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Through a glass, (more) clearly

The greatest power of the new marketing technologies available to pharma brands may be their capacity to bring the beliefs and questions of real patients…

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Through a glass, (more) clearly

The greatest power of the new marketing technologies available to pharma brands may be their capacity to bring the beliefs and questions of real patients and HCPs into sharper view.

By Joshua Slatko • josh.slatko@medadnews.com

No matter how complicated our newest marketing technologies get under the hood, the problems they aim to solve and the questions they attempt to answer remain simple. And the simplest question of all, going back to the very beginning of marketing, is: how do my customers, and potential customers, view my product? Armed with all the growing power of big data, artificial intelligence, vast processing power, machine learning, and all the rest, brand teams are finding that they can answer that first simple question to a degree of granularity and detail unimaginable to previous generations, or even to themselves just a few years ago. Want to know what patients are thinking or saying about your brand? Want to know how much HCPs know about it? Want to know what questions either are asking? The answers, thanks to the tools profiled below and others like them, are just a click away. 

PatientMetRx

PatientMetRx’s Patient Opinion Maps help users track patterns and trends in patient views about a medicine.

Talking Medicines’ PatientMetRx AI platform is designed to sift through millions of patient conversations online to determine how patients are experiencing their medicines in the real world. The platform is driven by AI models that use machine learning and natural language processing to provide science-based insights that cut through the noise from social media. PatientMetRx uses real-time continuous sourcing from public social platforms and private platforms with permissions. 

“We are agnostic as to where those insights come from so long as we can find genuine patient experience within it,” says Jo Halliday, CEO and co-founder of Talking Medicines. “For example, Talking Medicines are able to source unstructured text from the large social media firehoses through to message boards and specific special interest groups. We can also run a client’s unstructured data source through our models.”

According to company leaders, the platform’s proprietary Patient Data Classifier and Named Entity Recognition models pull out patient voices from hundreds of millions of social posts at an accuracy of 95 percent. This allows for real-time tracking of Patient Confidence, Patient Opinions, Patient Personas, and Patient Language on the PatientMetRx online dashboard, allowing users to quickly and effectively access their patient insights at a medicine brand level. “At the touch of a button, users can access real-time, structured, and unlimited data that has been distilled into clear insights designed to help healthcare agencies win and retain pharma business through excellence in their patient strategies,” Halliday says.

The platform can be accessed on a subscription basis through buying medicine brand seats. “We encourage usage and do not charge by user seat within an agency realizing that multiple stakeholders need to be able to access the lived experience of patients when, for example, working on a pitch,” Halliday says. PatientMetRx differs from other social listening tools, its creators say, in that the platform does not require the client to write queries to see results. “The AI has already filtered potentially millions of conversations to find the Patient Voice. The tech homes in on the direct patient experience about medicines, and the context around this. As with panning for gold, we only serve the relevant insights rather than full query results.”

Insights can be accessed in a variety of ways through the features within the platform. For example, there is a Patient Confidence Score that calculates the brand health for a medicine and provides a summation of patient experience. Further analysis of insights can be made through the Patient Feed and Patient Opinion Map features, which offer structured ways to follow patterns and trends and search specific topics that patients have talked about.

How did all this come to be? “Talking Medicines was established as a mission-led business to help pharmaceutical marketing industry put patients right in the center of everything they do,” Halliday says. “To achieve this, we had to find a way to connect the patient voice to pharma while considering the highly regulated nature of the industry. Three major changes in the medicines market persuaded us to accelerate our capabilities in AI in capturing the patient voice.” 

Pre-COVID, Halliday explains, pharma relied heavily on deriving patient insights from healthcare professionals. However, with less reps on the road able to meet face to face with healthcare professionals, there was an evident forced change in the feedback loop. At the same time, as a result of the pandemic, fewer patients were visiting their GPs and more were increasingly turning to social media channels to find peer-to peer-support, alongside voicing their experiences about treatment, conditions, and medicines. Finally, the Talking Medicines team noticed that healthcare marketers were increasingly looking to tech to help with the automation of data analysis as well as the adoption being seen by pharma toward digital transformation and data-driven solutions.

