April 25, 2021 • 19 mins
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to the Daily Dive Weekend Edition. I'm Oscar Ramirez,
and every week I explore the top stories making waves
in the news and some that are just playing interesting.
I'll connect you with the journalists and the people who
know the story and bring you news without the noise
so you can make an informed decision. You can catch
a new episode of The Daily Dive every Monday through Friday,
and it's ready when you wake up. On the weekend edition,
(00:27):
I'll be bringing you some of the best stories from
the week in coronavirus news this week, COVID vaccination cards
are increasingly being used in fraud scams. Recent listings on
eBay are promising an authentic CDC vaccination card for about
ten dollars, and scammers are also using those vaccination selfies
(00:47):
you might be posting to make their face look even
more real. For more on these vaccination card scams, will
speak to Dan Diamond, national health reporter at the Washington Post.
Many Americans, more than half of adults have now legally
a vaccination cards by going to get vaccinated, so the
trend is pointing in the right direction. The challenges that
(01:07):
there are many Americans who don't want to be vaccinated
at all, and with the human possibility of organizations, sporting arenas, businesses,
some travel and so on that are are asking for
proof of vaccination, some of these Americans have decided that
the way to meet that potential requirement is to forge
(01:29):
their own paper vaccination card or buy one off eBay.
Now I don't think regulators know how much this is happening.
It's possible it's just a fringe, but there's certainly a
lot of interest in it. And my story for The
Washington Post delve into why this is happening and who
some of these scameras are. I do want to get
into who one of these cameras are because it's an
interesting story there. But let's start off first with why
(01:53):
did we get these paper cards. My understanding is that
there was a lot of plans ready to go digital
on this, and that the paper card were kind of
the fail safe, the backup plan that didn't happen. That's
what they went with. So how did that part of
it work out? About a year ago, when the federal
government was starting to roll out its anticipated plans for
the vaccine, knowing that a vaccine could come at the
(02:15):
end of the year, or come very soon. There was
talk about doing a digital system where if you've checked
out a library book and you've got the email saying
your library book is due next week, your library book
is due today. Similar idea that you would get digital
reminders about where you were in the queue, when it
was your time to get a shot, when it was
(02:36):
your time to get a second shot, and so on.
That plan never really materialized. Now, whether that was because
CDC officials, officials at the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention were aiming too high and they just ran out
of time and expertise, that might be one reason. Another
is that, given the complexity of setting up the digital system,
paper cards were seen as the easiest way to give
(02:59):
people remind there's to make Slacking on some basic level
happened as fast as possible, and as the end of
the year approached and vaccines were starting to be prepared
to be shipped out to states, that's when CDC started
telling other officials, will be going with paper cards instead.
Easy to use, but also easy to counterfeit as well.
(03:21):
So now let's get into one of these listings that
you saw on eBay. You guys actually were able to
obtain one of these fake cards. But it's a weird Sorry.
It was like a real card but illegally obtained, So
tell us about how that worked out. Yeah, it appeared
to be a real card. There was a person on
eBay among the many people anyway, listing vaccination cards for sale,
(03:42):
or in one case, listing a protective pouch for a
vaccination card for It was about ten dollars, I think,
and if you bought the vaccination card pouch, as one
whistleblower did, that person got an actual blank CDC vaccination card,
and using clues that the whistleblower shared with me, I
(04:04):
was able to trace back that account to a pharmacist
in the Chicago area who works in a major pharmacy chain.
I'm not mentioning that person's name or the chain because
that person claimed to me that he had no knowledge
of these cards that were being sold through his account
that have been sold for the past couple of weeks.
He claimed that his eBay password has been mysteriously changed
(04:26):
and he didn't think about fixing it. It was odd
because he has other listings up that he did confirm
that he posted either way. In fact, this was happening
under girds the issue that I think is bigger that
these cards are either available on eBay on Etsy, people
are making them at home, because as you pointed out,
they're very easy to counterfeit, and if a pharmacist is
(04:48):
even tangentially involved in this, it points up that there
is some market for these kinds of fake cards. Yeah,
I mean the pharmacies for themselves. And as you know,
I guess there's an investigation going on, so we'll have
to see happens. But the pharmacy say that they have
protections in place to track the cards, basically one card
for every dose that they're going to administer, So that
(05:09):
just kind of adds another little wrinkle into all of this.
