Doubt: Hope

The data is totally public. The first thing, it says that there's been forty four thousand, eight hundred and fifty six adverse events related to the COVID nineteen vaccine. That doesn't sound so bad for millions of time, millions of people being vaccinated every day. In very urs you can read all of the details of injuries people say happened after getting vaccinated. But it's important to know that not every health issue that comes up after getting a vaccine

is necessarily caused by a vaccine. Bronco spasm with coughing tongue itching. I know, I don't know if I've ever had an ischy tongue. It's not just injuries. You can look up how many deaths were there there were. Okay, now let me back up and say that before you get to any of this, there is an extremely prominent and detailed disclaimer that you have to click through. The disclaimer is very clear that just because an injury is reported here does not mean a vaccine caused that injury.

You actually have to click that you read the disclaimer in order to view the data. The fact is anyone can report a claim to this website and it'll show up. That doesn't mean it's true. It's just a claim that will help the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration catch any troubling side effects that are occurring because of vaccines. And this is just one of many ways the federal government monitors these things.

This is just good responsible science. When you have a mass vaccination campaign, you want to keep an eye on it in case any truly troubling patterns emerge. These systems have helped flag problems before the CDC recommended a roadavirus vaccine be pulled from market. That was after fifteen cases of vowel obstruction among infants who received the vaccine had

been reported in THEIRS. These kinds of monitoring effort are why the CDC decided to pause the Johnson and Johnson vaccine roll out in April after six people who got it experienced blood clots. This is the system working, not a problem with the system. But correlation is not causation. Every report in vrors is not indicative of a catastrophic vaccine side effect. In the anti vax world, virors has

long occupied this sort of contradictory territory. It's both something untrustworthy and proof that vaccines are not as safe as the government says. So they have argued for for years that the data can't be trusted. UM, that the CDC and the FDA, UM if there's an event that's credible that's reported to it, that they don't act on it intentionally. Um And then it's all part of a government conspiracy to hide the actual adverse events due to due to immunization.

This is Joe Smiser. He's the head of the Public Good Projects, a public health nonprofit that has been analyzing vaccine misinformation over the past year. Joe has noticed anti vaccine groups changing their script a bit here and now they're saying that in addition to THEIRS not being trusted, also you should report to THEIRS and any any adverse event, make sure you report to THEIRS. Robert F. Kennedy Juniors organization the Children's Health Defense encourages people to report to errors.

It also frequently sends out newsletters with subject lines trumpeting the numbers of injuries or deaths reported in the database after COVID vaccines. All of the context of the disclaimers in the database, though, are conveniently missing. The way Joe explains it, groups like Kennedy's have basic weaponized bears, and they'll look for any adverse event and then they'll turn

that into media. So there'll be memes and videos, and there are very popular videos of people just going through every single instance of someone reporting an adverse event to bears, and they'll read it out loud, and some of these videos are two and a half hours long of the person just reading out loud all of the things reported to bears. And then at the same time, the same groups and the same individuals will say, Okay, well that can't be trusted, so go to this new system. So

basically they get believers to report alleged injuries. Then they make content out of those stats. It is a self perpetuating panic machine. The anti vaccine movement doesn't so much manufacture reality as manipulated bears. Is one of the latest lines of attack from anti vaccine groups for causing doubt round vaccines. Somehow various data is untrustworthy and also proof of everything anti vaccine groups are saying. Despite this giant

cognitive disconnect, this message has spread far and wide. Mike Joe says, there are videos of people just doing the same thing we did, checking out the data and reading it aloud. That is ungentleman. I'm wanted to see d sees web page right, and I decided that I needed to see the results for the vaccines and their simptoms and the dead that this particular video was viewed more than twenty one thousand times on Facebook. When they get to the alleged deaths, the speaker in the video just

