Just thought I’d share a couple of things I had to say about the vaccine today:
Everybody: Stop getting excited about the vaccine shipping. You’re not going to get it for a long time. If you’re one of the few who DO, the desired effect won’t occur until everyone else does. Which will be a long time. And your life cannot, MUST not, change until then. Got it?
— Brad Warthen (@BradWarthen) December 13, 2020
Basically, I was just sick of all the headlines that read to me (maybe not to you, but to me) like “Yay, it’s over! Here come the vaccines!” So I added to the above thread:
For my friends in the press: The small headline should simply say, “Vaccine ships. Don’t get excited.” The full body of the story should read: “Now go think about something else. And stay away from people, and wear your damn’ mask — properly. -30-“
— Brad Warthen (@BradWarthen) December 13, 2020
Of course, part of the thing is that after I switched from news to editorial 26 years ago, I started thinking less it terms of “here’s a fact,” and more in terms of “so what should we do?” I mean, yeah, it’s a fact — vaccine doses are shipping. It’s the beginning of the beginning of a very hopeful thing that we look forward to happening over the next several months.
But what do all of us need most to be hearing right now? It is that this is a very dangerous moment, and we all need to hunker down with masks and social distancing more strenuously than ever.
And instead, the message I keep seeing is, “Look — vaccines!” And I worry about people seeing only that, and not the stories about how bad things are, and how much worse they’ll be if we as a country ignore warnings during Christmas the way we did on Thanksgiving….
If everybody reads a lot, we’re OK. Carefully read the NYT or the WSJ or Washington Post and you’ll get the whole picture. But plenty of people don’t read news at all, and watch TV, where they might see stuff like the headline pictured above. And as we know, lots of other people don’t get information from any professional news source, print or broadcast, and just go by what their friends tell them on social media. Or what Trump tells them, God help us…