Communication

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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Report on a model community resilience program

CES - Neighborhood Resilience : Florida Atlantic University - Center for Environmental Studies

In the Summer of 2019, researchers at the FAU Center for Environmental Studies (CES) collaborated with Jan Booher of Heron Bridge Education, LLC on a resilience mapping initiative in Broward County, Florida. The goal of this collaboration was to bring to light the many complex factors and processes at play within communities, and within the Estates of Fort Lauderdale community specifically, that work to contribute to community resilience to environmental hazards including flooding, extreme wind and extreme heat.

Reputable census-based vulnerability and resilience assessments such as the Social Vulnerability Index (SoVi) and the Baseline Resilience Indicators for Communities (BRIC) offered an important conceptual foundation for this study. Utilizing the BRIC indicators and framework as a point of departure, this study serves to examine the roles that locally tailored BRIC indicators and dimension types play in shaping resilience within Broward County communities.

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Analysis: Vaccine Skepticism is More Than a Lack of Knowledge Problem. It’s Actually About Gut Beliefs.

For years, scientists and doctors have treated vaccine skepticism as a knowledge problem. If patients were hesitant to get vaccinated, the thinking went, they simply needed more information.

But as public health officials now work to convince Americans to get Covid-19 vaccines as quickly as possible, new social science research suggests that a set of deeply held beliefs is at the heart of many people’s resistance, complicating efforts to bring the coronavirus pandemic under control.

“The instinct from the medical community was, ‘If only we could educate them,’” said Dr. Saad Omer, director of the Yale Institute for Global Health, who studies vaccine skepticism. “It was patronizing and, as it turns out, not true.”

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