starts scrolling through the hundreds of cases. Dare marry a dead people? Dead people? Oh, nobody not talked about the people are dead from the vaccine, much less COVID. It's the video doesn't mention any other context. All the average person would see is an endless stream of alleged deaths related to COVID vaccines. And by the way, Facebook has put a disclaimer on the top of this video that says it's missing context, but you can still see it

and share it. Not ability to distort reality is one of the reasons why anti vaccine extremists have had a good year. Today, these groups are more powerful than ever. Misinformation is running rampant. Only about a third of the US population is fully vaccinated, and it's unclear exactly when we will get to widespread immunity from the virus. Doubt reigns, but there is hope. In the final episode of this series,

we're going to look forward. The majority of Americans are now faced with the choice of whether to get vaccinated against COVID nineteen. We're going to examine how the medical establishment and public health has failed in inspiring vaccine confidence and what can be done to fix it. One of the answers to that question can be found in the least likely of places. I'm Bloomberg News health reporter Kristin V.

Brown from the Pregnosis podcast. This is Doubt. Joe Smizer of the Public Good Projects says anti vaccine groups are in an especially strong position. I think is going to be the year of the anti vaccor. Like they're getting more money than ever before, they're more organized never before. They actually have elected representatives who believe in their viewpoints. They're more global than ever before, and so the infrastructure is so much more solid than it than it ever

has been. This has just added so much fuel onto their their fire, and now we've got signal fires all over the all over the globe. It's it's what they've been hoping for. Um, It's it's a global mass immunization effort. This is a big problem. As we've shown in this series, anti vaccine groups have been refining how to spread out for decades. Andrew Wakefield gave vaccine skepticism of a new

or of science. Jenny McCarthy, I mean it part of popular culture, and newer waves of anti vaccine activists like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Have used social media to turn this messaging into viral content. The groundwork for an explosion of anti vaccine sentiment had been laid long before the global pandemic. This worries Joe. I don't think we're going to go back. That's that's my concern is I think, like I mentioned, that infrastructure is just so well built now.

Going into there had already been massive protests against vaccine mandates. Estates tried to tighten childhood ammunization laws. So it's easy to see why it didn't take very long for talk about COVID vaccines to turn to talk about vaccine skepticism, like way before any vaccine was anywhere near ready, And

we saw that all through the spring. If you follow news reporting on on covid um, there was a lot of reporting started pretty much right away what if people won't take a vaccine for COVID when we have one? And it was mostly using the misinformation frame as a kind of explanatory framework for why people um didn't want to vaccinate. And then the misinformation frame is pretty pervasive. Bernice Housman studies medical controversies at Penn State College of Medicine.

Bernice breaks it down like this, there are two different theories that people generally use for why people are skeptical of vaccines. The first one is that misinformation is to blame. All those viral Facebook videos are causing people to suddenly turn on vaccines. As we have talked about a lot in this series, The explanation is just overly simplistic. If you have no other reason to distrust vaccines, one video

isn't necessarily going to change your mind about them. And thinking about misinformation as the main driver of vaccine skepticism, it's problematic because you're never going to fix the problem if you're not address saying the real cause. And Bernie says, that's where the second theory comes into play. But another frame started to emerge over the summer and is now supplanting the misinformation frame, and I think it's a really

really positive development. People started talking about confidence and trust. Bernice says three main things helped spur this shift. One is that UM, the data from COVID demonstrates, you know, really severe existing health disparities along the lines of race and ethnicity in this country and also associate economic status.

