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AP Investigative report: A look into vaccine misinformation industry

The couple in the website videos could be hawking any number of products.

“You’re going to love owning the platinum package,” Charlene Bollinger tells viewers, as a picture of a DVD set, booklets and other products flashes on screen. Her husband, Ty, promises a “director’s cut edition,” and over 100 hours of additional footage.

Click the orange button, his wife says, “to join in the fight for health freedom” — or more specifically, to pay $199 to $499 for the Bollingers’ video series, “The Truth About Vaccines 2020.”

The Bollingers are part of an ecosystem of for-profit companies, nonprofit groups, YouTube channels and other social media accounts that stoke fear and distrust of COVID-19 vaccines, resorting to what medical experts say is often misleading and false information.

An investigation by The Associated Press has found that the couple work closely with others prominent in the anti-vaccine movement — including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his Children’s Health Defense — to drive sales through affiliate marketing relationships.

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Insights into those who have not been vaccinated yet but are not hesitant

 

It had been weeks since Acy Grayson III, owner of Let It Shine, a home improvement outfit he runs out of his own home in the suburbs of Cleveland, had vowed to get a Covid-19 vaccine.

Appointments were available.

But Mr. Grayson, who never knows how long a job will take or when a new one will come along, had found it hard to commit to a time and a place. The mass vaccination site where appointments were not required was off his beaten path. He did not know that a nearby church, Lee Road Baptist, had been dispensing vaccines on Fridays — but the truth is, even if he had, it is unlikely he would have made the short trek to get one there, either.

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The Coronavirus spread threatens Southeast Asia and elsewhere

As the virus threatens Southeast Asia, the spread of new variants continues to be a danger everywhere

After a devastating year with wave after wave of coronavirus infections around the world, new cases and deaths are falling in many of the Western nations that were once among the hardest hit. But while the virus recedes in wealthy nations with robust vaccination campaigns, it is pummeling India and threatening to swamp Southeast Asian countries that until now had largely kept the virus at bay.

Taken together, the opposing regional trends add up to a leveling of global daily new cases at “an unacceptably high plateau” that leaves the world in continuing danger, the director general of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said on Monday.

In Southeast Asia, Dr. Tedros noted that “cases and deaths are still increasing rapidly.”

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