[Nursie]

It would never work as well in America.

Voluntary measures tend to work well in places where people have a reasonable trust in their government, scientific and medical authorities etc.

When the government of Japan says "Please get vaccinated of your own decision, understanding both the effectiveness in preventing infectious diseases and the risk of side effects. No vaccination will be given without consent.", they can be confident that the people of Japan will take rational, sensible, well-informed action. A large proportion will get vaccinated purely because the government recommend it.

Look me in the eye and tell me you believe the same about the US populace.

[dotnet00]

That's putting things pretty charitably for a society that pushes conformity to the point of it being fairly unhealthy.

Japanese peoples' trust in govt for 2020 was actually less than that of the US's. Their vaccination rates are more likely due to their community-oriented culture rather than their trust in government officials.

https://data.oecd.org/gga/trust-in-government.htm

[Nursie]

Interesting...

Thanks for that link, though I find it a little bit ambiguous that the measure is trust but the question asked is "In this country, do you have confidence in… national government?", which I think is slightly different to what I was alluding to which is trust in the motives of government.

For instance I trust the motives of the health establishment in the UK, but I have considerably less confidence that I will get the best outcomes from it.

Does that make sense? I wonder if it applies here and people in Japan are not confident in the ability of their government to deliver good outcomes. Whereas in the US a significant number question the motives.

Or I could just be wrong :) Always worth entertaining that possibility.

Yes, the community-oriented culture thing seems like a great explanation.

[dotnet00]

Yes that does make sense.

Perhaps this is a slightly more useful analysis: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/07/20/tokyo-olymp...

They look at peoples' opinion on specifically covid related policy, although they still don't address how this relates to opinion on health outcomes. At the same time I'm not sure if useful conclusions on vaccine policy can be drawn from these stats. Largely because the above numbers are from right before the Olympics, which would have politicized covid policy the same way it has been politicized in the US. However, while that politicization would have ended with the Olympics, the US is still stuck in the stupidity of politicizing a disease.

Perhaps a key difference between the two is that we in the US have a problem where political affiliation seemingly trumps everything. A vaccine must be rushed and risky if a republican is in charge or it must be an attempt to take away basic freedoms if a democrat is in charge etc.

Maybe if we didn't have that issue, the so-called individualists would actually act like individualists and look at all the evidence for the safety and efficacy of the vaccine.

[echelon]

I did before the CDC waffled on mask guidance. I know why they did it, but it seriously hurt credibility for a whole lot of folks and will have long term ramifications. It became something to latch onto, and it was obvious almost immediately as it happened.

If the Republicans were pro-vaccination, the numbers would change overnight. The reason they're not is because the establishment threatened the ego of Trump, and he couldn't have any group challenge his ego.

This is all political fighting, and it's stupid.

[Nursie]

I was pretty horrified, watching from overseas, as a lot of the covid stuff turned into a partisan R/D points-scoring exercise.

Our politicians in the UK are pretty damned incompetent, arrogant and nakedly self-interested. But to their credit they didn't turn much of it into a party-political exercise.

They f*cked it up in so many other ways though!

(I am now resident elsewhere and glad to be off plague island)