Brain Virus?

Headline: “49% of Republican men say they won’t get vaccinated.” Is there some sort of virus that gets in these people’s brains that causes them to form convictions contrary to elementary general knowledge and against their own self-interest? You can bet most of them would tell you the election was stolen from Trump. I suspect that they seize upon and adhere to such myths as a way of propping themselves up, carving out a world of alternative facts in which they are special; they are in the right. Self-satisfaction in their contrariness sustains them.