What better strategy can you create that is better than “There is a global pandemic. Here is a vaccine that will help. It is available free at hundreds of places. You will be provided with a document that says you are vaccinated, at no charge. All you have to do is show up.”?
…if this strategy is working so well, why have you spent most of this thread complaining about it?
I don’t think I’ve spent “most of this thread” complaining about it.
…I think you have.
What you’ve outlined isn’t a strategy. It’s more akin to a tactic than an over-arching strategy. What do you hope to achieve with this alleged “strategy?” What are the goals? What are the target metrics? How will you overcome hesitancy? How will you reach people that don’t have access to primary care?
people here don’t need access to primary care to get the vaccine. The goals are to easily get people vaccinated. The target metrics are “People who haven’t been vaccinated”.
…did you go back and reread what I wrote earlier? One of the barriers to information about the vaccines in black and marginalized communities is a lack of access to primary care.
So it sounds like you’ve got nothing to complain about then. The strategy has been implemented and is proceeding as one would expect.
You don’t need access to primary care to find out about the vaccine here. Perhaps you are not aware of that since you don’t live here.
Yes, it’s proceeding as one would expect. Because one would expect people to be stupid and not get the vaccine.
… it’s really sad that you DO live there, but are choosing to pretend that the voices of the black and marginalized people I’ve cited don’t exist.
Which is why engagement with those communities is so important.
As I said: you have no cause for complaint.
I’m not pretending that. They should just get the vaccine. That’s it. There are many, many resources that say “get the vaccine” That’s it. Just get the vaccine
… you are a random user on a relatively obscure message board that goes by the handle “Slash1972.” What makes you an authority, and why should they listen to you, and not their pastor, or their neighbors, or their workmate?
Maybe they are simply too busy surviving, working two jobs, six days a week, cooking for family when they get home. Or maybe they are just lazy arseholes.
70% of Americans have had one jab. That’s really great work and about where I would expect you to be. The reality is if you want to get to 80% you are going to have to work on it. And if you want to get to 90% then you have to work even harder.
But if you were expecting that everyone would get a jab tomorrow and then the pandemic would be over then you need to reset your expectations. The US is only a month behind target. By the end of the year you should be upwards of 80-85%. But the pandemic still won’t be over because much of the rest of the world are desperate for vaccines. We are still probably two years away from the end.
Gotta have a source of information and ready access. My insular 70-something non-driving, mostly non-TV watching, mostly non-newspaper-reading mother with no internet probably wouldn’t have figured out there was a pandemic for months if I hadn’t told her. As it was I had to organize her vaccination because non-internet avenues were virtually impossible to navigate.
While overall vaccination rates in Philadelphia are beginning to slow in the last couple of weeks, providers there — and echoed nationally — say the disparity between racial groups isn’t the result of people who are hesitant to get vaccinated. Instead, they say barriers such as the location of vaccination sites, online-only sign-ups, appointment scheduling, transportation and other planning and access issues are to blame.
From NPR, here. That was April of 2021. A couple of months on from that story things may be improving, but I’m sure they’re far, far from perfect.
Have you noticed how many US conservatives, among them many influential Republican officials up to and including the most recent Republican President, have been deliberately mischaracterizing, undermining and obstructing public-health tools such as contact tracing, isolation, mask-wearing and social-distancing (besides vaccination)?
When you assert with your antipodal generalization that “Americans” are “treating the unvaccinated as the enemy”, you’re ignoring an important reality of the situation. Namely, that a very specific subset of “the unvaccinated” (or in some cases, the secretly vaccinated who are hypocritically encouraging anti-vaccine sentiment for political advantage) started this by deciding to treat another group of Americans—namely, the pro-science and pro-responsibility faction who are willing to confront and acknowledge uncomfortable facts—as “the enemy”.
America as an entire nation certainly hasn’t done “everything we could” to combat the pandemic. But your pious finger-wagging about it is failing to take into account that this is largely because an influential minority of Americans have been actively sabotaging the efforts and the willingness of the rest of us to act responsibly.
It’s mean and counterproductive to gratuitously decide to treat another group of people as the enemy, sure. But it would be the act of a fool to pretend that nothing’s happening when another group of people has gratuitously decided to treat you as the enemy, and the act of a masochist to blame yourself for their deliberate sabotaging of your aims.
…for fucks sakes. Don’t accuse me of ignoring something when I’m the only person in this thread who has bought it up. I’ve highlighted it. Waved my hands at it. And you remember how people responded?
All I’m doing is pointing out is that people are holding the wrong people to account. You aren’t uniting against covid. You aren’t fighting the grifters or the corrupt politicians or the conmen or the corporations. Its the unvaccinated.
The reality is the vaccine rollout isn’t going badly in the US. You’ve hit your targets, albeit a month late. And if you keep pushing you will get to 80%. And if you push more you might get to 90%. Nobody ever anticipated getting to 100%.
