“Pfizer and others [pharmas] even decided to not assess the results of their vaccine, in other words, not come out with a vaccine, until just after the election…That’s because of what I did with favored nations and these other elements. Instead of their original plan to assess the data in October. So they were going to come out in October, but they decided to delay it because of what I’m doing, which is fine with me because frankly this is just a very big thing.”
Donald Trump, November 21st
It is truly difficult to convince anyone whose passionate beliefs are based on unprovable assumptions of anything that might contradict those beliefs. For a substantial portion of human experience, the world was flat, and disease was caused by demons. Suggest anything to the contrary, and you were declared a heretic, facing shunning, banishment, ridicule or worse, torture and death. Ah mythology persists. The pandemic is real and growing. The unfortunate reality is the COVID-19 is passed from human to human primarily in aerosol form. While surface contact poses its own risk – generally resulting from touching a contaminated surface and then touching one’s face – the bulk of transmission for this virus is airborne.
It absolutely does not matter to nature – which appears to be addressing our overpopulation issue by finding new ways to cull the human herd – whether you believe in the toxicity risk of the novel corona virus or not. The mythology of “non-threat except to the economy” is further sustained by the vastly differing levels of human susceptibility to the infection; some get it and join the 255,000+ to die, while others manifest virtually no symptoms at all. But what is particularly strange is that so many people who have lost friends and family to this infectious agent but who did not previously believe SARS-cov-2 (the formal name for the virus) was a serious threat to life and limb do not change their minds about the threat.
Aside from the usual tax and regulatory averse fat-cat Republicans, Donald Trump has struck a nerve with a large populist group that is increasingly feeling left behind in a world changing into something they cannot or will not accept. Well before the pandemic, they were losing their jobs, mostly to obsolescent skills, online retail, or dwindling demand in the product/services range in which they have been working. The genuine “why” this is happening is less important than their perception that there must be others to blame and that these exclusionary forces can be stopped and even reversed. Not exactly how change has ever worked. If only…
Unscrupulous politicians, more interested in enhancing the economy for the richest in the land, have learned that if they blame enough, promise enough – regardless of the truth behind the words – they can cater to people who are sliding into that most dangerous category (towards nothing left to lose) and generate power, passion and mythical beliefs that allow them to explain these politicians’ consistent failure to deliver on their pledges under a fabricated blame game. For example, they can promise social conservatives, slowly fading in a sea of diversity, that their religiosity can be imposed as law on a majority of Americans who have long since rejected that cornerstone of that vote: right to life vs right to choose.
Given that there is absolutely zero doubt today, based on a whole lot of data that we did not have at the inception of this pandemic, that masks save lives and prevent the spread of COVID-19, wearing a mask still is imbued with the notion of government interference that so many Republicans cannot fathom. They have even fabricated a notion of a fundamental constitutional right – without the slightest judicial support for that position – that they cannot be required to take medical precautions to protect other Americans… by simply wearing a mask. If that doesn’t change, along with an antivax movement that threatens the efficacy of a vaccine-driven path to herd immunity, we are in for a very long attempted recovery and an economic slam which can only build on the damage already done. But there is a path, and it involves modern marketing techniques, that just might work.
“Lisa Feldman Barrett, a distinguished professor of psychology at Northeastern University, the chief science officer of the Center for Law, Brain & Behavior at Harvard University, and now the author of Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain, agrees. She speculates a solution on a grand scale: We need the most highly coordinated influencer campaign in history to stop COVID-19 in its tracks…
“‘What happens when you have a social reality that is in direct opposition to physical reality? ‘I’m not going to wear a mask because I’m an individual and I have rights. I can make my own decisions, and this is a plot by the government,' ’ says Barrett. ‘That’s a social reality that’s ignoring physical reality, in the sense that it doesn’t matter if you believe a virus is a plot or not, because if the virus is there it’s very real. All the virus cares about is you have a nice, wet set of lungs.’… So what can we do to fix social realities?
“We know where these misbeliefs come from because scientists understand how we learn: from the people around us, through both language and mimicking behavior. But we don’t value what everyone says equally. We model people who we admire—our parents, political figures, and celebrities. Prestige makes a difference.
