We are excited about hosting a family Christmas gathering and looking forward to sharing and meeting with family and friends. We have a dilemma. Two younger immediate family members are not, and refuse to be, Covid vaccinated.
Others protest and want us to un-invite them (unless they get vaccinated soon). We have interstate visitors and the concern is that the unvaccinated may be infected by Covid. What do we do? We love these two. We dearly want to see them on Xmas day.
Eleanor says: What you’ve got here is a problem about how to handle disagreement.
One option is to try persuasion. Since you said these people “refuse” to be vaccinated, I assume they’re moved by ideological reasons (they don’t want a vaccine) instead of immunological ones (they can’t have one).
If there’s even the remotest hope of persuading them to get vaccinated, I do think you ought to try. Vaccines are safe, vital, and quite literally the least we can do to keep each other safe. Friends and family are far more effective at changing minds than fact sheets or the internet, and by taking a real swing at persuading these relatives you’d be keeping them safe, too.
Who knows, you might discover their commitment to their position isn’t that strong after all. Perhaps they’ve refused to get vaccinated so far because it’s been largely up to them and the social costs are pretty slim (people disapprove silently, from a distance).
Maybe their refusal would buckle if they knew what a problem it posed to you, their immediate family and hosts; or if they understood what their stance looks like through other people’s eyes. Some “anti-vaccine” people get vaccinated if things they care about are on the line, like work, or an important event. You won’t know how unshakeable their position is if you don’t put one big effort into trying to shake it.
But suppose your persuasive efforts exhaust, and these people just cannot be moved to get vaccinated. Perhaps, then, they could be moved at a higher level – on the question of which rules should triumph given the disagreement.
What rule do they think other people should respect? Presumably it’s something about risk imposition. “Why should I have to do something I think is risky, just because other people don’t think it is?”. Strikingly, this is exactly what the ultimatum-issuing guests are saying, too: “Why should they get to expose me to a risk I’m not comfortable with, just because they don’t see it that way?”
This is an exploitable symmetry. Even if you can’t communicate the arguments for a jab, these relatives should more than understand the idea that people get to decide what risk they’re comfortable with – and that others don’t get to trample on that just because they disagree with the facts. After all, isn’t that their whole position?
Maybe if you can’t get them to be vaccinated, you can at least ask them to be consistent: to say “fair enough” instead of “how dare they” when they hear others would rather stay away.
You could offer to see them separately, say the day after. You could ask the other guests how they’d feel about being outside, if you’re in the southern hemisphere; or if a negative test from each guest would be enough. These are all attempts to reconcile everyone’s level of comfort with risk. But ultimately, if everyone can’t agree, the decision is yours – if you do invite these young people, anyone can choose not to come.
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