<em>The Atlantic Daily</em>: How Our Pandemic Public-Health Messaging Backfired

Many factors influence vaccine hesitancy. The third of Americans who reportedly don’t want or are undecided about the vaccine are driven by “a constellation of motivations, insecurities, reasonable fears, and less reasonable conspiracy theories,” Derek Thompson reports.

One question, answered: A 68-year-old named Patrick planned to get vaccinated this week, but recently experienced a mild case of COVID-19. He asks our Social Distance podcast host James Hamblin to weigh in on whether he should wait a few weeks before getting his first shot.

James talks it through on the latest episode:

So with a lot of diseases, you don’t want to get vaccinated right after you’ve had it, because there can be an increased rate of side effects. If you already have high levels of this acute immune reaction going on, and then you get vaccinated, your body could react more strongly than it would otherwise. We don’t know a lot yet about how that would work with this vaccine, because it’s so new, and I think it’s very reasonable to wait that amount of time.

I doubt that it would be a high-risk thing to go ahead and get it. But I also would expect that you have enough protection, having just been sick, that it would be almost impossible for you to get a serious bout of COVID in that time. You are protected, essentially, at least from severe disease. So I don’t think you can go wrong by waiting that period. I certainly wouldn’t wait a year. I wouldn’t expect the immunity that you’re going to have after this infection lasts extremely long or is going to be 100 percent. We’re not seeing people have reinfection cases really shortly after being sick, so I think that should be reassuring.

Listen to the full discussion on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Tonight’s Atlantic-approved isolation activity:

How about a movie? Minari is now available to rent online. Our critic David Sims called it “one of the first must-sees of 2021.”

“[Director Lee Isaac] Chung’s visual vocabulary stands out as the master narrative engine,” the professor Anne Anlin Cheng pointed out.

Today’s break from the news:

We love a good planetary debate: Mars is a hellhole, the writer and journalist Shannon Stirone argues.