The government’s rollout of the coronavirus vaccine is very similar to CD Projekt Red’s release of Cyberpunk 2077.
In both situations, an organization has a low quality product which has been hyped up as awesome. In both cases, they know the ultra-hyped product is broken, and they know that upon release, the consumer will find out it is broken. The only thing that they can do is attempt to mitigate the fallout when the product reaches the end user. In order to do this, they have pre-planned damage control programs, which are based on lies and post-release marketing.
Both the government and CDPR primarily have relied on claiming that they are going to deal with the problems their product has. The government has claimed that they are doing research into the side effects the vaccine is causing, and they are also planning to release a second vaccine from a different company. CDPR said that they were rushing out patches to make their broken game playable in the very near future.
Both the government and CDPR have loyal support bases that will back up their lies and attack unsatisfied consumers. The government has the advantage over CDPR in that the former has nigh total control of the media, whilst the latter only has limited influence on the media. However, CDPR has more good faith built up than the government.
Ultimately, the government cannot completely silence all information about the defects in their product. We recently saw that someone in Alaska broke protocol and reported two hospitalizations caused by negative reactions to the vaccine. Now, there’s a viral video out of a woman passing out from taking the vaccine.
The woman, Tiffany Dover, is a Chattanooga, Tennessee nurse who was being interviewed for a local news station on Thursday shortly after taking the government’s Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine.
Before passing out, she appeared confused.
“I’m sorry, I’m feeling really dizzy,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
She then fell down, and doctors were able to catch her before she hit her head.
Dover has come out and claimed that she has a condition which causes her to faint. However, it seems to me that this is likely a lie on her part, as she is herself a member of the medical establishment, and thus almost certainly involved in the unhinged pro-vaccine groupthink. It probably isn’t true, as she claimed that she faints when she feels pain (this is a condition known as “being a woman”), and there was no obvious pain trigger in the video. However, whether she really has a condition or not, this viral video footage of someone passing out after receiving the vaccine is going to make a lot of people think twice.
Despite all of the best efforts of the media and the government to silence any and all discussion of the vaccine, the general public is at least vaguely aware of the fact that there are a lot of people who are concerned about the rushed release of this totally experimental new form of gene therapy. When people see someone fainting as a result of the vaccine, they automatically think: “there is a group of people who say this vaccine isn’t safe – maybe they’re right?”
One fainting video hurts the government’s brand more than a hundred negative reviews or a thousand screenshots of texture popping can hurt CDRP. With Cyberpunk, the hype is so large that people are going to be willing to spend the $60 just to find out what is going on with the game. Few will subject themselves to a vaccine that they think is not safe. So the government is required to explain that the product is safe, whilst CDPR is only required to make the case that you’ll have some fun with the game.
The fundamental difference between a vaccine and a video game is the price. If you buy a big open world video game that sucks, you might end up only spending ten hours with it instead of the hundred hours you thought you were going to get based on the hype. But if you take a vaccine that’s unsafe, you could end up paying the price for that for the rest of your life, experiencing permanent health problems.
Ultimately, both the vaccine and the game are going to sell well, because marketing works. A massive marketing program can result in any product selling. A proper marketing campaign could sell pieces of dog shit from someone’s yard to a certain segment of the population.
There will likely be a lot of overlap between the people who buy Cyberpunk 2077 and the people who agree to take the vaccine, given that susceptibility to marketing is a psychological trait which applies to all areas of life.