So we'll see what happens. But as you mentioned, it
shows that the demand is there. And the last thing
I wanted to just kind of bring up. You even
mentioned in your article that some of these scameras are
exploiting all those selfies that people are posting. You know,
people are excited to get their vaccines and get back
to normal, so they're putting it on social media. But
this kind of also helps these scammers when they can
(05:31):
see those lot numbers for the vaccine. It helps them
get the wording and the numbers right to make their
fakes look more authentic. This is something that attorneys general
have been warning about for a few months that, in
the best of intentions, people posting photos of getting vaccinated
hoping to encourage others to do the same, but by
putting their names, their birthdates, the lot numbers up, that
(05:54):
is sharing personal private information, and it makes it that
much easier for a scammera to simply copy all that down.
Dan Diamond, national health reporter at the Washington Post, thank
you very much for joining us. Thanks for having me back.
Vaccine hesitancy continues to be a problem for the country.
(06:15):
More than half of Americans have received at least one
dose of a COVID vaccine, and while that's good news,
experts increasingly feel that we might not get to her immunity.
Recent poll suggest that about fifteen of Americans don't plan
on being vaccinated, which won't help in the effort for
more and why her immunity might no longer be on
the table, we'll speak to Elizabeth Weis, national correspondent at
(06:37):
USA Today. So the first thing to know is that
so her immunity is basically there, are enough people in it.
It actually started out in cattle, which is what we
call it, heard that there were enough people who are
immune to a disease that it basically can't find any
more people to infect, and it stopped spreading and for COVID,
(06:58):
as you said, and then we're still learning how COVID works.
So at first we thought sixty to seventy. Then we
learn more and we're like, yeah, maybe seventy eight with
the variants, maybe worked at ninety. Now what we're hearing
is that, yes, the United States could totally get the
full herd immunity if of Americans got vaccinated against the
(07:20):
COVID nineteen virus. We're not going to get there because
from all the surveys that we're seeing, fifteen to percent
of Americans are either saying they are unlikely or definitively
won't get vaccinated. And if we are at seventy, vaccination
will never reach her community. The outside of that is
(07:42):
they're saying, but if you read me, Unice, there's great
data out of Israel, and you may be okay, even
though yeah, let's and let's talk a little bit about
the data out of Israel, because they're number one right
now when it comes to vaccinations, they're about sixty so
they're doing really well there. And what they saw is
that when they hit over people vaccinated, they started to
(08:05):
see cases that's really severe cases of it starts to
plummet right away, So right away you can see the
gains hitting there when the majority of the population gets vaccinated.
Everybody that I talked to said, if you want to
know what happens when a lot of people get vaccinated,
look at what's happening in Israel. And the news from
there is great. And the other news out of there
(08:25):
which is heartening is that it looks like when you
get a lot of people, a lot of adults vaccinated,
the cases in children starts to fall a lot as well.
And again this is just because that's what viruses do.
They're looking for the next person to infect so that
they can keep moving around in a population. And the
(08:45):
fewer people there are that it can infect, the harder
time it has to move around, and so it's it's
protective of people who haven't gotten vaccinated, and of course
the people who have gotten vaccinated are well protected. So
that's all really heartening. The thing that experts were telling
me is what they're concerned about is will end up
with the US looking a bit like a patchwork quilt.
(09:08):
There's going to be some areas with very high rates
of vaccination where there's very little virus circulating, and so
if you've been vaccinated, or even if you weren't able
to get vaccinated, you're probably not going to get sick.
And if you were vaccinated, even if you do get sick,
you won't get desperately ill. But there are other parts
of the country where vaccination rates are lower, and they
(09:30):
may stay lower, and in those areas, the possibility of
getting infected with COVID will be just as it is
right now, and COVID will continue to be just as
dangerous as it is right now. Unfortunately, with a lot
of things nowadays, it's it's just almost comes with the
territory for everything. Now, you know, these splits have become political.
