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The more reports appear about the work on the COVID-19 vaccine, the more fake news related to it also multiplies. American social media is flooding with information that the vaccine contains monkey brains or that vaccination is a CIA plot to take over the world. The US government has a lot to do in the fight against disinformation.
- The United States has a serious problem with public reluctance to vaccinate in general and the COVID-19 vaccine
- CNN Survey Shows One-Third of Americans Are Not Going to Vaccinate COVID-19, Even if the Vaccine is Cheap and Widely Available
- Experts in various fields regret the CDC’s failure to conduct large-scale vaccine safety education campaigns
Educational campaign on vaccines
The United States has invested millions of dollars in developing a COVID-19 vaccine, but the effort to find an effective vaccine may be partially thwarted by the so-called anti-COVID-XNUMX vaccine. anti-vaccination movements.
A May poll conducted by CNN found that a third of Americans said they would not be vaccinated against COVID-19, even if the vaccine was widely available and cheap.
Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, said he underestimated the level of public resistance to the vaccine and did not expect it to be so common. Michael Caputo, deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said the government was seeing increasing distrust over COVID-19 vaccines. President Trump’s advisers say an educational campaign is about to emerge that will focus on educating the public about vaccines.
CNN also notes that the government has little time for effective educational efforts, as Dr.Anthony Fauci and other experts say the COVID-19 vaccine may appear on the market in late 2020 or early 2021.
“We know how important it is, especially with the new vaccine, to start education early,” said Chelsea Clinton, a spokeswoman for the Clinton Foundation, adding: “We saw how important it was years ago when the polio vaccine was released. So we know what we must do. The problem is, we don’t do that ”.
See also: What do we know about COVID-19 vaccines? Will Our Country win the race against other countries?
CDC is delaying vaccination campaigns
In June, director of the CDC’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Robert Redfield, said a plan for an educational vaccination campaign was in preparation. “We are developing a plan to continue our efforts to rebuild confidence in vaccines, as it has dropped dramatically recently,” said Redfield.
CNN asked a spokeswoman for the CDC to what stage this plan is at and what the organization has done to educate the public about vaccines, but the station got no response. Chelsea Clinton commented on the CDC’s work, saying the organization is not doing its job and is inactive on the vaccine disinformation front.
Probably the CDC’s tardiness was the reason why Operation Warp Speed took over some of the functions of the organization. As Michael Caputo said, Operation Warp Speed is developing a solid public health awareness campaign and added that it will soon focus on vaccine safety and effectiveness.
Private parties such as Vaccinate Your Family and Voices for Vaccines are also involved in smaller-scale vaccination education programs. But Clinton believes the government’s immunization education efforts should start a few months ago, given what is happening on social media, which is flooded with misinformation and fake news about vaccines.
The power of the US anti-vaccine movement
Chelsea Clinton also noted in an interview with CNN that the strength of the anti-vaccine movement should not be underestimated. This was clearly demonstrated by last year’s measles epidemic in the United States, the largest in almost 25 years. It was largely driven by the anti-vaccine movement that is very popular on social media.
According to Collins, the strength of the anti-vaccine movement was based on the fact that the measles vaccine has been known and effective for decades, so many people have forgotten how dangerous the virus is.
«People stopped believing that measles could be fatal to children. I thought then that since we see how dangerous COVID-19 is and how many deaths it causes each day, there would be no temptation to say, ‘well, we don’t need a vaccine’. Apparently I was wrong »added Collins.
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