I’m sorry but my profession is vaccine hesitancy and persuasion researcher and OP is just wrong. I have n=20,000 polls showing people get disinformation from Facebook that informs their decision to not get vaccinated and hours of focus group recordings also showing this.
What about those who have never stepped foot on the platform yet are still hesitant? Not everybody is on Facebook.
Also while we're here, if you are what you say you are, add the military forcing vaccinations, people witnessing side effects while being forced to continue duty, and the network effects this has on them and their friends / family after leaving the service. Look at how many people try to go the route of court martial to avoid some vaccines only to change their mind later when they're literally sitting in jail and have no rights. Then think about how this plays out in a civilized society when you can't throw the person in jail.
> What about those who have never stepped foot on the platform yet are still hesitant? Not everybody is on Facebook.
No, but many (most?) people are. So many of "those who have never stepped foot on the platform yet are still hesitant" may well have gotten much of their hesitancy from people who are on Facebook and got much of it from there.
You can generally trace it back to someone they know on Facebook or Tucker Carlson. Dems would serve themselves better by not trying to point fingers on where to aim the ban cannon. This is only going to cause more mistrust.
Actually visit the areas with hesitancy, then come back and see if you say the same. I know some 100 people that are hesitant. Not a one of them are on FB, nor listen to anything FOX puts out. It's gov mistrust fueling it. Not Tucker Carlson. That's the most ridiculous thing I've heard lately.
I’ve done 15 12 hour shifts at vaccine clinics, designed clinics around the country, and regularly talk with unvaccinated individuals but thanks for the advice.
Nobody's suggesting military members have an option for vax, but are you denying the network effects this can have? In the US veterans make up some 7% of the population. Expand that from their network effects and we get closer to the 40% or so that are hesitant. Clearly not all military members and veterans are hesitant so this is nothing more than an estimate than anything. But it still holds, you see your friend get the shot then have a bad reaction and ultimately leaves deployment because of it then it stays with you. You see it 2 times, and you're ready to swear off most vaccines.
How do you distinguish correlation and causation? People who are concerned about something are naturally going to search online and engage with content that confirms their biases. Do you have a robust evidence that vaccine hesitant go on Facebook and change their minds based on pro-vaccine content that is heavily promoted these days?
No, most of the pro-vaccine content doesn’t persuade people because it’s not crafted right. There are some interesting efforts in the field now with promising effects.
But being on the fence/ skeptical and seeing disinformation that aligns with your fears does move someone from the hesitant to resident category
Tuskegee experiment cast a very long shadow and contributes a significant reason for the racial divide in vaccination rates for covid. No research needed, the bias is built into cultural memory.
No idea why you got downvoted so much. This is very much so a reason people are untrusting.
One method a Black pastor and I came up with for our county and surrounding ones was to bring the parishioners to a county vax clinic with white folks also present, and let them point in the pan of pre-drawn needles for which one they wanted, so they didn’t have to fear they were getting a “Black” vaccine
Most likely, I presume, is that telling people whose livelihood depends on the internet that other people do not research on the internet everything they develop beliefs about is apparently not a great idea if you are concerned about fake internet points.
That's an excuse, not a reason. The reason for both whites and blacks acting like idiots is lack of mastery of even kindergarden-level critical thinking among US adults.
> my profession is vaccine hesitancy and persuasion researcher
Can't get if this is sarcasm or not. If true, it's scary how fast micro-fields are created and funded once there is a political purpose behind it, so that policies can be rubber-stamped as science. If false, nice troll.
The antivax movement existed long before COVID and Facebook was a huge contributor to its spread. There is nothing scary about someone researching that.
Because some people have witnessed rushed vaccines first hand, some have the the test subject of other vaccines. Sometimes this doesn’t go well (see anthrax vax). So some of us want to wait to allow others to be the test subject. You definitely can’t count on a Dr telling you something is safe, it didn’t work out for us in the military there either.
Anecdata: I've seen several people in my circle who have never identified as anti-vax in the past, who reject SARS-CoV-2 vaccines on the grounds of "they were made too quick, we didn't have enough time for testing". Of course this argument completely falls apart when you know how vaccine development works, but it's an argument that genuinely only applies to this specific group of vaccines.