Now everybody has known that this these exist, but the COVID pandemic has actually really brought that into public view and made people understand that um vulnerability to COVID is really based on these kinds of social justice issues. It wasn't news that there are deep health disparities in America, but the pandemic made those disparities very public. It was just harder to ignore when so many more people of

color were dying from the virus. Secondly, Bernie says, all the protests of last summer after the murder of George Floyd helped to publicize concerns about trust. So they also brought out the issue of social justice and especially concerns that black communities have about trust and authority. And the Trump administrations handling of vaccine development also brought trust into

the conversation. Vaccine dissenters have been saying all along that there's a problem of corruption between the government pharmaceutical companies um UM, and these federal agencies. So in the summer, ordinary people saw that that could actually happen. Remember all those news stories about the White House meddling with the f d A and the CDC. Suddenly everyone was talking about trust and scenes. So suddenly all of that has led, I believe, to this big shift in public health where

now we see the people talking about vaccine confidence. How do you build vaccine confidence if we're going to get more people on board with vaccination. This shift in thinking is crucial. Now when you think about it, those two frames misinformation and confidence are really different. The misinformation frame identifies the individual who believes the misinformation as the problem

who needs to be educated. The confidence frame says, people lack confidence in vaccine programs and we need to demonstrate that we We need to earn their trust so that they have confidence in these programs. So it shifts the burden to public health agencies, the government, public health workers themselves medical practitioners to understand the reasons for the lack of confidence and think about ways to rebuild trust. The truth is, our public health officials haven't always done a

great job of communicating with us about vaccine safety. This is a big factor and why so many people are skeptical of vaccines right now. Take THEIRS for instance, most people who have heard of THEIRS probably learned about it from an anti vaccine group because there just isn't otherwise enthusiasm for talking about problems with vaccines. This makes it seem plausible that the government is trying to hide this data, even though it's totally public and out there for anyone

to look at. Anti vaccine groups are just exacerbating existing weaknesses and how we talk about vaccines, and really, when

there's a lack of formal information. We will always see the rise of informal information because people want information, and we saw that early in the pandemic with death dumentaries like Plandemic that's a so called documentary filled with misinformation that became very popular at the start of the pandemic, which filled that gap when there wasn't any official information coming out from government agencies about the pandemic and its

levels of contagion and how to contain it. When we had gaps in information, we've seen those spaces filled with other kinds of misinformation. This is Jennifer Reich, a sociologist

University of Colorado, Denver who studies vaccine hesitant people. She says public health is not doing a great job of explaining how they make sure COVID vaccines are safe, and so I was surprised to learn how many systems monitor vaccine safety by doing things like looking at large health maintenance organizations and looking for upticks and emergency room visits within the first few days after a vaccination, and then looking for patterns that are statistically important to and go

back and look at the vaccines, and that has been successful in identifying very rare adverse reactions to vaccines like the vaccine against rotavirus. So there is this real time kind of monitoring of both safety and efficacy that happens that nobody talks about and that has remained largely invisible

prior to COVID, and I think during COVID. Imagine if the CDC had been proactive about informing people about THEIRS, then put ads on YouTube explaining safety standards around vaccines before you watch your little nos X video, that wouldn't just help combat misinformation, but also help gather more data to monitor vaccine safety. Jennifer says, most people want good information. It just hasn't been as readily offered to the public.

But the majority of people right now who are saying I want to wait and see are asking for better information. They are asking to have a conversation, and they want to know what they can do. UM I'm surprised in my research to hear how many people are still wiping down their groceries and surfaces but not worrying about the air.

It's we're really far into that to have people not fully understand how to the best assign their energies towards the best strategies for limiting infection that should that's a lack of clarity that has gone on too long and needs to be addressed, I think directly. But we could go even further to help people make the right decision

and give them more than just good information. For example, if people are worried they might be out for a day or two after getting the shop, which is totally possible, we can make sure people have paid leave to make

the choice to get vaccinated easier. And while access to information is important, it's not the sole driver of decision making, and so what's also important is to think about how does this fit into people's priorities, How does it fit into their work life, how does it fit into their resources, how does it fit into their community and their values? Right, how do we think about this more holistically and then figure out are their spaces where people are saying they

need something different. We need to give people the information and the resources to make the right choice. Right now, we're all living little bubbles. We interact with fewer people and do it more cautiously. We're literally distancing from each other, and that means we're all living in echo chambers with less exposure than ever to new points of view. That's