You were talking about some polling and stuff about Democrats
(09:53):
sy they have plans to get vaccinated or have been
already on the Republican side, for six percent say they
don't plan to, and I think it was like a
hard thirty percent that said they're not going to get
it at all. So this is where the difficulty comes.
This is why there's you know, information campaigns geared towards conservatives,
obviously communities of color, younger people also to get them
(10:14):
all on board to get it. But that patchwork, you know,
we might see these pockets where certain counties, certain states
continue to have these higher infection rates. No. I did
talk to one population biologists at the University of Wisconsin
who he had a slightly more hopeful message. He said,
you know, yes, people are saying, no, there's it's conservatives,
(10:37):
it's also evangelical Christians, white Evangelical Christians, because rates of
hesitancy in the African American community or actually went down.
But his message was a little more hopeful because he said,
you know what, I were starting to maybe see glimmers
of this as more people see lots of folks around
them who have gotten vaccinated, They know people have gotten vaccinated,
(10:58):
and they see that nothing horrible happened to them, and
the in fact are able to open up their lives
in ways that they haven't for a long time. And
also as we continue to see the unvaccinated getting sick
and sometimes ending up in the hospital and sometimes dying,
that he's hopeful that over time, some of that that
hesitancy or that outright refusal will shift, and that we
(11:22):
will see those vaccination rates live even in the pockets
where there's kind of hard refusals in place. I have
to say, just anecdotally, I went to go get my
second shot just very recently, and in California they just
opened up to all tiers so everybody can come and
get a vaccine now, and there was a lot of
people at the site that I went. It was a
(11:43):
larger side as well. So the demand is there. People
still do want to get vaccinated, and in CITs especially
there's still a love demand, but in a lot of places,
especially in rural areas, there isn't as much demand as
people were hoping for. I mean, well, we will see
how it plays out to April. Now, so we first
saw the vaccine, I mean, if you say January, you
(12:04):
know we're four months in. These things take time, so
hopefully those rates will go up everywhere. What's remarkable is
that we're at a little more than fifty nationally have
gotten at least one shot. I mean, that's pretty amazing.
It is, it definitely is. And so the new focus
now is containment similar to like the flu, possible regular
(12:25):
booster shots annually. Maybe we've heard things like that Edifiser
and Maderna, So we're on our way. Herd immunity, the
definition of it might not be reached, but we still
need to keep fighting forward on getting everybody vaccinated. Elizabeth Weis,
national correspondent at USA Today. Thank you very much for
joining us. You're so welcome. Thank you finally for this week.
(12:49):
Get ready for the forever Maskers. There are pockets of
people that have indicated that despite the easing of mask
wearing rules and increased vaccination rates, they will most likely
be wearing their masks are beyond the pandemic. Reasons vary,
with many saying they have avoided the flu and other
illnesses and want to keep that street going. For more
on those who won't be putting their masks away just yet,
(13:10):
we'll speak to Eve Piser, writer at New York Magazine.
In my work, I kind of like looking for anomalies
and people who go against the grain in some way.
So I found some people who wanted to wear masks
after the pandemic ended, and they all kind of had
different reasons. Some people it was as simple as they
(13:35):
hadn't gotten a cold since the pandemic started. Yeah, and
they wanted to keep it that way. But I think
for others there was more emotional complexity, and it was
kind of had to do with how traumatized they've been
by what's happened over the past year. Yeah, let's start
off with the first one, because I think that's the
easiest one to understand. A lot of people might even
(13:57):
feel very similar. I know I do. I haven't really
had any major illness, flu, cold, anything like that. I
think we saw flu rates plummet this past year, like
almost really no flu season. That happened in part because
a lot of people were wearing their masks. So there's
a few people that you spoke to. I think Michael Bizarro,
he's a Colorado teacher in particular, said Hey, this has
(14:18):
been working for me. I want to keep it going.
Michael Bizarro has a job that involves interacting with kids,
and I'm sure we can all remember that when we
were kids and went to school, you just had got
cold after cold. So I thought that his reasoning made
a lot of sense. And I mean my interview with
him was longer, and I obviously didn't get to include
(14:41):
all of it in the article, but he said that
his fiance works in public health, so it's something that
he's been really conscious of and he's been really focused
on keeping their household safe. But that's also been hard
because he's the choir director for the school and that's
the one time at school where he can't wear a mask.
