To Fight Vaccine Misinformation, US Recruits an 'Influencer Army' (nytimes.com) 314
The New York Times tells the story of 17-year-old Ellie Zeiler, a TikTok creator with over 10 million followers, who received an email in June from Village Marketing, an influencer marketing agency.
"It said it was reaching out on behalf of another party: the White House." Would Ms. Zeiler, a high school senior who usually posts short fashion and lifestyle videos, be willing, the agency wondered, to participate in a White House-backed campaign encouraging her audience to get vaccinated against the coronavirus...? Ms. Zeiler quickly agreed, joining a broad, personality-driven campaign to confront an increasingly urgent challenge in the fight against the pandemic: vaccinating the youthful masses, who have the lowest inoculation rates of any eligible age group in the United States...
To reach these young people, the White House has enlisted an eclectic army of more than 50 Twitch streamers, YouTubers, TikTokers and the 18-year-old pop star Olivia Rodrigo, all of them with enormous online audiences. State and local governments have begun similar campaigns, in some cases paying "local micro influencers" — those with 5,000 to 100,000 followers — up to $1,000 a month to promote Covid-19 vaccines to their fans. The efforts are in part a counterattack against a rising tide of vaccine misinformation that has flooded the internet, where anti-vaccine activists can be so vociferous that some young creators say they have chosen to remain silent on vaccines to avoid a politicized backlash...
State and local governments have taken the same approach, though on a smaller scale and sometimes with financial incentives. In February, Colorado awarded a contract worth up to $16.4 million to the Denver-based Idea Marketing, which includes a program to pay creators in the state $400 to $1,000 a month to promote the vaccines... Posts by creators in the campaign carry a disclosure that reads "paid partnership with Colorado Dept. of Public Health and Environment...." Other places, including New Jersey, Oklahoma City County and Guildford County, N.C., as well as cities like San Jose, Calif., have worked with the digital marketing agency XOMAD, which identifies local influencers who can help broadcast public health information about the vaccines.
In another article, the Times notes that articles blaming Bill Gates for the pandemic appeared on two local news sites (one in Atlanta, and one in Phoenix) that "along with dozens of radio and television stations, and podcasts aimed at local audiences...have also become powerful conduits for anti-vaccine messaging, researchers said."
"It said it was reaching out on behalf of another party: the White House." Would Ms. Zeiler, a high school senior who usually posts short fashion and lifestyle videos, be willing, the agency wondered, to participate in a White House-backed campaign encouraging her audience to get vaccinated against the coronavirus...? Ms. Zeiler quickly agreed, joining a broad, personality-driven campaign to confront an increasingly urgent challenge in the fight against the pandemic: vaccinating the youthful masses, who have the lowest inoculation rates of any eligible age group in the United States...
To reach these young people, the White House has enlisted an eclectic army of more than 50 Twitch streamers, YouTubers, TikTokers and the 18-year-old pop star Olivia Rodrigo, all of them with enormous online audiences. State and local governments have begun similar campaigns, in some cases paying "local micro influencers" — those with 5,000 to 100,000 followers — up to $1,000 a month to promote Covid-19 vaccines to their fans. The efforts are in part a counterattack against a rising tide of vaccine misinformation that has flooded the internet, where anti-vaccine activists can be so vociferous that some young creators say they have chosen to remain silent on vaccines to avoid a politicized backlash...
State and local governments have taken the same approach, though on a smaller scale and sometimes with financial incentives. In February, Colorado awarded a contract worth up to $16.4 million to the Denver-based Idea Marketing, which includes a program to pay creators in the state $400 to $1,000 a month to promote the vaccines... Posts by creators in the campaign carry a disclosure that reads "paid partnership with Colorado Dept. of Public Health and Environment...." Other places, including New Jersey, Oklahoma City County and Guildford County, N.C., as well as cities like San Jose, Calif., have worked with the digital marketing agency XOMAD, which identifies local influencers who can help broadcast public health information about the vaccines.
In another article, the Times notes that articles blaming Bill Gates for the pandemic appeared on two local news sites (one in Atlanta, and one in Phoenix) that "along with dozens of radio and television stations, and podcasts aimed at local audiences...have also become powerful conduits for anti-vaccine messaging, researchers said."
Can't they just hire the four Russians (Score:4, Insightful)
that somehow got Trump elected with 1200 dollars of Tweets?
