AP Investigative report: A look into vaccine misinformation industry

The couple in the website videos could be hawking any number of products.

“You’re going to love owning the platinum package,” Charlene Bollinger tells viewers, as a picture of a DVD set, booklets and other products flashes on screen. Her husband, Ty, promises a “director’s cut edition,” and over 100 hours of additional footage.

Click the orange button, his wife says, “to join in the fight for health freedom” — or more specifically, to pay $199 to $499 for the Bollingers’ video series, “The Truth About Vaccines 2020.”

The Bollingers are part of an ecosystem of for-profit companies, nonprofit groups, YouTube channels and other social media accounts that stoke fear and distrust of COVID-19 vaccines, resorting to what medical experts say is often misleading and false information.

An investigation by The Associated Press has found that the couple work closely with others prominent in the anti-vaccine movement — including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his Children’s Health Defense — to drive sales through affiliate marketing relationships.

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Administration plans to provide $7.4 Billion to hire more public health workers, strengthen agencies

Los Angles Times billion owner pledges $210 million to help South Africa produce coronavius vaccines.

 

LA Times owner pledges $210 million to transfer vaccine technology to  South Africa

Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire biotechnology entrepreneur who owns The Los Angeles Times, announced on Wednesday that his corporation and his philanthropic foundation would commit an initial 3 billion South African rand (about $210 million) to transfer the latest technology for producing vaccines and biological therapies to South Africa, where he was born.

Companies there, he said, could then use them to make a second generation of vaccines to address variants of the coronavirus that might make current vaccines less effective.

Dr. Soon-Shiong spoke at an international meeting on the equitable distribution of coronavirus vaccines, diagnostics and therapeutics that was co-chaired by the director-general of the World Health Organization.

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President of Key U.S Teachers’ Union calls for reopening schools this fall

Randi Weingarten, president of the nation’s second-largest teachers’ union, plans to call on Thursday for a full reopening of the nation’s schools for the next academic year, saying: “There is no doubt: Schools must be open. In person. Five days a week.”

Her prepared remarks, made available to The New York Times, come with about half of the nation’s public schools not offering five days per week of in-person learning to all students and with many families uncertain about whether they will have the option for a more traditional schedule in the fall.

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Ohio Governor offers million dollar lottery and college scholoarships to counter vaccine hesitancy

Q&A's about coronavirus vaccines for younger adolescents

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Insights into those who have not been vaccinated yet but are not hesitant

 

It had been weeks since Acy Grayson III, owner of Let It Shine, a home improvement outfit he runs out of his own home in the suburbs of Cleveland, had vowed to get a Covid-19 vaccine.

Appointments were available.

But Mr. Grayson, who never knows how long a job will take or when a new one will come along, had found it hard to commit to a time and a place. The mass vaccination site where appointments were not required was off his beaten path. He did not know that a nearby church, Lee Road Baptist, had been dispensing vaccines on Fridays — but the truth is, even if he had, it is unlikely he would have made the short trek to get one there, either.

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ANALYSIS: COVID pandemic urgency distrupted initial evidence based research efforts

How COVID broke the evidence pipeline

It wasn’t long into the pandemic before Simon Carley realized we had an evidence problem. It was early 2020, and COVID-19 infections were starting to lap at the shores of the United Kingdom, where Carley is an emergency-medicine doctor at hospitals in Manchester. Carley is also a specialist in evidence-based medicine — the transformative idea that physicians should decide how to treat people by referring to rigorous evidence, such as clinical trials.

As cases of COVID-19 climbed in February, Carley thought that clinicians were suddenly abandoning evidence and reaching for drugs just because they sounded biologically plausible. Early studies Carley saw being published often lacked control groups or enrolled too few people to draw firm conclusions. “We were starting to treat patients with these drugs initially just on what seemed like a good idea,” he says. He understood the desire to do whatever is possible for someone gravely ill, but he also knew how dangerous it is to assume a drug works when so many promising treatments prove to be ineffective — or even harmful — in trials.

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COVID-19 booster shots could help in global fight against the virus

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