“‘Especially credible or unlikely messengers are powerful. That’s why it’s really important to have more Republican governors [who were previously] skeptical about public health measures, speaking out [in support], says [Brendan J. Nyhan, a professor of government at Dartmouth College]. ‘And why it’s really dangerous, conversely, to see a lot of the Fox News opinion machinery turning public health measures into identity politics. It’s not that there’s a risk to public health and that thousands of people are going to die in the coming weeks and months, but that it’s a ‘war on Thanksgiving.' ’…
“Can some updated messaging change hearts and minds this deep into the pandemic? Evidence suggests, yes… In 2016, Princeton researcher Elizabeth Paluck led a study across 56 middle schools in New Jersey that had significant issues with bullying. Her team was able to reduce conflicts by an incredible 30% within a year. How? They didn’t try to change everyone’s minds about bullying. Instead, they targeted the tastemakers, the popular or influential students in the schools, and encouraged them to post about the dangers of bullying on Instagram, wear bracelets for the cause, and speak to other students about better means of conflict resolution.
“Leveraging a handful of influencers—the people we model to learn and create social realities—researchers were able to quantifiably reduce bullying across dozens of schools… Barrett cites this research and believes that America needs to duplicate it, albeit on a much larger scale, to get people to believe in the dangers of COVID-19, wear masks, and actually take the vaccine when it’s available so that we can put this pandemic behind us. But picking out a few popular kids in a high school is easy. How do you do that on the scale of America itself?
“‘We have brilliant marketers in this country. Imagine what would happen if you had the people who market things for Apple, or the products we feel like we can’t do without, and you put them on the job to come up with campaigns to give to the influencers who are widespread?’ muses Barrett. ‘Could that turn the tide against the naysayers?’
“We’d need politicians. Celebrities. Micro-influencers. And, yes, members of the conservative-leaning media. Barrett imagines a coordinated movement, with a simple, unified message, in which all of these different power brokers actually demonstrate themselves social distancing, wearing a mask, and taking a vaccine.” FastCompany.com, November 21st.
“We also have other, logistical problems in getting vaccines, some of which require really cold temperatures, into tens of thousands of inoculation centers to vaccinate millions of Americans. Cows just might have given us the solution. “On [November 16th], the pharmaceutical company Pfizer announced early data that showed a vaccine it has been developing in partnership with the German drug manufacturer BioNTech was more than 90 percent effective in preventing covid-19. This level of efficacy amazed researchers, including those at my own institution, Yale School of Medicine, who agreed that if the data holds (it has not yet been peer reviewed), then this vaccine would be poised to dramatically curtail the impact of the virus.
“This news made headlines, along with Joe Biden’s and Kamala D. Harris’s rollout of a covid-19 task force composed of biomedical experts, suggesting even as the number of daily new infections reached an all-time high in the U.S., a cure was in sight. But, storing and distributing a vaccine — especially the potential Pfizer vaccine, which must be frozen until use at -70°C, around the temperature of dry ice — poses a significant challenge.
“Rural cattle breeders offer a solution. In the 1950s, during the Cold War, they played a major role in developing and scaling up the technology to circulate biological materials globally at temperatures as low as -196°C, that of liquid nitrogen. In what is known as the ‘cold chain,’ these supply networks made it possible to ship temperature-sensitive agricultural and medical products within and beyond the United States.
“In the age of covid-19, the history of cattle breeding in the Midwest provides insights about the challenges and possibilities involved with the distribution of Pfizer’s potential vaccine, whether it ultimately uses liquid nitrogen or another mode of cold storage. In fact, how agricultural workers and engineers partnered with public health officials the world over at mid-century, during times of geopolitical strife, provides precisely the kind of unexpected object lessons necessary for surviving the present.” Joanna Radin, assistant professor of history of science and medicine at Yale, writing for the November 12th Yale News. Right there in the middle of red state America is a brilliant solution that benefits us all.
I’m Peter, Dekom, and if we can combine red and blue into red, white and blue, yes we can!
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