Differentiating Interpretation From Fact: Unpacking A Viral Vaccine Meme

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A picture is worth a thousand words or, in this case, a thousand interpretations. Recently, a viral Facebook meme illustrating vaccine requirements for employees made its round on the internet. For today's episode, Bill Stierle and Tom share their two cents on the matter. They unpack the messaging behind the post and discuss how and why such varying and divisive opinions came up from a single image. Join them for an insightful conversation on interpretation versus fact and freedom and independence versus consideration for others.

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Differentiating Interpretation From Fact: Unpacking A Viral Vaccine Meme

Bill, I got motivated and I'm trying to find a way to put some emphasis on this without making it positive or negative because I think there are so many ways to look at this. I got motivated or maybe I got somehow a fire lit under me to talk about a particular meme that was circulated on Facebook, at least that's where I first saw it. When I looked at it, I'm like, “That's a very interesting meme.” It's definitely something that's here and now in our society that a lot of people are wrestling with. I had a certain perspective as a business owner that I wanted to comment on the meme and I did. What I was shocked by is how other people saw it.

A lot of times, Tom, people see images or memes and how could they do anything different than read it from their perspective, beliefs, bias and information. That's the challenge. If I extend somebody that trust to another person and they tell me something's bad, I don't go there because I'm trusting them. I believe it's bad but I haven't looked at the thing myself. There are several things in the environment that are being written about and decided upon at the government level that doesn't being decided at that level because of the belief or bias or confirmation that this thing is bad when it's not bad.

It's written in a way to have the person engage in the image, which is what you brought forward here is an image in regards to vaccines. How do we on a communication show empathize with an image? Train our brain to create perspective and perception with this image rather than saying, “This is what it means.” We needed to check our internal world to say, “We're putting some interpretation on this.” It's not a bad thing but it's also something that we can catch on our site that we are escalating. It's not the images escalating it. Our belief or bias is escalating things.

I certainly experienced that. Although at the time, maybe I didn't fully understand what was happening.

You knew something was up. Your internal world knew something was up and you are like, “What does this thing mean?” That's called, “Hats off to you,” is that your observational mind is getting better. That's a good thing. That's what that is.

I hope so. I certainly try to approach things from that place of observation first. As we've learned back in the truth scale, observation is the closest on the scale of truth. It's very high up on the truth scale. Let me for our readers paint a mental picture here for them. This meme is a graphic image like a cartoon, if you want to call it that. Those of you who are reading can check this image out at the blogpost to PurchasingTruth.com.

It is a drawn image of what I would call a chasm or think of it as a canyon. Basically, there's this place that a person is standing on the edge of, it could be a cliff or only 10 or 12 feet off the ground. It’s hard to see because the image is cut off. The idea is you'd need a bridge to cross from one side to the other. There's a gap in the earth that is there that no one could walk across or jump across.

There's a person there holding a briefcase, bent over and a couple of little lines or hashes drawn around his head so it looks like the person is maybe exasperated. There's a gap. On the other side of the gap is a big signpost that says “job” and that same-looking briefcase underneath the job. Some money on the other side of that sign of the job. There’s a line coming down from the top with what looks like a fishhook holding the money.

What the bridge is across the chasm is a hypodermic needle, an obviously enlarged one. It's bigger than the person. The implication is to get the vaccine and walk across the vaccine to get to their job. There are texts of thought that say, “No one should have to cross this bridge. NO ONE.” A person with who I'm connected on Facebook, it was somebody I’m associated with back in my high school days although I don't know the person very well. I had to look that up. Was I in high school with this person? I saw this meme and I was like, “That's very interesting.”

That's the way I approach it. I looked at this meme and what it said. They're saying, “No one should have to get a vaccine in order to have a job or to do their job.” There are a few different ways you could interpret this. On its face, meaning looking plainly at what it says. I decided I'm going to make a comment as a business owner because while it says, “No one should have to cross this bridge.” While I agreed, no one should have to. I thought I would offer some perspective as a business owner who employs a lot of people that there are other things to consider. There may be some good reasons why an employer requires a vaccine for their employees or certainly certain jobs within their company.

