As though the current COVID isn’t transmissible enough, this new strain spreads about 70% more easily. Hence 70% more urgency to educate your employees/members here and now. (Not quite sure that’s the way the math works, but close enough.)

The strain has already been found in 3 states. And the two countries in which it is already firmly established –Britain and South Africa — have already suffered dramatic increases in case rates.

It is believed that the vaccine(s) will protect against that strain too. Unfortunately, the anti-vaxxers have launched a disinformation campaign featuring enough lies to make a wellness vendor blush. And that doesn’t even include lying about the new strain, at least not yet.

Here is an example of an antivax myth perpetrated by someone on a health-and-wellness listserve, no less, that is so embarrassingly stupid that — even though this site is devoted to publishing embarrassingly stupid things that wellness vendors say — we aren’t going to mention any names:

According to actual infectious disease experts (Dr. William Schaffner at Vanderbilt, Dr. Anthony Fauci), and government and FDA documents in regards to vaccines, Pfizer has caused 6 deaths (within 3 days of vaccination)

Here’s what really happened:

• Randomly, about 6 deaths would be expected in 9 months and 40,000 adults
• Within 3 days of the vaccination, no one died
• No deaths were attributable to the vaccination at all, and (drumroll)
• 4 of the 6 deaths were in the control group.

It kills us to withhold the perp’s name (we will make it available upon request) but because COVID is life-threatening, we thought it would be better to focus instead on the positive, such as it is. 

The “positive” is that the coming “surge” within your own organization — and, don’t kid yourself, it is coming, due both to holiday gatherings as well as the new strain — can be mitigated, if you choose to do so. You have four choices:

1. Send out information and link employees/members to your “COVID resource center” which has more information — and hope that no one relies on social media instead for their “information”;
2. Within the next week or two, write concise and thoughtful sets of COVID educational trivia questions about both safety precautions in light of the new strain and myths about the vaccines, put them in an elegant user interface, and get a major medical school, like, to use one random example, Harvard, to let you put their name on the questions to ensure credibility;
3. Retain Quizzify, which has already done exactly that and is ready to go tomorrow with two full quizzes, and a customized and linked landing page like the one at the bottom, for your organization
4. Do nothing.

If history is any guide, the overwhelming choice will be #4. Those people should also have their names named, but we won’t. Instead, we’ll just observe that every time one of your employees takes ill with COVID, remember that you could have done something about it, starting tomorrow.