Good grief. Public health communications has been a bonfire of idiocy since day #1:
Recent public messaging harps on the idea that people can still become infected and transmit COVID-19 after they get vaccinated. While that is a risk, it’s an extremely low risk, and not worth the negative consequence: it’s stopping people from getting vaccinated.
People are using the idea that others can spread the virus after being vaccinated to claim that the vaccine does not work and therefore should not be taken. I have spoken with people who have done just that.
Source: Op-Ed: Stop Stressing Post-Vax Risk of Spreading Coronavirus | MedPage Today
This:
“A lot of things might happen. But it is not smart to focus on what might be the case rather than on what is likely to be the case.“
I had to deal with anxiety as a consequence of traumatic brain injury. In anxiety, our brain gravitates to the worst case possibilities – the anxious mind turns everything into a potential catastrophe. (This is known as “catastrophizing”)
A solution is to focus on the most likely scenario, not the scariest scenario. But that is not how public health messaging around a pandemic has been done. It has consistently focused on the most scary and least likely outcomes.
This approach by public health “experts” has been exasperating and idiotic. How many messages of hope have you seen versus messages of panic?
Over the past year, there have been almost no messages of hope, and even when hope is visible, they shoot it down, spin it into the negative, and tell us that vaccines might not work – and if they do, they might not prevent infections – it’s face masks and lockdowns forever!
This outcome is not likely, and evidence is piling up that these vaccines work well like many other vaccines have done. But they still focus on the scary messaging.
The experts have run a one year long psychological terror op campaign that has an enormous part of the population in panic, hysterical and terrified of nearly everything. There is no plan to start unwinding the panic either.
This is a mental health disaster unnecessarily created by public health itself. It is among the worst public relations (“PR”) messaging in human history.