exacerbating all of this too. When people make decisions about vaccines or anything, really, we all look to those around us who who share our lifestyle, who seems similar to us, who understand where we're coming from. And it's why churches have become such an important rule um in the conversation. It's why people look to their community networks. It's why there's evidence that barbershops and beauticians have become really important sources of health information. People talk to the people that

they trust. The challenge right now during COVID is that we've really limited the number of spaces in which people can have comm stations of people they don't already know. It's hard to have close, intimate conversations during a time when social distancing is recommended and people are scared of a highly infectious disease. But there is one place in particular where people have been having those conversations and it's been helping to re establish trust with the vaccine. Let's

take a trip to West Virginia. West Virginia isn't the state you'd expect to be a vaccine success story. The state is extremely rural and registered Republicans now outnumbered Democrats These are two groups that we know are among the most skeptical of vaccines. It's mountainous terrain and spread out population also create logistical challenges for delivering vaccines. Many of its residents are also poor, with health conditions that make

them especially at risk for severe cases of COVID. A survey by West Virginia University shortly before vaccines began rolling out found that about half the population expressed some level of vaccine hesitation. But despite all of these obstacles, West Virginia has become a model for other states when it comes to vaccination efforts. By mid February, it had already used up more than a percent of the vaccines it

had been allotted, the first state to do so. And the reason West Virginia is so successful in vaccinating its population has to do with people like Drew Massey. I have mentioned first your Hometown Family Pharmacy. Drew is the clinical director for Fruit Pharmacies. It's one of West Virginia's biggest pharmacy chains, but it doesn't feel like it. Massey says, their locations feel like they're part of their local communities. For example, not that long ago Drew noticed someone else

side the store whose car needed to jump. We had somebody in the parking lot. They were using their blinkers and their battery went dead. Totally nothing to do with the shot, nothing to do with pharmacy. Went and got the jumper cables, got my car and went over and

jumped the guy. And I was laughing because I'm like, you know, he's not going to think about that me necessarily when he talks about his his um COVID shot, but he will remember the guy that came out here in the parking lot and jumped his car for him, wearing wearing his pharmacy smock. Drew told me about the fruit store in Nitro, that's a town of seven thousand people where he's based. He says, people will happily wait

hours for a prescription, just chatting with their neighbors. Literally, you can tell the people it would be three hours. They would get a root beer out of the cooler, they would sit down in one of the chairs. They used to have rocking chairs out front of the pharmacy, and they would stay there for two or three hours and they wouldn't care. Pretty much, everything I heard from Drew seemed to exemplify what I've heard about the best ways to address hesitancy. He gives people good information, but

while listening to their concerns about vaccines. Instead of dismissing them, he addresses those specific concerns and all of that information is coming from someone in the community that the people Drew is talking with trust. I think a lot of times in the healthcare field, I think a lot of us get into the thing that we're providing information and it's either cold and stagnant, or it seems like it's coming from I'm up here and you're down here, and

it's not really a conversation. It's more like I'm talking down to you. And I don't think that people key in on that. Nobody wants to be talked down to. West Virginia had some things going for it when it came to the vaccine rollout. It's got a small population about the size of Phoenix, Arizona, and as everyone you will ever talk to from West Virginia will tell you, it's a very community oriented place. Um when people say you have a tight knit community and everyone knows everyone

in West Virginia, it's it's almost true. This is i'n I'm John Iron is a physician as well as the top health officer in the state. She is West Virginia born and raised. It's such a different feeling when you walk down the street people say hi to you and smile. I mean, it's just a different vibe. You go through d C you smile and say hi, people look at you like you're weird. But here if you don't say hi,

it's almost rude. At the start of the vaccine rollout, Iron says, West Virginia made a decision that would prove key. Every other state signed onto a federal program partnering with CBS and Walgreens to vaccinate nursing homes, West Virginia didn't. They went with the local guys like Fruth. But we don't have a wall Greens and CVS on on every corner.

