NEW YORK—In a first-of-its-kind survey conducted by rival news networks Fox News and CNN, more than 4,000 anti-vaxxers across the nation ranked fictional diseases, viruses, and bacteria that would change their minds and convince them to get vaccinated. Immediately after the results were released, Fox News called them proof that anti-vaxxers are intelligent, reasonable people who will consider a vaccine if they were at real risk from something definitely fake, while CNN fired back that the results instead prove anti-vaxxers live in a warped and dangerous alternate reality.
NBC’s chief medical correspondent, Dr. Gillian Chung, M.D., Sc.D., Ph.D., M.S., M.B.A., B.S., B.A., A.S., A.A., who got an A+ in high school biology but was not involved in the survey, says that some of the rankings make sense when you consider how anti-vaxxers think. For example, she says, No. 1 would be a pretty obvious “gimme the vaccine now” for them because if they didn’t get the vaccine for the Say the Opposite of What You Mean Disease [youtu.be], they would essentially turn into exactly who they rail against and even hate: people who are in touch with reality and support vaccines. She considers the Ripley virus at No. 3 also a no-brainer near the top. “It’s alien,” she says, “with hundreds of teeth that bite through steel, and the young versions, called ‘shit weasels,’ can escape your body by eating between your stomach and anus. So you can bet the pharmacy that even the most stubborn or paranoid of anti-vaxxers would be rolling up their sleeves to avoid that shit from happening to them.”
However, Dr. Chung says that there are some things in the rankings she can’t quite figure out. For example, No. 2 makes no sense at all to her. “Sure,” she says, “the Smurfy pink plague is a horrible disease for smurfs, but there’s no evidence that it would make the jump to humans. I’ve gotten my COVID booster, but I wouldn’t get the Smurfy pink plague vaccine.” She suspects that the reason it was ranked so high is that many anti-vaxxers consider Dabbler Smurf (aka, Doctor Smurf) a real doctor compared to Dr. Anthony Fauci, who many anti-vaxxers believe to be a fraud or evil or both. Dr. Chung also can’t understand how flesh-eating bacteria, which is real, ended up in the rankings and why, when it did, it came in so low, at No. 7. “Necrotizing fasciitis is pretty horrific,” she says, referring to the medical term for flesh-eating bacteria. She then pauses for a moment, before concluding, “But so is COVID, which kills more Americans in a day than necrotizing fasciitis kills in a year. And that, to me, makes COVID way scarier than any disease in this ranking. Anti-vaxxers should get real because COVID is real. And they should get vaccinated.”
FOX News/CNN Survey Results of Fictional Diseases That Would Make Anti-Vaxxers Rethink Vaccines
No. 1 Say the Opposite of What You Mean Disease (from a deleted scene of “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective”)
No. 2 Smurfy pink plague (from “The Smurfs”)
No. 3 The Ripley virus (from “Dreamcatcher”)
No. 4 Mad Zombie Disease (from “Zombieland”)
No. 5 Motaba (from “Outbreak”)
No. 6 The Andromeda strain (from “The Andromeda Strain”)
No. 7 Flesh-eating bacteria (from reality)
No. 8 Rage or human cortico-deficiency virus (from “28 Days Later” and “28 Weeks Later”)
No. 9 Spattergroit (from “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” and “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”)
No. 10 Purity/the black oil (from “The X-Files”)
