Even if ivermectin were as effective as some people would like to believe, and widely used for COVID, it wouldn't be an alternative to the vaccines in the sense of preventing their emergency use authorization.
What we need is a policy of absolute honesty with a one-strike-and-your-out-forever punishment for any health authority that engages in propaganda, even if they had good intentions. Credibility matters. It matters a lot. All of these coy little word games and character assassinations being conducted in the name of the common good is achieving the exact opposite result. As it stands now, the credibility of the medical community might be forever tarnished especially since there appears to be no attempt to get it back but rather endless doubling downs on the slime tactics that should be to exclusive province of political campaign directors and used car salesmen.
Won't work, unless there are multiple health authorities – but the average person isn't going to keep track of the reputation of multiple small health authorities, so the authorities will have comparatively less reputation at stake.
You are onto something, though. Consider fleshing it out a bit before reading what other people are talking about. (ROT13: cerqvpgvba-onfrq zrqvpvar)
You aren't kidding. That whole hydroxychloroquine thing was a mess.
My father is kind of scared of the COVID vaccine - understandable.
But he gets his 'flu shot' (and a bunch of other things) by the doctor all the time.
He has zero problem running all the other tests, taking pills and taking the 'flu shot' which is literally a vaccine!
But he also reads stupid conspiracy theory stuff on Facebook and watches Fox News, and I believe to this day he has not been vaccinated.
That's how powerful misinformation can be.
My bet is that he'll probably take Ivermectin if he's heard about it on Facebook a bunch of times as being that 'safe drug that the government tried to hide'.
My father is not a dumb man, and neither are most of the people involved in this - but about 40% of the population can't effectively deal with information. They will take the drug depending whether Biden or Trump told them to take it.
>But he gets his 'flu shot' (and a bunch of other things) by the doctor all the time.
Does make a lot of sense to me. Because not all vaccines are the same. Infact their contents can be vastly different (It has to be, given that they protect against different diseases, you know).
So Just because you are Ok with one vaccine, does not mean that you should be Ok with all vaccines.
Sounds like common sense to me. Don't you agree?
But the hesitancy I've witnessed is not based on a kind of logic or reasoning, rather just an 'instinct'.
If all you read is weird FB posts, tabloids then the sum totality of the 'decision' will just be 'no'.
Fox News I think illustrates how this can happen. Fox hasn't taken a Covid or vaccine denying position. In fact, you could probably find that officially they have been 'on the side of the vaccine'. But since so much of the coverage is questioning, cynical, downplaying and contrarian - and - they have not actually been overtly supporting the vaccine programs ... it's easy for people to be 'net vaccine hesitant' if that's their information source.
So while at the very same time that a news organization can be '100% technically correct' on everything, the channel might become noisy and the net result is lack of clarity.
My father doesn't have an argument about 'it was made too fast', it's more like 'Oh, there's that goddam Fauci again, telling us what to do!'. He personally dislikes Dr. Fauci, at least in part because of the media he's consuming.
He believes that coronavirus is real, and oddly, has even been in the hospital for some minor things where there were insane protocols he was more than fine with following (i.e. masks everywhere, everyone taking it seriously) - but at the same time, when the subject comes up he says 'Oh it's a bunch of bull**t' , kind of in a huff. Also - he lives in rural area that has mostly not been affected.
Public Communications is not about making just rational arguments - it's about information clarity, emotions, credibility, how much fog and misinformation is thrown about, all of the specious and frankly totally false bits of Social Media etc..
CNN went to somewhere in the Midwest and interviewed a bunch of people in a small town and they largely reacted the same way:
"We just do thing differently here"
"It's not a big deal for us"
"We just don't need it"
While the 'it was made very rapidly' logic (and other reasonable arguments) are sometimes made ... that's really not it.
That's why in a crisis, information discipline is so important.
I firmly believe that if Republican apparatus and media were very committed to vaccination especially with public messaging, then about 25% more Americans would be vaccinated.
Imagine if the President of the USA was using his Twitter to try to get people vaccinated. Imagine if he held 'vax rallies' where free tickets went to anyone vaxxed. Imagine if he asked Country Music stars to support the effort. Instead of 'technically supporting vaccination while publicly being cynical about it'. That's what it boils down to.
What about the advocacy? I would go further and say that not even advocacy, but the general behaviour to trust the authority, is an instinct, rather than rooted in logic or rationality.
Because there is really no reason to trust CDC/FDA, after so many instances where these have caught to act diametrically opposite to the interests of the public (For some examples, look at real event portrayed in documentaries like 'what lies upstream' and 'Dark Waters'). Time and again, these agencies get away with little more than a pat on the wrist.
But people still, instinctively trust them. It is very sad, as you say.
>He personally dislikes Dr. Fauci
To be frank, it is hard to like someone who declares himself as the embodiment of scientific truth.
Once you trust someone, then you don't have to scientifically validate everything they say.
Also - there's tons of coverage of the vaccine. There are dozens of rich nations, each with dozens of Health Agencies doing public work, it's impossible to keep a secret.
You're borderline conspiracy theory if you think there's 'no trust' in the CDC/FDA. There's tons of trust.
What's 'sad' is people' inability to grasp that institutions are not perfect. Police, government, military, etc..
The US has military has committed some pretty terrible atrocities, and yet 'trust' in it is very high.
Same with police: they've been known to arbitrarily kill and imprison people unnecessarily - and yet they have high levels of trust.
The CDC are Health Officials for God's sake, that people wouldn't trust them as much as the military is sad.
"To be frank, it is hard to like someone who declares himself as the embodiment of scientific truth."
Now you're resorting to crude populism ... He's done no such thing.
When you're talking daily to wall of reality and science-deniers, it will get frustrating.
I don't care about Dr. Fauci, but his opponents try to create contrarian conditions regarding him in an attempt to get clicks and rile people up. They're vile.
It's wild to see people grasping at random anti-parasitics as some sort of miracle cure when (if you're over the age of the 12 and in the US) you can literally walk into any pharmacy and get a real miracle cure for free.
I am not sure how that can be correct. Because each vaccine is different, and can vary drastically in what the contain.
Now, if you say, all FDA approved vaccines are generally safe, then that might make a little more sense. Then you are at least qualifying something apart from just the name "vaccine".