White Republicans are more likely to reject the COVID-19 vaccine than any other group in America
Source: Business Insider
Early polls about vaccine attitudes in the US revealed Black Americans were more likely to be vaccine hesitant compared to other racial and ethnic groups. Noting this gap, public health officials initiated national and local vaccine outreach efforts targeting minority groups.
But vaccine acceptance campaigns so far have failed to address who may be the most vaccine hesitant group at this point in the rollout: white Republicans. Republicans, especially white ones, are less likely to want to get vaccinated.
According to Civiqs, 56% of white Republicans said they were either unsure or would not take a COVID-19 vaccine if it were available to them, compared to 31% of Black Americans, 30% of Latinx Americans, and just 7% of white Democrats.
"Vaccines are our only way out of this. If we don't have 80-plus percent of the population vaccinated before next winter, this virus is going to come back raging," Dr. Paul Offit, a member of the Food and Drug Administration's vaccine advisory committee, told NBC News. "What worries me is if 25 percent of Republicans say they won't get vaccinated, that's going to be hard to do."
Read more: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/white-republicans-are-more-likely-to-reject-the-covid-19-vaccine-than-any-other-group-in-america/ar-BB1eChgt?li=BBnbcA1
This is another example of why right wing misinformation is so deadly. Indeed, Republicans try to fight efforts to combat these lies by arguing that such efforts are "biased," as though accepting a false equivalency between facts and lies is desirable.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/03/14/facebook-vaccine-hesistancy-qanon/
Facebook is conducting a vast behind-the-scenes study of doubts expressed by U.S. users about vaccines, a major project that attempts to probe and teach software to identify the medical attitudes of millions of Americans, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.
The research is a large-scale attempt to understand the spread of ideas that contribute to vaccine hesitancy, or the act of delaying or refusing a vaccination despite its availability, on social media — a primary source of health information for millions of people. It shows how the company is probing ever more nuanced realms of speech, and illustrates how weighing free speech vs. potential for harm is more tenuous than ever for technology companies during a public health crisis.
While Facebook has banned outright false and misleading statements about coronavirus vaccines since December, a huge realm of expression about vaccines sits in a gray area. One example could be comments by someone expressing concern about side effects that are more severe than expected. Those comments could be both important for fostering meaningful conversation and potentially bubbling up unknown information to health authorities — but at the same time they may contribute to vaccine hesitancy by playing upon people’s fears.
The research explores how to address that tension by studying these types of comments, which are tagged “VH” by the company’s software algorithms, as well as the nature of the communities that spread them, according to the documents. Its early findings suggest that a large amount of content that does not break the rules may be causing harm in certain communities, where it has an echo chamber effect.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Sit on hands.
Don't say it or post it out loud.
That was my good act for the day.