And so we felt like in West Virginia, since these long term care facilities and a fruit pharmacy or a locally owned pharmacy was our coming into a long term care facility, they knew the patients, um the records were already there. There was that trust built in with them. We could have this accomplished at a faster rate. Rather than getting into the nitty gritty with the federal pharmacy. This was important for a few reasons. First off, it was just a better way to get the vaccine to

the many rural pockets of the state. And like I says, there was trust and logistics in place because these pharmacies, in many cases already visited facilities to take care of other medical needs or do COVID testing. The pharmacists giving out the shots were part of the community. One locally owned pharmacist, they weren't able to go in UM for that second round. They had a personal family emergency, so we offered to send in a backup team to do that. He said, no, UM, just give me one day to

take care of this family business emergency. And he wanted to go into that UM long from care facility because him and his team they knew the patients. That's West Virginia for you. It is not just a job for them, It is family to them. They know these patients, they want to do what they know them by their first name. Even Fine says those relationships were key not just in getting the roll out to go smoothly, but also in

making people comfortable opting into vaccination. Getting it into local pharmacies. You know, and we have community partners with churches, places where you can go and ask all the questions you

need and get proper answers. Makes a big deal for people who are vaccine deliberating vaccine and different right now, people who don't trust the vaccine process, because they're going to trust asking those questions to you know, those people that they are most comfortable asking, you know, basic questions that either they're embarrassed to ask, they're not sure about because they hear people like me talking all the time. They don't know me. Though, Binds messaging pretty much mirrored

what Drew had told me. She says it's important to take people's concerns seriously and to not force them to make a decision. She says she has a close family member who believes a lot of the conspiracies about vaccines, and she gets where people who believe that stuff are

coming from. But I think West Virginia, because of their community partnerships, the trust that people have with their friends and family who have taken it, that's going to bode more well than with someone even like me telling you to take the vaccine. And it's true that almost everyone knows each other somehow through some way, and I think the more people that take it, the more people were going to have uptake it. Actually. Chris Martin is a

professor at West Virginia University School of Public Health. He says all of the stuff happening at the community level in West Virginia was aided by a collector of statewide identity. For example, the state chose Courses Boss, the head of the university's Health Science Center, to be its coronavirus are. Everybody knows West Virginia University in West Virginia. If you drive here, it will take you about one minute to find somebody wearing the symbol of our university on a hat,

on a T shirt. It's an enormous source of pride and trust. Chris also says the Universities College of Media did a focus group to help the state understand what kinds of concerns people had, and those focus groups clearly identified not surprisingly, but critically important for us to appreciate that a lot of West Virginians were worried about infringement on personal liberties and the freedom to choose. Well, we can address that. This was something both Drew and I'm

emphasized in our conversations. You can't try and force someone to get back eccinated, especially perhaps in West Virginia. Chris actually wrote an op ed that was published in a few West Virginia publications that address this concern. In it, he does this really clever thing. He totally flips the script. He argues that not only is getting vaccinated a choice, it's an empowering choice. It's a decision you can make to help keep your friends and family safe, to help

end the pandemic. This is a tool that you have should you choose, and it's totally voluntary. But should you choose to do this, you are playing an important role in getting us back to normal life. This all goes back to something I've heard over and over in reporting this series. Meet people where they are, address their concerns. Do not just shove facts in people's face and hope they make the right choice. So you first, you've got to listen. And the second opponent is who is going

to be trusted is going to vary by community. Polls frequently find that people are more likely to trust their own healthcare providers, like doctors or pharmacists. And as a public health community, if we understand a lot of those specifics and understand the menu of common vaccine hesitancy or the basis of vaccine hesitancy, and so that we can respond in very specific ways to those specific concerns. From a person of trust, I think we can sway large

numbers of people. That doesn't mean we can't have mass vaccination sites like the Javitson or New York City. That approach is fine for someone like me that totally trust vaccines. I would let anyone stick a vaccine needle on me at this point. But for the hesitant messaging coming from your church or vaccinations coming from your chatty neighborhood pharmacist, that goes a long way. You have to have the

flexibility to address the realities of your community. I don't want to represent what West Virginia has done, as clearly it's not a template that you migrate somewhere else and apply without change. No matter where in the world you are, it always comes back to starting from a place of empathy. There's a very poor correlation between scientific measures and how people fear, get worried, get upset about a specific issue.

