Zero Covid goal: how is it done?

Now let’s all pretend it doesn’t exist, and maybe that’s right; for our mental health. But there is, and there will be, who knows for how long. Therefore, once the 500 million cases and the six million deaths in the world have been exceeded, it is good to start wondering how Covid is seriously and forever controlled. The answer, net of sensible behaviors and masks, is obvious: the vaccine, waiting, more than possible, for one that is active against all the variants expected in the autumn. But there remains a hard core of people who do not want the vaccine to do so: to date 11% of Italians over 12, and 46% of children between 5 and 12. Many, too many if you really want to declassify Covid.

Il New England Journal of Medicine makes a proposal: to convince the undecided, why not take the triumphant anti-smoking campaign as a model? What does that have to do with anything? You will say. Well, it has to do with it.

In the 60s of the last century smoking was supertrendy, everyone smoked, the winners smoked, the beautiful smoked. Today it is the exact opposite: who smokes is a marginal, one who damages himself and others, one who certainly does not make a good impression on us. And this despite the violent and mendacious multibillion-dollar campaigns of tobacco producers. Similarly, the no-vax people portray themselves as cool, cunning and savvy; he built his own aesthetic / ethics on this being “beyond” us mere mortals who accept the truths of science and the rules of the civilized world. And he propagates all this cool cunning with a heap of nonsense similar to the lies of Big Tobacco. With subliminal campaigns of mockery of insiders. Of praise of transgression.

The Nejm details what made smoking change status, with the idea that it could also work with those who feel “great” by rejecting the vaccine. Net of correct information from the doctors, which however does not “hole”, the key is to hit in the stomach. People who die of suffocation shown naked. Statements of who would like the vaccine while being intubated. Representation of no-vax as ugly, smelly, stupid and harmful to all of us. Yes, just as it was to discover that passive smoking is bad for all of us, it would be useful, the Nejm underlines, also to push on the accelerator of the damage caused to each of us by no-vax (health, economic, psychological damage). They must become reprobate, says the Nejm, as smokers are today. Too hard? Bah, you decide.