There are almost no LGBTQ people among those opposed to the covid vaccine. Are they more resistant to misinformation?
Most queer Americans got inoculated a long time ago
The Human Right Campaign (HRC) found that 91% of LGBTQ adults in the U.S. had already fully completed the covid-19 vaccine in July, and another 3% had at least their first dose behind them. This is an impressive number that the general population in the United States failed to reach even four months later. Currently, only 70% of the entire US population has been vaccinated.
In the hard core of vaccine opponents, queer people are the bare minimum. Only 6% of LGBTQ people say they will never get the vaccine, according to a representative HRC survey. Across the U.S. population as a whole, one-fifth of people (19%) held this radical position in September, according to a poll by the NPR radio network.
LGBTQ people have a higher chance of contracting covid
There may be a number of reasons why queer people are more likely to trust vaccines than the majority society. The Human Right Campaign sees the reason as being that the LGBTQ community has a higher proportion of those who have had covid themselves or have someone in their immediate circle who has had it. Even in the first year of the coronavirus crisis, HRC looked at how covid affects LGBTQ people and found that they are more vulnerable to the disease than others.
According to the HRC report, there are 14 million LGBTQ adults and two million LGBTQ youth in the US. Roughly 5 million of them work in professions that have been identified as most at risk for covid, such as restaurants and cafeterias, hospitals, schools, and stores. Additionally, LGBTQ Americans are poorer than heterosexuals and often cannot afford quality health insurance and care. Paid sick or parental leave is not as well established in the U.S. as it is here, for example, and even when employers do provide some forms of support, rainbow families with newborn or adopted children are often excluded. LGBTQ youth are in a specific situation and are at significantly greater risk of homelessness. Similarly, queer seniors are twice as likely to live alone and four times less likely to have children, according to the HRC report. This means that they are left to fend for themselves in terms of preventative measures and illness.
LGBTQ people don't get the misinformation from anti-vaxxers
But as it turns out, LGBTQ Americans aren't enthusiastically vaccinating just because they're more likely to get sick or because getting sick would be more of a hassle for them. The other reason is almost laughable. That's because queer people don't watch conservative news media that airs anti-LGBTQ hate propaganda. And because they're not in the mood for the homophobic "bullshit" published on TV stations like Fox News or Newsmax, misinformation about vaccinations doesn't reach them either. These two media outlets are the mouthpieces of the anti-vaxxers.
Zdroj: Giphy
The Human Rights Campaign says that LGBTQ Americans lean more to the left in their political views than the general population. And the line between trust and distrust of vaccines runs right through the middle of the political spectrum. Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to say they wouldn't inject the vaccine for the world, and are very willing to uncritically believe reports such as the vaccine containing microchips that can then be used to determine a person's location. Newsmax White House correspondent Emerald Robinson was temporarily blocked by Twitter for tweeting this nonsense. And then her mouth went off again and Twitter permanently shut down her account. But the situation in the United States could be generalized to the whole world. There is a simple rule: don't follow homophobic media, you will have confidence in science.
