A little more context on the Army vaccine reticence, based on an enlisted experience 2007-2012:
The base level of trust among soldiers is much lower than among civilians with respect to vaccines. There are a few reasons for this:
Huge victories like smallpox are not factors in our thinking, because we still get the smallpox vaccine. This is because it still exists in weapons stockpiles.
The military in general and Army in particular are super awful about messaging. Partially this is a matter of institutional ignorance, but mostly this is a matter of the communication arms being staffed by people who are chosen for the relevant training largely by lottery among the least qualified people available, and then assigned also largely by lottery. Most jobs that aren’t combat-related are like this.
I was there through the tail-end of the Anthrax fiasco. For clarity I took the vaccine without objection, but it was clearly being managed poorly; they went light on medical justification and heavy on threats and non-judicial punishment while issuing blanket rejections of any kind of bad facts and not being able to articulate anything positive. I have no source for this, but the rumors going around at the time said that 4000 guys in the first wave got erectile disfunction, which couldn’t have been more effective at terrifying a bunch of 18-25 hard-living dudes if it had been designed by a civilization with far more knowledge of group behavior than we now possess.
A little more context on the Army vaccine reticence, based on an enlisted experience 2007-2012:
The base level of trust among soldiers is much lower than among civilians with respect to vaccines. There are a few reasons for this:
Huge victories like smallpox are not factors in our thinking, because we still get the smallpox vaccine. This is because it still exists in weapons stockpiles.
The military in general and Army in particular are super awful about messaging. Partially this is a matter of institutional ignorance, but mostly this is a matter of the communication arms being staffed by people who are chosen for the relevant training largely by lottery among the least qualified people available, and then assigned also largely by lottery. Most jobs that aren’t combat-related are like this.
They bitterly bungled their last major vaccine push, the Anthrax Vaccine Immunization Program.
I was there through the tail-end of the Anthrax fiasco. For clarity I took the vaccine without objection, but it was clearly being managed poorly; they went light on medical justification and heavy on threats and non-judicial punishment while issuing blanket rejections of any kind of bad facts and not being able to articulate anything positive. I have no source for this, but the rumors going around at the time said that 4000 guys in the first wave got erectile disfunction, which couldn’t have been more effective at terrifying a bunch of 18-25 hard-living dudes if it had been designed by a civilization with far more knowledge of group behavior than we now possess.