Vaccine hesitancy might be a cause X (no, really!)
One thing that stuck out to me in the interview between Rob Wiblin and Ezra Klein is how much of a risk vaccine hesitancy poses to the US government’s public health response to COVID:
But there are other things where the conservatism is coming from the simple fact, to put this bluntly, they deal with the consequences of a failure in a way you and I don’t. You and I are sitting here, like, “Go faster. The trade-offs are obvious here.” They are saying, “Actually, no. The trade-offs are not obvious. If this goes wrong, we can have vaccine hesitancy that destroys the entire effort.” …
I think that there is a very different kind of feedback they are getting, and a kind of thing they fear, which is not that just the vaccine will be three weeks slower than it should have been, but if they are wrong, if they did not get enough data, if they missed something, they are going to imperil the whole effort, and that will also kill a gigantic number of people.
I’m aware of PR campaigns aimed at convincing people to get vaccinated, especially populations with higher rates of vaccine hesitancy. I wonder if these efforts could lead to a permanent shift in public attitudes toward vaccines. If that happens, then maybe governments can act faster and take more high-risk, high-reward actions during future epidemics without having to worry as much about vaccine hesitancy and mistrust of public health authorities “crashing” the public health response.
Vaccine hesitancy might be a cause X (no, really!)
One thing that stuck out to me in the interview between Rob Wiblin and Ezra Klein is how much of a risk vaccine hesitancy poses to the US government’s public health response to COVID:
I’m aware of PR campaigns aimed at convincing people to get vaccinated, especially populations with higher rates of vaccine hesitancy. I wonder if these efforts could lead to a permanent shift in public attitudes toward vaccines. If that happens, then maybe governments can act faster and take more high-risk, high-reward actions during future epidemics without having to worry as much about vaccine hesitancy and mistrust of public health authorities “crashing” the public health response.