This explains, for example, why when you're swimming at the beach and you heard that there was a shark attack in Australia the week before. In spite of all the evidence and your rational brain as you swim in the ocean, you're going to be thinking about a shark attack. Um and and it's not based on data. So the correlation between scientific measures and perceptions of risk what people get upset about, worried about, fearful of, or mistrust is very poor.

From that, I think flows and understanding that we have to approach vaccine hesitancy with sensitivity as experts. Chris talks about vaccination in a way I hadn't heard before. He says he thinks a big part of why people feel so weird about it is that it's intimate. No, that might sound like a strange word, but I think that is the best word for it. Think about it. I am going to roll up my sleeve and somebody is going to inject a substance that you know, we can

have a long conversation about. But that's a really complicated substance that you're injecting into me. That intimate act ultimately requires trust. There's only so far you can go with the data. At the end of the day, I've got to say, this person has my best interests in mind, they want to do what's right for me. I'm going to trust them, and I'm going to allow this to happen.

I want to jump in here and say that in the series, I've included conversations with a lot of experts like Chris that preach empathy and understanding of people with concerns about vaccines. But this is still pretty novel thinking in the world of public health. I commonly hear the the answer to this is just give them the data. He thinks that a lot of the work that needs to be done is really on the side of public health, teaching physicians and nurses and public health experts how to

talk to people. For example, he says, one issue is that there isn't always full transparency when it comes to vaccines. Part of the problem we have is a public health community is we want to be transparent, but we want to be transparent about only the positive things, and we struggle when it comes to those negative things. There isn't

always robust conversation about things like side effects. One example that I use when I speak to primary care providers is I go through statements and I say, tell me this if this is a true or a false state. And the statement that I use is the US federal government currently financially compensates people for alleged adverse events from routine vaccinations. When I say that statement to primary care providers, most of them answer that this is false, that this

is uh misinformation about vaccines. That's a true statement, that that program does exist. He's talking about the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, which we talked about in episode two. The gist here is that we're so scared people will get the wrong idea if we talk about any potential downsides to vaccines, that even doctors don't know this program exists. We have the best of intentions, but we fear that if people learn those things, they won't do what we

want them to do, which is clearly vaccination. But the problem is, of course, in our age, especially with all the tools that we have, people will find things out. For example, when people discover the vaccine Injury Compensation program, they often wind up learning about it from anti vaccine groups like Various Data. They take this information out of context and cite it as evidence of all the ways

of vaccines are unsafe. The fact that these things aren't openly talked about makes the messages those groups are selling more believable. It has confused people and undermine their confidence in what should be the trusted source of information, which is the public health community. Really not talking about the less pleasant side of vaccines more openly. It's just another form of dismissiveness, of talking down to people. We often treat people with vaccine concerns as anti science or uninformed.