Why not just hire Trump himself? (Score:2, Funny)
They said it couldn't be done. They said it would take 3 to 5 years. They said we'd need to wear masks, stay at home, and social distance. But we did it, we got the vaccines out and in RECORD time!
Get vaxxed! These jabs are going to SAVE THE WORLD!!
Re:Why not just hire Trump himself? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't recall anyone one saying it couldn't be done. When a virus epidemic breaks out, it isn't rocket science to go to Pharma and asks for vaccine development. Any dolt can figure that one, as one did....or rather his alleged administration did.
Now let's review the rest of his record: denying that Covid was a problem, whining it was a Democrat plot, claiming it would be gone by last summer so no need to worry, denying that masks were unnecessary and encouraging right wing nutjobs such as yourself to fuzz up the record, pushing lame "cures" like hydroxychloroquine, holding news conferences to belittle gov. researchers and health experts, actively causing his alleged administration to lean on government health agencies to downplay the severity of the crises, complain it was all China's fault when the fact of where it came from in the middle of the pandemic was entirely beside the point, encourage fellow travelers at Fox "News" and other right wing media outlets to politicize a pandemic so that even now many Conservatives are scared of the vaccines or too stupid to admit the pandemic exists, ignoring many calls over the preceding years to fill out U.S. strategic reserves of medicine and equipment, putting inept bureaucrats in charge of pandemic crisis management (Jared Kushner comes to mind, but there were many others). Need I go on?
By the way, the vaccine technology started its funding back in the GW Bush administration and had continued apace only because Congress forced it to remain in the budget.
And he inflicted the same level of stupidity on government scientists such that many left government. Now, it will be very difficult to get those staffing levels back. And you should want them back because the next pandemic is right around the corner. And there is the on-going climate problems only made worse through 4 years of ineptitude of mythic proportions.
You should be ashamed of yourself.
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When a virus epidemic breaks out, it isn't rocket science to go to Pharma and asks for vaccine development. Any dolt can figure that one, as one did....or rather his alleged administration did.
But did they really? From what I recall Trump's administration simply promised to buy vaccines. Kind of like how I will promise you right here right now that the sun will rise tomorrow.
As to who actually went to big Pharma and asked for vaccine development, that was the Germans who injected $370m directly into Bio-N-Tech / Pfizer.
Now I'm going to operation warp speed my local supermarket and promise to buy groceries tonight.
Re: Why not just hire Trump himself? (Score:5, Informative)
Hold up. I think that both you bickering about left and right are missing something massive here.
Dr. Walter Orenstein, a professor at Emory University and the associate director of the Emory Vaccine Center, said a vaccine in less than a year would be “miracle.” While technically possible, he added, it is unlikely.
While you both blame one another, I think it's important to remember how super important this mRNA vaccine is and how just "like nothing else before it" it was. People were correct to be critical, nothing like this has ever happened before in terms of time to development.
That said, most people were critical just to be critical to the President. But at the same time, it was easy to be critical because at no point was the President indicating that he was taking the whole thing seriously. Which considering both of those ends there, is the reason why it was stupid to make this shit political in the first place.
Republicans have been pretty consistent on their vaccine views
Bullshit, come to Tennessee and say that with a straight face. Republicans are waking up to the fact that droves of their voters are the ones that are dying. Literally every single rep in the State assembly has that on their lips and are doing their best to reverse direction on what they've been spewing.
it's Democrats who politicized it from the start
I don't know about "from the start" but yeah both sides have made this some stupid political shit. The difference being is that the politicizing that Democrats did, didn't end up convincing people of things that could potentially get themselves killed. Yes, they shouldn't feed the trolls on the right, but Republicans especially a particular Senator from Kentucky have actively said things that are straight up conspiracy theories. Hell, there's a Congressional rep from GA-14, who actively tweets anti-vax information. Fine, you want to call Democrats out, cool, if that get's you going in the morning, whatever. But Republicans have actively been killing their base, there's not a denying that.
It was no longer "Trump's vaccine" that was "rushed through without testing"; now it was "Biden's Miracle!" that was 100% safe and would cure you of all your ills. What a change in just 4 months!
Yeah, and all the people chanting that are idiots. But bigger point, they're idiots that are still alive. The idiots on the right are having a pretty hard time chanting anything with a ventilator down their throat.
