Hospital systems and medical professionals around the country are once again finding themselves at the threshold of collapse from an overwhelming number of severely ill patients infected with COVID 19. Everyone from Dr. Anthony Faucci to Arnold Schwarzenegger is calling on the unvaccinated to get one of the three vaccines currently available to help bring the latest wave of infections under control – that is, to save thousands of Americans from dying unnecessarily from the latest mutation of Delta, the most easily spread COVID variant to date.
Reliable vaccines are now widely available but stores are going unused as people remain unwilling to get the shot(s)
Each of the three vaccines available, Johnson & Johnson, Moderna, and Pfizer, offers high levels of protection against infection and, in the rare instances of breakthrough infections, each of the vaccines lower the patient’s risk of dying from COVID.
Despite this, many people around the country remain unvaccinated, unwilling to get the shot(s) because they are not convinced the vaccines are effective and/or necessary. As a result, vaccination rates in the U.S. are still not high enough the to bring the spread of the virus under control – or at least prevent yet another surge in cases this fal
As colleges open for fall classes, officials try, and fail to impose vaccination requirements for incoming students
To make matters worse, month millions of students are now returning to college, where they will live in close quarters in dorms, eat together in large campus dining facilities, sit together in classrooms, go out drinking and dancing in bars and clubs, and attend other crowded indoor social events: each of which presents the potential for a super spreader disaster because, according to the CDC, young adults ages 18-24 continue to comprise the lowest vaccination rate.
Why do 18-24 year olds continue to remain the group with the lowest rate of vaccination?
I think it’s an issue of poor threat assessment as much as anything. Quite simply, many young adults in this age group seem to believe that the virus will not strike them down because they are young and healthy.
Coming of age in an age of unprecedented danger and uncertainty
Consider this: as children, preteens, and teens the members of Generation Z, to which those aged 18-24 belong, have born witness to and perhaps even survived domestic threats much more immediate and tangible than a microscopic organism that they can’t see, hear, taste, or smell.
Our children were in kindergarten and elementary school when the 9/11 attacks occurred, in real time on television. The major television networks replayed the moments just before, during, and after the attacks again and again for days and weeks as search and rescue efforts became increasingly bleak and became efforts to recover any and all human remains. The images, permanently housed in Internet sites, are still available to anyone who cares to look.
The United States has been at war for most, if not all of these young adult’s lives. The ensuing effort to locate, capture, and kill Osama bin Laden and exact retribution for the attacks on American soil grew into a full fledged war that American is now trying to bring to an end with limited success.
Our children went to school every day knowing that, at any time, either a stranger or someone they knew might enter their school building and start shooting. From an early age, these young adults were drilled in active shooter procedures. Instead of the “duck and cover” drills of their grandparents’ time, they learned participated in “duck and hide” drills. Americans have had the good fortune never to have come under nuclear attack, but a percentage of Generation Z certainly has survived or know someone who survived a mass shooting at school.
Global warming and the resulting changes in the earth’s climate are all too real for this generation. They have watched as the glaciers have begun to melt; hurricanes have become more frequent and more devastating; earthquakes brought down huge freeway structures; a devastating earthquake off the coast of Japan generated a terrifying tidal wave like something out of a bad disaster movie that devastated coastal areas and led to the destruction of a nuclear power plant built to and believed capable of withstanding such an event; have begun to occur across the country; and wildfires have not burned millions of acres, destroyed entire towns in parts of California, and grown so hot and powerful that they produce their own weather systems.
Generation Z has, however, enjoyed unprecedented protection from previous generations most feared diseases
On the other hand, this generation has enjoyed unprecedented protection from the diseases that sickened, crippled, scarred, and/or killed so many children of the twentieth century. While their parents might bear the scars of bad cases of Chicken Pox or recount the time that they had the German Measles, it is highly unliked that someone born between 1997 and 2012 has ever met an individual left crippled by polio or know someone in or outside the family who died from contracting Tetanus after stepping on a rusty nail.
