Free vaccinations appeared suspicious to Americans conditioned to equate cost with quality

Evidence

Those expressions of solidarity were the real vertigo, the real upside-down world, since they bore no resemblance to the ways capitalism had taught us to unsee and neglect one another for so very long. Looking back now, it seems entirely unsurprising that a subset of the population said, Fuck you: we won’t mask or jab or stay home to protect people we have already chosen not to see. It also makes perfect sense that the vaccines being free worked against them for many people—especially in the United States, a country that treats health care as a profit center and where many have come to equate good medicine with “gold-plated” private insurance plans. As Kevin Newman, a thirty-one-year-old estate agent in Arkansas reasoned, “If Covid was really serious, we’d have to pay for the vaccine. Everything else is expensive so why are they giving it out for free? It’s suspicious.” — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 769

Categorization

• SEED: The US health care system’s profit logic so inverts Americans’ sense of value that free public goods read as traps — a strong essay angle on how market conditioning produces anti-solidarity reflexes.