But still just this one change for him. I mean,
(15:03):
I think for me, when people said, oh, I haven't
gotten sick since I started wearing a mask, in my head,
I was kind of wondering, well, there are other things
that play like you're during the pandemic. You're just interacting
with a lot less people than you normally would. But
I think Michael Bizarro kind of presented a compelling argument
because he's interacting with the same amount of kids as
(15:26):
he was before the pandemic, but there's been this one
big shift that has changed his life for the better.
Let's talk about some of the more psychological effects I
guess about it. One of the psychologists that you spoke
to about it says that the pandemic kind of gave
everybody almost like an anxiety disorder, and wearing the mask
is this safety behavior that can alleviate some of those anxieties.
(15:48):
You feel like, if I'm wearing the mask, I'm at
least doing the most I can to protect myself. And
there was a few common threads that people had that
kind of surrounded that they were trying to calm those
anxieties down. I mean, I think with the pandemic, there
are a lot of behaviors you can control to make
your risk of getting this disease less likely, but most
(16:12):
of it is pretty much out of your control. And
so I think that wearing a mask makes people feel proactive.
And the psychologists I spoke to Lena Pearl, she said
that it's a way of relieving anxiety in a similar
way that having a drink after a long day at
work relieves anxiety, or going running or any sorts of
(16:36):
behaviors that people do to be less stressed out. But
I think that she also made a really important point,
which is the psychological benefits of getting to see other
people's faces and how that can actually be something that
helps you feel more calm, because if you're walking down
(16:56):
the street and you see a stranger and you see
the face and they smile at you, it can kind
of put you at ease and say Okay, like I
see strangers all the time and these people don't actually
pose any threats to me. Yeah, it could be a
drawback to constantly wearing that mask, having half of your
face hidden. So definitely get that. I mean, we've all
had to start being able to read people's eyes only
(17:18):
just you know, from the top, and if somebody's wearing sunglasses,
you're you're not gonna get anywhere on that front. Um. Yeah,
So definitely that's another part of that. Yeah. And so yeah,
I mean I'm one of those people. I'm ready to
take the mask off, you know, just to kind of
go back to normal. But I've kind of long posed
that question. I never thought it would be something cultural
here in the United States, but we've seen it in
(17:39):
a lot of Asian countries where mask wearing is just
kind of part of their everyday life. And I've long
thought that there's gonna be a lot of people that
are gonna want to hold onto that. Not everybody, obviously,
but a lot of people still wanting to keep those
masks on. Yeah. I mean, I think that the pandemic
has shifted life in all these pro found ways, and
(18:01):
it's made people be more insular, and it's made their
world smaller and made them afraid of the public and
like scared of strangers. And I think that even as
more and more people get vaccinated and rates and death
continue to go down, those feelings won't just go away.
(18:25):
One of the people I talked to, this really lovely
woman named Robin our Genty, had like a really traumatic pandemic.
She had a really close family member die. She didn't
really get to see anybody. She said, she hadn't touched
anybody in over a year, and she had previously been
(18:46):
kind of agoraphobic before the pandemic, and then the pandemic
affirmed all those fears that she maybe once thought were
irrational about being afraid of being in public spaces, where
she was learned like, no public spaces really are threatening,
and now she's going to do everything she can to
hold on to that safety net in the mask. Yeah.
(19:07):
She you mentioned that she's one of the people that
are going to be having this on for a long time.
So I think we'll see, you know, as all the
regulations do start to get ease, you know, we'll start
to be able to point out those people that are
going to be the long haul mask wears. Eve Piser,
writer at New York Magazine, Thank you very much for
joining us, Thanks for having me. That's it for this weekend.
(19:29):
Be sure to check out The Daily Dive every Monday
through Friday. Join us on social media at Daily Dive
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us a comment, give us a rating, and tell us
the stories that you're interested in. Although The Daily Dive
and I Heart Radio or subscribe wherever you get your podcast.
This episode of The Daily Dive has been engineered by
Tony Sarantino. I'm Oscar Ramirez in Los Angeles and this
(19:54):
was your Daily Dive weekend edition
Welcome to the Daily Dive Weekend Edition. I'm Oscar Ramirez,
and every week I explore the top stories making waves
in the news and some that are just playing interesting.