“Having built great credibility and experience in working with pharma companies and healthcare agencies, we realized that there was a market opportunity to use technology to help pharma connect with the true patient voice,” Halliday says. “Pharma outsources patient marketing to healthcare agencies, so partnering with those agencies has been a natural step. We have only ever sold to pharma and healthcare, giving us a deep understanding of needs, opportunities and challenges, as well as a strong domain knowledge around patients, mining data and servicing healthcare clients is strong.”

As the pandemic brought much business as usual to a halt, the Talking Medicines team raised funding and dedicated R&D time to developing the AI models and the early platform. “From the very beginning, compliance and quality have always been high on the agenda for us – a key priority that was driven by the vision for the company in supporting patients by giving them a voice,” Halliday says.

So how might access to PatientMetRx impact a brand team’s awareness of market conditions and subsequent decision making? Talking Medicines tried out a test case last year to find out. In September 2021, an FDA-approved autoimmune medicine was at the center of a safety concern, which culminated in a black box warning. “We wanted to use PatientMetRx to see how this regulatory event would impact patient confidence and opinion,” Halliday told Med Ad News. “Running the data through our platform, we looked at what terms could be associated with this event, how many opinion posts were talking about the black box warning, and which terms and in what quantity these terms were mentioned in opinion posts. Having identified the key themes (by using tags) we filtered our opinion map by these themes, allowing a more focused overview of patient sentiment. We found that while the FDA and safety concerns did arise in our analysis, they were not common. In fact, contrary to popular belief, we found that positive appraisals of the medicine were more common and people spoke in positive terms.” The team was quickly able to establish the impact of the FDA warning on patient perception both contextually and from a sentiment analysis perspective, insights that could be used to inform specific communication strategy and language in the face of a regulatory issue. “And, just as important, our ability to analyze this data was 80 percent faster than a conventional Excel-based analysis.”

Looking forward, the Talking Medicines leadership plans to enhance the depth and breadth of PatientMetRx both within its current market of healthcare advertising agencies as well as the adjacent industries of insurance and pharmacy. “The future involves prediction, as well as more depth of socio-economic filters,” Halliday says. “We have heard the need for health care to improve the way they understand and market to subgroups of patients whether by age, gender, location, [or] ethnicity.”

Most importantly, PatientMetRx will be staying focused entirely on the patient. “Our view of only looking at patients is what differentiates PatientMetRx from other data analytics tools,” Halliday says. “This laser focus gives us a level of accuracy and sophistication that would be spread thinly if we applied it more broadly. It is one part of the jigsaw, as other tools service needs from the healthcare professional/HCP and other voices, but we have made it our purpose to provide gold standard insights on the patient voice.”

Scientific Awareness

Veeva, Link for Scientific Awareness app

Veeva’s Link for Scientific Awareness app helps measure awareness and sentiment among HCPs by calculating share of scientific voice across a broad range of sources.

Veeva’s Link for Scientific Awareness app, a part of its broader Link platform, measures awareness and sentiment among HCPs regarding specific medicines. The app’s real-time dashboards track the share of scientific voice across all relevant scientific and digital sources, including publications, congresses, clinical guidelines, social media, and professional associations. On the back end, more than 100 human data curators with deep scientific and clinical knowledge are on hand to measure sentiment, which helps users understand how the scientific and clinical community “feels” about different treatments.

“Understanding the actions and sentiments of scientific experts and prescribers has become an essential part of the industry’s efforts to strengthen field engagement and drive better patient outcomes,” says Kilian Weiss, general manager of Veeva Link. “This expanded need for real-time intelligence applications drove us to launch Link for Scientific Awareness as the first in our four new Link data applications that include Key Accounts, Medical Insights, and Link+ for agile workflow and relationship management.”