Maybe it doesn't have to be every job within their company but certain jobs. I thought I'd offer some perspective and I did. I preface it by saying, “I'm not making a political statement. This isn't meant to be a political post. I'm purely offering some thoughts from the perspective of a business owner. For the most part, there was a real civil discussion and debate that took place amongst people commenting on this but still, some things surprised me.

I was shocked at how some people reacted to not only this meme but to what I wrote. Bill, I want your serious thoughts on this because you have an incredible perspective to offer. Let me say, I had so many people comment on this post saying the government should never require a vaccine for people to do their job. It's like, “Okay, I hear you. I would try to empathize with them.” I didn't see this meme as having anything to do with government mandates over vaccines. Honestly, I didn't. From my perspective, there's nothing in this meme that says anything about the government.

The word government is not on this thing. There's nothing. That's a great example, Tom. It's activating a belief, bias and perception. The perceptions activated that the government is putting the needle there. The government has made a mandate but that's not what this thing is about. This is you've got to cross this threshold of vaccination to have these other things. That's the perception now. That's what the picture showed.

There's none in its words or the cartoon. Is there anything here about the government doing anything? When people would comment about the government mandating things, we were right in the middle during this time. The Joe Biden administration had issued an executive order for OSHA, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, to require any company with more than 100 employees to mandate their employees get the vaccine or the government was mandating it.

This was being challenged and going through the courts so the decision had not yet come down as a lot of this debate is going on. We know the Supreme Court ended up ruling against the Joe Biden administration from the OSHA perspective that they thought it was the bridge too far for the government to require any company with 100 employees.

That is a big discussion point right there. You've got two things, individual freedoms and the collective good of the nation. The collective good of the nation also needs to consider individual rights. At the same time, they also got to realize that as soon as you meet some individual rights, you lose the collective good of the nation. Those are the things. Here's the bad news. The bad news is they picked individual rights over the collective good of the nation.

That means there's nobody protecting the greater good. Let that sink for a second. The protection of the greater good is not what the court does. In the past, we've gotten ourselves into trouble here. During the AIDS epidemic, there were decisions made in the same way where people picked money over a person's life. That's what they did.

They said, “We're not going to vote for the greater good and test the blood banks. We're not going to do that because it's going to cost too much.” It’s what they did. It costs lives. How many? Thousands. That's problematic because it's a health issue. I'm bugged by this because I lost a sibling in that. In our condition, this picture is saying, “This individual is required to meet the needs of the greater good.” The way it's set up is, “Your job and financial security is going to be threatened because we need the greater good to be taken care of.”

Notice how I'm looking at the picture very differently than the person that has the mandate. Now we're ready to take a look at what those different needs are on both sides. A child will look at this and have a snap decision, a person that is not exploring, the perception of this is going to jump to a bias. It's easier to jump to something that you validated in the past to be true or somebody that you trust. It's easier to pick that than it is to do what you and I are doing is critically looking at the picture. I'm ready for the next piece of it.

The Supreme Court, while on the one hand, denied or ruled against the Joe Biden administration from the perspective of OSHA. Having this mandate apply to all companies with so many employees, they did allow the mandate to go forward that the Joe Biden administration required for healthcare and hospital workers and things like that. There was a partial victory and a partial loss for both sides in this debate. That's the information that the news on its face.

You used the word with me that this meme activated things in the viewers of the Facebook post. I am trying to empathize with their needs and my comments back and forth and have a civil discussion about it, which we did have a civil discussion and empathize with their needs. One person said to me, “Tom, I saw this meme as the government requiring vaccines.” That's why they were coming together. I said, “I can appreciate that. Thanks for letting me know.”

I didn't see how anywhere in this meme it was talking about the government. My comments are not about a government mandate. They're about an individual company. By the way, Bill, we should say just for the record that individual private companies are allowed to mandate that their employees take the vaccines. I had somebody say to me in a comment that it was unconstitutional. I had to break the bad news to them in an empathetic way, “I hear that you'd like me to hear that a private company requiring vaccines is unconstitutional. Is that right?” They said, “Yes.”

