RT: Maria Van Kerkhove, Head of Emerging Diseases and Zoonoses at the World Health Organization (WHO), speaks at a press conference on the situation of the coronavirus at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, on January 29, 2020 .
Denis Balibouse | Reuters
A senior World Health Organization official said misinformation about Covid-19 and vaccines appears to have worsened in recent weeks and is preventing people from receiving shots and causing an increase in cases around the world.
Public health leaders have blamed conspiracy and misinformation theories for growing mistrust of vaccines around the world, to the point that U.S. surgeon general Vivek Murthy has declared Covid’s misinformation a “grave threat.” public “in the US last month.
“Over the last four weeks or so, the amount of misinformation out there seems to be getting worse, and I think it’s really confusing for the general public,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO technical director at Covid-19. , during a Tuesday a live broadcast was made on the organization’s social media channels. It became another risk factor that “really allows the virus to thrive,” he said.
Misinformation has become a growing problem in the outbreak, fueling the vaccination of the vaccine among a distrustful audience, health officials say. They hope the formal approval of Pfizer’s Covid vaccine on Monday will help push some people to the fence about vaccination to receive the shots.
Three out of ten unvaccinated Americans said they would be more likely to receive the vaccine once it is approved by the FDA, according to a July 15-27 Kaiser Family Foundation survey. Some medical experts are concerned that some Americans do not give a credible explanation for their hesitation and we will now look for other excuses for why they refuse to receive the vaccine.
Most unvaccinated Americans think Covid vaccines are more of a threat to their health than contracting the virus itself, according to Kaiser data. Americans least likely to receive a vaccine against Covid-19 are mostly white, less likely to have a college degree, and Republicans, according to Kaiser data.
Dr Peter Marks, director of the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Biological Product Evaluation and Research, said vaccine misinformation is “one of the biggest challenges we still face in vaccinating the public.”
“We have heard false claims that the Covid-19 vaccine causes infertility, contains microchips and causes Covid-19,” Marks said. “And what’s worse, we’ve heard false claims that thousands of people have died from the vaccine. Let me be clear: those claims are simply not true.”
The director of the WHO’s Latin America branch, the Pan American Health Organization, made a personal call to residents of Caribbean countries to “wake up” from the sleep of misinformation and get vaccinated while Covid’s misinformation spreads across the islands.
Misinformation has affected public school board meetings across the country, as school districts weigh masks and vaccine warrants for children and staff returning next school year. Parents and community residents have presented themselves at public school board meetings with public education and health officials to consider mask warrants as videos of residents citing unproven and false claims. about Covid and vaccines go viral on social media.
Vaccination could help us control Covid-19 in the spring of 2022, according to the president’s medical adviser, Dr. Anthony Fauci.
“I would like to call on people in the country who are not vaccinated to realize that we have the ability to basically reduce the time to get to the end of this pandemic,” Fauci said during a press conference on Tuesday. “Get vaccinated and the deadline will be drastically reduced.”