AstraZeneca’s PR crisis, Putin’s maskless Moscow rally and pseudoscience in Iran
Welcome to the Infodemic and, if you just joined us, thank you for signing up! We are tracking how disinformation surrounding the coronavirus crisis is reshaping our world. Below are the narratives, both real and fake, that have grabbed our team’s attention and deserve yours.
ASTRAZENECA’S IMAGE PROBLEM
“I am not an anti-vaxxer, but there is no way I am getting the AstraZeneca shot,” a friend told me this week. We were on a socially distanced walk in the hills above Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, which has just received its first shipment of the Oxford University-developed vaccine.
The long-awaited first batch is small, even for Georgia’s tiny 3.7 million population: 43,200 shots is barely enough to inoculate the country’s medical workers. But, never mind. It looks like most of them don’t want the shot anyway.