emphasising the need for public health initiatives to increase population-level vaccine uptake
Several countries have ended vaccination programs outside of the elderly, in some cases making it impossible for <50 to get one. Not just for free, they're just not available anymore. With a constant messaging that the pandemic is over, uptake was looking to be so low that it wasn't worth it. And some people are talking about a yearly, completely arbitrary, vaccine, even though efficacy clearly wanes significantly past 4 months or so.
It's kind of funny seeing how the antivaccine crowd has tried very hard to put Long Covid onto the vaccines, even though it reduces it, just not nearly enough, but medicine's continuing denial of Long Covid means they can basically ignore this and continue posting about how it's the vaccines, sealioning people about the vaccination status, etc. Two mutually exclusive realities co-existing, exactly fitting the modern propaganda playbook. Amazing.
This is all reminding everyone again that the most important thing to do in a public health crisis is to tell the truth, the whole truth, even when it's politically inconvenient, and how the absolute of that has been the default. Except now too many will not believe authorities the next time even if they go ahead and tell the whole truth, because this credibility has been completely shot. Brilliant.
Meanwhile many physicians, ID specialists, epidemiologists and pediatricians are ecstatic about infections going up and their nonsense about "priming" and "hybrid immunity" and all the other pseudoscientific woo going on out there.