I don't care if you think Trump made the vaccine or Biden made it. I don't care if you think the Chinese are building biological weapons. I don't care if you think liberals are socialist or conservatives are Nazis. If you are able to be vaccinated, go fucking get vaccinated.
Re: Why not just hire Trump himself? (Score:5, Informative)
"overplaying..."
https://abcnews.go.com/Politic... [go.com]
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You don't hire Trump because he can barely read a teleprompter, and when he can't read it he just makes stuff up and that stuff is rambling and nonsensical.
If they wanted that they could just have Biden do it
Old Man vs. Old Man, this is the best American can muster apparently
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And this is coming from someone who has never watched an actual Trump speech.
Yes, troll, I have. He wanders from statement to statement like the poster child for senility, and all the lowlifes looking for excuses for their shit behavior eat it up like candy because his mumblings are exactly what they want to hear. As long as he says what a bunch of low-information dildos want to hear, he is loved. The moment he says something they don't like, such as that it would be a "wonderful thing" (his exact words) if they would take the vaccine, they ignore him and even make up new conspiracy
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Here's from a campaign speech before he was elected.
Look, having nuclear—my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart —you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I’m one of the smartest people anywhere in the world—it’s true!—but when you’re a conservative Republican they try—oh, do they do a number—that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune—you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged—but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me—it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are (nuclear is powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what’s going to happen and he was right—who would have thought?), but when you look at what’s going on with the four prisoners—now it used to be three, now it’s four—but when it was three and even now, I would have said it’s all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don’t, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years—but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us.
Granted, punctuation isn't there because it's a speech that wasn't written down, so don't bash on that. But look at just how strange it is, and rambling, and full of repetition. Repeating phrases: "good genes, very good genes", "very smart ... very smart". And irrelevant stuff like how he needed a smart uncle to tell him that nuclear is bad, despite no one anywhere thinking nuclear bombs aren't that big a deal. But he acts like he's gotten some speci
This could backfire I think... (Score:3, Insightful)
At this point, pretty much everyone has kind of baked in ideas about under what conditions they might get the vaccine it seems like.
Constant bombardment of messaging will I think be counterproductive, in that it will turn off some people from even getting the vaccine that may have been on he fence. People hate being pushed into something, which messaging from al directions telling you to get vaccinated is doing.
Far better to have random messaging from news that can be picked up about how well the vaccine is working, punctuated by having every single vaccinated person have no reason to wear masks.
You want people to get vaccinated? Try the carrot instead of the stick. It worked before when people were promised mask-free existence and a lot of people got vaccinated, but this reversal has pretty much shut down vaccine progress for people that maybe were not thinking about it much during the summer but would have got vaccinated into the fall.
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At this point, pretty much everyone has kind of baked in ideas about under what conditions they might get the vaccine it seems like.
Constant bombardment of messaging will I think be counterproductive, in that it will turn off some people from even getting the vaccine that may have been on he fence. People hate being pushed into something, which messaging from al directions telling you to get vaccinated is doing.
Far better to have random messaging from news that can be picked up about how well the vaccine is working, punctuated by having every single vaccinated person have no reason to wear masks.
You want people to get vaccinated? Try the carrot instead of the stick. It worked before when people were promised mask-free existence and a lot of people got vaccinated, but this reversal has pretty much shut down vaccine progress for people that maybe were not thinking about it much during the summer but would have got vaccinated into the fall.
you want to get people vaccinated give a tax rebate to people that get it. Make it 2% or $250 back on income tax which ever is higher and people will line up.
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Re:This could backfire I think... (Score:4, Interesting)
People have already lined up to get vaccinated. Remember the stories of people driving to a neighboring state to get a vaccine sooner than they could in their local area? Nearly 70% of Americans have been vaccinated and the vaccines have shown to be 99.999% effective in preventing hospitalizations and deaths.
What are the other 30% waiting for? Obviously logic isn't working. I hate to think the decision to get vaccinated has become political but with the high availability of vaccines it begins to look like that is a part of the issue. The other factors could be misinformation and confirmation bias.
Cost can't be an issue since the vaccines are free and many employers are granting paid sick leave time to employees to get vaccinated.
Perhaps some people are waiting for a monetary incentive to get vaccinated? Every time someone mentions an incentive for newly vaccinated people it could convince people to wait even longer to see just how high the incentive might get. Stop talking about monetary incentives and the rest might decide there is no reward for waiting and finally get vaccinated.