This is where politicization is so dangerous: it’s reasonable to have questions in that regard but the odds of them getting bad advice go up massively when there’s a billion dollar propaganda machine pumping out false claims faster than they can be debunked. A share on Facebook or political news can take hours to reason through a concern, find the supporting evidence, etc. even if someone is available to help. My wife has done this with her biology students and it’s a really good education for how science works but it’s also a job.
> Of course this argument completely falls apart when you know how vaccine development works, but it's an argument that genuinely only applies to this specific group of vaccines.
So if this is true then there should be no testing period right? We should know out the gate if a vaccine is safe or not right? Clearly this is incorrect.
If you like testing vaccines, join the military. Then let’s see after you’re injected with various chemicals and get a 100% disability from it if you feel the same way and attempt to force others into your line of thought.
> We're already past the testing period. The phase 3 trials of multiple vaccines are concluded and analyzed.
From the FAQ on the Pfizer vax:
"The Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine is an unapproved vaccine..."
"The Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine has not undergone the same type of review as an FDA-approved or cleared product. FDA may issue an EUA when certain criteria are met, which includes that there are no adequate, approved, available alternatives. In addition, the FDA decision is based on the totality of scientific evidence available showing that the product may be effective to prevent COVID-19 during the COVID-19 pandemic and that the known and potential benefits of the product outweigh the known and potential risks of the product...."
Not to mention this trial period along with vaccine development was accelerated.
Also, from actual mouths of those hesitant, the reason is mostly gov mistrust. Which is yet again another problem of this divide dems have been building.
> Isn't that the better option anyway, if you don't trust the government?
/me reviews history of Fauci speaking…
Nope.
When approval gets completed and the left quits trying to force the vaccine on people and implying they are too stupid to understand why they need it, when they quit trying to censor information they don't like (what do you think the #1 cause of gov mistrust is these days? how do I know the paper you posted isn't gov propaganda? you see how deep and dangerous censorship is?) maybe you’ll get more traction.
Further what you’re implying with these types of statements is that science never makes a mistake. We both know that’s not true don’t we? So while in aggregate the risk to an individual is limited, individually it’s their life and the only one they get. Let them make their own decisions. With delta now we can’t get herd immunity anyways.
And while we’re here, how many people do you know that have had COVID? Also stop telling people they need an expert to explain it to them.
> I said to read it yourself or get an expert, the latter meaning one you choose.
Great! Don't tell someone to get an expert unless you want them to not listen to you. OK?
> I didn't say anything about Fauci, and I didn't say you need an expert.
I did say something about Fauci. He's an expert no?
> If that's the worry why does FDA approval matter?? this doesn't make any sense.
Because that's why some people are hesitant, lack of approval. Others like myself won't believe pretty much anything put out by the left.
> And the rest of what you said about trying to convince people isn't related to what I said.
It 100% is, you're just avoiding it because it's difficult. Just like before you weren't downvoting and yet now you are. It's pretty clear the convo didn't go the way you wanted it to.
> Great! Don't tell someone to get an expert unless you want them to not listen to you. OK?
Does the 'or' not make sense here? If you don't feel qualified, you can get anyone you trust that is. If you do feel qualified, then go read it yourself.
> I did say something about Fauci. He's an expert no?
In a way that makes no sense as a counterargument. If I say you can fix your own car or get a mechanic to do it, there's no reason for you to name some famous mechanic you hate and act like I meant them.
> Just like before you weren't downvoting and yet now you are.
It's impossible to downvote replies to your own comments.
> It's pretty clear the convo didn't go the way you wanted it to.
This conversation just confuses me. All I wanted to do is explain that the vaccine is tested. And there are plenty of non-'left' people that can confirm the numbers and the underlying science, if you're honestly looking for the truth.
> Does the 'or' not make sense here? If you don't feel qualified, you can get anyone you trust that is. If you do feel qualified, then go read it yourself.
OK so I'll try again. If you want someone to listen to anything you have to say, do not start off implying they need someone to interpret information for them. Fix your language or not, I don't really care anymore.
> In a way that makes no sense as a counterargument. If I say you can fix your own car or get a mechanic to do it, there's no reason for you to name some famous mechanic you hate and act like I meant them.