The push for the Scientific Awareness app, Weiss told Med Ad News, came not from the brand marketing side but from medical affairs teams. Unlike their commercial counterparts who rely on market share and sales data to determine performance and impact, medical affairs cannot tie its performance to commercial measures. So a bit more creativity in measurement is necessary. 

“After hosting multiple brainstorming sessions with different medical teams, we defined three metrics that are valuable to track,” Weiss explains. “Scientific share of voice is an important measure of visibility and awareness, while sentiment and sentiment reach allows those teams to capture the human factor. For example, how the medical and scientific community interprets their scientific platform and what’s the prevalence of that opinion. It’s not just Medical Affairs that find our product useful, though; commercial teams have also been excited to see how their campaigns are reflected through a new, unbiased external lens.”

That external lens is able to dig through an enormous amount of relevant scientific data almost instantaneously. ASCO, ESMO, and other congresses now consistently publish agendas, speaker rosters, and scientific presentations online. The app can also pull data from ClinicalTrials.gov, PubMed, Twitter, YouTube, and elsewhere. “We can track and measure this data as soon as it’s published,” Weiss explains. “Our dashboards help medical teams make sense of all this data by visualizing where their product stands in comparison to competitors, as well as showing what data channels and people are the largest contributors to their scientific share of voice. It’s valuable to track the progression of your scientific share of voice over time, and you can group the data into categories such as publications, clinical trials, social media, and so forth.”

Veeva’s Scientific Awareness app is growing up alongside another online phenomenon, the HCP digital opinion leader. “Interestingly, digital opinion leaders may not be the true experts in the field, yet they drive visibility and engagement by constantly being digitally active and prolific,” Weiss says. “Now that there’s a clear trend of the increasing importance of digital opinion leaders, our customers are exploring how to best engage this customer group. Even though this trend was accelerated by the pandemic, it’s clear that it’s likely to stay.”

So what sorts of questions are users asking with the help of the app? “What congresses are going to be impactful?” Weiss says. “What publications should be considered? Where is my audience and where should the focus be?” And the answers have already been used to brand benefit. In one case, a top 10 pharmaceutical company was able to increase by 50 percent its share of scientific voice and keep it for one of their products in just two quarters, which was especially significant as this was during its brand’s launch. When analyzing the competitive landscape and underlying sentiment data for this class of therapy, the team found that other companies were focusing on driving diagnostic tool awareness ahead of focusing on the therapy they were launching. They also uncovered clear HCP concerns about outpatient center preparedness like logistical barriers to carrying radiolabeled therapy that needed to be addressed early to ensure strong therapy adoption. With this knowledge in hand, they were able to fine-tune communications accordingly and gain that impressive bounce in voice.

Just as with PatientMetRx, the future of the Scientific Awareness app lies, at least in part, in a predictive capability. “Our goal is to make it even easier for our customers to use Link applications in their decision-making process,” Weiss says. “The next step is to use all this data across different channels and products and propose intelligent recommendations on what should be done to achieve the outcome the user is seeking.”

Veeva is also exploring the possibility of applying advanced technologies and powerful analytical engines to structured and unstructured data, a trend already well under way throughout the healthcare industry. “Our customers are faced with a real challenge of trying to integrate insights across the multitude of data sources available, both their own and external,” Weiss told Med Ad News. “Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing can help significantly accelerate insight integration and create ‘meta’ insights, which previously hasn’t been possible. We are still in the nascent stage of leveraging data to show how products and therapies are making an impact. Share of scientific voice and sentiment are precursors to true impact. We want to be able to demonstrate that customers’ activities are making a difference in increasing access to treatments for patients that need them to improve and extend patient lives.” 

Josh Slatko, Med Ad News Josh Slatko is contributing editor of Med Ad News and PharmaLive.com.

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Chinese migration to US is nothing new – but the reasons for recent surge at Southern border are

A gloomier economic outlook in China and tightening state control have combined with the influence of social media in encouraging migration.