I explained to them, “That's not the case.” Private companies are allowed to do anything but constitutional challenges have been only about the government making a mandate of some kind like this, not individual companies. The airlines are the biggest example like United Airlines and American Airlines have absolutely issued a company-wide mandate. Their employees need to be vaccinated or they lose their jobs.

A police department in New York City did the same thing. Even though that's a local government agency, they made that decision on their own. Many companies have and that is legal and constitutional. Putting that out there as a fact, although I realized, Bill, as I'm having this civil discussion/debate with other people over Facebook, even though the facts are on my side, the facts didn't matter very much to them.

In the face of a person's perception that they're holding on to, it's not as much important as fighting for the thing I know. If I fight for the thing I know, I have more stability in my world and more certainty. I've made a decision about this.” The influencers, media, politicians and various different leaders are trying to solidify the perception and the belief early in trying to get something to stick, to keep the person on their side.

Former President Donald Trump goes on to the stage and does a thing called test marketing. He says a sentence and looks to see how many people cheer for it. He then comes back and says it in a different way and then sees if they cheer for it. He is testing the tone and the impulse of what the audience is listening to in order to increase loyalty, engagement and the thing. That's why he would say, “Ron DeSantis is boring.” Why? Because Ron is copying something rather than testing something.

He's a marketing and salesperson. The people don't know that the president is a marketing and salesperson. He's not necessarily a civic leader. A civic leader is somebody different than what he is. He's not a civic leader. He is a marketing and sales expert that uses a language to market and sell. He was on TV and kept doing marketing and sales messaging. That's what he did. It's all about getting his brand, image and products to be purchased. A large part of it has to do with his own respect and recognition that he gets mad at the expense of others and his own self-worth that he's trying to fill. Part of it is all of that.



With this picture, to pivot back to the picture, if the bias or the imprint has been laid in that government mandate is the image, that phrase gets associated with this picture. Government mandate means that freedom is lost instead of government mandate is a civil protective recommendation/demand on society called, “Let's not kill our fellow Americans by exposing them to these viruses.” This is problematic.

There are two things that you said that I would help to put a little emphasis on. The first thing is you're saying that the person who views the meme if they've been hearing, “Government mandate,” even though this meme on its face says nothing about a government mandate. It doesn't even imply anything about government mandate. From my perspective, an objective viewing place, this meme has nothing to do with a government mandate.

However, that doesn't matter. Many people that saw it, this “requirement” to get a vaccine to have their job is they're concerned about big brother, the government mandating it, and the idea of a government mandating it. As we were in the middle of this Supreme Court battle/review of the Joe Biden administration's mandates, a lot of people are activated by that. They go and comment in a very unhappy way back to me about this because of the government mandating it and the constitutional issues and saying, “You know how the Supreme Court's going to rule on this, Tom,” whatever or things like that.

I found it very interesting and all I was trying to do to is say, “Everyone, I understand an individual's desire to not be required to have a vaccine to have their job. I can understand the personal freedom argument and concerns. All I was trying to do is give them a little perspective of the consequences to a business owner for an employee who decides not to get vaccinated especially for jobs that require them to go out into the field and be with other people and get potentially exposed to the virus. If they get sick and hospitalized, there's a whole host of consequences for the company to that individual person's choice to not get vaccinated. That's all I was trying to put perspective on. Something else you said there, Bill, I think is quite important to talk about.

To pick up on that important thing to talk about, it has to do with motivation. What is the motivation for this thing? I can change the meaning of this picture with two words.

That was the thing I wanted to bring up. You got it right there. Let's be honest about this meme. This meme has a bias or the author of the meme.

I want to change the meaning first. The thing it says is, “No one should have to cross this bridge. NO ONE.” Watch this one, “No one should have had to cross this bridge, early testing to keep the virus out of the nation.” Notice it's no one should have had to have. We needed to protect ourselves earlier, do contact tracing and get ahold of a national illness so it didn't wreck our economy. No one should have had to because we're stuck having to do this or doing this. The image of the person going, like, “Where were the civil servants? Where were the people to protect us from this disease?” The answer was denying it was real. It was going to have a major impact. That's what they were doing. How do we know this? I don't know, news footage, 500 people a day are dying.