The danger I’m highlighting here is that there are plenty of people that are not distinguishing between the (1) “influential minority of Americans have been actively sabotaging the efforts”, (2) the “Americans that have been influenced by that minority”, (3) and the marginalised who either don’t know how to access or can’t access vaccines for reasons that need to be explored. And it’s group 3 that I’m highlighting here. Why are people angrier with the unvaccinated than the "influential minority? That’s a question you need to be asking them, not me.
My position in this thread really shouldn’t be that controversial. Will vaccine passports have a bigger affect on black/poorer/marginalised communities? If history is the judge then yes they probably will. And the best way to mitigate that is to bring people from those communities into the process.
As for the snippet you quoted from me: that’s just the reality. Contact tracing is barely a thing. You only genomically sequence a fraction of cases. The messaging on masking is all over the place.
So I’m not ignoring anything. I haven’t failed to take into account anything. However you can’t blame everything on the " influential minority of Americans have been actively sabotaging the efforts" because the Biden administration could have and should be doing more. And the biggest thing they could be doing right now is investing in professional science communicators.
Erin Biba makes that case here.
Well, this is their current plan.
It includes plans to reach out to the home bound, disabled, those with limited proficiency in English, free transportation to and from both jabs, mobile vaccination clinics directed to underserved areas, tracking what areas are underserved or more highly impacted, partnership with community organizations, pop up clinics, availability at local pharmacies, grocery stores, and Wal Mart, paid media campaigns, community engagement making 100,000 phone calls and knocking on thousands of doors, training local leaders and working with trusted community organizations in Covid outreach.
We aren’t exactly ignoring marginalized communities here. This is one city of 1.5M people. This is often how we do things, it’s not Biden creating the plan, it’s the Mayor, the Governor, the County Executive or the Town Council. Hell, my County Exec has left me a voice mail every Sunday since October about Covid programs and vaccination availability.
Sure, but what if they don’t have TV, never answer their door, never go to the pharmacy or supermarket, never answer their phone, never go to church, never go outside? America is just doing nothing at all for the underprivileged when it comes to vaccination! /s
I’m skeptical that your group 3 really exists. There have been a LOT of efforts in my area at least (Dallas) to reach those groups- up to and including door to door efforts, putting vaccination locations in community centers, churches, etc… arranging free transportation, etc…
And yet, in spite of all that, the vaccination rate among minorities is STILL unacceptably low. This isn’t a question of access, it’s a question of choice, and at some point, you have to draw a line and let people live (or not) with their choices.
And honestly, people need to be engaged with the world, and it’s their responsibility to make that happen. You can’t live under a figurative rock, and then expect everyone to make stuff happen for you because you’re making a choice to be ignorant. Nor can you live under that figurative rock and then bitch and moan when stuff outside of your rock happens that you don’t like, even though you didn’t actually do anything.
…its August. America is at 70% vaccination. It hasn’t been a year yet. The initial targets were for around 80%, but with Delta some scientists think you need to get higher.
So you are sceptical that group 3 exists.
Okay then. I think the evidence I’ve cited so far disagrees with you, but let’s go with this.
So what is it you want to do? Do we call it a day? Close up shop? You’ve given up on practically everything else. You’ve hit 70%, you’ve given it your best shot, time to move on?
The latest ding-dong to liken showing proof of vaccination to racist oppression is the acting major of Boston, Kim Janey.
“The controversy began when Janey was asked about the New York policy, which requires that patrons show they’ve vaccinated against COVID-19. New York has developed a vaccine-pass system that diners can use to demonstrate their vaccination status. But Janey likened that requirement to the way Trump demanded to see Barack Obama’s birth certificate and to the passes that enslaved people were required to carry in antebellum America.”
This is beyond stupid, seeing that Covid-19 is disproportionately affecting minority communities. It plays into the hands of antivaxers, who’ve been gleefully exploiting black-white divisions while encouraging vaccine avoidance among communities experiencing measles outbreaks, including Somali immigrants in Minnesota, Orthodox Jews in New York City and residents of Samoa.
*Andrew Wakefield proselytized among Somali refugees, resulting in declining vaccination rates. RFK Jr. hosted a video titled “Medical Racism: The New Apartheid”.
Can I ask where this number is from? My sources show we’re still below 60%. Note that I don’t consider one shot of Pfizer to be “vaccinated” for all practical purposes.
What I’m saying is that your group 3 isn’t what’s driving low vaccination, and that for those people in your group 3, lack of access and marginalization isn’t what’s driving their specific low vaccination rates.
Instead, the big driver of low vaccination rates isn’t your group 3 or reasons of access/marginalization, it’s politicization of vaccination and COVID mitigation measures by the Republican party/conservatives. They’ve literally ginned up a bunch of crazy-ass conspiracy theories as to why the vaccine causes disease, how it’s a government plot to put ‘chips’ in you for tracking purposes, how mask-wearing and vaccinations are a personal-liberty issue, and that mandates, etc… are tyranny.
We’ve tried fighting that good fight for four years now against these people. They’re resistant to logic and good sense, and at this point, if they get sick, it’s because they’ve chosen to because they’re crazy and stupid.