That’s because these diseases have been, for the most part, eradicated by the vaccine protocols pediatricians follow. When the young adults of Generation Z were infants, they were vaccinated against Hepatitis B, Diptheria, Influenza, Polio, Pneumoccocal (PCV), Rotovirus, Tetanus, and Whooping Cough. Before they were two years old, they were vaccinated to protect them from Chicken Pox, Hepatitis A, Measles, Mumps, and Rubella. As preteens, they were vaccinated against Meningitis and HPV. Their pediatricians most likely administered a flu shot every year they were in school. Now, as adults, they can visit their doctor, local health clinic, local pharmacy, or grocery store and get a flu shot tailored for the whichever flu strain the CDC has decided will manifest in the general population.
They believe they aren’t at risk
At first, HIV/AIDS was thought to be a “gay man’s disease.” As infections multiplied and spread across every demographic group, the public learned that anyone participating in unprotected sex with, sharing needles with. and receiving blood donated by individuals infected with the virus was at risk. Despite efforts to educate the public about the ways in which the virus was transmitted, misinformation and disinformation led many to continue believing that either (a) they were not at risk of getting sick because they weren’t gay and/or (b) any type of interaction with an infected individual – even an infected child – whether it be casual contact such as a handshake, a compassionate hug, using the same water fountain – could result in them getting AIDS.
Even when reliable testing became widely available – people could even take a test at home and send it in for confidential analysis, people remained unaware they were infected until it was too late.
The initial problems with COVID testing frustrated a frightened public and have continued to affect people’s decision to get tested
The public understand early on that COVID-19 can infect and potentially kill anyone, regardless of gender, sexual preference, race, age, or economic status. Initial testing efforts were stymied by unreliable CDC testing kits, the government’s inability to get the necessary infrastructure in place to provide an adequate number of testing sites and/or testing sites people could easily reach via public transportation.
COVID testing is now widely available for free. People can even buy in-home testing kits; I saw a package of two for under $20 at my local Walmart last week.
Yet many still remain untested; this poses a very real danger as someone can be infected yet show no symptoms of the disease, potentially capable of unknowingly infecting others he or she encounters simply by breathing in or out, talking, or laughing -‘he or she doesn’t even have to sneeze to spew thousands of virus particles into his or her personal space.
Testing, while helpful, is still not as great a weapon against the spread of the virus as getting vaccinated
Greater access to testing has allowed people to seek medical care earlier. That has not resulted in a significant decrease in hospitalizations or death, however. First of all, the test results can be incorrect. An individual may test negative for the virus once, even two or three times only to later find he or she does indeed have the virus. More importantly, an individual can be sick for some time before he or she shows symptoms and seeks testing and/or treatment, giving the virus the time it needs to multiply and move throughout the infected person’s system. Perhaps worst of all, an infected individual may unknowingly expose any number of other people to the virus before he or she begins to manifest the symptoms of the disease.
For all these reasons, Dr. Faucci and the medical community continue to stress the importance of getting vaccinated. Yet to date, only 40% of Generation Z has been fully vaccinated against COVID.
The dissemination of disinformation and misinformation via social media seems to be the primary driver of skepticism or disbelief in the efficacy of the current vaccines.
On the one hand, this is understandable. In the first few months of the pandemic, accurate information, even from credible sources was hard to come by. For example, at first, the CDC’s list of COVID-19 symptoms was essentially the same as the list of flu symptoms: fever, headache, muscle aches, cough, sore throat, and difficulty breathing. President Trump, who we now know understood a lot more about the risk of the disease than he was letting on, repeatedly told Americans that COVID-19 was no worse than the flu. Dr. Faucci and the CDC first recommended that people wear masks. Then the public was told that masks did not help prevent the spread of the virus. Then the experts changed their minds and once again advocated for masking both indoors and outdoors.
The ever evolving list of symptoms also left the public confused and angry.
