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.

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