“Researchers find these sentiments echoed in poor and marginalized communities around the world. Despite the scale of the problem, experts are divided on which interventions might work best. Here, too, the experience of the United States might prove instructive. In America, anti-vaccine movements are as old as vaccines themselves; efforts to immunize people against smallpox prompted bitter opposition in the turn of the last century. But after World War II, these attitudes disappeared. In the 1950s, demand for the polio vaccine often outstripped supply, and by the late 1970s, nearly every state had laws mandating vaccinations for school with hardly any public opposition.
What changed? This was the era of large, ambitious government programs like Medicare and Medicaid. In the mid-’60s, the number of government-funded social programs targeting the poor and communities of color skyrocketed. The anti-measles policy, for example, was an outgrowth of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and War on Poverty initiatives. Government workers from initiatives like Head Start assisted in vaccination campaigns. In some cities, the government sponsored the creation of health councils, made up of community members, which served as intermediaries between health centers and the public. These councils embodied the idea that public health is effective only when community members share in decision making.
The experience of the 1960s suggests that when people feel supported through social programs, they’re more likely to trust institutions and believe they have a stake in society’s health. Only then do the ideas of social solidarity and mutual obligation begin to make sense.
The types of social programs that best promote this way of thinking are universal ones, like Social Security and universal health care. Universal programs inculcate a sense of a common good because everyone is eligible simply by virtue of belonging to a political community. In the international context, when marginalized communities benefit from universal government programs that bring basic services like clean drinking water and primary health care, they are more likely to trust efforts in emergency situations — like when they’re asked to get vaccinated.
If the world is going to beat the pandemic, countries need policies that promote a basic, but increasingly forgotten, idea: that our individual flourishing is bound up in collective well-being.”