Vaccine Hesitancy and the Pursuit of Purity

Recently I unsubscribed from Chris Masterjohn’s YouTube channel. While previously I’d found his perspective on vitamin D and other nutrition research to be interesting and helpful, the fact that he got Covid twice and still won’t take the vaccine was just too much for me. I just don’t have any patience for vaccine hesitancy when there is so much evidence that the vaccine offers protection against severe disease and death from Covid. I don’t disagree with Masterjohn that some supplements (such as vitamin D and zinc) can also offer protection against severe Covid. And of course contracting and surviving Covid offers some natural immunity as well. But as I’ve written about before, continually rolling the dice when the stakes are so high just isn’t a good strategy. There are just too many cases of robustly healthy people who take all the right supplements getting severely sick from Covid.

So what’s behind vaccine hesitancy? Academics who have looked into the issue associate vaccine hesitancy with values such as purity and personal liberty. Many people are willing to accept the larger risk of Covid (or measles, or other serious diseases) to avoid the much smaller risks of adverse side effects from vaccines.

It makes me think of other health areas where priorities get mixed up in the pursuit of purity and optimization. For example:

• Suffering from dehydration because you don’t want to drink tap water (which is mostly safe — though in some parts of the U.S. it isn’t)
• Avoiding the sun so much (to prevent skin cancer) that you become deficient in vitamin D, and miss the blood-pressure lowering/nitric-oxide-releasing benefits of direct sunlight
• Not getting enough calories or nutrients because of strict dietary restrictions (organic-only, veganism, etc.)

Tolerating some levels of impurity (in air, water, food, radiation and chemical exposure) can ultimately improve health outcomes.