RE: What is the real power of outreaching? What is the impact?

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I wouldn't say it's ignorance, or history repeating itself (maybe it is). Even so, Brazil has more % of their population with full vaccinated than a lot of "more educated countries", I think they're one of the top countries with more people vaccinated. It's really a difficult subject.

And I don't think it's about education or what ever. People just trust their doctors (or science) in most places, there's respect for them. There's also respect for authorities in a time of crisis. I'm pretty sure most of us don't how a vaccine works, yes I can repeat the fragment from a textbook and tell you something about antibodies lymphocytes or whatever. It's just a social problem, religion, politics, conspiracists, "dont tread on me", freedom speech, and more ideologies are all entangled in this.

Sometimes extremism (forcing to take the vaccine) leads to other kind of extremism (refusing to take it). Then some may start calling those who don't take the vaccine ignorant...

Okay this is getting too long... . I'm not saying education isn't one of the solutions (But what kind of education?) :)



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Hello
let's see some parts of your comment

I wouldn't say it's ignorance, or history repeating itself (maybe it is). Even so, Brazil has more % of their population with full vaccinated than a lot of "more educated countries", I think they're one of the top countries with more people vaccinated. It's really a difficult subject.

You are correct, Brazil has a good % of their people full vaccinated, and this is thanks to the culture of the country of adopting vaccines. And probably, Oswaldo Cruz the guy cited in this post was one of the people that influenced that. The Vaccine Revolt occurred in a regional way only happening in the city of Rio de Janeiro, and the legacy of Oswaldo Cruz has lasted until now in the country. He was the first director of the vaccine production facility and it is also associated in starting the production of yellow fever vaccine in the country for example. The brazilian vaccine culture is something very stabilished, kids receive the first vaccines when they are born and it is not optional, like in other countries like Canada and the US ( probably Europe too ). I had two childs one in Brazil and another one here in Canada. The first one it was in the schedule of the post born schedule, they took my baby and gave the Hepatitis B shot and the BCG (for tuberculosis, which is in the vaccination schedule in the country). For my child in Canada, I didn't know, but I had to tell the nurses that I wanted to give the shot that they offered in the hospital and signed a term that I was agreeing with that. The video about the revolt was made by the Oswaldo Cruz Institution, by coincidence, the institution where I studied. My goal wasn't to compare the vaccine revolt and the COVID vaccination in Brazil, despite of the president was totally against in the beginning saying that if you take pfizer vaccine you would turn into a crocodile. I don't like him not only for that, I didn't like all his measures in the last 4 years, including the cut in science. Since you mentioned about the vaccine in the pandemic, in Brazil, the only problem was another thing associated to the culture: tons of self prescribed medicine. Here we go for the next part:

And I don't think it's about education or what ever. People just trust their doctors (or science) in most places, there's respect for them. There's also respect for authorities in a time of crisis.

People respect more the doctors than the authorities. For some cultural reason, people all over the world have Medical Doctors on another level. They have a huge responsibility of saving lives. But they are humans, and like any profession, there are good and bad ones. Like I said before title in my post a title doesn't mean anything. The problem is if two doctors are saying two different things who do you trust? Even for a regular thing. For example, my wife went to a gynecologist that made an ultrasound in her lab on her own and identified a polyp in her uterus. She had already had in her hands a recent exam that didn't identify that. She went to two other gynecologists, that said that the exam had nothing in there. The last one sent her to another exam, to check again, to a specialist in vaginal ultrasound, she inspected and came to the same conclusion nothing. So my tip is never to hear only one diagnosis for anything! two and three opinions are very good. But coming again for the problem that you mentioned about COVID vaccine, doctors aren't scientists, at least most of them that are found in the clinics. There are some that work in the university or research institutes, but most of them aren't.

I'm pretty sure most of us don't how a vaccine works, yes I can repeat the fragment from a textbook and tell you something about antibodies lymphocytes or whatever. It's just a social problem, religion, politics, conspiracists, "dont tread on me", freedom speech, and more ideologies are all entangled in this.

You don't need a textbook if there are lots of people around explaining how it works, so maybe people aren't going to say that mRNA vaccine modifies the DNA for example anymore. Before I left Brazil, I was teaching biology in a public school. At least in Brazil, the basic education is focused in preparing kids for the big test to enter the university, so there is a culture to give lots of content for memorizing so people absorb it and forget it after a while. I always tried to bring things that people are in contact in a daily basis, such as vaccines of course ( at that time no COVID yet), fight the culture that you need to take medication against viral infection (lots of antibiotics in the culture over there, luckily now I guess you need a prescription for antibiotics at least) and other things not also associated to the health of course. I don't know if all my students will remember forever about all lessons, but I know that some of them still remember about it, like I also remember about the vaccine revolt that I learned from history class.

Sometimes extremism (forcing to take the vaccine) leads to other kind of extremism (refusing to take it). Then some may start calling those who don't take the vaccine ignorant...
Okay this is getting too long... . I'm not saying education isn't one of the solutions (But what kind of education?) :)

If you have a crisis in the country like a big civil war, you have a state or emergency, sometimes the army goes to the street and locks people at home to avoid more casualties. In an event of a health crisis politicians need to take a decision about it, if there is something to avoid disease to spread they need to take an action. During the pandemic, some politicians were more conservative than others to see how the country would face pandemics. I am not a public health specialist, so I don't know which measures were right or wrong, but you can see that more conservative politics like Israel and Canada were behind countries like US and Brazil in the number of deaths /100k people (https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality) that took too much time to react to the pandemics. What kind of education maybe you are referring what people are saying that there is mainstream science (supported by big pharmacological companies) and an alternative? That is a very confusing way that doesn't exist, people who believe in the flat earth or against that the human was already on the moon also believe in that. In the whole story of science, you have new hypotheses that contradict the mainstream way of thinking, and they are supported by experiments. In the story what happens is that the mainstream defenders continue to fight the proof and reject the person for a long time. People who bring that concept to the mainstream come with a hypothesis based on opinions with no results or scientific proof, or some weak results with no statistical basis. Let's go back to the topic that you brought about COVID vaccines, for now, we still don't know the future of the vaccines, we know that there is a new variant, which any vaccine available is not so much effective compared to previous variants, and we know nowadays that some vaccine brands are not as many effective compared to others at least with the earlier variants. Does any are bad to take it? if you are not sensitive to vaccines in general, it is pretty odd that you will have any problems, since in all vaccine history there are side effects and rare major side effects which are found also in the COVID vaccines now. I don't know if there is going to be a better vaccine in the future or if we just reached a point that maybe only the most affected population needs to take it, only time and new data will tell.
A good source of easy science you can find from https://carlzimmer.com/ , Carl Zimmer is a scientist writer that is dedicated to outreaching, he has good articles about science subjects. During the pandemics, he wrote a lot about the components, like virus biology, vaccines, treatments and etc ( I didn't read all of them).
Kurzgesagt is a project that brings lots of educative videos in many languages here is about side effects in vaccines:

Well for a long comment, a long answer! I hope that it brings you something new here.
Cheers,

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