Six months into America's COVID-19 pandemic cases are surging, small businesses are faltering,
playgrounds are empty, and unemployment is at 11%.
Our best hope for ending this nightmare is a vaccine and there are more than 165 in development.
But when a vaccine becomes available how many Americans will refuse it?
Bill Gates vaccine is magically ready,
but in order to get the vaccine you also have to receive the biometric tattoo.
Will you take it?
I don't trust the vaccines, I never did.
And be able to force things into your body that then slowly debilitate you with binary weapon systems
and kill you.
Vaccines are the greatest healthcare advance of our time preventing an estimated 4.5 billion infections
since their advent.
So what explains the reluctance of so many Americans to vaccinate?
It's a combination of bad science the government's long history of misleading the public and the collapse
of confidence in public health authorities because of their catastrophic failures in response
to the COVID-19 pandemic.
But if the government responds by attempting to force Americans to take a COVID-19 vaccine
it will only help the conspiracy theorists.
Public health officials can begin to undo the damage of the past six months by rejecting authoritarian
and paternalistic approaches in favor of careful persuasion and brutal honesty
about the limits of their own knowledge.
Though most Americans surveyed say they'll probably take the vaccine there's a real possibility
that a sizable block of refusers could allow this Novel Coronavirus to continue spreading
based on what's happened with measles, and vaccine refusal tends to happen
in clusters according to researcher Tara C. Smith.
2019 was the worst measles year in a generation when you have some of these
groups of individuals where vaccination rates are low
it just takes one person with measles to get in there and spread it through a
community vaccine skeptics often focus on the
claim that childhood vaccines cause autism i think
they need to wake up and stop hurting our
kids the vaccines are dangerous if not given a dangerous
to certain people who are more susceptible
two years old two and a half years old a child a beautiful child
went to have the vaccine and came back and
a week later got a tremendous fever got very very sick
now is autistic the claim famously was amplified by a british researcher named
andrew wakefield i started getting calls from parents who said
my child was developing perfectly normally and then they had their mmr
vaccine in many cases and then they just
disappeared his 1998 paper linking vaccines and autism
was later retracted and the uk general medical council found him guilty of
multiple ethics violations for lying about his test subjects
and failing to disclose a financial link to an anti-vaccine lawsuit
but concern about vaccines is rising among parents
along with objections to the use of mercury preservatives
which both haven't been proven to do harm and haven't been present in
childhood vaccines for nearly 20 years an ecosystem of anti-vaccine information
has emerged and according to the american journal of public health
bots and paid russian trolls participate in online vaccine debates
far more than the average social media user and the trolls don't always join
the anti-vaccine side of the debate but aim to elevate the visibility to
create false equivalency eroding public consensus on vaccination
you have some people that really don't know what to think so you
know we think of them as kind of fence sitters
and they're really just trying to figure out you know what is going on what do i
believe what do i trust largely those people in the middle are
the ones that that i try to reach but u.s public health authorities have
sometimes misled the public about vaccines and other public health
interventions which has made the job of convincing
skeptics more difficult the united states government did
something that was wrong deeply profoundly morally
wrong the tuskegee experiment so deep distrust of the government and
public health particularly in black american communities
in 1932 government doctors recruited mostly poor black sharecroppers at the
tuskegee institute for a study of the impact of syphilis
the participants the majority of whom had the disease
were told they were getting an experimental medicine when in fact they
were all given a placebo scientists running the study were
actually interested in the progression of the illness when left
untreated the experiment continued until well
after penicillin became available in 1947
and many participants died they were lied to
by their government another incident that damaged trust in public health
occurred in 1976 when a novel virus called the swine flu
broke out at a u.s army base and scientists believe that it bore a
genetic similarity to the 1918 flu that had killed more than 100 million
people worldwide offer every american the opportunity to
be inoculated against a swine type influenza virus
president gerald ford authorized 135 million dollars to develop
and deploy a vaccine and the government injected 25 percent of americans in a
10-month period but the global pandemic never came the
disease died out and the rushed version of the vaccine
likely resulted in some injuries though probably not as many as
reported by the media at the time smith says more humility is called for
in public health communication it's hard but i think we have to emphasize that
uncertainty and i think that may have been one thing
missing with the masks and i was probably guilty of it myself you do not
have to wear masks because there is no evidence
that they protect people who are not sick over the weekend
the u.s surgeon general urged people to stop buying masks saying
in a tweet they are not effective in preventing general public from catching
coronavirus wearing a mask might make people feel
a little bit better and it might even block a droplet
but it's not providing the perfect protection that people
think that it is after reversing their position on face masks
authorities claimed their earlier message was motivated by a desire to
preserve protective gear for medical workers
without ever acknowledging that they were wrong to say that masks wouldn't
slow the spread of the virus do you now regret not advising people
more forcefully to wear masks earlier i don't regret that because let
me explain to you what happened at that time there was a
paucity of equipment that our health care
providers needed public health authorities also issued
contradictory messages on the safety of large
gatherings following the black lives matter protests the who
failed to properly investigate the original outbreak in china
perhaps leaving the world less prepared than it should have been for the
emerging pandemic the trump administration repeatedly
played down the threat of the virus and the cdc
botched the early rollout of testing if there is any hope of winning back public
trust in a vaccination program which unlike
the 1973 swine flu vaccine will have been subject to extensive
safety testing public health authorities should acknowledge their past mistakes
we did not want to divert masks and ppe away from them
to be used by the people if warning against face masks was a so-called noble
lie to preserve supplies for healthcare
workers they should own up to that rationale
and stop condescending to the public doctors should acknowledge that vaccines
can carry some risk but that it's a risk often worth taking
because there are no perfect solutions only trade-offs the lesson of the last
six months is that authoritarian mandates and noble
lies tend to backfire fact-based persuasion
which is the basis of good science is our best hope for stopping covet 19
and restoring the personal freedom that's been eroded by the governmental
and societal response to it