--
Logic will never change emotion or perception. If you never change your mind, why have one? -- Edward de Bono
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What are the other 30% waiting for? Obviously logic isn't working.
That's an unwarranted assumption.
Some people will have medical issues, e.g. in the UK pregnant women were told not to get vaccinated initially. I know some people with auto-immune issues are holding off because others have had very had side effects.
Some people just can't afford it. Potential time off work is the big issue, especially where there is no right to sick days and employment is at-will or on a zero-hour basis. There are also travel and childcare costs.
Don't misunderstand me, a lot of it is anti-va
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Some people will have medical issues, e.g. in the UK pregnant women were told not to get vaccinated initially. I know some people with auto-immune issues are holding off because others have had very had side effects.
30% is still very high.
Some people just can't afford it. Potential time off work is the big issue, especially where there is no right to sick days and employment is at-will or on a zero-hour basis. There are also travel and childcare costs.
Even in TX they will come to you, if you can find four other people who also want to get vaccinated.
Don't misunderstand me, a lot of it is anti-vaxx idiocy, but some people have legitimate reasons.
Vanishingly few compared to those who don't and aren't vaccinated.
Re:This could backfire I think... (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps some people simply refuse to put any rapidly prototyped, barely tested substances into their systems.
That is a myth. With this disase time was of the essence so instead of using the traditional methods with lot of paper work inbetween each step they allowed the companies to run the process in parallell to save time.
As for "barely tested", what are you talking about? In a medical trial you have test subjects in the thousands. We have already vaccinated 2 BILLION people, at least three orders of magnitude more. So how much more data do you need?
Especially substances that HAVE killed people.
Pretty much ANY substance can kill. Drink too much water and you will upset the sodium-potassium balance in your body and disrupting your nervous system. Look up water poisoning aka water intoxication [wikipedia.org]. Drink too little and you die of dehydration.
No vaccine is 100% safe, but for what it does – provoking your immune system to mount a defense against a disease –it is safer than the pathogen it is supposed to mimic. If it isn't, it isn't a vaccine! And there might be complications, that is why they want you to stay under observation for a short while to be able to treat those that for example experience an anaphylactic shock.
The running point is that the vaccine is safer than the disease itself.
Or they have contraindications.
If you belong to such a group, you shouldn't run off to take your jab, you should firsto consult your doctor and see what you can do. Then make sure that everyone around you that can, take their jabs! THEIR vaccinations are what will protect YOU in this case.
Or they've already had COVID and have the antibodies.
It has been shown that those that have had one of the first variants of COVID have worse protection against Delta than those who got a full vaccination. So the recommendation is that even those that have had COVID and have confirmed to have antibodies should get at least one shot of the vaccine [healthline.com] to boost the antibody levels. Remember that you can have COVID and not get antibodies at a level where you have a good protection. Getting antibodies is not a binary state where you are protected or not. The more antibodies you have, the better your chances are for future infection.
Re: This could backfire I think... (Score:5, Insightful)
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A myth? No. These drugs are still only provisionally approved on an emergency basis.
Yes, it is a myth that they are "rapidly prototyped, barely tested substances" (your words, not mine). They have been tested and there was no rapid prototyping. The technology was shown working in 1989 and in 2005 they managed to make a dellivery system suitable for it. The two companies who made the vaccines were started in 2008 and 2010 for the purpose of developing mRNA technologies so they have been working on this technology for years.
Yes, it they have Emergency Use Authorization [wikipedia.org] but that does not mea
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The reality is, 99.74% of people who catch the disease manage to survive, unvaccinated.
You might want to talk to the survivors who will be spending the rest of their lives dealing with the pulmonary and neurological aftereffects of the infections they've survived before deciding it's no big deal.
By the way, the survival rate for measles is several orders of magnitudes higher that for COVID-19. We don't vaccinate just to prevent death; we vaccinate to prevent the spread of highly infectious diseases.
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One of the lies that anti-vaxxers spread is that "more people have died from taking the vaccine than from covid".
Some people have died after taking the vaccine, but the death rate is no higher that what you would normally expect for people in their age group.
If you have lots of influencers publically taking the vaccine, and not suffering any ill-effects from it, that should help to counter these lies.
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I suggest not giving a tax rebate to your greediest 1% first. Then you can easily afford such a tax rebate for those who actually need it and will actually do something with it that benefits the country, like buying something, instead of putting it on top of some giant money heap. ;)
I don't think the ones with the highest income are the ones without a vaccine... but any such proposal should have a cap. Just make it a flat rebate. I think lower education, lower income and lower vaccine coverage correlate.