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March 11, 2024

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Chinese migrants wait for a boat after having walked across the Darien Gap from Colombia to Panama. AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko

The brief closure of the Darien Gap – a perilous 66-mile jungle journey linking South American and Central America – in February 2024 temporarily halted one of the Western Hemisphere’s busiest migration routes. It also highlighted its importance to a small but growing group of people that depend on that pass to make it to the U.S.: Chinese migrants.

While a record 2.5 million migrants were detained at the United States’ southwestern land border in 2023, only about 37,000 were from China.

I’m a scholar of migration and China. What I find most remarkable in these figures is the speed with which the number of Chinese migrants is growing. Nearly 10 times as many Chinese migrants crossed the southern border in 2023 as in 2022. In December 2023 alone, U.S. Border Patrol officials reported encounters with about 6,000 Chinese migrants, in contrast to the 900 they reported a year earlier in December 2022.

The dramatic uptick is the result of a confluence of factors that range from a slowing Chinese economy and tightening political control by President Xi Jinping to the easy access to online information on Chinese social media about how to make the trip.

Middle-class migrants

Journalists reporting from the border have generalized that Chinese migrants come largely from the self-employed middle class. They are not rich enough to use education or work opportunities as a means of entry, but they can afford to fly across the world.

According to a report from Reuters, in many cases those attempting to make the crossing are small-business owners who saw irreparable damage to their primary or sole source of income due to China’s “zero COVID” policies. The migrants are women, men and, in some cases, children accompanying parents from all over China.

Chinese nationals have long made the journey to the United States seeking economic opportunity or political freedom. Based on recent media interviews with migrants coming by way of South America and the U.S.’s southern border, the increase in numbers seems driven by two factors.

First, the most common path for immigration for Chinese nationals is through a student visa or H1-B visa for skilled workers. But travel restrictions during the early months of the pandemic temporarily stalled migration from China. Immigrant visas are out of reach for many Chinese nationals without family or vocation-based preferences, and tourist visas require a personal interview with a U.S. consulate to gauge the likelihood of the traveler returning to China.

Social media tutorials

Second, with the legal routes for immigration difficult to follow, social media accounts have outlined alternatives for Chinese who feel an urgent need to emigrate. Accounts on Douyin, the TikTok clone available in mainland China, document locations open for visa-free travel by Chinese passport holders. On TikTok itself, migrants could find information on where to cross the border, as well as information about transportation and smugglers, commonly known as “snakeheads,” who are experienced with bringing migrants on the journey north.

With virtual private networks, immigrants can also gather information from U.S. apps such as X, YouTube, Facebook and other sites that are otherwise blocked by Chinese censors.

Inspired by social media posts that both offer practical guides and celebrate the journey, thousands of Chinese migrants have been flying to Ecuador, which allows visa-free travel for Chinese citizens, and then making their way over land to the U.S.-Mexican border.

This journey involves trekking through the Darien Gap, which despite its notoriety as a dangerous crossing has become an increasingly common route for migrants from Venezuela, Colombia and all over the world.

In addition to information about crossing the Darien Gap, these social media posts highlight the best places to cross the border. This has led to a large share of Chinese asylum seekers following the same path to Mexico’s Baja California to cross the border near San Diego.

Chinese migration to US is nothing new

The rapid increase in numbers and the ease of accessing information via social media on their smartphones are new innovations. But there is a longer history of Chinese migration to the U.S. over the southern border – and at the hands of smugglers.

From 1882 to 1943, the United States banned all immigration by male Chinese laborers and most Chinese women. A combination of economic competition and racist concerns about Chinese culture and assimilability ensured that the Chinese would be the first ethnic group to enter the United States illegally.

