Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla recently doubled down on vaccine misinformation peddlers, saying, “People who spread misinformation on Covid-19 vaccines are “criminals” and have cost “millions of lives”.
Bourla said there is a “very small” group of people that purposefully circulate misinformation on the shots, misleading those who are already hesitant about getting vaccinated.
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“Those people are criminals,” he told Atlantic Council CEO Frederick Kempe. “They’re not bad people. They’re criminals because they have literally cost millions of lives.”
“The only thing that stands between the new way of life and the current way of life is, frankly, hesitancy to vaccinations,” he added.
According to a survey published Monday by the Kaiser Family Foundation, more than three-quarters of U.S. adults either believe or aren’t sure about at least one of eight false statements about COVID or the vaccines.
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Unvaccinated adults and Republicans among those most likely to hold misconceptions.
One of the survey’s key findings also said, “People’s trusted news sources are correlated with their belief in COVID-19 misinformation.
The share who hold at least four misconceptions is small (between 11-16%) among those who say they trust COVID-19 information from network news, local TV news, CNN, MSNBC, and NPR.
This share rises to nearly four in ten among those who trust COVID-19 information from One America News (37%) and Fox News (36%), and to nearly half (46%) among those who trust information from Newsmax.
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One thing this study cannot disentangle is whether this is because people are exposed to misinformation from those news sources, or whether the types of people who choose those news sources are the same ones who are pre-disposed to believe certain types of misinformation for other reasons.”
Among the falsehoods are that Covid vaccines contain microchips, cause infertility and change one’s DNA, according to the survey.
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