One large problem I see with this is that you reward not doing the sane thing for a long time. If a reward is given, just give it to everyone who has taken a vaccine in the past as well. Otherwise, you reward stupidity and standing by it for a long time.
Here in Norway, it's fortunat
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Sadly that's more than 1% of the people.
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2) Was the death toll from the vaccine statistically significant? after what I've heard, no. under 200 dead worldwide after the hundreds of millions of doses given
3a) Does said vaccines protect fully? No
3b) does the vaccines offer significant protection (be it somewhat time limited) to mos if not all currently know strains? Yes
Given the above list would you say that the vaccines generally have more positive than negative outcomes? I would say yes but I'm no ex
Re:This could backfire I think... (Score:4, Informative)
I'd replace the first point with "Have people died after getting the vaccine? Yes". So far there's only a really vague hint of a correlation, mind you, not vague enough to be dismissed outright, but the number of cases is so small that it is hard to get a statistically significant dataset going. Have there been adverse reactions to the vaccine that did not result in death? Yes, definitively. But by the same account, they do exist with a lot of other medicinals that people buys over the counter without any second thought to get rid of an headache.
Government saving money (Score:3)
but bribing people by giving their own money back to them
That's one way to looking at it.
Another way to look at it is that government will save metric shit tons of money by giving a bit to people as an incentive of getting vaccinating now and slow down the pandemic, instead of needing to spend said metric shit tons of money later on while dealing with the consequences of yet another wave of infections that would have been easily prevented with vaccines.
Oh sorry, I forgot: you con't actually have a public health system in your country, so the government wouldn't b
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People do understand these imbeciles eternal hard-on for deficit spending.
Couldn't agree more. https://www.newsweek.com/under... [newsweek.com]
Re: This could backfire I think... (Score:2)
Re: Yes good reward (Score:2)
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Re:This could backfire I think... (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Well, it could backfire in the way you describe, but so could *not* pushing messaging. In fact, not pushing messaging already has backfired, because vaccination rates have tailed off
2. There is plenty of evidence to show that there remains a substantial number of younger people in particular who are influenceable, and that's who this is aimed at. It's not angry 55-yo white men in the Rust Belt on TikTok, by and large
3. The risks of people becoming resistant when they have pro-vaccination messaging also exist for people hearing anti-vaccination messaging. Fingers crossed they get bored of the anti-vaxx stuff first
4. You wanted the use of carrot as well as stick. That's part of the value of campaigns like this -- influencers are successful because followers enjoy acting on their suggestions
Re:This could backfire I think... (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is there IS already constant messaging, and by god is it stupid messaging.
I cant open facebook without seeing some dufas on someones wall screaming about mercury or about "secret mass graves of vaccine victims" (gotta love conspiracies where for some reason its a massively well cordinated secret known only to the elite, uh and some hillbilly glue eater with a youtube channel).
The misinfo is just drenching social media and other than the occasional bit of comical nonsense like youtube giving murdoch a 7 day sit in the naughty corner, the social media giants seem pretty uninterested in enforcing their TOS's against people spreading dangerous health misinformation.
This is the thing, for some reason theres an issue with youngsters not getting vaccinated. You gotta hit them where their attenion span is at;- on their favorite social media channels, influencers, streamers, etc.
Cos if we dont get that vaccinated number to 70-80%, Covid just isn't going to go away, and this things going to eventually mutate into something much meaner.
Re:This could backfire I think... (Score:4, Insightful)
2500% you say? (Score:4, Informative)
Not seeing it. https://graphics.reuters.com/w... [reuters.com]
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It's propaganda. When it convinces you it works, when it increases distrust it is counterproductive. Both effects coexist.
The main thing convincing people is the vaccine passports/certificates: they give you freedom to move around.
Re: This could backfire I think... (Score:2)
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That is simplistic. vaccine hesitancy covers
- confidence: not trusting the Putin vaccine(sputnik), the Trump vaccine(pfizer), the big pharma vaccine or the plandemic vaccine
- complacency: it doesn't look that urgent right now, if I wait longer we'll know more about side effects, the risk to me is not that high
- convenience: what does it cost, what effort do i have to do to understand the risks, do i have to take a day off..