Chris says that's wrong too. A lot of people who are vaccine hesitant might be misinformed, but they also have often done a lot more research into vaccines than most people. We cannot equate anti vaccine with anti science. I mean, if you think about it, the scientific communities approach to

vaccine hesitancy has actually been kind of unscientific. Studies of vaccine hesitancy show that more facts aren't likely to be the thing that persuades people to trust vaccines, and yet that is the mainstream approach to getting people to trust vaccines. When you go back, you will see that vaccine hesitancy has been present ever since we've had vaccines, and you can go back to the eight hundreds in fact and

see that back then people will worried about vaccines. What's most interesting about this is that while vaccines have changed since the first vaccines were developed in the eighteenth century, the concerns really haven't. We have always been weird and irrational about vaccines, and we probably always will be. There's just something about them. Maybe it's that we give them to healthy people, or that there's the genetic material of a virus in them. Maybe there's just kind of an

ick factor. But you don't see people for going colonoscopies because they're worried the doctor might plant a chip in them during the procedure, which by the way, is way more possible than somehow getting a chip into a vaccine. There is something in human nature that large numbers of people are going to be excessively worried about vaccines. That's just human nature. It's always been with us, and it will always be with us. A certain number of us

may always fear vaccines. But what has slowly started to change over the past year is more people in positions of influence are starting to think the way Chris does. There is a lot of cause for optimism here in places like West Virginia and in minority communities We've seen evidence of strategies that seem to work, and as more Americans get vaccinated, they influenced their friends and family and neighbors to do the same. About half of Americans have

received at least one COVID shot. Polling suggests enthusiasm for vaccines continues to grow as the number of vaccinated Americans does too. Things are looking up. So boy couldn't really in this series without also talking to the man who has become the face of the pandemic response in the US. Obviously, we're talking about Dr Anthony Fauci. Now, I didn't just want to talk with him because he's the top infectious disease expert in the country, or because the vaccines have

been referred to as the Fauciocci, a nickname. He seems totally unimpressed by. Well, I don't know if that's an honor, but it's sort of unusual. Anything that gets people to get vaccinated is fine with me. If using my name is helpful, then go ahead and use my name. As vaccines have rolled out like many Americans, I couldn't help but notice Faucci's tireless public speaking efforts. He's doing Q and as with basketball superstar Steff Curry on Instagram, appearing

on the news at night talking to black churches. I'm surprised no one has floated a conspiracy theory that Fauci has cloned himself because it feels like he's everywhere at once. But Fauci isn't just out there talking. He's listening. He's addressing the concerns of specific communities. He's tapping other trusted voices like Reverence to help get his message heard. In other words, he's doing a lot of the things we've talked about in this series and not something I've honestly

not seen that many public health officials do. I wanted to get Fauci's take on doubts about vaccines and how he thinks we should be addressing it. Well, I think you have to first realize that the issue of vaccine assidency is not a unidimensional or monolithic issue at all. There are multiple different groups and subgroups who have concerned about vaccine that really different. This is why Fauci has been on such a diverse speaking tour the past few months.

There are some people who just fundamentally or anti vaccine. I mean, it doesn't matter whether it's measles, whether it's you know, polio, or if it's COVID nineteen vaccines, they're inherently against vaccines. I want to put them aside because I think are a minor group. Then there are those who traditionally have problems not only with vaccines, but with the entire issue of the federal program that has to

do with medicine. Many minority groups, particularly African Americans, understandably feel that way because traditionally, over the years, they have not been treated well by federally run health programs. So the first thing I do when I confront that is respect the fact that they have hesitancy and don't kind of blow it off as if why are you hesitant, and say I can understand really why you might be hesitant.

Vauci also likes to tell people about all of the systems in place that are designed to prevent an unethical experiment like the Tuskegee syphilis study from happening again, or to prevent scenes from being authorized before it's clear that they're safe. And then they need to understand the independence and the transparency, for example, of the data and safety monitoring boards and the advisory committees to the Food and

