“Hard to imagine a segment less likely to convince vaccine-hesitant people to get vaccinated,” tweeted writer James Surowiecki about the clip below.

Derek Thompson of The Atlantic recently contacted more than a dozen people who were refusing to get a Covid-19 vaccine.

But we can’t reach herd immunity with that attitude since herd immunity requires a lot of low-risk people (like kids) to get immunized anyway.

And if we don’t reach herd immunity then the people who can’t get vaccinated for medical reasons, like the immunocompromised, are at dire risk if they try to participate in society again.

An older member of my own family thought the vaccine contained the COVID virus itself, an assumption that’s probably derived from the public’s experience with the polio vaccine.

That vaccine hit the market when he was a kid; it involved taking the virus itself, killing it, and then injecting it into people to produce antibodies.

(Some later variations of the polio vaccine use a *live* but weakened virus, which can cause outbreaks if the virus isn’t weakened enough.) If you haven’t read up on how the mRNA vaccines work — and how many people have.

The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines instruct your cells to produce only the spike protein, not the virus.

Not only that, it’s almost equally effective against the British variant of the virus and solidly (but less) effective against the tricky South African variant, which seems able to evade AstraZeneca’s vaccine

More doctors offering people better information like that to replace disinformation will get us closer to where we want to be