So you trust the Russian and Chinese vaccines then? If not, I guess that makes you a
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Problem is we have reached the limits of medical science bureaucracy here.
People are used to drugs being extensively tested before being given to people. This time we got hit with a pandemic and needed vaccines fast.
The reality is that the medical advice being given is simply wrong in some cases. In my case I have CFS, and the first dose of AZ gave me a massive relapse despite all the official advice being that it is safe for CFS sufferers and has no interactions with it. Eventually got Pfizer as a 2nd dose
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Sounds like your CFS could be an auto immune problem.
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It certainly has auto immune links. It's not well understood unfortunately. Now that millions of people are getting Long COIVD, which seems to be similar, there might be some more research done on it.
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You are correct. Among those whom I know, the single greatest incentive for any of them to get vaccinated has been the offer of removing the mask at work. Nothing else has worked.
Telling people their lives may be at risk didn't work.
Telling people the lives of their friends and loved ones didn't work.
Offering them a shot at going mask-free all day, everywhere? To the extent that any offer worked, that worked best of all.
Re: This could backfire I think... (Score:2)
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The Sad part is there is only so much we can do as a Carrot, We have a freely available vaccine that is available are nearly every pharmacy now, they were rules that allowed vaccinated people to go maskless, but the Misinformation spread is making people to be afraid of that carrot.
As Delta is now hitting some more rural areas, these people who are now catching it, and loosing family members are not thinking, oh I was wrong about what I know, and perhaps my information gathering is faulty, but more towards
Re:This could backfire I think... (Score:5, Insightful)
Ya, well the longer the unvaccinated don't get stuck, the more variants will arise. It will also cut future GDP. Think about it, the Conservatives actively promoting cutting the GDP. That's about as intelligent as curtailing immigration when SS and Medicate will shortly need to be cut because there won't be enough people paying into them, those programs are pay-as-you-go. And guess which blue-hairs will take it in the teeth when that happens? Who will they blame? Anyone but themselves.
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Is it that bad in the USA? (Score:5, Funny)
I'm in Canada, I've already got my two doses of Moderna and I feel absolutely no side-eff{#`%${%&`+'${`%&NO CARRIER
Re: Is it that bad in the USA? (Score:2)
Re: Is it that bad in the USA? (Score:5, Funny)
Oh no! We're doomed! The virus has mutated and is taking out Hayes modems!!
Re: Is it that bad in the USA? (Score:2)
The Vaccine protects. (Score:2)
CNN.com, Sunday, August 1, 2021
Re: The Vaccine protects. (Score:2, Interesting)
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No, the same is not true for "natural immunity".
Natural immunity:
- Exposes you to the risks of long covid from the first infection
- Wanes more quickly than vaccine-induced immunity
- Does not provide the same level of protection against infection, transmission of infection, morbidity and death as vaccination, especially over time
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Seems some people with expertise in the subject disagree with you.
https://www.jhsph.edu/covid-19... [jhsph.edu]
More to the point, people have been maimed by covid, we don't yet know how many, but parts of their bodies were damaged, sometimes the brain, sometimes the heart, lungs, intestinal tract and more...
That's not what I'd be willing to risk to get "natural immunty"
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Yeah your not going to find many doctors with actual covid experience advocating "natural immunity".
The doctors I know who've been on the front line speak of the virus in apocalyptic terms. Mass deaths, constant writing of death certificates, traumatised medical stafff.
And a consistent theme of "Can I get the vaccine now?" from vaccine hesitant people who where dying when a vaccine would have made it no-disease at best and mild disease at worst. (And no, once your goose is cooked, no vaccine is going to sav
Re: The Vaccine protects. (Score:2)
Re: The Vaccine protects. (Score:2)
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The same is true for people who had Covid once and have natural immunity, yet we treat them as the same as just plain unvaccinated. Want to garner the public trust in the medical experts? Stop lying to them about natural immunity.
If you have had Covid once, the policy in Norway is that you still need one shot of vaccine some time after recovery - as opposed to the normal two.
Re: The Vaccine protects. (Score:2)
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That's not quite true.
-You have to sign a waiver, meaning if you get injured by the vaccine, you have no recourse
-Children are being excluded from the vaccine because they can't sign the waiver
-In general, pharmaceutical companies regularly injure people by releasing products prematurely and based on flawed studies
-There was a huge political and monetary incentive to push through a "fix", and many safeguards were discarded in that pursuit
-The l
Re: The Vaccine protects. (Score:2)
Re: The Vaccine protects. (Score:3)
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I didn't know we had good data on how persistent and how broad protection from recovered infection or from vaccination. Both should be 'pretty good', but afaik claims about requiring booster shots are still shaky.
