Seeds of doubt

As I noted yesterday, I'm staying with my aunt and uncle for the Thanksgiving holiday. And this morning I found myself briefly discussing the politics of COVID-19 with my aunt.

For years my aunt has identified herself as a "yellow-dog Democrat": one who would vote for any Democrat over any Republican, no matter what. And in general her political positions have been reliably those of the Democratic Party. But she remarked this morning that she had asked herself more than once, "If Donald Trump had won re-election in 2020, would she have trusted the COVID-19 vaccine that came out in 2021?" 

Of course, politically speaking in the USA, Democrats have tended to support the COVID-19 vaccines, and hesitancy or distrust has been expressed mostly by Republicans. But my aunt seemed to recognize that this alignment was in some ways peculiar: "Why  did those of us who believed what our government told us about the disease actually believe it, when we know that our government has lied to us before?"

This is a question I have heard many times from Republicans, when they want to accuse Democrats of hypocrisy on the issue of COVID-19. But I think that hypocrisy might be too simple an accusation. Certainly my aunt realizes that there is some kind of inconsistency here, and it bothers her. In retrospect I wonder if she was trying to elicit a firm statement from me one way or the other, to find out where I stand. If that was her aim, then I hope I evaded her. But I did suggest that it may have been no more than a historical accident that the parties aligned the way they did around the vaccines, and not the opposite way.

It's not a red pill yet, but the conversation did expose seeds of doubt. I think those are healthy, and I'm glad to see them.

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P.S.: My own position on the vaccines is ill-formed. I do not have strong opinions pro or con, and the information that I hear is too confusing for me to make sense of. I am intrigued by (and sympathetic to) John Michael Greer's hypothesis, but I don't commit to any specific explanation or account.