New symptoms differentiating COVID infections from other retroviruses were shared as doctors and scientists learned more about the way in which the disease attacked the various systems in the body. The CDC soon expanded the list of symptoms to include nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea when some COVID patients presented with GI track issues but no pneumonia or difficulty breathing. Next we learned that some people’s only symptom was a loss of taste and smell. Then dermatologists reported the first cases of so-called COVID Toe (chilblains) in patients who subsequently tested positive for COVID even though they had no other symptoms of the virus.
It should not come as a surprise, then, that these young adults, age 18-24, who comprise what is really the most “plugged-in” generation have a healthy dose of skepticism about the very real danger that COVID-19 poses to them and/or the value of getting vaccinated.
Unlike those of us who were in college in the 1980s, today’s young adults have access to nearly unlimited amounts of information, and it’s easily accessible through any number of electronic devices that they can use to connect to the Internet. Conversely, my generation, which watched as HIV/AIDS became a worldwide pandemic affecting people of all genders, ages, and sexual preferences. Back then, we got our news from the three major networks: ABC, CBS, and NBC. We read the local newspaper and popular magazines. If we wanted or needed to learn more about a current issue, we headed to the school or local library, where we spent hours in the stacks trying to track down articles in a wider range of periodicals, academic journals, and books. Fortunately, we could be relatively sure that the information, once found, was credible and that the sources were reliable.
Today’s young adults both suffer and benefit from the amount of information available to them and the ease with which they can access it.
In our search for information and understanding, we were paddling canoes across a glassy lake. Conversely, today’s young adults are like people in lightweight fiberglass hulled kayaks trying to navigate white water rapids and the dangerous rocks hidden from their sight. At any point, they might hit an unseen rock, get sucked into a vortex, or lose their paddles only to then be pulled under the rushing water to their deaths.
Who are you to believe? How do you determine what is credible and what is “fake news”?
Separating the rumors or “fake news” from credible information is just difficult, if not more so, than trying to navigate the seen and unseen dangers in white water rapids. Kasisomayajula “Vish” Viswanath, the Lee Kum Lee Professor of Health Communication in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Harvard’s T.H. Chan of Public Health, addressed the danger of the situation in an interview back in February, 2021. “Social media platforms are one of the most significant abettors to the spread of misinformation and disinformation,” Dr. Viswanath explained, “and their algorithms have compounded the problem.”
The algorithms are not solely to blame, however, much of the problem can be attributed to the “active efforts [of people writing on social media platforms] to sow seeds of doubt.” In addition, Lee says, “our governments and public health systems are not geared up to properly handle the world of social media.”
The solution? Lee argues that government “agencies need to have the agility to address the spread of misinformation right away by putting out reliable, accurate information from trusted sources to counter the misinformation. Most importantly,” he adds, “we need social media platforms to take responsibility and improve their efforts to stop the spread of harmful misinformation.”
Here’s the bottom line
Bottom line: 30 years later, researchers have yet to develop a vaccine that can protect an individual against contracting HIV/AIDS, but the current COVID cvs cones were developed in record time. Their efficacy is proven; they are safe; they are widely available, and they are FREE.
As many people wiser and more eloquent than me have argued, each of us eligible for the vaccine, especially those 18 and older, needs to get vaccinated NOW.
We must each take responsibility not only for ourselves but for others. That means getting vaccinated, washing your hands frequently and/or using hand sanitizer appropriately, wearing masks outside the home, maintaining social distancing, and choosing to stay staying home in lieu of going to bars and parties where lots of unmasked people are closely interacting
Finally, our local, state, and federal leaders need to act more like parents and less like politicians. They need to work together to ensure that every school district, every city, every county, and every state enforces the same mandates for masking requirements, social distancing, and the ways in which businesses can operate and serve customers while the virus continues to spread. Only then will we have a fighting chance of gaining control over our mutual enemy, COVID-10.
As Abraham Lincoln said, “You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.”