaccinated by using very moralistic rhetoric. Now survey research shows that divisions based
on vaccination status have emerged amongst the general public and those who refuse vaccines
report that they feel quite discriminated and pressured. They state the vaccination status has
been consistently aligned with political opinions and in the case of the United States partisanship.
This study I'm going to talk about included 64,000 people and they actually quantified
discriminatory attitudes between vaccinated and unvaccinated citizens in 21 countries.
This figure shows the average level of exclusionary attitudes in family relationships.
These are exclusionary attitudes towards the unvaccinated from vaccinated respondents,
and towards the vaccinated for unvaccinated respondents. There were 54,054 vaccinated
respondents in this survey and on average they were 13% more unhappy when presented with an
unvaccinated versus a fully vaccinated person. Now this varied across countries and ranged
up to a high of 36% in Malaysia while results in Romania and Hungary were actually not significant.
If you look at the unvaccinated respondents of which there were 10,386 people they exhibited
negligible exclusionary attitude towards vaccinated individuals with the average of
minus two percentage points -2%. Due to the small number of unvaccinated people sampled in their
survey they're actually quite wide confidence intervals for a number of the countries.
Unvaccinated individuals in Malaysia, Italy, and Russia, actually exhibited significant
exclusionary reactions towards other unvaccinated individuals as you can see in the figure.
One interesting thing about the study is that they found that discriminatory attitudes were
higher in countries with cooperative norms and what this means is that the more likely
a country's population followed the rules or the norms of society the more discrimination
was evident towards the unvaccinated. It's extremely important to note that the study
demonstrated that vaccinated in the United States support restrictions of the rights and freedoms of
the unvaccinated. These desired restrictions were not little things like not just being
allowed to go to the mall and as you can see from this slide the vaccinated Americans feel
greater apathy towards unvaccinated Americans by 16% they're also 28% less likely to respect
the unvaccinated freedom of movement, 10% less likely to respect freedom of residents,
8% less likely to support their application for U.S citizenship, 7% less likely to respect
their freedom of speech, and 7% less likely to support their application for welfare benefits.
The study concludes and I quote "We have documented that individual vaccinated against
Covid-19 expressed negative attitudes against the unvaccinated in the form of things like apathy,
stereotypes, support for exclusion of family relationships, and support for removal of
political rights. In total these four forms of discriminatory attitudes are consistent
with the observation of prejudice according to standard definitions in social psychology.
Now many of you may have come across these attitudes in your interactions with people
whether you're vaccinated or not. At the beginning of the pandemic we also saw discrimination against
those who unfortunately got this virus through no fault of their own and came down with Covid-19.
You have to remember that we all get viruses and colds and we know this and to discriminate
or look down on someone who just got sick is not appropriate. We know very early on in the pandemic
that once this virus got into animal populations it was going to be a virus that was simply not
going to be able to be eradicated. Thus whether you're vaccinated or not you're going to get
infected with this virus intermittently throughout your life just as we do with other respiratory
viruses. Now only a minority of people in most countries have not been infected with the virus
as we go into 2023. Some people have had several symptomatic infections over the past three years.
In my profession it's important not to discriminate against people who have any
kind of illness. It's also important not to discriminate against their choices of
investigations or medical treatments our job as Physicians is to discuss investigations, treatment
strategies with our patients and ideally we want to treat the patient with the right intervention,
at the right time, using the right dose, and frequency of whatever that intervention is.
Now the risks and the benefits of each intervention must be quantified.
There will be times where patients will choose against an intervention even when the benefits
outweigh the risks and you have to remember that ultimately that's the patient's choice.
Thank you for joining me today on Medicine with Dr. Moran. Get healthy and stay healthy.