Coronavirus

what we have going now is a "pandemic of the unvaccinated"...

White House turns up heat on Big Tech's Covid 'disinformation dozen'

"There's about 12 people who are producing 65% of anti-vaccine misinformation on social media platforms,"
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Thursday.

That statistic is from the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) which identified in a report
published in March about a dozen people it said were super-spreaders of anti-vaccine misinformation.

The CCDH had at the time called on Facebook and Twitter to shut down all pages run by those people.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent figure in the anti-vaccine movement, is among the people whom the
CCDH said should be kicked off social media.

Kennedy's page on Facebook-owned Instagram was shut down earlier this year for sharing Covid-19
misinformation, Facebook said. However, Kennedy is still allowed on Facebook (FB) itself, and he has
more than 300,000 followers on the platform.

The vast majority of Covid-19 anti-vaccine misinformation and conspiracy theories originated from just 12 people, a report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) cited by the White House this week found.

CCDH, a UK/US non-profit and non-governmental organization, found in March that these 12 online personalities they dubbed the “disinformation dozen” have a combined following of 59 million people across multiple social media platforms, with Facebook having the largest impact. CCDH analyzed 812,000 Facebook posts and tweets and found 65% came from the disinformation dozen. Vivek Murthy, US surgeon general, and Joe Biden focused on misinformation around vaccines this week as a driving force of the virus spreading.

On Facebook alone, the dozen are responsible for 73% of all anti-vaccine content, though the vaccines have been deemed safe and effective by the US government and its regulatory agencies. And 95% of the Covid misinformation reported on these platforms were not removed.

Among the dozen are physicians that have embraced pseudoscience, a bodybuilder, a wellness blogger, a religious zealot, and, most notably Robert F Kennedy Jr, the nephew of John F Kennedy who has also linked vaccines to autism and 5G broadband cellular networks to the coronavirus pandemic.

Kennedy was since removed from Instagram, which Facebook owns, but not from Facebook itself.

“Facebook, Google and Twitter have put policies into place to prevent the spread of vaccine misinformation; yet to date, all have failed to satisfactorily enforce those policies,” wrote CCDH’s CEO, Imran Ahmed, in the report. “All have been particularly ineffective at removing harmful and dangerous misinformation about coronavirus vaccines.”

Although platforms have since taken measures to remove many posts and even remove three of the 12 from one platform, the CCDH is calling on Facebook and Instagram, Twitter and YouTube to completely deplatform the disinformation dozen they believe are dangerous and instrumental in creating vaccine hesitancy at a crucial moment in the pandemic.

“Updated policies and statements hold little value unless they are strongly and consistently enforced,” the report said. “With the vast majority of harmful content being spread by a select number of accounts, removing those few most dangerous individuals and groups can significantly reduce the amount of disinformation being spread across platforms.”

It's Joe Biden's fault. His lack of leadership means that people don't trust him or the vaccine.

As top health officials warn that COVID-19 has become a "pandemic of the unvaccinated," recent figures from states and cities throughout the United States reveal the extent to which the virus is impacting people who are not fully inoculated.

A stark case in point: During June, every person who died of COVID-19 in Maryland was unvaccinated, according to a spokesperson for the governor's office. There were 130 people who died of COVID-19 in Maryland in June, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

New COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations were also predominantly among unvaccinated people, the state said, at 95% and 93% respectively.

In Louisiana, 97% of the state's COVID-19 cases and deaths since February have been in unvaccinated people, Gov. John Bel Edwards said Friday. Between February and July, unvaccinated people in Louisiana were 20 times more likely to become infected with COVID-19, according to the state health department.

In Alabama, over 96% of COVID-19 deaths since April 1 were in unvaccinated people, the state health department said on July 13, for 509 deaths out of 529 total.

New York City Health Commissioner Dr. Dave Chokshi said the vaccines are "astonishingly effective" while sharing that over 98% of COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths in the city between Jan. 1 and June 15 were in people who were not fully vaccinated. That included 8,069 deaths in people who were not fully vaccinated.