It was hardly clear that the vaccination plan was being strengthened with the arrival of millions of doses, which could reach the entire population at risk in a short time, the media companies and the main opposition leaders changed the axis of their attacks to the only way that can rescue the country from the nightmare of the pandemic. Thus arose the speech of the second doses. It was necessary to transform that pleasant feeling of beginning to be protected into the anguish of not being completely protected.
Polls, especially those commissioned by the opposition, show that there is a perceptible correlation between the number of applications and the votes. Support for the Government grows among the population that is already immunized or that, at least, sees its elders reached by the campaign. That explains why for a while the media story focuses on the 5.4% who received the two doses and not on the 20% reached by the first.
But that is not enough, for the millions already vaccinated, a reinforcement message is needed: if they do not give you the second dose, the first does not work; Worse yet, if they don’t give you the second dose, you can end up suffering more than if you didn’t have the first.
It does not matter that such arguments are absurd. To influence a good part of the population, all you need is a national chain of irresponsible media and journalists who, against all evidence, repeat the slogans minute by minute.
The data available
The strategy of vaccinating the largest number of people with the first dose, postponing the second, has already proven its effectiveness in Great Britain and Canada and today it is supported by the majority of specialists around the world for those countries that do not have doses enough to complete both applications immediately, or almost all of them.
It is also long proven that the effectiveness of the first doses of all recognized vaccines is not only high to reduce infections, but is also very high to avoid serious cases and deaths.
The speech would even be funny if it didn’t involve human lives. Mauricio Macri himself traveled to Miami to apply and praise Johnson’s single-dose vaccine, which declares an effectiveness of 66.3%, while the PRO leadership and its related communicators terrorize those who are waiting for the second dose of Sputnik, although guarantees 79.4% effectiveness only with the application of the first one.
The chain of misfortune
In a polarized society, opposing people only have ears to the opposing media. The polls show that the voters of the Frente de Todos always expressed a willingness to be immunized and that the doubts were concentrated in those of Together for Change in percentages that are worrying for the success of the campaign.
That reality changed as the media, convinced that the global shortage of vaccines would prevent mass immunization, insisted that not inoculating a person was equivalent to murdering them and that what the government was actually doing was “genocide”. The most determined compared it to the dictatorship.