It's even more than that. It's like 1,500 people are dying a day. Is it down?

It was down a little bit. What does that mean to us? At this point, 878,000 people have died. We're getting close to one million. I don't know if we're going to get our free sub at the end of this thing or whatever. We're sitting at a place where we need to motivate the population now to overcome marketing and branding and being sold that this is not real or this is not a big deal. We need to overcome this with a lot of early childhood parenting strategies. If you do this, you get that. Bribing people, deal-making, trying to give a discount and gifts for people to take the things. We're doing very early childhood parenting strategies. By the way, that doesn't work all that well.

The other side doesn’t work well either. The province of Quebec, Canada has put a mandate over all their citizens that if you don't get vaccinated, you have to pay a tax. They're saying, “We're not going to pay. The government isn't going to foot the bill for all you people continuing to get sick who aren't getting vaccinated. You are going to have a tax by this date if you don't get vaccinated. That’s different. I forget what you call that in terms of the parent. That's the parent that's going to institute strong punishment.

It's a carrot and a stick technique. You’re taxed on the vax. If you don't do it, we aren't paying for your healthcare and you've got to pay it.

It scared the heck out of people. As soon as they did issue that requirement in Quebec, the appointments for a vaccination shot way up.

The Americans are going like, “Yeah, I'm going to be defiant.” The reason why Americans can do that is that the healthcare burden is on the person anyways. The insurance purchasing and stuff like that are on them anyways. It's like, “I guess you could mandate it. I'm going to take advantage of the broken system anyway. If I'm sick, I'll show up there. They'll treat me anyway and I won't pay for it. Because there is no gift already of healthcare that’s available, we don't have the stick option as much have.

The national healthcare like they have in Canada makes it probably a harder argument that compulsory vaccines or you're going to pay a tax is maybe more tolerable as an idea without revolt.

If you want your freedom, you got to pay a tax for it. If you want your independence, you got to pay a tax for it because then we're creating money so that when you become sick, we have money to pay for your illness. That's what the tax is for. You're not doing it.

Bill, back to the meme or the cartoon. Definitely, this is drawn and put out by someone who has a perspective that no one should be required to have a vaccine to have their job, regardless of whether it's a government mandate. What's missing perspective-wise and I found this interesting. We were talking about this and you were saying, “We could write on the syringe a few words for the good reason why a company might require it.” Some of that you've mentioned like protection of others and getting to a more stable economy more quickly, things like that.

Let's clean that up. There are different needs sitting on both sides of this issue. One of the needs has to do with the need for freedom and independence, as well as I get to have a choice about what happens with my body and my medical issues. That's on one side. This choice, freedom, independence and hyper individuality is what America provides us. The other side of the narrative has to do with consideration for others and protection for self. You take the vaccine and there are different ways to choose. My son says, “I am taking the vaccine because I do not want to get anybody else sick. I also don't want to be in the hospital. I am not doing XYZ because I'm choosing.”

He's twenty years old and that was his choice. He didn't say, “I'm a rugged individual. I'm a young person. I can get it and get it over with.” He's not saying that. He's saying, “I don't want to be a spreader and one of the unlucky persons to be in the hospital with a ventilator.” Notice how he's working through it. He's picking the set of needs. As we’re looking at this picture, do we pick it that this is about the loss of freedom for the person? Do we pick it as here's what a civic duty looks like? Here's what consideration for others. Here's what to get back to normal looks like.

All of that stuff could be written around the syringe area. It could be written as freedom, choice. You could put literally all the words that are necessary for the decision because it's not just one motive to get you across to take the vaccination. It's here are some things on this side. You get your freedom and independence. On the other side, you get financial security and stability with the job. In between that is caring for other or civic or social duty. That's what the syringes and the representation of now. There are going to be people that are going to argue the vaccines don't so and so.