With legal options for arrival eliminated, some Chinese migrants took advantage of the relative ease of movement between the U.S. and Mexico during those years. While some migrants adopted Mexican names and spoke enough Spanish to pass as migrant workers, others used borrowed identities or paperwork from Chinese people with a right of entry, like U.S.-born citizens. Similarly to what we are seeing today, it was middle- and working-class Chinese who more frequently turned to illegal means. Those with money and education were able to circumvent the law by arriving as students or members of the merchant class, both exceptions to the exclusion law.

Though these Chinese exclusion laws officially ended in 1943, restrictions on migration from Asia continued until Congress revised U.S. immigration law in the Hart-Celler Act in 1965. New priorities for immigrant visas that stressed vocational skills as well as family reunification, alongside then Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s policies of “reform and opening,” helped many Chinese migrants make their way legally to the U.S. in the 1980s and 1990s.

Even after the restrictive immigration laws ended, Chinese migrants without the education or family connections often needed for U.S. visas continued to take dangerous routes with the help of “snakeheads.”

One notorious incident occurred in 1993, when a ship called the Golden Venture ran aground near New York, resulting in the drowning deaths of 10 Chinese migrants and the arrest and conviction of the snakeheads attempting to smuggle hundreds of Chinese migrants into the United States.

Existing tensions

Though there is plenty of precedent for Chinese migrants arriving without documentation, Chinese asylum seekers have better odds of success than many of the other migrants making the dangerous journey north.

An estimated 55% of Chinese asylum seekers are successful in making their claims, often citing political oppression and lack of religious freedom in China as motivations. By contrast, only 29% of Venezuelans seeking asylum in the U.S. have their claim granted, and the number is even lower for Colombians, at 19%.

The new halt on the migratory highway from the south has affected thousands of new migrants seeking refuge in the U.S. But the mix of push factors from their home country and encouragement on social media means that Chinese migrants will continue to seek routes to America.

And with both migration and the perceived threat from China likely to be features of the upcoming U.S. election, there is a risk that increased Chinese migration could become politicized, leaning further into existing tensions between Washington and Beijing.

Meredith Oyen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Vaccine-skeptical mothers say bad health care experiences made them distrust the medical system

Vaccine skepticism, and the broader medical mistrust and far-reaching anxieties it reflects, is not just a fringe position in the 21st century.

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March 11, 2024

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Women's own negative medical experiences influence their vaccine decisions for their kids. AP Photo/Ted S. Warren

Why would a mother reject safe, potentially lifesaving vaccines for her child?

Popular writing on vaccine skepticism often denigrates white and middle-class mothers who reject some or all recommended vaccines as hysterical, misinformed, zealous or ignorant. Mainstream media and medical providers increasingly dismiss vaccine refusal as a hallmark of American fringe ideology, far-right radicalization or anti-intellectualism.

But vaccine skepticism, and the broader medical mistrust and far-reaching anxieties it reflects, is not just a fringe position.

Pediatric vaccination rates had already fallen sharply before the COVID-19 pandemic, ushering in the return of measles, mumps and chickenpox to the U.S. in 2019. Four years after the pandemic’s onset, a growing number of Americans doubt the safety, efficacy and necessity of routine vaccines. Childhood vaccination rates have declined substantially across the U.S., which public health officials attribute to a “spillover” effect from pandemic-related vaccine skepticism and blame for the recent measles outbreak. Almost half of American mothers rated the risk of side effects from the MMR vaccine as medium or high in a 2023 survey by Pew Research.

Recommended vaccines go through rigorous testing and evaluation, and the most infamous charges of vaccine-induced injury have been thoroughly debunked. How do so many mothers – primary caregivers and health care decision-makers for their families – become wary of U.S. health care and one of its most proven preventive technologies?

I’m a cultural anthropologist who studies the ways feelings and beliefs circulate in American society. To investigate what’s behind mothers’ vaccine skepticism, I interviewed vaccine-skeptical mothers about their perceptions of existing and novel vaccines. What they told me complicates sweeping and overly simplified portrayals of their misgivings by pointing to the U.S. health care system itself. The medical system’s failures and harms against women gave rise to their pervasive vaccine skepticism and generalized medical mistrust.

