Controversy Based Media Threatens Us All
I’m 100% convinced that we are doing ourselves no favours with how the vaccination story is covered in this country. We worry about a capacity problem that will be solved and ignore the failed policies that are making vaccines so fucking necessary so quickly. The media is so obsessed right now with when vaccines will be available that more important points are ignored.
The most important point that is overlooked in this debate; when we keep re-opening schools/economy without effective track, trace and lockdown protocols we are effectively doing our damndest to make the vaccines ineffective. We are unwittingly trying to mutate the virus into another form that we can’t defend against.
It doesn’t matter on its own, how quickly Canadians get vaccinated. What matters is how quickly we vaccinate the entire. damned. planet. Until that moment happens, when the whole world is vaccinated, we need to have effective tried and tested containment protocols in place. We have to keep the virus from spreading through other measures available to us now. Like how Australia and New Zealand are doing it.
If we vaccinate the whole country by the end of September 2021, that is good news. But that does not mean this is over! The Canadian angle on the vaccination story is dangerous myopic thinking. We’re one small part of a worldwide effort where demand for vaccines far exceeds the supply.
The policies that our provincial leaders are enacting in our largest provinces are exacerbating this danger. It’s a danger to us as Canadians, and it’s a danger we then pose to the rest of the planet! That is not hyperbole. If Canadian variant 666 evolves and is loosed on the world, it will be our fault. Because the evidence is in, we’re doing sweet-fuck-all to stop it from happening.
This Wired article summarized the threat we face quite well:
“But mutations, like pandemics, are a numbers game. Every new person infected provides another opportunity for the virus to adopt a new form. So far, Sars-CoV-2 has infected at least 106 million people worldwide and taken on many thousands of mutations. Most of those changes are slow and inconsequential — evolutionary dead ends that nobody will ever realise existed. But, in some people, the virus hits the jackpot.”
We are watching the virus evolve in real-time, but watching is not enough. “We can’t afford to keep giving the virus more and more chances to mutate to new, stable configurations,” says Barrett. “Keeping the current restrictions until we really get transmission down is very, very important.”
This is the critical information that our “Scandal Based Media” causes us to overlook. It’s easier to create “click bait” headlines that hyperventilate about vaccine supply issues than it is to clearly report how we manage this virus can threaten us all for years to come.
The news media exists to keep us upset. To keep us angry. The mainstream media is more subtle about this than the bat-shit crazy outlets on the fringes on the right or left that just make shit up that is easily disprovable. The mainstream media relies on public criticism by anyone with relative credibility. And the focus is on that criticism, no matter how valid. But the criticism has to be easy to explain, summed up in a few words: “Smug Liberal government is too incompetent to get vaccination right.”
This treatment of the vaccine story clarified for me this point that the media exists to propagate controversy. We had endless stories about the pause in vaccine production at the Pfizer facility in Belgium. Never mind that this impacted global supply chains for all vaccines. This was a failure of Canadian Government policy! But when it was released that production at that same facility resumed, not a single news org in Canada published that story. Not one. As a matter of fact stories about the production delay continued AFTER production resumed. Talking heads were still going on about it. Production had resumed, but the story was still about the delays.
Why? To propagate controversy. To attract eyeballs. It’s easier to keep people interested if you can keep them angry and upset.
Do you have another theory? I’d love to hear it.
Even now, as production is now ramping up, increasing Canada’s supply of vaccines the headline is “But questions remain about whether the target of 6M doses from Pfizer and Moderna can be met by end of March”
And so here we are. The greatest threat we face isn’t a slightly delayed Canadian roll-out of vaccines. The greatest threat is our unwillingness to contain this virus through other measures until we get the whole world vaccinated. But you’d never know it by following the news.
