The strangely influential Google vaccination ad

by

I feel like it’s not entirely healthy for an ad consisting only of search terms to elicit an emotional response.

On the other hand, as many others pointed out as this place ran during the Final Four this weekend, the message here is much better than the CDC’s. Last week, Rochelle Walensky’s shop alternately told us that we were facing “impending doom”; that vaccinated people could not carry the virus; that actually vaccinated people could have the virus with them, but it was still okay for them to travel; and that they shouldn’t travel to be on the safe side.

Compare that to the simple elegance of Google’s point: take the photo and get your life back.

In an advertising contest between a private entity needing to make money or die and an inexplicable federal agency, I think we shouldn’t be surprised the company wins. Watch and then read on.

Americans get the chance and get their lives back. On Friday and Saturday, we took an average of four million doses a day, bringing the seven-day average to the north of three million. That’s about one percent of Americans every 24 hours. At the current rate, assuming we can find enough willing recipients, we could get at least one dose in 70 percent of the population by June 15. We have already crossed that threshold among seniors. More than 75 percent of adults 65 or older have had their first injection, and more than half have had their second injection. What does that look like in practice?

It looks like this. The pool of people most vulnerable to dying from COVID is shrinking.

Fewest deaths in a year. In Israel, where an even higher percentage of the population has been vaccinated, scientists are now openly talking about the COVID end game:

After a lockdown during the second wave, infection rates increased rapidly and never decreased until another lockdown was imposed. But after the third wave, “the effect of the vaccines started”, [biologist Eran Segal] said. The R number (the growth of infections) has since fallen to its lowest level during the pandemic, he said, although the economy is more open than a year ago.

In the coastal city of Tel Aviv, the beaches are packed for the Easter holidays. When the sun goes down, thousands of people go to bars and restaurants. While indoor locations are supposed to scan people’s green pass, which contains a QR code, many bars seem to assume their customers have been immunized …

Adi Niv-Yagoda, a health policy expert at Tel Aviv University and a member of the Ministry of Health’s Covid-19 advisory panel, said he believed Israel may have almost reached an end point in the pandemic

Meanwhile, our public health bureaucracy here in the US cannot explain why vaccinated people should not travel and only now, after 13 months, is it finally time to officially inform the public that viral transmission via touching contaminated surfaces is unlikely. The experts won’t go back to the norm without kicking and yelling, but they will get there eventually. We’re going to drag them by following Google’s advice instead.

I’ll leave you with Scott Gottlieb once again urging the Walenskies of the world to be realistic about their health guidelines. Both he and she noticed that today younger people are driving the rise in the number of cases in some states, which you would expect given the number of older people vaccinated. Spring is here, the restrictions are loosening, the young are unprotected and they want to get together. It’s a race between the virus and the vaccine to see if we get a real wave of that or not.

Source