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Misinformation about Covid is deadly

by carlos matÍAS

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Covid misinformation is deadly. Health, civil rights and journalism specialists believe it “creates distrust of vaccines, but without them there would be more deaths.

“Covid has killed more than 800,000 people in the United States in two years; more than in the wars of the last century,” says Dr. Tang Nguyen, Professor of Medicine at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) and Director of the Asian Health Research Center. Nguyen compares the two world wars with the statistics on Dec. 17, the date of the videoconference “The Ghosts of COVID: Past, Present and Future,” organized by Ethnic Media Services.

Ten days later, December 27, Alaska recorded since March 2020, 155,000 cases and almost 1,000 deaths, half of them in Anchorage (417), followed by Matanuska-Susitna (173), Fairbanks (117), Kenai (78) and Bethel (32). Another 135 deaths were unaccounted for. On that day, the U.S. reached nearly 54 million cases (53,791,852) with 839,605 deaths. More than any other country in the world and fewer than there will be when this article is published.

Risk without vaccines
Tang Nguyen states that “the risk of death of unvaccinated patients is thirteen times higher than that of vaccinated patients,” and Dr. Ben Neuman, chief virologist at the Global Health Research Complex of Texas A&M University, adds: “vaccines and masks are effective, but they do not provide total protection. Politicians and journalists create a false sense of total immunity, which is a risk because precautions are relaxed.” 

Studies by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) point out that political partisanship is a determining factor. Republicans are three times less vaccinated than Democrats. Their misinformation is greater and is an obstacle to accepting vaccines.
Dr. Roshni Mathew, a professor at Stanford Children’s Health and a specialist at Stanford University, assures that “not vaccinating is worse than vaccinating. There is a danger that Omicron could lead to school closures, leading to more risks and complications.”

Dr. Dali Fan, professor of Health Sciences at UC Davis (California), assures that “misinformation produces fear of disease and distrust towards vaccines, when without them there would be more deaths.”

“Apartheid in vaccines”
“The black population is less vaccinated; Latinos and whites are evenly matched, and Asians are the most vaccinated,” comments Nguyen. “We can’t underestimate Omicron,” adds Ben Neuman, “or leave any group unvaccinated. It would be like letting Covid re-infect humanity.”
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Peter Maybarduk, of Public Citizen for Access to Medicines and a member of Yale Law School, tells Sol de Medianoche that “vaccination is the only global defense against Covid. But rich countries do not transfer their patents to poor countries. The maximum lack of protection is in the African Sahel. It is a ‘vaccine apartheid’.”

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Sol de Medianoche is a monthly publication of the Latino community in Anchorage, Alaska