“Television makes so much at its worst that it can't afford to do its best.”
Ferdinand Friendly Wachenheimer was born in NYC IN 1915. He worked in Radio in the 1930’s when he changed his name to Fred Friendly and moved to television in the 1950’s working with Edward R. Murrow and serving as President of CBS News. He became a preeminent expert on media and communications.
I was fortunate to hear him speak while I was in college and will always remember a question he asked of the audience:
“What is being sold on Television?”
The crowd then responded with answers like: “Beer”, “Soap”, “American Consumerism”.
“NO!”, he explained. “The thing being sold on Television is The Audience.” The single motivation for media executives is the acquisition of the greatest number of viewers/listeners/readers, because it is that mass of people that is being sold to the beer, soap and automobile manufacturers and it is those ad sales that are the revenue for the media companies.
This is critical when considering what is broadcast today on cable news channels. If the audience declines, revenue declines. It does not matter what the advertisements are for, they are simply the customers of the channel, not you or me.
As I have written about in the past, many of our fellow citizens are “a-rational”. They are not interested in analyzing information to reach a conclusion; rather, they are only interested in hearing information that supports their pre-determined position on an issue.
For those on the left, Rachel Maddow needs to bring a new story that horrifies you each night so that you continue to tune in.
For those on the right, FoxNews needs to reaffirm your pre-determined views so that you continue to tune in.
Today, I am concerned about what I am beginning to see in the right-wing media outlets concerning COVID-19. For many of our population, those who have already cemented their positions on vaccines and the virus, they are being fed new analyses that rewrite history, and it is important for all of us on both sides of the political spectrum to be aware of this and recognize its danger.
The argument being made is this:
Omicron is infecting virtually everyone, so all the efforts that the Democrats have been making over the past 2 years were futile and useless and that the harm to the country of shutting down the economy was worse than the cure; the mandates for masks and social distancing did nothing and, therefore the Republicans who resisted these incursions into our privacy had been right all along.
This is a terrible remaking of the actual events and I think it is important to review what has happened.
There are several “truisms” concerning vaccines that must be acknowledged:
- No vaccine EVER has been designed to create a shield around people that would prevent a virus from entering your body.
This is not what a vaccine does. Vaccines prime your immune system so that when a virus enters your body, the defenses already exist to control and eliminate the virus before severe infection occurs.
You can think of this like the alarm system in your home. Without an alarm system, anyone can break into your home and spend as much time as they like stealing and destroying your home.
But if you have an alarm system, you can moderate these dangers. You have a code that shuts the alarm off when you enter, and you can give that code to someone else to allow them in by themselves. Someone who has not been “primed” with that code can still enter your home, but after they enter, the system has been alerted and ready to be activated. The alarm itself may scare off the intruder, or the police may be notified to come quickly and lessen the potential damage by the intruder.
No virus EVER has been controlled or eradicated by natural immunity conferred by population infection.
Without vaccination there has NEVER been a virus that was eliminated by herd immunity through infection.
Vaccines have removed the scourges of Measles, Mumps, Diphtheria, Tetanus, Typhoid, Smallpox, Yellow Fever, Influenza and Polio from our population. Except for Smallpox, none of these viruses have been eliminated from the environment, they still pop-up in isolated areas where vaccination has been ignored, so we know that they are still around. The most important take-home is that although they are in our environment, they do not create epidemics with large numbers of deaths each year – due to vaccination.
The Real Story.
For those of you who have been reading my essays over the past 22 months (whew), you will recall that at the beginning of this pandemic I echoed the concerns of many in the scientific/healthcare community who were concerned about two things:
First, that the hospitals were being filled up and that they were short on PPE, staff and beds and could not sustain an increase in demand from more and more ill patients.
Second, that we needed to control the rate of spread (reduce the curve) to get to a point at which treatments and vaccines would begin to come online.
Those are the reasons we pushed for social distancing, in order to slow the spread of virus from one individual to another and thereby dampen the viral spread acceleration.
Those are the reasons we pushed for the use of masks (when the mask supply was sufficient to fulfill the needs of the healthcare workers). Who doesn’t remember the stories of healthcare and hospital workers washing the few masks they had available to them? Who doesn’t remember all the articles about how to clean your masks using Hydrogen Peroxide mists? As a stop gap for ordinary individuals, we were using cloth face coverings until the mask production ramped up enough for us to be able to purchase them ourselves.
Those are the reasons we had shutdowns, to lessen the rate of spread of infections so that hospitals could continue to treat the seriously ill.
We were not wrong!
Had we not followed the science, had we not worked to control the spread of the virus, our healthcare services would have been overwhelmed and the catastrophic consequences would have been unimaginable.
We did what we intended to do. Hospitals were pushed to, but not beyond the breaking point. They learned how to treat patients a little better. We learned that we needn’t be so afraid of touching a surface that was potentially touched by someone infected. We learned that some drugs worked, and others did not. But, most importantly, vaccines were developed, tested, and approved in record time. Vaccine production and distribution was ramped up to the point that everyone in this country above the age of 5 now has the availability of the vaccine.
The vaccine is immensely successful at preventing severe disease, and of lessening the levels of expelled virus. Vaccinated people with breakthrough infections clear the virus from their system much faster than those who are unvaccinated and infected. Virus shed from people with breakthrough infections is far, far lower than that shed from unvaccinated, infected people.
The Bad News
It does appear that Omicron is so infectious and so transmittable that we can all expect that eventually we will all be infected.
The Good News
It also appears that if you have been vaccinated you will either experience no symptoms, or just minor symptoms for a few days.
BUT…
Those who have not been vaccinated still are at risk for hospitalization and death. Their own personal decision to delay or refuse vaccination cannot be overcome by getting their first dose today and expecting to be protected tomorrow. The longer they wait, the greater their exposure and their risk of death. This is not a game.
I want to close with another quote from Fred Friendly:
“TV is bigger than any story it reports. It is the greatest teaching tool since the printing press.”