I'll connect you with the journalists and the people who
know the story and bring you news without the noise
so you can make an informed decision. You can catch
a new episode of The Daily Dive every Monday through Friday,
and it's ready when you wake up. On the weekend edition,
(00:27):
I'll be bringing you some of the best stories from
the week in coronavirus news this week, COVID vaccination cards
are increasingly being used in fraud scams. Recent listings on
eBay are promising an authentic CDC vaccination card for about
ten dollars, and scammers are also using those vaccination selfies
(00:47):
you might be posting to make their face look even
more real. For more on these vaccination card scams, will
speak to Dan Diamond, national health reporter at the Washington Post.
Many Americans, more than half of adults have now legally
a vaccination cards by going to get vaccinated, so the
trend is pointing in the right direction. The challenges that
(01:07):
there are many Americans who don't want to be vaccinated
at all, and with the human possibility of organizations, sporting arenas, businesses,
some travel and so on that are are asking for
proof of vaccination, some of these Americans have decided that
the way to meet that potential requirement is to forge
(01:29):
their own paper vaccination card or buy one off eBay.
Now I don't think regulators know how much this is happening.
It's possible it's just a fringe, but there's certainly a
lot of interest in it. And my story for The
Washington Post delve into why this is happening and who
some of these scameras are. I do want to get
into who one of these cameras are because it's an
interesting story there. But let's start off first with why
(01:53):
did we get these paper cards. My understanding is that
there was a lot of plans ready to go digital
on this, and that the paper card were kind of
the fail safe, the backup plan that didn't happen. That's
what they went with. So how did that part of
it work out? About a year ago, when the federal
government was starting to roll out its anticipated plans for
the vaccine, knowing that a vaccine could come at the
(02:15):
end of the year, or come very soon. There was
talk about doing a digital system where if you've checked
out a library book and you've got the email saying
your library book is due next week, your library book
is due today. Similar idea that you would get digital
reminders about where you were in the queue, when it
was your time to get a shot, when it was
(02:36):
your time to get a second shot, and so on.
That plan never really materialized. Now, whether that was because
CDC officials, officials at the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention were aiming too high and they just ran out
of time and expertise, that might be one reason. Another
is that, given the complexity of setting up the digital system,
paper cards were seen as the easiest way to give
(02:59):
people remind there's to make Slacking on some basic level
happened as fast as possible, and as the end of
the year approached and vaccines were starting to be prepared
to be shipped out to states, that's when CDC started
telling other officials, will be going with paper cards instead.
Easy to use, but also easy to counterfeit as well.
(03:21):
So now let's get into one of these listings that
you saw on eBay. You guys actually were able to
obtain one of these fake cards. But it's a weird Sorry.
It was like a real card but illegally obtained, So
tell us about how that worked out. Yeah, it appeared
to be a real card. There was a person on
eBay among the many people anyway, listing vaccination cards for sale,
(03:42):
or in one case, listing a protective pouch for a
vaccination card for It was about ten dollars, I think,
and if you bought the vaccination card pouch, as one
whistleblower did, that person got an actual blank CDC vaccination card,
and using clues that the whistleblower shared with me, I
(04:04):
was able to trace back that account to a pharmacist
in the Chicago area who works in a major pharmacy chain.
I'm not mentioning that person's name or the chain because
that person claimed to me that he had no knowledge
of these cards that were being sold through his account
that have been sold for the past couple of weeks.
He claimed that his eBay password has been mysteriously changed
(04:26):
and he didn't think about fixing it. It was odd
because he has other listings up that he did confirm
that he posted either way. In fact, this was happening
under girds the issue that I think is bigger that
these cards are either available on eBay on Etsy, people
are making them at home, because as you pointed out,
they're very easy to counterfeit, and if a pharmacist is
(04:48):
even tangentially involved in this, it points up that there
is some market for these kinds of fake cards. Yeah,
I mean the pharmacies for themselves. And as you know,
I guess there's an investigation going on, so we'll have
to see happens. But the pharmacy say that they have
protections in place to track the cards, basically one card
for every dose that they're going to administer, So that
(05:09):
just kind of adds another little wrinkle into all of this.
