Virus World

LOS ANGELES  — A man who mocked COVID-19 vaccinations died this week at a Los Angeles-area hospital after contracting the virus. Stephen Harmon was 34. Harmon died on Wednesday at Corona Regional Medical Center, about an hour’s drive east of Los Angeles. Stephen Harmon posted photos of himself in his hospital bed, wrote that he had pneumonia and critically low oxygen levels and was going to be intubated. In a tweet Wednesday, Harmon wrote: “Don’t know when I’ll wake up, please pray,” KCBS-TV reported. Three days before his death, Stephen Harmon tweeted: “If you don’t have faith that God can heal me over your stupid ventilator then keep the Hell out of my ICU room, there’s no room in here for fear or lack of faith!”  Before his hospitalization, Harmon had made fun of vaccination efforts on social media.  “I got 99 problems but a vax ain’t one,” he said in a tweet last month. On July 8, he posted: “Biden’s door to door vaccine ‘surveyors’ really should be called JaCovid Witnesses. #keepmovingdork.” Harmon’s death was “unbelievably demoralizing,” Dr. Oren Friedman, who treats COVID-10 patients at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, told KCBS-TV. He said the number of COVID-19 admissions had increased tenfold.  “Virtually every single person that is getting sick enough to be admitted to the hospital has not been vaccinated,” Friedman said.

California has seen escalating numbers of COVID-19 infections, led by the highly transmissible delta variant that has proliferated since the state fully reopened the economy last month. The vast majority of new cases are among unvaccinated people, and health officials have pleaded for people to get the shots. On Friday, the state Department of Public Health reported nearly 8,000 new cases a day earlier and the testing positivity rate over seven days had jumped to more than 5% after dipping below 1% only a few weeks ago. Los Angeles County, which has about a fourth of the state’s population, reported more than 3,000 new cases for the first time since February. There were 655 people with COVID-19 in hospitals, a jump of more than 200 people in a week, according to county figures. Harmon attended Hillsong Church in Los Angeles. Founder Brian Houston called him “one of the most generous people I know.” “As a church, our focus is on the spiritual well-being of the people in each of our local communities. On any medical issue, we strongly encourage those in our church to follow the guidance of their doctors,” Houston said in a statement to KCBS-TV. “While many of our staff, leadership and congregation have already received the COVID-19 vaccine, we recognize this is a personal decision for each individual to make with the counsel of medical professionals.”

To stop the pandemic, the world’s public health experts must win the coming “story war” over vaccine misinformation. Within days of the first confirmed novel coronavirus case in the United States on 20 January, antivaccine activists were already hinting on Twitter that the virus was a scam—part of a plot to profit from an eventual vaccine. Nearly half a year later, scientists around the world are rushing to create a COVID-19 vaccine. An approved product is still months, if not years, away and public health agencies have not yet mounted campaigns to promote it. But health communication experts say they need to start to lay the groundwork for acceptance now, because the flood of misinformation from antivaccine activists has surged.

Such activists have “kicked into overdrive,” says Neil Johnson, a physicist at George Washington University who studies the dynamics of antivaccine groups on social networks. He estimates that in recent months, 10% of the Facebook pages run by people asking questions about vaccines have already switched to antivaccine views. Recent polls have found as few as 50% of  people in the United States are committed to receiving a vaccine, with another quarter wavering. Some of the communities most at risk from the virus are also the most leery: Among Black people, who account for nearly one-quarter of U.S. COVID-19 deaths, 40% said they wouldn’t get a vaccine in a mid-May poll by the Associated Press and the University of Chicago. In France, 26%  said they wouldn’t get a coronavirus vaccine.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is now working on a plan to boost “vaccine confidence” as part of the federal effort to develop a vaccine, Director Robert Redfield told a Senate committee this week. Advocates urge campaigns that include personal messages and storytelling. “We better use every minute we have between now and when that vaccine or vaccines are ready, because it’s real fragile ground right now,” says Heidi Larson, an anthropologist and head of the Vaccine Confidence Project at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM)...

Facebook said the goal is to amplify messages about the safety of vaccines and limit information that could harm public health efforts. Facebook said Tuesday that it will no longer allow anti-vaccination ads, its latest move to crack down on misinformation on the social-networking platform.  Facebook will reject any ad that “explicitly discourages” someone from getting a vaccine and the ban will go into effect in the next few days, Facebook’s Head of Health Kang-Xing Jin and Director of Project Management Rob Leathern wrote in a blog post. They said the goal is to amplify messages about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and prohibit ads that have the potential to harm public health efforts. Ads advocating for or against legislation or government policies about vaccines, including a Covid-19 vaccine, will be allowed.   They said the company regularly reviews its approach to ads about social issues and may narrow or expand its rules about vaccine-related ads. Facebook also announced Tuesday that it has launched a flu vaccine information campaign to connect people with resources including the nearest location to get a flu shot and said it is working with public health organizations on campaigns aimed at increasing immunization rates. Prior to Tuesday’s announcement, Facebook already prohibited ads about “vaccine hoaxes” publicly identified by global health organizations including the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg has said he is a proponent of free speech and does not want to widely limit discussion on the social network aside from harmful content. However, after scrutiny about conspiracy theories and other misinformation on the platform, Facebook has tightened up its vetting of content. Facebook announced Monday that it will ban Holocaust denial posts, a reversal made two years after Zuckerberg came under fire for defending the company’s decision to allow such content. Last week, Facebook said it would ban any pages, groups, and Instagram accounts related to the conspiracy theory QAnon and said it would suspend political advertising after the Nov. 3 election. Facebook has come under fire for allowing hate speech on its platform, which was the catalyst earlier this year for an advertising boycott. 

As families face back-to-school medical requirements this month, the country feels the impact of a vaccine resistance movement decades in the making. 

The question is often whispered, the questioners sheepish. But increasingly, parents at the Central Park playground where Dr. Elizabeth A. Comen takes her young children have been asking her: “Do you vaccinate your kids?”

Dr. Comen, an oncologist who has treated patients for cancers related to the human papillomavirus that a vaccine can now prevent, replies emphatically: Absolutely.

She never imagined she would be getting such queries. Yet these playground exchanges are reflective of the national conversation at the end of the second decade of the 21st century — a time of stunning scientific and medical advances but also a time when the United States may, next month, lose its World Health Organization designation as a country that has eliminated measles, because of outbreaks this year. The W.H.O. has listed vaccine hesitancy as one of the top threats to global health. As millions of families face back-to-school medical requirements and forms this month, the contentiousness surrounding vaccines is heating up again, with possibly even more fervor.

Though the situation may seem improbable to some, anti-vaccine sentiment has been building for decades, a byproduct of an internet humming with rumor and misinformation; the backlash against Big Pharma; an infatuation with celebrities that gives special credence to the anti-immunization statements from actors like Jenny McCarthy, Jim Carrey and Alicia Silverstone, the rapper Kevin Gates and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And now, the Trump administration’s anti-science rhetoric.

“Science has become just another voice in the room,” said Dr. Paul A. Offit, an infectious disease expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “It has lost its platform. Now, you simply declare your own truth.”  The constituents who make up the so-called vaccine resistant come from disparate groups, and include anti-government libertarians, apostles of the all-natural and parents who believe that doctors should not dictate medical decisions about children. Labeling resisters with one dismissive stereotype would be wrongheaded.

“To just say that these parents are ignorant or selfish is an easy trope,” said Jennifer Reich, a sociologist at the University of Colorado Denver, who studies vaccine-resistant families.....