The House of Stewart

1/22/2023

Today's Jon Stewart's podcast is, as they put it, “A Nuanced Conversation About COVID Vaccines (Yes, Really!)" As Jon says, “We’re back and we’re coming in hot with a conversation about COVID vaccines! We’re joined by Dr. Gregory A. Poland (Director of Mayo Clinic’s Vaccine Research Group), Dr. Saad Omer (Director of the Yale Institute for Global Health), and Zeynep Tufekci (Professor at Columbia University) who bring something that’s often lacking from these conversations: nuance. We talk through why many non-crazy people are hesitant to get vaccinated, how our public health institutions have failed to communicate effectively with the masses, and why it should be perfectly okay to ask questions about the risks and benefits of any vaccine.“

Happily, although a podcast, the show now seems to be posting an audio Zoom version of the episode, so that's what we'll go with. And you can watch it here.

2 Comments

Don Friedman

1/22/2023 06:34:58 pm

That was very interesting. But while I get the point they made about the failure to communicate clearly (and with humility) but public health officials, I also think that there were and are some additional factors that helped create the environment for the distrust of the vaccine:

1. The rapidly changing nature of the virus and the rapidly changing understanding of it by the scientists. The belief that the virus could spread by physical contact, the changing understanding of how it was communicated by air, etc. Although no doubt that the CDC etc could have communicated about this better, inevitably people would be confused. Long covid wasn't identified as a serious problem for some time.

2. The low fatality rate and initial belief that only the elderly and those with co-morbidities were in danger led to people not taking it seriously. If COVID had the impact of polio, for example, there would have been a lot less skepticism about the vaccines.

3. The comparison to Denmark is misleading. There's no doubt that Americans have a siginficant cultural and historical skepticism about and resistance to government that Western Europeans just don't have. It's about American character.

The politicization of the vaccine wasn't really mentioned and I'm convinced that this has a seriously detrimental effect on confidence in the vaccine. And for this I blame Republicans who used opposition to the vaccines as a political tool.

Robert Elisberg

1/23/2023 04:23:32 pm

Don, thanks, I agree that those are all important factors.

The House of Stewart

Leave a Reply.

Author

Archives

Categories