The seeds of women’s skepticism

I conducted this ethnographic research in Oregon from 2020 to 2021 with predominantly white mothers between the ages of 25 and 60. My findings reveal new insights about the origins of vaccine skepticism among this demographic. These women traced their distrust of vaccines, and of U.S. health care more generally, to ongoing and repeated instances of medical harm they experienced from childhood through childbirth.

girl sitting on exam table faces a doctor viewer can see from behind
A woman’s own childhood mistreatment by a doctor can shape her health care decisions for the next generation. FatCamera/E+ via Getty Images

As young girls in medical offices, they were touched without consent, yelled at, disbelieved or threatened. One mother, Susan, recalled her pediatrician abruptly lying her down and performing a rectal exam without her consent at the age of 12. Another mother, Luna, shared how a pediatrician once threatened to have her institutionalized when she voiced anxiety at a routine physical.

As women giving birth, they often felt managed, pressured or discounted. One mother, Meryl, told me, “I felt like I was coerced under distress into Pitocin and induction” during labor. Another mother, Hallie, shared, “I really battled with my provider” throughout the childbirth experience.

Together with the convoluted bureaucracy of for-profit health care, experiences of medical harm contributed to “one million little touch points of information,” in one mother’s phrase, that underscored the untrustworthiness and harmful effects of U.S. health care writ large.

A system that doesn’t serve them

Many mothers I interviewed rejected the premise that public health entities such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration had their children’s best interests at heart. Instead, they tied childhood vaccination and the more recent development of COVID-19 vaccines to a bloated pharmaceutical industry and for-profit health care model. As one mother explained, “The FDA is not looking out for our health. They’re looking out for their wealth.”

After ongoing negative medical encounters, the women I interviewed lost trust not only in providers but the medical system. Frustrating experiences prompted them to “do their own research” in the name of bodily autonomy. Such research often included books, articles and podcasts deeply critical of vaccines, public health care and drug companies.

These materials, which have proliferated since 2020, cast light on past vaccine trials gone awry, broader histories of medical harm and abuse, the rapid growth of the recommended vaccine schedule in the late 20th century and the massive profits reaped from drug development and for-profit health care. They confirmed and hardened women’s suspicions about U.S. health care.

hands point to a handwritten vaccination record
The number of recommended childhood vaccines has increased over time. Mike Adaskaveg/MediaNews Group/Boston Herald via Getty Images

The stories these women told me add nuance to existing academic research into vaccine skepticism. Most studies have considered vaccine skepticism among primarily white and middle-class parents to be an outgrowth of today’s neoliberal parenting and intensive mothering. Researchers have theorized vaccine skepticism among white and well-off mothers to be an outcome of consumer health care and its emphasis on individual choice and risk reduction. Other researchers highlight vaccine skepticism as a collective identity that can provide mothers with a sense of belonging.

Seeing medical care as a threat to health

The perceptions mothers shared are far from isolated or fringe, and they are not unreasonable. Rather, they represent a growing population of Americans who hold the pervasive belief that U.S. health care harms more than it helps.

Data suggests that the number of Americans harmed in the course of treatment remains high, with incidents of medical error in the U.S. outnumbering those in peer countries, despite more money being spent per capita on health care. One 2023 study found that diagnostic error, one kind of medical error, accounted for 371,000 deaths and 424,000 permanent disabilities among Americans every year.

Studies reveal particularly high rates of medical error in the treatment of vulnerable communities, including women, people of color, disabled, poor, LGBTQ+ and gender-nonconforming individuals and the elderly. The number of U.S. women who have died because of pregnancy-related causes has increased substantially in recent years, with maternal death rates doubling between 1999 and 2019.

