It's very hard to say, but IMHO the best thing that governments and public health officials could have done (and could do) with this whole scenario is just ... lay off ... on these people once the majority were vaccinated and Omicron came on the scene and the vaccines were shown not to be "sterilizing" against it. Putting pressure on past Jan 2022 or so simply became counterproductive.
To be clear: I think the vax skeptics/opponents were wrong. I've had every one of them I could get as have my kids. And I've still not caught COVID, over 3 years on (or if I did it was so mild as to be undetectable.) I think the vaccines are great.
But these people have been backed into an ideological corner, and they're behaving like anybody when they're cornered. It is now best to back away, because we are now dealing with another kind of contagion because many anti-vaxxers became ripe pickings for formerly unrelated far right, conspiracy type radicalization.
I think there are many lessons for public health officials here for future campaigns.
There was basically nothing any public official in the US could do to steer the ship in any kind of direction, once the political leader of 75 million Americans had hijacked the entire disease, public health measures to address it, and medical treatments of it, for some pretty over the top and insane political pivoting.
The timeline really highlights the volume of avenues he took that damaged the public health apparatus around COVID.
its no big deal, itll go away soon, i took hydroxychloroquine, masks dont work, "If we didn’t do testing, we’d have no cases", stop shutting down, kids with the sniffles are classified as COVID, and a near constant name drop and slamming of Fauci.
The guy undermined HIS OWN public health officials constantly and turned them into conspiracy scapegoats. The battle was lost well before the vaccine was even released. What did he think his supporters would do when Fauci came out and said "take this vaccine"? Hell, Trump has been supporting the vaccine for at least 2 years now, and even he cant fix the mess he made.
To be clear: I think the vax skeptics/opponents were wrong. I've had every one of them I could get as have my kids. And I've still not caught COVID, over 3 years on (or if I did it was so mild as to be undetectable.) I think the vaccines are great.
But these people have been backed into an ideological corner, and they're behaving like anybody when they're cornered. It is now best to back away, because we are now dealing with another kind of contagion because many anti-vaxxers became ripe pickings for formerly unrelated far right, conspiracy type radicalization.
I think there are many lessons for public health officials here for future campaigns.