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> 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 f

> 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.

p1necone 5y ago
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.
- decremental 5y ago
  316 people have died of Covid in the last 7 days in the US, according to the CDC.
  - modriano 5y ago
    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).
  - perl4ever 5y ago
    I believe the correct number is over 2100, and it's up nearly 15% week-over-week. Hopefully we are near a peak, but it never seems to register with some people that deaths lag cases by a few weeks, whatever the ratio may be.
- cududa 5y ago
  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.
slg 5y ago
The antivax movement existed long before COVID and Facebook was a huge contributor to its spread. There is nothing scary about someone researching that.
- epicureanideal 5y ago
  Although we should be careful not to lump everyone opposed to the current vaccines in with the anti-vaxers.
  - mackwell 5y ago
    Why?
    - tekknik 5y ago
      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.
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    How many people are opposed to all of the major covid vaccines, but are not anti-vaxers?
    - majewsky 5y ago
      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.
      - acdha 5y ago
modriano 5y ago
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.
- modriano 5y ago
  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. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jul/08/fears-of-new-us-covid-surge-as-delta-spreads-and-many-remain-unvaccinated https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jul/08/fears-of-new...
  - majewsky 5y ago
    > 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.

p1necone 5y ago

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.

decremental 5y ago
316 people have died of Covid in the last 7 days in the US, according to the CDC.
- modriano 5y ago
  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).
- perl4ever 5y ago
  I believe the correct number is over 2100, and it's up nearly 15% week-over-week. Hopefully we are near a peak, but it never seems to register with some people that deaths lag cases by a few weeks, whatever the ratio may be.
cududa 5y ago
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.

slg 5y ago

The antivax movement existed long before COVID and Facebook was a huge contributor to its spread. There is nothing scary about someone researching that.

epicureanideal 5y ago
Although we should be careful not to lump everyone opposed to the current vaccines in with the anti-vaxers.
- mackwell 5y ago
  Why?
  - tekknik 5y ago
    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.
- Dylan16807 5y ago
  How many people are opposed to all of the major covid vaccines, but are not anti-vaxers?
  - majewsky 5y ago
    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.
    - acdha 5y ago

modriano 5y ago

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.

modriano 5y ago
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. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jul/08/fears-of-new-us-covid-surge-as-delta-spreads-and-many-remain-unvaccinated https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jul/08/fears-of-new...
- majewsky 5y ago
  > 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.