So we'll see what happens. But as you mentioned, it
shows that the demand is there. And the last thing
I wanted to just kind of bring up. You even
mentioned in your article that some of these scameras are
exploiting all those selfies that people are posting. You know,
people are excited to get their vaccines and get back
to normal, so they're putting it on social media. But
this kind of also helps these scammers when they can
(05:31):
see those lot numbers for the vaccine. It helps them
get the wording and the numbers right to make their
fakes look more authentic. This is something that attorneys general
have been warning about for a few months that, in
the best of intentions, people posting photos of getting vaccinated
hoping to encourage others to do the same, but by
putting their names, their birthdates, the lot numbers up, that
(05:54):
is sharing personal private information, and it makes it that
much easier for a scammera to simply copy all that down.
Dan Diamond, national health reporter at the Washington Post, thank
you very much for joining us. Thanks for having me back.
Vaccine hesitancy continues to be a problem for the country.
(06:15):
More than half of Americans have received at least one
dose of a COVID vaccine, and while that's good news,
experts increasingly feel that we might not get to her immunity.
Recent poll suggest that about fifteen of Americans don't plan
on being vaccinated, which won't help in the effort for
more and why her immunity might no longer be on
the table, we'll speak to Elizabeth Weis, national correspondent at
(06:37):
USA Today. So the first thing to know is that
so her immunity is basically there, are enough people in it.
It actually started out in cattle, which is what we
call it, heard that there were enough people who are
immune to a disease that it basically can't find any
more people to infect, and it stopped spreading and for COVID,
(06:58):
as you said, and then we're still learning how COVID works.
So at first we thought sixty to seventy. Then we
learn more and we're like, yeah, maybe seventy eight with
the variants, maybe worked at ninety. Now what we're hearing
is that, yes, the United States could totally get the
full herd immunity if of Americans got vaccinated against the
(07:20):
COVID nineteen virus. We're not going to get there because
from all the surveys that we're seeing, fifteen to percent
of Americans are either saying they are unlikely or definitively
won't get vaccinated. And if we are at seventy, vaccination
will never reach her community. The outside of that is
(07:42):
they're saying, but if you read me, Unice, there's great
data out of Israel, and you may be okay, even
though yeah, let's and let's talk a little bit about
the data out of Israel, because they're number one right
now when it comes to vaccinations, they're about sixty so
they're doing really well there. And what they saw is
that when they hit over people vaccinated, they started to
(08:05):
see cases that's really severe cases of it starts to
plummet right away, So right away you can see the
gains hitting there when the majority of the population gets vaccinated.
Everybody that I talked to said, if you want to
know what happens when a lot of people get vaccinated,
look at what's happening in Israel. And the news from
there is great. And the other news out of there
(08:25):
which is heartening is that it looks like when you
get a lot of people, a lot of adults vaccinated,
the cases in children starts to fall a lot as well.
And again this is just because that's what viruses do.
They're looking for the next person to infect so that
they can keep moving around in a population. And the
(08:45):
fewer people there are that it can infect, the harder
time it has to move around, and so it's it's
protective of people who haven't gotten vaccinated, and of course
the people who have gotten vaccinated are well protected. So
that's all really heartening. The thing that experts were telling
me is what they're concerned about is will end up
with the US looking a bit like a patchwork quilt.
(09:08):
There's going to be some areas with very high rates
of vaccination where there's very little virus circulating, and so
if you've been vaccinated, or even if you weren't able
to get vaccinated, you're probably not going to get sick.
And if you were vaccinated, even if you do get sick,
you won't get desperately ill. But there are other parts
of the country where vaccination rates are lower, and they
(09:30):
may stay lower, and in those areas, the possibility of
getting infected with COVID will be just as it is
right now, and COVID will continue to be just as
dangerous as it is right now. Unfortunately, with a lot
of things nowadays, it's it's just almost comes with the
territory for everything. Now, you know, these splits have become political.
You were talking about some polling and stuff about Democrats
(09:53):
sy they have plans to get vaccinated or have been
already on the Republican side, for six percent say they
don't plan to, and I think it was like a
hard thirty percent that said they're not going to get
it at all. So this is where the difficulty comes.
