Thread by @ASlavitt

COVID Update: In most countries, the greatest threat are variants & the lack of vaccines.

In the US it’s different. Very different. 1/

Vaccines are broadly available in the US. To understand the significance of this, you need to talk to people in other countries.

I’ve spent much of the week talking to officials & media in Australia. Oh how they wish they were in the US. 2/

Australia didn’t buy enough vaccines and the one they bought has run into problems. They are low vaccinated & not likely to get vaccines until September. Cases are rising & they’re on lockdown.

Rough winter for them. (They believe winter is in July for some reason). 3/

Australians want to know how we did it— got the country vaccinated so quickly. What advice we have for them.

But we reached a limit here in the US that the officials I talked to in Australia couldn’t fathom. 4/

We let the media, 12 misinformation specialists, and a duped radical Republican party convince just enough US communities that a vaccine was worse than COVID. 5/

2/3 of the unvaccinated believe one of 5 falsehoods
The number one place the unvaccinated say they get their info is social media
12 people on social media are responsible for 65% of the falsehoods 6/

The US Surgeon General has gone as far as to call out purveyors of misinformation as just like the air polluters & water polluters. These are people who pollute our minds. 7/

So in communities around the US, we have 20-30-40% rates of vaccination levels not because we don’t have vaccines like Australia, but by choice. And by coercion. 8/

In the US, variants & a lack of access to vaccines are not the main enemy as they are in Australia.

Here we are the envy of the world. We have the capabilities to vaccinate everyone & defeat the variants. We have chosen not to. /end

And next week on @inthebubblepod … I will be talking to both the US surgeon general and Facebook.