| I've heard and read a lot about this in the past couple weeks and I sincerely hope public health officials and media don't freak out. We need to stay the course on this and emphasize the positive. 1. Vaccines are still difficult to get in a lot of places. I and my partner only just got appointments for this weekend for our first dose. As long as appointments are required and you have to fight to get a spot at 9am it is going to be difficult to get hesitent people to sign up. I think hesitency will go down dramatically when you can just walk in without an appointment and get it. 2. I really don't understand why Public Health officials keep downplaying the vaccines. They are still talking about everyone masking for months, limited gatherings, no vacations, etc. Why is it always doom and gloom? There is no evidence to support this level of paranoia and the messaging should be the exact opposite. These vaccines are scientific miracles. Get the vaccine and go out and have fun again! 3. The worst thing we can do at this point is to start shaming people for being hesitant. I don't think it has started just yet but I can see it bubbling in certain circles. I was just in a work meeting where we were talking about vaccines and everyone on the call was on board BUT some people only wanted the JandJ one because it used older tech and they didn't want to try the new mRNA ones. This was with a group of all college educated software developers... There is no evidence at all to support this form of hesitancy and yet there it is. Are they Anti-vax? Kind of, but would it have helped matters to argue that they were wrong and that they were helping kill their neighbors by only wanting one of the vaccines? No, let them have their hesitancy, continue vaccinating, and in 6 months when hundreds of thousands of people have it and nothing bad happens they will quietly go get it done. We know the vaccines work. Just make them widely available and the proof will be in the results. |