I am assuming you haven't spent much time around the kind of people that didn't approve of the vaccine. Let me write out a string of thoughts that support saying empathy isn't a great core principle.
At the start of the pandemic we are told it's no big deal. Then a few weeks later it's a massive deal. At first masks don't work so don't rush out and buy them. Then masks are mandatory in all public places. We then put society on hold for about a year. Finally we have an experimental drug that helps you be protected from the virus. YOU MUST TAKE THE DRUG! Don't want it? YOU MUST TAKE THE DRUG! You already had COVID and recovered? YOU MUST TAKE THE DRUG! You had a legitimate medical reaction to a previous vaccine? YOU MUST TAKE THE DRUG!
That process broke the trust of a significant amount of people. Why trust the establishment when they change their minds all the time and demand demand demand? If they do all these things in the name of empathy, empathy shouldn't be the base principle.
Objectively, the vaccine is extremely low risk, and the benefit is orders of magnitude larger than the risk for almost all groups.
I understand that some people have an irrational fear of the vaccine, and I can even try to empathize with them to that extent. However, it still is very difficult to understand the level of opposition to something which is so simple (just two painless injections, each taking seconds to administer) and so overwhelmingly positive (a 90+% reduction in the chance of serious disease, in exchange for a vanishingly small risk).
Public health messaging in the US was terrible, but US public health agencies were extremely cautious with the vaccines. If they hadn't cared about testing the vaccines, the vaccines could have been rolled out by mid-2020. After all, the vaccines were formulated all the way back in January 2020, pretty much as soon as the viral RNA sequence was published. I think it's sad that people have the impression that the vaccines were not thoroughly tested, because they were actually subjected to an extremely high level of scrutiny. They weren't approved until full-scale phase-3 trials with tens of thousands of participants had shown that the risk of severe side-effects was minuscule (i.e., as low as in other approved, safe vaccines).
The vaccine saved on the order of a million lives in the US. It's one of the most unambiguously positive things developed by humankind. That's why the strident opposition is so difficult to understand - it points to something very wrong in society.
Yep, pretty much hits the nail on the head. It’s not so much about empathy vs. feigning it for internet points. I can empathize with the situation in OP, but not in an outsized proportion to what’s occurred in society in the past few years. The same folks repping “empathy” were laughing to the bank when humans were locked in cages for getting around the vaccine mandate in their own way.
There’s people who were forced to sell their homes, lost their jobs, and can’t move back to the place they grew up right here on American soil - in layman’s terms, I’m out of f’s to give.
Empathy isn’t the core principle of getting vaccinated. It’s just one of the reasons; and you cannot claim to be empathetic if you refuse to do it out of something that isn’t medical exemption.
The actual reasons are self preservation and slowing down a pandemic. And when people don’t care about the latter, that is an easy tell that yeah they have zero empathy.
"Empathy for my children [and nobody else's]" is a good round-about way of saying "for entirely selfish reasons".
Especially since your actions do absolutely nothing to advance that goal you likely just made up now. If the governments have learned anything, it's that mandates need to be quicker and stronger, with much more stringent penalties for the dodgers.
At the start of the pandemic we are told it's no big deal. Then a few weeks later it's a massive deal. At first masks don't work so don't rush out and buy them. Then masks are mandatory in all public places. We then put society on hold for about a year. Finally we have an experimental drug that helps you be protected from the virus. YOU MUST TAKE THE DRUG! Don't want it? YOU MUST TAKE THE DRUG! You already had COVID and recovered? YOU MUST TAKE THE DRUG! You had a legitimate medical reaction to a previous vaccine? YOU MUST TAKE THE DRUG!
That process broke the trust of a significant amount of people. Why trust the establishment when they change their minds all the time and demand demand demand? If they do all these things in the name of empathy, empathy shouldn't be the base principle.