Trump administration, CDC fumbling efforts to push back against vaccine deniers

| | August 24, 2020
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While anti-vaxxers flood social media with lies about the upcoming coronavirus vaccine — that it contains monkey brains, that it’s a CIA plot to take over the world — the government’s multi-billion-dollar vaccine effort has yet to come up with a public education campaign to counteract that propaganda.

“We are behind here,” said Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health. “We haven’t done a good job of getting [coronavirus vaccine] information out there.”

“We’re developing a plan as we speak to keep building on the efforts to rebuild vaccine confidence in this country, which is really critical,” [CDC director Dr. Robert] Redfield said at a [June] Senate Health Committee hearing on Covid-19.

CNN asked a CDC spokeswoman what happened to that plan mentioned by Redfield, and what the CDC has done to educate Americans about the Covid vaccine. She did not respond.

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“We see more vaccine hesitancy with the Covid vaccine than with other vaccines. We know that. This concerns us, of course,” said [HHS assistant secretary] Michael Caputo.

Operation Warp Speed “is developing a robust public health information campaign” that has already begun with public health service announcements requesting plasma donors, Caputo said, adding that “this campaign will soon focus on vaccine safety, efficacy and hesitancy…” But the public service announcements that deal with the vaccine won’t be coming out until late November.

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