In particular, the morality tale cum obituary disregards the fact that to persuade someone to do something, you have to present them with information that is persuasive to them, not strictly with information that’s persuasive to you. People who have chosen vaccination (like myself) are already convinced that being vaccinated radically improves their odds of avoiding the worst effects of COVID-19, and thus the shot sells itself. The tsk-tsk obituary reflects that exact mentality, which is useful only if you hope to persuade someone who would’ve already been persuaded in the first place. These stories also reflect (unflatteringly) some of the feelings of the vaccinated set toward the willfully unvaccinated: anger in need of discharging (plenty have written as much) and its cousin schadenfreude—glee at the radically false notion that dying of an illness is a form of moral comeuppance. (NB: No one here gets out alive.)

So what would persuade the unvaccinated? A recent iteration of the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey asked unvaccinated Americans about their reasons for putting off or refusing vaccination against COVID-19, and allowed them to select more than one option, resulting in a set of ranked concerns for COVID-vaccine skeptics. Just more than half of the respondents listed the potential side effects of the vaccines as a major concern. Perhaps they’ve been paying attention to the news. The New York Times recently reported that myocarditis, inflammation of the heart muscle, is more common after COVID-19 vaccination; likewise, NPR featured a story earlier this month on university researchers looking into thousands of claims of menstrual changes following vaccination, and two days later Reuters ran a news article noting that European regulators were probing a skin rash and a pair of kidney disorders as possible side effects of the vaccines. None of these potential side effects has yet been verified by rigorous research. I think the vaccines are worth the slate of (what appear to me to be) relatively minor known risks (particularly when weighed against the risks of severe complications from getting COVID-19), and I haven’t had any sort of trouble since my Pfizer shots, which I got back in April—but that set of concerns is at least distinct from the total recalcitrance sometimes imputed to the unvaccinated.