Social behavior

Justice Department announces charges against hundreds of alleged COVID-19 fraudsters Hundreds of people have been charged with the theft of more than $830 million in COVID-19 emergency aid following a nationwide operation conducted by federal, state and local law enforcement agencies, the U.S. AP News

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Report spotlights 52 US doctors who posted potentially harmful COVID misinformation online Arkadiusz Warguła / iStock CIDRAP

Two new studies describe a couple sources of the COVID-19 "infodemic" on social media: US physicians and proponents and practitioners of "doing your own research."

Vaccine hesitancy behind most decisions to not get COVID-19 vaccines The level of hesitancy for the COVID-19 vaccine was much higher than for other routinely given vaccines. CIDRAP

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Vaccine hesitancy, which began to grow steadily in the US during the early 2000s with false claims that common childhood vaccines caused autism, soared again during the pandemic, as employee vaccine mandates became political footballs.

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The Steep Cost of Ron DeSantis’ Vaccine Turnabout On a Saturday in September 2020, with COVID-19 killing more than 600 Americans daily and hundreds of thousands of deaths still to come, Dr. Deborah Birx, a member of the White House coronavirus task force, heard her cellphone ring. It was Dr. Scott Rivkees, the Florida surgeon general. He was distraught. “‘You won’t believe what happened,’” she said he told her. Months before COVID vaccines would become available, Gov. Ron DeSantis had decided that the worst was over for Florida, he said. DeSant Yahoo News

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