Famous mechanic? Just curious, can you list any famous mechanics that anybody would know? Anyways, since this one is too difficult for you (see how offensive that is?) I'll explain more. Last year how many times did these people step on their toes when speaking to the public? That mask vs no mask thing early on in the pandemic. What became clear is that these "experts" will say whatever is needed to get people to do what they want. Be it get vaccinated or stay indoors. They lied to attempt to control people, and destroyed all the trust they had on the way.
> This conversation just confuses me. All I wanted to do is explain that the vaccine is tested. And there are plenty of non-'left' people that can confirm the numbers and the underlying science, if you're honestly looking for the truth.
It is tested in that we've stuck in in arms and most people don't die. Please explain to me in excruciatingly great detail what will happen to our bodies as a result of this shot in 5 years. When you can answer that question, then it's tested
Vaccines have saved hundreds of millions of human lives. Human lives are valuable. Refusal to get vaccinated against things like measles, polio, smallpox, or COVID-19 cause a lot of unnecessary deaths, which destroys a lot of valuable things.
Just as spending on loss prevention in stores can easily produce a net positive impact on the store's balance sheet, reducing the rate of unnecessary destruction of human life (or other forms of permanent damage short of death) from diseases for which vaccines exist produces net positive impacts on the tax rolls/life insurance balance sheet/quality of life.
I guess "produce profit and avoid unnecessary misery and harm" is a political purpose, but I don't understand how anyone could speak derisively about it.
The thing that really hammers home that there's something to study here is that we basically eliminated polio through vaccination campaigns, and we did this in my lifetime. The Global Polio Eradication Initiative was launched in 1988 (one year after I was launched), and since then the number of annual cases has dropped by 99.9%, from 350/year to a handful. 2% of the people that contracted polio suffered paralysis, which would necessitate living in an iron lung to keep breathing.
Before last year, I would have said that the clear and obvious harms of polio were the reason so many people got vaccinated that polio is basically eradicated. But since the start of COVID, over 10 million humans have died miserable deaths from COVID, yet so many people reject the vaccine.
There's an extremely grave threat, but there's also an easy way to gain near complete invincibility to that threat, but tens of millions of people in just the US are refusing invincibility to COVID. 99.2% of US COVID deaths now are among the unvaccinated [0]! 99.2%!!! Clearly there's something going on to make so many people make such an irrational choice, and that's worth studying, as the benefit of getting a few more people to embrace invulnerability is worth so much more than the cost of funding some research and outreach.
> since [1988] the number of annual [Polio] cases has dropped by 99.9%, from 350/year to a handful
And what's more, that's not even the impressive part of the curve in terms of magnitude. Polio was once so commonplace that the idea of being anti-vax would have been completely absurd to everyone just some 40/50 years ago, when you had someone crippled by childhood paralysis (of which Polio is the most common cause) living in basically every city block. And even in the White House, from 1933 to 1945.
Vaccine hesitancy is largely irrational, however polio and COVID-19 are hardly comparable. Polio has a 2 - 5% infection fatality rate for children and young adults, whereas the COVID-19 IFR for the same age group is close to 0. We're talking about multiple orders of magnitude difference in relative risk.
There's a global pandemic killing thousands of people and there's a sizeable portion of the American population spreading misinformation that's causing a significant number of people to not get the vaccine, in turn endangering both themselves and others.
It seems obvious to me that there would be people researching how to either stop this misinformation being spread, or educate people enough to stop believing it. This isn't some conspiracy theory - this is just sane people doing sane things in response to a very real threat.
It’s not like I wanted to do this, more a moral obligation. When a former EBOLA colleague texted me last February and said he was putting the team back together I had a small panic attack knowing this bullshit cycle of unmitigated spread and disinformation was about to be my life again for 2+ years. On our first Zoom one guy just banged his head on his desk for a solid 2 minutes to give us a bit of comic relief.
Doesn’t even pay well - like at all. Dunno why you got downvoted so much.
Actually that's average number of DAILY deaths from the past 7 days, not the number of deaths in the past 7 days. As a lot of people take the weekends off, reporting of new cases and deaths decreases sharply on weekends and increases on Mondays, but in reality people are not dying at a lower rate on weekends. That's why the stats are averaged over 7 days.
For reference, there are about 15k homicides per year in the US, or about 41 per day, which is about 13% of the 316 daily COVID death rate reported by the CDC (and on the front page of the NYTimes site).