The vaccines don’t work. I have some of that too. The vaccines have been proven to be effective some people were trying to say.

They have not proven to be effective in preventing the disease but they have been effective at mitigating death. That is what's missing in the narrative. People want the “all or none” thing.

It’s a lot easier decision than if it's an all-or-nothing proposition.

This one is sorry, the medicine's not that good but medicine in preparation for you dying, we can do that part. That's what this vaccine does. We have not gotten rid of smallpox or polio or some of these other things. I think I'm wrong about polio. We have certain diseases we have not eliminated but there are certain diseases that we have.

The measles outbreak at Disneyland several years ago is one example. Measles is something that we definitely, as a country, have mitigated. We've made it not a serious health threat because pretty much every child in the United States or grows up here is required to have that vaccine in order to go to school at some point. Lots of people travel to Disneyland from outside of the country and other places. Anyway, there ended up being this measles outbreak and we all saw how fast things spread like wildfire among people who were not vaccinated.

There's another thing that this meme doesn't do. I would, for business owners everywhere, like to mention on its face it says, “No one should have to cross this bridge to get a vaccine in order to have their job.” I'm in agreement with that as a business owner. No one should have to do that. This is America. You don't have to. If you don't want to be vaccinated, you don't have to work for a company that requires a vaccine. There are plenty of companies that have jobs out there that don't have vaccine requirements.

You, as an employee, have a choice to go get another job somewhere else. I know that may be easier said than done for some people. I don't mean that to be completely callous. I'm sure some people love the job they've had for decades and don't want to leave and go to another company. I get all that. In terms of the strict requirement, it's not a requirement. The other thing that's problematic for me about this meme, interestingly nobody in this Facebook post commented on it.

I thought they would because I thought it was a little troubling about the meme is the idea that the money is on a fishhook on a line almost as if to imply that when you cross the bridge and go to your job, you get the vaccine to have your job then the company might still yank the money away after you've done that. There are some troubling things about the money on the hook that I don't think is helpful. I think it would've made more sense to have a basket of money on the other side, sitting there for you and you do your job, you get the money and no one's location of the money being yanked away from you. Nobody commented on that. That isn't what activated anybody.

It activated you.

I'm prepared to deal with the fallout of that as an employer. I was prepared for somebody that challenged me on that and no one did. I didn't write the meme but here I am saying, “There's another perspective,” but there are many perspectives. What I appreciate about this meme is that it's very thought-provoking. I still now will say it was a very healthy debate and discussion among people on Facebook. For the most part, they're all having a civil discussion and being mutually respectful. It didn't descend into blaming, shaming, name-calling and all sorts of other stuff. I was appreciative and pleased with that.

The thing I think that we can stick the landing on here is that we've got to do a better job as both observers and speakers to see what the needs on both sides of the issue are. If the facts are in the information that comes in, lean towards one of those two things. We need to let go of or we're not going to get that thing that we think is most valuable. If we're in the place of commitment and loyalty to something and we want the need for freedom of choice but we want commitment and choice. People are making that decision all the time to make those things work together. Whether it's a family member, marriage, relationship or partnership, you don't get all the freedoms you used to have when you were single, when you're married.

You've got to choose which needs you're picking, integrity or commitment. You're picking those. Until the person says, “I don't want to do the commitment anymore. You don't want to do the commitment anymore. Part of the commitment was important to me.” That's the challenge. It’s a great discussion. I'm delighted that you brought it, Tom, because it helps us with the challenge that we're going to have as we're entering the cold civil war that we're in.

We've got to do some things and speak our way out of the cold civil war to create places where we agree and we can work together. Not all or none, you're this and you're that. That means that we can't even have an agreement at all, which is where our nation is wedging itself to. It doesn't need to be there.

That sounds like we're teeing up some good discussions coming up for future episodes there.

If any of you readers need support to work through these difficult issues, feel free to reach out to us. We'll be glad to support you more.

Bill, thanks very much. I appreciate your time. It was a lot of fun.

Thanks.