This is why there's you know, information campaigns geared towards conservatives,
obviously communities of color, younger people also to get them
(10:14):
all on board to get it. But that patchwork, you know,
we might see these pockets where certain counties, certain states
continue to have these higher infection rates. No. I did
talk to one population biologists at the University of Wisconsin
who he had a slightly more hopeful message. He said,
you know, yes, people are saying, no, there's it's conservatives,
(10:37):
it's also evangelical Christians, white Evangelical Christians, because rates of
hesitancy in the African American community or actually went down.
But his message was a little more hopeful because he said,
you know what, I were starting to maybe see glimmers
of this as more people see lots of folks around
them who have gotten vaccinated, They know people have gotten vaccinated,
(10:58):
and they see that nothing horrible happened to them, and
the in fact are able to open up their lives
in ways that they haven't for a long time. And
also as we continue to see the unvaccinated getting sick
and sometimes ending up in the hospital and sometimes dying,
that he's hopeful that over time, some of that that
hesitancy or that outright refusal will shift, and that we
(11:22):
will see those vaccination rates live even in the pockets
where there's kind of hard refusals in place. I have
to say, just anecdotally, I went to go get my
second shot just very recently, and in California they just
opened up to all tiers so everybody can come and
get a vaccine now, and there was a lot of
people at the site that I went. It was a
(11:43):
larger side as well. So the demand is there. People
still do want to get vaccinated, and in CITs especially
there's still a love demand, but in a lot of places,
especially in rural areas, there isn't as much demand as
people were hoping for. I mean, well, we will see
how it plays out to April. Now, so we first
saw the vaccine, I mean, if you say January, you
(12:04):
know we're four months in. These things take time, so
hopefully those rates will go up everywhere. What's remarkable is
that we're at a little more than fifty nationally have
gotten at least one shot. I mean, that's pretty amazing.
It is, it definitely is. And so the new focus
now is containment similar to like the flu, possible regular
(12:25):
booster shots annually. Maybe we've heard things like that Edifiser
and Maderna, So we're on our way. Herd immunity, the
definition of it might not be reached, but we still
need to keep fighting forward on getting everybody vaccinated. Elizabeth Weis,
national correspondent at USA Today. Thank you very much for
joining us. You're so welcome. Thank you finally for this week.
(12:49):
Get ready for the forever Maskers. There are pockets of
people that have indicated that despite the easing of mask
wearing rules and increased vaccination rates, they will most likely
be wearing their masks are beyond the pandemic. Reasons vary,
with many saying they have avoided the flu and other
illnesses and want to keep that street going. For more
on those who won't be putting their masks away just yet,
(13:10):
we'll speak to Eve Piser, writer at New York Magazine.
In my work, I kind of like looking for anomalies
and people who go against the grain in some way.
So I found some people who wanted to wear masks
after the pandemic ended, and they all kind of had
different reasons. Some people it was as simple as they
(13:35):
hadn't gotten a cold since the pandemic started. Yeah, and
they wanted to keep it that way. But I think
for others there was more emotional complexity, and it was
kind of had to do with how traumatized they've been
by what's happened over the past year. Yeah, let's start
off with the first one, because I think that's the
easiest one to understand. A lot of people might even
(13:57):
feel very similar. I know I do. I haven't really
had any major illness, flu, cold, anything like that. I
think we saw flu rates plummet this past year, like
almost really no flu season. That happened in part because
a lot of people were wearing their masks. So there's
a few people that you spoke to. I think Michael Bizarro,
he's a Colorado teacher in particular, said Hey, this has
(14:18):
been working for me. I want to keep it going.
Michael Bizarro has a job that involves interacting with kids,
and I'm sure we can all remember that when we
were kids and went to school, you just had got
cold after cold. So I thought that his reasoning made
a lot of sense. And I mean my interview with
him was longer, and I obviously didn't get to include
(14:41):
all of it in the article, but he said that
his fiance works in public health, so it's something that
he's been really conscious of and he's been really focused
on keeping their household safe. But that's also been hard
because he's the choir director for the school and that's
the one time at school where he can't wear a mask.
