There's a global pandemic killing thousands of people and there's a sizeable portion of the American population spreading misinformation that's causing a significant number of people to not get the vaccine, in turn endangering both themselves and others.
It seems obvious to me that there would be people researching how to either stop this misinformation being spread, or educate people enough to stop believing it. This isn't some conspiracy theory - this is just sane people doing sane things in response to a very real threat.
It’s not like I wanted to do this, more a moral obligation. When a former EBOLA colleague texted me last February and said he was putting the team back together I had a small panic attack knowing this bullshit cycle of unmitigated spread and disinformation was about to be my life again for 2+ years. On our first Zoom one guy just banged his head on his desk for a solid 2 minutes to give us a bit of comic relief.
Doesn’t even pay well - like at all. Dunno why you got downvoted so much.
Actually that's average number of DAILY deaths from the past 7 days, not the number of deaths in the past 7 days. As a lot of people take the weekends off, reporting of new cases and deaths decreases sharply on weekends and increases on Mondays, but in reality people are not dying at a lower rate on weekends. That's why the stats are averaged over 7 days.
For reference, there are about 15k homicides per year in the US, or about 41 per day, which is about 13% of the 316 daily COVID death rate reported by the CDC (and on the front page of the NYTimes site).
It seems obvious to me that there would be people researching how to either stop this misinformation being spread, or educate people enough to stop believing it. This isn't some conspiracy theory - this is just sane people doing sane things in response to a very real threat.