The Vaccine Misinformation Crisis Is More Severe Than You Think

[Celerity]

There is a profit to be made peddling anti-vaxx conspiracy theories, and no mechanism left to stop them.

https://thebanter.substack.com/p/the-vaccine-misinformation-crisis

https://archive.ph/pV4tN



While deep into research for this piece, the news broke that Alex Berenson was the latest “journalist” to be handpicked by Elon Musk to disseminate private Twitter files on the company’s previous policies towards vaccine misinformation. Given I was using Berenson as a primary example of Covid misinformation and grift, I found the news to be extremely distressing.

The wrongest man

Berenson was dubbed “The Pandemic’s Wrongest Man” by The Atlantic and has been thoroughly debunked as one of the leading sources of Covid vaccine misinformation. The Atlantic piece itself was so devastating that it is a wonder Berenson continued saying anything else on the subject. Derek Thompson didn’t just debunk Berenson’s claims, he laid waste to them. Quoting doctors and scientists involved with studying Covid and the vaccine trials themselves, Thompson showed Berenson appeared to be incapable of interpreting the data or understanding basic science. Furthermore, Berenson’s misinformation was so egregious it was hard to see it as anything other than disinformation. Here’s a stunning example of Berenson’s shocking dishonesty (from The Atlantic piece):

On February 11, Berenson warned his followers that early data from Israel proved that vaccine advocates “need to start ratcheting down expectations.” This was a strange claim to make at the time: An Israeli health-care provider had reported no deaths and four severe cases among its first 523,000 fully vaccinated people. But the claim seems even more ridiculous now, in light of Israel’s incredible success since then. New positive cases in Israel are down roughly 95 percent since January. Deaths have plunged, even though the economy is almost fully open.

Link to tweet

Thompson asked Berenson to explain himself, leading to this extraordinary exchange:

When I asked Berenson to explain his beef with Israel’s vaccine record, he sent a link to a news story in Hebrew that, he said, reported “several hundred deaths and hospitalizations and thousands of infections in people who have received both doses.” I can’t read Hebrew, so I reached out to someone who can, Eran Segal, a computational biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science, in Rehovot, Israel. He replied by email: “This link actually shows that the vast majority of those who died were NOT vaccinated.” By Segal’s calculations, the vaccines have reduced the risk of death by more than 90 percent in the Israeli population.

snip

[Kennah]

1. There is one

The only way to stop a loon with an anti-vax conspiracy is a loon with COVID

[Celerity]

2. depends on the age of the person getting Covid

Covid-19, as a killer, is extraordinarily stacked to the older age brackets.

Here in Sweden, almost 3 years in, for the youngest half of our population (which is almost 10.6m, so the youngest half is 5.3m people) we have had a total of 149 Covid deaths since the pandemic started in early 2020, despite the vast bulk of the cases hitting the younger sectors (85% of the cases have been 59yo and under, 71% have been 49yo and under, and those numbers are actually low, as so many younger people are either asymptomatic or never get tested).

Adjusted for the US population, that is the rough American equivalent of around 4,700 Covid deaths for the youngest 167 million people over an almost 3 year period.

Sweden stats by age group (åldersgrupp)

First column is cases (sjukdomsfall), then intensive care (intensivvårdade), then deaths (avlidna)

kvinnor is women
män is men

[Kennah]

5. VID the WORMS!

[John Ludi]

3. Good essay.

I confess...I myself was addicted to conspiracy theories back before the internet was a thing and there were BBS systems peddling the stuff. Mostly it was some pretty outrageous material about UFOs, much of which turned out to be possible government disinfo and/or stuff some kid came up with in their parent's basement. Once I saw the backyard gossip compounding nature of it all, I wised up and started looking VERY closely at where and whom it was emanating from. I became FAR less credulous where such things were concerned.

It's not that I don't think there ARE conspiracies out there; there have been plenty through history...but not EVERYTHING that happens in our world is the result of some Illuminati-like cabal conspiring away in a smoke-filled room.

All that being said, things on the devolutionary downward spiral have progressed to the point where I don't think much can be done about much of anything...too many holes in the dike, too few fingers, and many of the fingers are also attached to those who have a built-in profit motive...so when someone comes along with a sweet story that hits you right in the amygdala and that story includes a come on to buy their snake oil crack instead of a big-pharma vaccine, I totally get it that people would go that route...even if it kills them. And in this era where people will double down on their doubling-down before EVER admitting they were ever so slightly incorrect about anything, I doubt that all that many people can be fished out of the rabbit holes they have scampered down.

So it truly IS up to natural selection at this point, which makes me sad...but I doubt there is all that much that can be done about it at this juncture.

[tanyev]

4. Marking to read later.