You can count antibodies but that is not the same as actual cases and a proven additional protection requires a separate calculus from basic protection. If your protection level is 'good' is it worth getting that extra shot to make it 'even better'?
Another shaky area is the individual protection a
Just a year ago (Score:3, Insightful)
This would've been, "Trump spends taxpayer money to hire an army of Hitler Jugen 2.0 to spread propaganda."
Now the media says, "President Biden employs thousands of young people to debunk misinformation and fight Internet trolls."
Re: Just a year ago (Score:2)
That's ridiculous. Trumpâ(TM)s never paid anyone for doing work in his life. The headline would've been, "Trump reneges on payment to children for spreading his hydroxychloroquine treatment theories"
Re: (Score:2)
> Trump reneges on payment
True story. A friend of mine had to go to State school instead of the top-5 university he'd been accepted at after Trump called to "offer" his father 60% of the contract price on an 18-month job. "Or we could fight this in court for years."
The t&m cost on the job was 58%.
Re: (Score:2)
+1 Exactly. The irony is they don't realize that mainstreaming outsourced propaganda just gives legitimacy to the other side to do the exact same thing after the next election. They really are deeply unaware of how this works, I've had countless discussions with people on the left about this effect, and not one of them gets it. They truly are just that naive.
Give me someone who understands the sin nature any day of the week. At least those people aren't delusional about the human condition.
"Influencers"?? We've really come to this? (Score:2, Interesting)
Messaging must suit the audience (Score:2)
People who permit their thinking on important issues to be influenced by non-experts like entertainers, influencers and other varieties of celebrity are typical, not outliers. If you're intelligent you're in a minority group and should appreciate the good luck which put you there. You are not normal.
The average person, the 100 IQ crowd, are normal. and cannot be effectively addressed as if they were more intelligent than they are.
Messaging must suit the audience. There are lives to save and it's not a matte
What if it's a trick... (Score:2)
What if it's a trick to get rid of all these "influencers", and they actually signed them up to the real army instead?
Try to give make-up tips or teach "life hacks" to the locals of wherever the next war is going to be, see if they want to be "influenced".
For Pete's sake (Score:3)
There's no understanding to be reached with pretty much any of these people.
Just make vaccination mandatory.
Re: (Score:2)
Wow, the concept of Immunization schedules [cdc.gov] will blow your mind, i tell you.
Not so different from typical PSAs on radio/tv (Score:3)
Sigh. (Score:2)
Because the way to convince people is to literally to be seen engaging in paid propaganda.
Don't get me wrong, the people who refuse vaccines without genuine medical reason are utter morons.
But the government paying individuals to push their message is just going to be taken the wrong way by the anti-vaxxers.
Are you telling me that there's no celebrity out there who'll do it for their usual fee and/or for charity?
Vaccine misinformation (Score:2, Informative)
These could start by visiting the White House.
Asked by CNN's Dana Bash in a clip released Saturday whether she would get a vaccine that was approved and distributed before the election, Harris replied, "Well, I think that's going to be an issue for all of us." [cnn.com]
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have been sowing FUD about the coronavirus vaccine ever sends Trump announced "Warp Speed", and they've been FUDing about it all the way until November. Then, mysteriously, all the FUD stopped.
But by that time enough peopl
"Duck and Cover" (Score:2)
If people don't want to take it, that's their choice.
This is more and more like the old school RPG that asks you Yes or No, but will dialogue-lock you until you choose Yes.
Re: (Score:2)
No, *information* to counter misinformation.
Re: (Score:2)
I mean, Ellie Zeiler literally has a video interview of Dr Fauci, so I don't think it's exactly hidden away that she's been asked to do this. And her fans won't give two shits that she was asked. You're applying rules of thumb that make no sense in the context of her audience. She's an influencer for teens and young adults.
Re: (Score:2)
When some mummy blogger goes on about "vaccine injuries" I just assume she punched her kid in the face for not wanting to get a jab at the doctor's and blamed the brain damage on the vaccine. They're consistent in their abuse that's for sure.
