Day #428 of COVID19 Journal

Friday, 21 May 2021

Today’s rush transcription assignment was all about separating fact from stupid in regards to the COVID-19 vaccine. It was a live panel, and people either called in to ask questions or put them into a chat window. Most of the people asking questions were (much) older, or were from places like Texas or South Carolina. It was brain-breaking.

One of the callers asked if there was any truth to something they had heard, probably on some alt-right news site, regarding an ingredient in the vaccines that was designed to time-release a drug or other element that would — get this — kill people at a specific time at the end of the year.

Yeah.

Another caller still didn’t know how the virus was transmissible and stated that she had heard two different arguments, one was that it was only transmissible by touching infected surfaces and the other said it was only transmissible in the air.

Kudos to the panel of experts, nobody laughed and nobody said anything that could be considered condescending, they took all the questions, even the really dumb ones, very seriously and imparted actual facts. But it was totally was a wake-up call for me, seeing what different members of my own American population actually think about the information they’re being bombarded with on social media and less-than-mainstream news sites. At the end of the day, the assembled panel encouraged people to seek out fact checking via mainstream news sources, like Reuters and their own healthcare providers.

We still have a very long road ahead of us.