While I’m touching on Instapundit Glenn Reynolds’s insights on the vaccine and marketing thereof, this point is interesting:

A lot of people are afraid of needles — some say it’s over 25% of the population. Does every story featuring the “jab” (maybe also bad marketing — “jab” doesn’t sound very gentle) have to feature a needle? If your goal is to encourage people to be vaccinated, does it make sense to accentuate the part of the process that lots of people fear, and that nobody really enjoys?

True enough, but the question in response is:  What’s the alternative, at least for the people pushing the virus?  Think of every commercial for a medicine.  What’s the presentation?  It’s always freedom… freedom from the suffering and anxiety of the illness.  But the people pushing the vaccine don’t want to sell freedom.  That’s arguably the opposite of their motivation.

So they fall back on a message that, given their personalities, they find persuasive:  everybody else is doing it.