Opinion: The Unvaccinated May Not Be Who You Think | The New York Times

Back when a viral pandemic killing millions around the world was just the plot of a scary movie, the film “Contagion” was lauded for how accurately it depicted the way such an outbreak would occur.

On the science of viral contagion, it was quite sharp, clearly explaining things like R0 (the measure of how widely one infection could spread to others, on average).

Of the human dimension of contagion, it did not prove as prescient. In the movie, fearful nurses walked off the job at the start of the pandemic, which begins to end as soon as vaccines become available, with people lining up eagerly for their turn.

The opposite happened in real life. Despite enormous personal risk, almost all health care workers stayed on the job in the first months of the Covid pandemic. Despite vaccines being widely available since spring in the United States, tens of thousands of people are dying every month because they chose not to be inoculated.

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