They warn risk of contagion in children by covid-19 0:43
(CNN) -
White House officials are devising ways to fight the spread of dangerous falsehoods about covid-19 vaccines, government officials told CNN, as Republicans and their media allies surge. his overt skepticism about vaccines.
President Joe Biden could soon face some of the corrosive messages emanating from the right wing, officials said, as the administration's vaccination efforts hit a wall just as the highly communicable delta variant of the virus spreads. all over the country.
CNN spoke with five people in the government who described the White House's efforts to fight misinformation surrounding COVID-19 vaccines.
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And this week, US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy will make a rare appearance in the White House press room to discuss how the level of misinformation is now an urgent public health issue, according to a source familiar with the plan.
Officials are wary of taking steps that could further alienate Republicans and generate more skepticism about vaccines that health experts unanimously say are safe.
And Biden has openly acknowledged that neither he nor his administration are best suited to convince Republicans to get vaccinated, pointing instead to local doctors, pharmacists or members of the clergy as the most trusted messengers.
A senior administration official said the decision had been made to take a tougher stance against disinformation, with plans in the coming days to draw attention to Republican elected officials and specific social media platforms.
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"We are seeing the impact of misinformation," said a senior administration official, acknowledging the difficult balance the West Wing was trying to achieve by bringing the president into the race.
However, the White House is concerned as geographic gaps are beginning to open up between places with the highest vaccination rates and those where relatively few people have been vaccinated.
For Biden and his aides, the reality is that vaccinating the entire country will be the job of his entire presidency, and that areas of the nation where vaccination rates remain low will continue to suffer outbreaks that will hamper the nationwide recovery effort. .
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The challenge is prolonged
The highly politicized and misinformation-plagued vaccine debate poses an enduring challenge for Biden, even as he anticipates the overall trajectory of the pandemic.
Across the country, vaccination rates are declining, while in 45 states, this past week's new case rates are at least 10% higher than the previous week, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
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The gap between vaccinated and unvaccinated has begun to bridge along political lines, with Democratic-leaning areas ahead of Republicans in vaccination rates. Officials attribute part of the reason for the discrepancies to repeated messages in conservative media that question why people need the vaccine and that Biden's attempts to vaccinate the country amount to government overreach.
Some of Biden's advisers have already begun to take a firmer stance against Republicans who question the president's efforts to bring vaccines to all Americans.
Federal health officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's leading infectious disease expert who has been reviled in the conservative media, have consistently insisted that the vaccine be out of politics.
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as the gap between vaccinated and unvaccinated areas widens
In a speech in Detroit on Monday, Vice President Kamala Harris encouraged a crowd of health workers to rebut the falsehoods that have been spread about the vaccine.
"We have to release the facts, because unfortunately there is a lot of misinformation," Harris said in his speech Monday.
"So let's find out what it is, and let's talk to our neighbors and our friends and say: Come on, let me tell you the facts."
Persistent concern in the community, and on the Internet
The scene inside Harris's event, held in a downtown convention center, resembled the pre-pandemic era: most of the attendees had removed their masks and a youth choir was singing to everything. lung, not caring about the direction of the aerosols they exhaled.
The picture was exactly the same as the White House expected the country to have in midsummer, as vaccination rates increased and the number of cases declined.
Biden has also returned to the type of personal politics that characterizes him.
After a speech on the right to vote on Tuesday, he spent 45 minutes in the crowd shaking hands.
But beneath the scenes of normalcy there is a lingering concern: Administration efforts to promote vaccination have stalled as the delta variant rages.
"We have to be honest. Right now, in Detroit at least, we have fallen behind," Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan said at the Harris rally.
"We have less than 40% vaccinations in this city. And people say: I don't know anyone who is sick right now. We know what is going to happen. We know what the seasonal flu season is like. In November, this delta variant it's going to hit this state hard. "
In Detroit, the limits to the administration's ability to promote the vaccine were clear: nearly everyone who turned out to hear the vice president's speech had already been vaccinated.
Harris, by contrast, encouraged the largely African-American crowd to convince their friends and neighbors to get vaccinated as well.
This Wednesday, Biden will shoot informational videos about the vaccine with Fauci and Olivia Rodrigo, a pop celebrity the White House hopes will attract young people to get vaccinated.
And plans to more directly address vaccine skepticism on Fox News and other conservative outlets will be underway shortly. In the past week, the White House has tried to counter conservative criticism of its plan to go door-to-door to educate Americans about the virus, a backlash fueled by conservative media that only underscored for Americans. officials the increasing politicization of the vaccination effort.
"The failure to provide accurate public health information, including vaccine efficacy and accessibility to people across the country, including South Carolina, is literally killing people," said the Last week press secretary Jen Psaki, responding to criticism from Republican South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster about Biden's efforts to get more Americans vaccinated.
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It's not just the voices of the conservative media.
The White House is also fighting to combat vaccine misinformation on the big social media platforms.
In May, Biden's chief of staff, Ron Klain, confronted Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg over misconceptions about vaccines that he said came from "Facebook posts."
"I have told Mark Zuckerberg directly that when we gather groups of people who are not vaccinated and we ask them why they are not vaccinated, and they tell us things that are wrong, they tell us things that are false, and we ask them where they heard that , the most common answer is Facebook, "Klain told The New York Times.
While pointing to steps taken by Facebook to help people find vaccines, Klain declined to comment on whether companies like the social media giant should be regulated over issues such as misinformation about vaccines, saying it was a "political decision. "which corresponded to the government.
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Administration officials and executives of social media platforms have held conversations about fighting vaccine misinformation.
Entering the ideological struggle
Officials have not hesitated to slow down talks about federal vaccination orders, suggesting that it is not part of their purview to require Americans to get vaccinated.
And in the months before, they have refused to confront the most extreme Republican lawmakers like Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who have defended falsehoods about the vaccine.
However, now that vaccination rates have dropped, officials said the damaging effects of such rhetoric have become more apparent.
Even the current stark reality highlighted by officials, that nearly all hospitalizations and deaths now occur among the unvaccinated, may not be enough to convince those who have already decided not to.
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"I really don't have a good explanation for why this is happening. I think it's ideological rigidity," Fauci surmised during an appearance on CNN.
"Why do we have red states and southern places that are very ideological in a sense that they don't want to get vaccinated? Vaccines have nothing to do with politics. It's a public health issue," he said on the "State of the Union "from CNN.
"It doesn't matter who you are. The virus doesn't know if you're a Democrat, Republican or Independent. We do know that."
Still, it's unclear how much more the federal government can do to convince those still undecided to get vaccinated.
Authorities prepare for regional outbreaks to persist for months to come as large swaths of the population remain unvaccinated. In hopes of curbing the outbreaks, the White House said earlier this month that it was deploying response teams to carry out increased testing, provide therapies including monoclonal antibodies, and deploy federal personnel in areas that need support staff for vaccination.
Authorities expect the teams to help with everything from reinforcing tests to delivering supplies and possibly increasing paid media efforts targeting regions where vaccination is low. However, while response teams are dispatched to bolster communities, officials believe vaccines are the best way to stop the spread and acknowledge that their efforts may be limited.
In private meetings, Biden has asked his advisers about the broader impact the delta variant could have on the US, according to people present at those meetings.
The president continues to receive a daily report on case rates, the number of deaths, and the prevalence of variants.
The authorities have stressed that vaccinated people are safe, while the unvaccinated are those most at risk.
Although they have not ruled it out, officials do not currently expect Biden to set more numerical targets on vaccination, given that the US has yet to reach the last one and the rate of vaccination has slowed significantly, according to people familiar with the discussions. .
covid-19 vaccine
