"if (say) a COVID19 disinformation group is blasting out misinformation on a large scale."
Would that include Fox, Newsmax, and OAN?
Interestingly enough although the US started out far ahead of Canada in terms of the speed of the vaccine rollout, Canada has actually passed the US and is on the brink of achieving herd immunity. This analysis points out the reason Canada has been so successful is that Canadian Conservatives have not endorsed the anti-vax rhetoric that Fox and OAN have propagated...
“In the U.S., news sources have become politicized in a way that has just not happened in Canada,” says
Aengus Bridgman, a political scientist at McGill University in Montreal, and the lead author of
a recent study on the impact of U.S. pandemic misinformation on Canadian social media users.
Here, right- and left-leaning people both trust our large, important media organizations, and polarized media have been completely unsuccessful in comparison to their U.S. counterparts.
“Having that core anchor is really important during a pandemic,” Bridgman adds, “because
what we find is that people who consume traditional media direct from source in the Canadian context have far fewer misperceptions, are less likely to break social distancing norms and are more likely to want to get vaccinated.”
It started way behind the United States, but Canada, with nearly 70 percent of its population now at least partially vaccinated, is well on its way to reaching herd immunity. The U.S. — which has stalled out around 56 percent — is not.
www.yahoo.com
"To get a sense of how high Canada’s full-vaccination rate might go, consider that the country has already vaccinated 80 percent of its eligible population (age 12 and older). The U.S. has vaccinated just 65 percent. This suggests that only Canada is on track to hit the kind of vaccination threshold — 75 percent or higher, according to experts — that can keep Delta and other emerging coronavirus variants from triggering serious, recurring outbreaks (and protect those who can’t receive the vaccine due to preexisting health conditions)."
Wouldn't the proliferation of successful vaccinations in Canada destroy the claims about dangerous consequences from the anti-vax crowd? Or do all of these vaccine "evils" somehow disappear when they cross the border?
The US has one of the highest vaccine hesitancy rates in the world, and Canada one of the lowest...
"Vaccine acceptance is much stronger in Canada than in the U.S. According to Morning Consult’s
tracking survey of 75,000 people across 15 countries, a full 30 percent of U.S. adults say they are either unwilling to get vaccinated (19 percent) or uncertain about it (11 percent). That’s one of the highest hesitancy rates in the world — and it’s nearly double the corresponding rate in Canada, where just 11 percent are unwilling and just 6 percent are uncertain.
Other polls have shown that as few as 6 percent of Canadians say they will never get vaccinated — and that nearly 90 percent want to be inoculated as soon as possible."
I wonder what the difference might be?
Canada doesn’t have the same problem.
Yes, Canadian anti-vaxxers also tend to be conservative — but Canadian conservatives as a whole are far more open to vaccination than their American counterparts. According to
a June Abacus poll, nearly three-quarters (73 percent) of Canadian Conservative Party voters said they were already vaccinated or planned to get a shot in short order, while just 16 percent said they would never get vaccinated — half the share of Trump voters who say the same.
Hmmmm... (and remember we also have Newsmax and OAN)...
"Today, Fox News is available in Canada only via satellite subscription or certain cable providers. It wields little influence."