Fighting Fake News: How I made my co-villagers believe that vaccine will not kill them

Hello folks,

This is my first post on steemit and I can post this only because I have survived this pandemic, so far.

Read on...

Misinformation and fake news about the COVID-19 vaccine have taken social media by storm: the news attributed to Russian scientist claims, everyone who gets vaccinated will die within 2 years.

(screen grab from Yahoo)

I stumbled with the news merely 2 days after getting my first dose of vaccine. The needle prick in my left arm glowing scarlet I was yet to overcome the dizziness this dose had thrown me into.
so I couldn't help my anxiety ... I had very little time to live in this world if the news was to be believed.

I goaded myself out of the momentary lull and started looking for sources of the news. Unfortunately, I found some reputed news agencies too, becoming carriers of this misinformation! But, I didn't let the buck stop there: I continued looking for more credible sources and finally found that the news is concocted.

By now everyone who was yet to be vaccinated, in my village had stopped turning up to vaccination centres; people locked their doors to medical teams. Indeed fake news was taking a huge toll and something had to be done.

Assuming the role of a responsible citizen, I got in touch with the village head, local Auqaf committee and some friends including @aamir07 and @princa who helped me organise a small event in the community hall of our village.

(me speaking in village community hall)

Luckily, we succeeded in dismantling the influence of fake news and everyone went back home only to bring their (un)vaccinated family members to vaccination centres.

(village and Mohalla heads keenly listening to me while maintaining social distance )

Taking the fight against fake news to the next level I utilised my social media pages to spread the word. Besides, aggressive posting against the rumour mongers, I asked my friend in the medical profession to record a video and uploaded the same on my Facebook page: one of the videos has been watched more than 60K times.

(Doctor speaking about vaccine and immunity)

Thanks for reading my first post, I hope I will get to learn from here and promise to deliver back to this beautiful steemit community.