Re: (Score:2)
The keyword being, of course, related: VAERS reports are for any death post-vaccination. It doesn't matter if you crashed your car into a lamp pole; maybe down the line it is discovered that compromised eye sight is a side effect.
Having said that, the US currently has +160 fully vaccinated residents. I'll let you do the math on those odds.
Re: (Score:2)
+160 million, of course :)
Re: (Score:2)
The number of 6000 Vaers reports is about 'suspected link to the vaccination'. If your car crashed into a lamp pole after vaccination it is unlikely you will end up in the database , though not completely impossible if someone suspects a relation.
6000 reports also does not mean every case of vaccine related death is reported.
We simply shouldn't be using the numbers to make claims because it's raw data and a lot of it may be dismissed at a later stage but minimizing the numbers themselves isn't a good approa
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not minimizing - i'm putting the numbers into proper context. You're the one here torturing statistics to try further your point.
Because your argument is, what? That COVID vaccines have, under the most generous scenario, a 0.000375% mortality rate?
What's that figure for COVID infections again?
Re: (Score:2)
What is my point? You may accuse me of nitpicking but I'm not trying to make another point on top of that. Well now I am :) 6,000 per 160,000,000 is 0.00375%.
Re: (Score:3)
Cool. The mortality rate of COVID is 3-4% [ourworldindata.org]. Meaning, per your own argument, getting vaccinated is about a thousand times safer than not to.
So yeah, i really still don't get your point.
Re: (Score:2)
My initial point was that you were minimizing the number of 6000 while it was already small enough when interpreting it correctly. I know people who have been trying to use that number of 6000 in their arguments to claim vaccines are dangerous so I wanted to treat their argument fairly.
But now I think you get a lot of numbers wrong. Mortality of covid is not 3-4% . The case fatality rate was initially that high but that is the rate of people dying over people diagnosed with covid. The infection fatality rat
Re: (Score:2)
this one says two in a million. Depends a lot on where exactly you draw the line 'youngster' of course but that is the ballpark. https://www.bbc.com/news/healt... [bbc.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Give me your relevant number, not a datadump. What is the chance of death on infection for below 18 year olds. Or another young age when available. On infection!
Re: (Score:2)
You have no fucking idea of the number you need to give (it is the infection fatality rate of IFR)nor about what my narrative is supposed to be. End of discussion.
Re: (Score:2)
You're right, I used the wrong number. I just found the original article [medrxiv.org] and it says
Re: (Score:2)
Correction the chance a youngster who is infected with covid has of dying is one in 20000 (UK numbers) or 0.005%.
Re: (Score:2)
Stop using pedobrowser, AKA: Tor
Re: (Score:3)
Americans are so privileged they can't tell the difference between inconvenience and oppression.
Re:Meanwhile in Hong Kong (Score:5, Insightful)
As a non-American, it's hard to convey how insane is to hear that the US has more than enough vaccines to go around, yet half the country are refusing to take them. For "freedom", apparently.
Re: (Score:2)
We actually have vaccines expiring and being thrown away in this country because of how stupid and selfish we are. Those vaccines should have been sent to some nation that wants them and can't afford them instead of being allowed to expire in a nation that can afford them, but doesn't want them.
This is why humanity deserves to expire. Not because of what it's doing to anything else, but because of what it's doing to itself.
Re: (Score:2)
The Biden administration is donating a shitload of vaccines, mostly to Central/South America, but that's still a drop in the bucket.
I don't think most Americans realize how privileged the position they have is during this ongoing pandemic.
Re: (Score:2)
"I'm not going to cook this chicken, let's send it to another country", easy enough but you need to keep it frozen, make sure it's legal to export it, legal to import it, pay fees and taxes on it, and make sure it goes to the right people and so on. And that's just a raw plucked chicken.
Re: (Score:2)
The fees and taxes can likely be waived in this situation.
Most importantly, if the rest of the world isn't vaccinated, we can all be vaccinated and still wind up well and rightly fucked by a surprise variant. So it's worth something to us to make sure it happens, even if it costs money.
Re: (Score:2)
You really need to look into how mRNA vaccines work. As in, not from random YouTube videos.
These have NOTHING to do with your genes.
Re: (Score:3)
Vaccines that didn't go through regular FDA approval.
And what, you think emergency approvals are just a couple guys getting drunk and randomly signing paperwork?
The FDA will likely grant full approval to Moderna, Pfizer and (likely) J&J by September. Really looking forward for what your excuses will be then.