The prevalence of medical harm points to the relevance of philosopher Ivan Illich’s manifesto against the “disease of medical progress.” In his 1982 book “Medical Nemesis,” he insisted that rather than being incidental, harm flows inevitably from the structure of institutionalized and for-profit health care itself. Illich wrote, “The medical establishment has become a major threat to health,” and has created its own “epidemic” of iatrogenic illness – that is, illness caused by a physician or the health care system itself.

Four decades later, medical mistrust among Americans remains alarmingly high. Only 23% of Americans express high confidence in the medical system. The United States ranks 24th out of 29 peer high-income countries for the level of public trust in medical providers.

For people like the mothers I interviewed, who have experienced real or perceived harm at the hands of medical providers; have felt belittled, dismissed or disbelieved in a doctor’s office; or spent countless hours fighting to pay for, understand or use health benefits, skepticism and distrust are rational responses to lived experience. These attitudes do not emerge solely from ignorance, conspiracy thinking, far-right extremism or hysteria, but rather the historical and ongoing harms endemic to the U.S. health care system itself.

Johanna Richlin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Survey Shows Declining Concerns Among Americans About COVID-19

Survey Shows Declining Concerns Among Americans About COVID-19

A new survey reveals that only 20% of Americans view covid-19 as "a major threat"…

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March 11, 2024

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Survey Shows Declining Concerns Among Americans About COVID-19

A new survey reveals that only 20% of Americans view covid-19 as "a major threat" to the health of the US population - a sharp decline from a high of 67% in July 2020.

(SARMDY/Shutterstock)

What's more, the Pew Research Center survey conducted from Feb. 7 to Feb. 11 showed that just 10% of Americans are concerned that they will  catch the disease and require hospitalization.

"This data represents a low ebb of public concern about the virus that reached its height in the summer and fall of 2020, when as many as two-thirds of Americans viewed COVID-19 as a major threat to public health," reads the report, which was published March 7.

According to the survey, half of the participants understand the significance of researchers and healthcare providers in understanding and treating long COVID - however 27% of participants consider this issue less important, while 22% of Americans are unaware of long COVID.

What's more, while Democrats were far more worried than Republicans in the past, that gap has narrowed significantly.

"In the pandemic’s first year, Democrats were routinely about 40 points more likely than Republicans to view the coronavirus as a major threat to the health of the U.S. population. This gap has waned as overall levels of concern have fallen," reads the report.

More via the Epoch Times;

The survey found that three in ten Democrats under 50 have received an updated COVID-19 vaccine, compared with 66 percent of Democrats ages 65 and older.

Moreover, 66 percent of Democrats ages 65 and older have received the updated COVID-19 vaccine, while only 24 percent of Republicans ages 65 and older have done so.

“This 42-point partisan gap is much wider now than at other points since the start of the outbreak. For instance, in August 2021, 93 percent of older Democrats and 78 percent of older Republicans said they had received all the shots needed to be fully vaccinated (a 15-point gap),” it noted.

COVID-19 No Longer an Emergency

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently issued its updated recommendations for the virus, which no longer require people to stay home for five days after testing positive for COVID-19.

The updated guidance recommends that people who contracted a respiratory virus stay home, and they can resume normal activities when their symptoms improve overall and their fever subsides for 24 hours without medication.

“We still must use the commonsense solutions we know work to protect ourselves and others from serious illness from respiratory viruses, this includes vaccination, treatment, and staying home when we get sick,” CDC director Dr. Mandy Cohen said in a statement.

The CDC said that while the virus remains a threat, it is now less likely to cause severe illness because of widespread immunity and improved tools to prevent and treat the disease.

“Importantly, states and countries that have already adjusted recommended isolation times have not seen increased hospitalizations or deaths related to COVID-19,” it stated.

The federal government suspended its free at-home COVID-19 test program on March 8, according to a website set up by the government, following a decrease in COVID-19-related hospitalizations.

According to the CDC, hospitalization rates for COVID-19 and influenza diseases remain “elevated” but are decreasing in some parts of the United States.

Tyler Durden Sun, 03/10/2024 - 22:45

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