Drug Administration. So there's that whole group of people that once they understand that their hesitancy, at least I've seen, tends to diminish rather significantly. He says it's important to counter misinformation with facts like this, but also to tap trusted members of the community to help do it. I was on a on a town hall meeting yesterday with LLL cool J, you know, I mean, he is an extraordinarily popular personality, and we had a conversation about why

it's important to get vaccinated. And then and the millions of people who are following that, I think I accomplished more good towards getting people vaccinated in that, you know, forty five minutes that I spent with him, then I could have by you know, preaching for days and days and days. Dr Fauci says he is worried though, about the role anti vaccine groups have continued to play. I mean, the people who make statements that are anti vacs based

on no data, they're not responsible to anything. If they're wrong, nobody cares. Yeah, they're very rarely right, so it doesn't make any difference. You combat them by getting a message out in a way that really resonates with them. You know, I often joke around. You don't want, you know, a white guy in a suit talking to a fundamentally African American population who trust their own local leaders, their religious leaders, their sports figures, their their entertainment, uh heroes and heroins.

You've got to get trusted messages to do that. Before we hung up, I asked Dr Faucci how he's feeling about how everything is going. You know, I'm a cautious optimist. I'm more I'm I describe myself as a realist. I have to say that's sort of how I'm feeling too. There are real hurdles facing getting everyone in America vaccinated against COVID. Anti vaccine groups are strong right now. There is still a fair amount of people on the fence about vaccines and a small number who don't want them

at all. Variants threatened to make gaining population wide immunity especially challenging. We don't even know how many people will need to get vaccinated to get there, but more people are feeling confident about vaccines than they were a few months ago, and people like Dr Fauci are helping to change the conversation about this skepticism. They're working to earn people's trust. I don't think those efforts will go to waste. In this series, we have explored why so many people

are skeptical of COVID vaccines. We followed fringe anti vaccine groups as they went mainstream, explored why Black Americans don't trust the medical establishment, and how even healthcare workers can be filled with doubt about vaccines once they come into contact with misinformation. All of this can paint a grim picture, but there's also another truth. More and more people are getting vaccinated every day, and we're getting closer and closer

to something that looks a bit more like normal. With that in mind, we wanted to end this series on an optimistic note. We've spent a lot of time talking to people skeptical of the vaccines. I wanted to hear from people who put their faith in the shots. So I have um just parked my car here at here four at the Brooklyn Army Terminal, and uh, let's go talk to people who are getting vaccinated Windy. The terminal is a mass vaccination site in New York City. It's

in a more industrial part of Brooklyn. I'm standing just outside the entrance, a site worker directs people through amainze of checkpoints to get vaccinated. But it's also probably the vaccination site with the prettiest view. There is this great view of the New York City skyline and the Statue of Liberty. This is a twenty four hour vaccination site.

People stream in and out all day long, and I wanted to hear from them about why they decided to get the shot and what they're most looking forward to after getting it. I got my first tost I feel good. Yeah, I feel fine. So far, so good. I got my second vaccination today. I feel great. I'm trying to catch up with my wife. She already has both, so I'm halfway there. We got vaccinated because we want to, you know, get back to normal. I just think it's important to

have it so that everyone's healthy. I had no apprehension because I do not want to get the COVID and I want to see the city up and back up. It's like our ticket out of the pandemic. I want to see my coworkers in the office, and also just being able to go to restaurants and bars and be able to like mingle a little bit it and actually we have physical contact with people. I'm waiting to go to my first Major League Baseball game. I went to a game every year from seventy seven through I want

to feel free, like I'm not the effort. It's going to happen this summer. I got vaccinated to in early April. I am really looking forward to getting on a plane back home to l A to see my grandma. I haven't seen her since February of She just turned ninety one in March, and I miss her a lot. But more than anything, I can tell you, without a doubt, I'm looking forward to life after COVID nineteen. Doubt is written and reported by me Kristin V. Brown. So for

Foreheads is our senior producer. Molly Nugent is our associate producer. Our theme was composed and performed by Hannis Brown. Special thanks to Randy Shapiro, Loura Carlson, and Bloomberg editors Rick Shine and tim Annette. Francesca Leevie is the head of Bloomberg Podcast. Be sure to subscribe to Prognosis if you haven't already, and if you like our show, please leave us a review helps others find out about the show. Thanks for listening,