I appreciate you giving a thoughtful response to a COVID meme I had a problem with. This is a first for me. Perhaps there are more paranoid people than I thought who actually think that ... I will look for that survey. I do not want to do this research myself because I believe at most 5 people would read it (if I did it) but it would be interesting if a professional reporter could do an exhaustive research project where they look at how the media misrepresents COVID in a rigorous manner. I of course can see patterns and the way it is portrayed depending on which corporation it is.
I have my faults but when I want to learn about COVID or I hear the CDC says something I go look for something a scientist wrote, or I read the 5min summary from the CDC if I want to know what the official stance is.
MSM nearly constantly misrepresents the official stance and has stirred up crazy amounts of fear and misinformation. Memes can do the same since they're created by random people who too have very little skin in the game and accountability. People would be wise to go directly to the source for for public health data and statistics that rather than getting it from memes or journalists.
Memes are art more than anything. At best, I hope for memes to give us some laughs and maybe some motivation to check if the ideas presented match the empirical data. There are very few statements that have universal truth anyway, so it's a pretty high standard to hope for memes to live up to that when what they really do and excel at are using a humorous light to poke fun at some element of an accepted narrative that upon reflection doesn't make sense.
I'm guessing the creator of this meme isn't actually making that point. I'm guessing the creator is opposed to mandates and rather humorously pointing out how there are some really paranoid people out there on the vax "team" that simultaneously think the vaccine is both (1) very effective and (2) the unvaxed are unclean and putting everyone in supreme mortal risk. Those two statements are contradictory at face value, so there is clearly more nuance here than many people seem capable or interested in understanding.
I can't find it now, but I saw a whole survey (I think from Pew or Gallup) covering attitudes regarding vaccine safety and believed risk from covid. They included segmentation by political affiliation and vaccine status. There were two clear groups here.
1) Democrats thought 50%(!) of the unvaxinated would end up in the hospital if they got covid. Despite having delusional views on that, they, however, correctly estimated the <1% of those receiving the vaccine would.
2) Republicans thought 20%(!) of the vaccinated would end up in the hospital due to vaccine side effects. Similarly, while their world view here is bonkers, their estimate of the covid risk was much closer to reality at <1%.
So what we have here is a ton of people scared to death and not thinking these numbers through and how they're completely unplausible. I don't know how, but there are tons of people out there scared to death from their "side's" sources.
Will memes poking fun at the obvious holes in some of these beliefs snap people out of it? Maybe, maybe not. But I think we have much bigger problems out there in the general population than oversimplifying memes that try to get people to relax a bit and not view others as plague rats.