Are you willing to get the Covid vaccine when offered?

Interesting point.

Don’t know how much of a factor it is
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Ouch — there we go again. Another needle into another arm, for all to see on millions of TV screens coast to coast.

Over the past year, and despite the sheer victory that scene represents — the triumph of those vaccines, developed in record time, distributed free of charge and remarkably effective — it has gradually dawned on me, as I avert my eyes from the television, that even reputable broadcast media shares an inadvertent culpability in vaccine avoidance……

What I think about is this: that the unvaccinated — more than 26 percent of Americans, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — are the central problem of this phase of the epidemic.

They’re the ones who end up in the hospitals, on ventilators and not infrequently, dead. We’re currently hovering at just over 1,200 U.S. deaths per day — a metric that has become so numbing it’s not even mentioned much anymore. In recent months, the unvaccinated have made up the vast majority of that figure.

And if I, as a vaccine proponent and science advocate, find myself looking away from the screen, how many thousands of others out there who have a deep-seated horror of needles, or who have doubts about science and vaccines, or both — how many of them have been put off by that shot of a shot, endlessly reshot?

Quite a lot, as it turns out. If you thought that only a small percentage of the population suffers from trypanophobia, think again. (The term combines the Greek word “trypano,” for piercing or puncturing, and “phobia,” meaning fear.)

Something like 25 percent of adults have an irrational antipathy to needles. (One of them, apparently, is freshly convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes, who has cited such a fear as a reason for founding her sham blood-testing company, Theranos.)

This results in about 16 percent of the adult population avoiding routine vaccinations. Such statistics make it easy to surmise that repeated televised footage of injections provides many people with more than a reason to look away.

It gives them graphic grounds to stay away from vaccinations altogether.

I’m not suggesting that broadcast media of the mainstream kind, or lefty cable such as MSNBC, are willingly assisting anti-vaccine propagandists.

What I am saying is that even media genuinely operating in the public interest, and serving as a vital buttress to our democratic system, are playing an unwitting yet significant role.

Certainly, all those televised needles advancing toward arms make the death-dealing dishonesty of disinformation superspreaders immeasurably easier…….

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...edia-please-stop-showing-shots-vaccine-shots/