The life you save may be your neighbor’s

Saturday dawned gray and cold. In the Hilltowns, gusts of wind whipped back to wintertime.

But later in the day, the clouds cleared and the sun shone. In Altamont, the streets surged with roiling, rolling humanity. Parents pushed their toddlers in strollers down Maple Avenue. Grown children pushed their elders in wheelchairs. Front lawns and driveways burst with possessions for sale.

Altamont’s village-wide garage sale had returned — and with it, a sense of normalcy. For us, the day parallelled the pandemic. The dark sense of isolation gave way to the golden glow of shared humanity.

The annual fundraiser for the Altamont Elementary School PTA had been canceled last year, a sign of a cautious society eager to follow directives for the common good — to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

As we watched, from our upper-story newsroom, the undulating swarms, migrating from household sale to sale we thought of a herd — and of herd immunity.

The science that so swiftly developed several effective vaccines against COVID-19 — more than half of Capital Region residents have gotten at least one shot — has liberated us. 

But scientists say we need 70 to 90 percent of the population to have immunity from COVID-19 in order to return to life as we knew it.

Saturday, as the crowds rolled by, we edited the Old Men of the Mountain column — thrilled to read that enough of the old men have been vaccinated to once again gather for their traditional Tuesday breakfasts.

Columnist John R. Williams, in isolation along with all the other old men for the last year, had carried on heroically with his column, calling his compatriots to share their views so he could write.

But now, they are together again and, in his witty way, Williams had something wise to write about it: “In the chatter, it is often that one OF thinks what has happened has only happened to him. As the story is told, the OF finds another OF has gone through the same thing.”

That is what is at the center of common good, of shared humanity. Each of us needs to get vaccinated so that, together, we can move forward as a society.

While New York’s governor and Albany County officials have for months, even before the vaccine rolled out, focused on reaching underserved minority communities — and rightly so as they are often health-care deserts — last week, we focused in a front-page story on the rural areas in our midst, which have the lowest percentage of vaccinated residents.

We cited a New York Times analysis that looked at data for counties across the United States and found “both willingness to receive vaccine and actual vaccination rates to date were lower, on average, in counties where a majority of residents voted to re-elect former President Donald J. Trump in 2020.”

We then looked at 2020 election data that Enterprise reporter Sean Mulkerrin had gathered for each district in the Hilltowns and found a similar correlation — areas where Trump prevailed had lower vaccination rates than areas where Joe Biden prevailed.

We had read a poll in April from Quinnipiac University that found 7 percent of Democrats were not planning to get a COVID-19 vaccine compared to 45 percent of Republicans and 29 percent of Independents. In February, Siena College had released a poll with similar findings.

This troubled us. And it also puzzled us. After all, Trump himself had gotten vaccinated.

We suspected something deeper was going on. People we knew who had eschewed wearing masks to prevent the spread of the virus were also not getting vaccinated. They thought of themselves as independent of government and its directives, as liberated.

These qualities also might be the very ones that would lead them to vote for Trump. So, rather than being a political stance, it was a deeper personal quality that was keeping them from vaccination.

Trying to parse this out, we talked for our story last week to Jill Martin, a nurse practitioner who owns and runs Hilltown Healthcare, located in Berne.

Martin highlighted practical concerns, like residents not having transportation off the Hill or not feeling comfortable traveling to city or suburban locations for their shots.

Indeed, we talked to a rural resident in early March who said she would not sign up at the large state vaccination clinic held on the uptown University at Albany campus. “I once got lost for an hour in there. All the buildings look the same,” she said. “I can’t get out of their maze.”

Martin contacted the county’s health department, which sent 100 doses to each Hilltown and said, “We got 400 people vaccinated within a couple of days.” Her staff called each patient 60 or older to offer vaccination and now her office is offering anyone who calls — whether a patient or not — a vaccination.

We applaud these essential efforts.

Beyond practical concerns, Martin said something deeper that gets to the culture in the Hilltowns. “We tend to socially distance as a norm,” she said. “Even our houses are situated far apart.” And many Hilltowners work independently — say, as farmers — and don’t regularly go to crowded venues like theaters or restaurants, she noted.

“It gives a false sense of security that we don’t have the virus,” Martin said.

Indeed, she detailed a post-holiday surge in the Hilltowns when at least half of the tests for COVID-19 came back positive, calling it “unbelievable.” Most residents are unaware of this.

In addition to this sense of isolation and independence, Hilltowners also have a heritage of distrust of the government, going back to the Anti-Rent Wars. In the mid-19 Century, Helderberg farmers declared independence from the feudal patroon system, resisting tax collection and successfully demanding land reform.

Sabrina Tavernese wrote in The New York Times last Thursday a story that made the pieces of the puzzle fall together for me in understanding the rural and Republican resistance to vaccination in the Hilltowns.

“For years,” Tavernese wrote, “scientists and doctors have treated vaccine skepticism as a knowledge problem. If patients were hesitant to get vaccinated, the thinking went, they simply needed more information.”

She looked at social science research that suggests, instead, that deeply held beliefs are at the heart of many people’s resistance. A December 2017 study, “Association of moral values with vaccine hesitancy,” found that existing messaging may work in the short-term but ultimately backfires and worsens vaccine hesitancy.

Tavernese spoke with one of the authors of the paper, Dr. Saad Omer, director of the Yale Institute for Global Health, who said, “The instinct from the medical community was, ‘If only we could educate them.’ It was patronizing and, as it turns out, not true.”

“Our results demonstrate that endorsement of harm and fairness — ideas often emphasized in traditional vaccine-focused messages — are not predictive of vaccine hesitancy,” the paper concludes. “This, combined with significant associations of purity and liberty with hesitancy, indicates a need for inclusion of broader themes in vaccine discussions.”

Vaccine skeptics, the researchers found, were much more likely than nonskeptics to have a highly developed sensitivity for liberty — the rights of individuals — and to have less deference to those in positions of power.

Vaccine skeptics, too, were twice as likely to care a lot about the “purity” of their bodies and their minds. It could be religious — halal or kosher — or entirely secular, like people who care deeply about toxins in foods or in the environment.

These strong moral intuitions must be recognized, not brushed away.

We believe a successful appeal might instead sound very much like what nurse practitioner Jill Martin said to us: “I got vaccinated to protect my patients, to protect my parents … The sooner everybody gets vaccinated, the sooner we have normalcy.”

So, as the throngs travel through the streets of Altamont today, buoyed with a sense of sharing — sharing talk, sharing smiles, sharing good will and a return to normalcy — we would urge our readers to get vaccinated in the same spirit that nearly two centuries ago drew the Hilltown farmers together to stave off the oppression of the patroon system: Do it for your fellow citizens, do it for the common good.

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