Them: Is there any other vaccine in history that required three doses in a year and yet still didn’t prevent transmission of the virus it was meant to protect against?

Me: Your childhood vaccinations would like a word with you.

Last week I spoke to over 5000 people in rural Georgia. Most were not vaccinated because they still had questions. EVERY question they asked was legitimate and important.

Stop telling people to “just get vaccinated” if you aren’t willing to put in the work to help them do it.

That “work” is MUCH more high touch than spouting condescension online.

“The unvaccinated” are not a monolith of defectors. They are people our health care system has long underserved - Black folks, rural folks, un and un/under insured folks and young folks.

That work requires daily acts to dispel and decrease the rampant disinformation people are contending with. It requires laws that prevent media organizations from willfully distributing disinformation about science during a pandemic when peoples lives depend on vaccine science.

That work requires interventions that can successfully vaccinate groups NOT individuals - like households, schools, churches work places - so that the protection of vaccination is SHARED among those most likely to encounter each other. Remember, vaccines protect you AND others.

That work requires incentives to vaccinate that begin locally, not trickle down from above. A lot of people are not aware of the large federal programs available to them. But they know their child care provider or grocery store attendant or neighbor - THEY are the influencers.

9 year old child with COVID pneumonia.
Florida

NEW: people worry when they hear "40% of hospitalisations are fully vaxxed", but this chart shows that's actually good news.

The more people you vaccinate, the higher their share of hospitalisations, but the *total* number in hospital is a fraction of what it would otherwise be

If fewer people are fully vaccinated, a smaller share of hospitalisations will be fully-vaxxed too, but this is not a good thing:

Overall there will be a lot more people in hospital because far more of the population is unprotected.

In other words: if you want to know whether the vaccination program is working, don't focus on whether the fully vaxxed make up 40% or 12% of hospitalisations.

Focus on whether the hospitalisation rate is 270 per million or 684 per million.

And since this is Twitter, I've prepared the same thing in meme form

But back to charts:

All the data we have suggests vaccines are working remarkably well. Far beyond what had been hoped for a year ago.

For example, a fully-vaxxed 80-year-old now has the same risk of dying from Covid as an unvaxxxed 50-year-old. That's an enormous drop in risk!

https://t.co/vP5UYtMvdk

I've been wanting to write this thread for a while. It has been inspired by hearing a common thought: why can't people just "listen"? If people just followed the rules, we wouldn't be in this mess. I think this is oversimplification of the problem with COVID: 1/

It is true, there are people who haven't been following guidelines (by definition that happened a LOT at Christmas/NYE in my region), but even before, we know transmission in private gatherings happens. 2/

These private gatherings are pictured to be big raucous parties, but in reality, even before lockdown, this is just people having dinner, watching TV, doing things we did before on a daily basis. These little ripples when added across the country make a big wave.. 3/

...and little can be done about this apart from positive messaging. You can't very well have police patrolling neighbourhoods across the country. 4/

Next thing is we keep hearing over and over and over, stay home. There are diminishing returns with this advice, but also, most people who can stay home ARE. So what's the issue? There are a HUGE # of people who can't stay home because they work in essential jobs 5/