Some people hospitalized with the virus still vow not to get vaccinated, and surveys suggest that a majority of unvaccinated Americans are not budging. Doctors in Covid units say some patients still refuse to believe they are infected with anything beyond the flu.“We have people in the I.C.U. with Covid who are denying they have Covid,” said Dr. Matthew Sperry, a pulmonary critical care physician who has been treating Mr. Greene. “It doesn’t matter what we say.”Still, some hospitals swamped with patients in largely conservative, unvaccinated swaths of the country have begun to recruit Covid survivors as public health messengers of last resort.
Theirs are Scared Straight stories for a pandemic that has thrived on misinformation, fear and hardened partisan divisions over whether or not to get vaccinated.
One woman in Utah who regretted not getting vaccinated now worries that her hospitalized husband will die from his COVID infection. She wrote on her Facebook page: “We did not get the vaccine. I read all kinds of things about the vaccine and it scared me. So I made the decision and prayed about it and got the impression that we would be ok. If I had the information I have today, we would have gotten vaccinated.”
This again shows that dark free speech leads some people to firmly believe things that are clearly false. The NYT described people's fear as coming from “a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories touted by anti-vaccine lawyers and YouTubers, and videos in which anti-vaccine doctors and nurses decried the Covid-19 shots as bioweapons.”
Questions: What responsibility, if any, do people and groups, e.g., Fox News, the Republican Party, etc., that spread lies about COVID bear for the suffering and deaths their deceit has caused, even if they themselves were deceived? Do people who fall for the lies and emotional manipulation bear full responsibility? Does it matter for those who now express regret are honest and public about their mistake?
Fox News doing its best to keep
the pandemic alive and growing
Go Laura! Keep on lying to the public!
Keep on killing people!!
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