But still just this one change for him. I mean,
(15:03):
I think for me, when people said, oh, I haven't
gotten sick since I started wearing a mask, in my head,
I was kind of wondering, well, there are other things
that play like you're during the pandemic. You're just interacting
with a lot less people than you normally would. But
I think Michael Bizarro kind of presented a compelling argument
because he's interacting with the same amount of kids as
(15:26):
he was before the pandemic, but there's been this one
big shift that has changed his life for the better.
Let's talk about some of the more psychological effects I
guess about it. One of the psychologists that you spoke
to about it says that the pandemic kind of gave
everybody almost like an anxiety disorder, and wearing the mask
is this safety behavior that can alleviate some of those anxieties.
(15:48):
You feel like, if I'm wearing the mask, I'm at
least doing the most I can to protect myself. And
there was a few common threads that people had that
kind of surrounded that they were trying to calm those
anxieties down. I mean, I think with the pandemic, there
are a lot of behaviors you can control to make
your risk of getting this disease less likely, but most
(16:12):
of it is pretty much out of your control. And
so I think that wearing a mask makes people feel proactive.
And the psychologists I spoke to Lena Pearl, she said
that it's a way of relieving anxiety in a similar
way that having a drink after a long day at
work relieves anxiety, or going running or any sorts of
(16:36):
behaviors that people do to be less stressed out. But
I think that she also made a really important point,
which is the psychological benefits of getting to see other
people's faces and how that can actually be something that
helps you feel more calm, because if you're walking down
(16:56):
the street and you see a stranger and you see
the face and they smile at you, it can kind
of put you at ease and say Okay, like I
see strangers all the time and these people don't actually
pose any threats to me. Yeah, it could be a
drawback to constantly wearing that mask, having half of your
face hidden. So definitely get that. I mean, we've all
had to start being able to read people's eyes only
(17:18):
just you know, from the top, and if somebody's wearing sunglasses,
you're you're not gonna get anywhere on that front. Um. Yeah,
So definitely that's another part of that. Yeah. And so yeah,
I mean I'm one of those people. I'm ready to
take the mask off, you know, just to kind of
go back to normal. But I've kind of long posed
that question. I never thought it would be something cultural
here in the United States, but we've seen it in
(17:39):
a lot of Asian countries where mask wearing is just
kind of part of their everyday life. And I've long
thought that there's gonna be a lot of people that
are gonna want to hold onto that. Not everybody, obviously,
but a lot of people still wanting to keep those
masks on. Yeah. I mean, I think that the pandemic
has shifted life in all these pro found ways, and
(18:01):
it's made people be more insular, and it's made their
world smaller and made them afraid of the public and
like scared of strangers. And I think that even as
more and more people get vaccinated and rates and death
continue to go down, those feelings won't just go away.
(18:25):
One of the people I talked to, this really lovely
woman named Robin our Genty, had like a really traumatic pandemic.
She had a really close family member die. She didn't
really get to see anybody. She said, she hadn't touched
anybody in over a year, and she had previously been
(18:46):
kind of agoraphobic before the pandemic, and then the pandemic
affirmed all those fears that she maybe once thought were
irrational about being afraid of being in public spaces, where
she was learned like, no public spaces really are threatening,
and now she's going to do everything she can to
hold on to that safety net in the mask. Yeah.
(19:07):
She you mentioned that she's one of the people that
are going to be having this on for a long time.
So I think we'll see, you know, as all the
regulations do start to get ease, you know, we'll start
to be able to point out those people that are
going to be the long haul mask wears. Eve Piser,
writer at New York Magazine, Thank you very much for
joining us, Thanks for having me. That's it for this weekend.
(19:29):
Be sure to check out The Daily Dive every Monday
through Friday. Join us on social media at Daily Dive
pod on Twitter and Daily Dive Podcasts on Facebook. Leave
us a comment, give us a rating, and tell us
the stories that you're interested in. Although The Daily Dive
and I Heart Radio or subscribe wherever you get your podcast.
This episode of The Daily Dive has been engineered by
Tony Sarantino. I'm Oscar Ramirez in Los Angeles and this
(19:54):
was your Daily Dive weekend edition
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