The first Covid-19 vaccines began being distributed in the US today, and amidst the rollout Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams took to Fox News to talk about the race to develop a cure for the pandemic. And to do that he started talking about Xbox.
“I want to put it in Christmas-think for people out there,” Adams told Fox And Friends host Steve Doocy. “The Xbox is the new big gift for Christmas and what we did was really use what’s called platform technology. If you get a new Xbox and you want to change your game out you don’t throw the whole Xbox out and buy a new Xbox, you just get a new game.”
That was only the beginning of the odd metaphor. Adams continued:
What we did with this vaccine was use a platform that had been around for over a decade so we know its safe, we know it’s effective, we changed out the cartridge to adapt it to Covid-19 and that is really scientifically what allowed us to get here in record time. These vaccines are safe and I will get one as soon as they tell me I can.
Fortunately, unlike actual game cartridges, it doesn’t sound like the covid vaccine will accidently wipe your data, or needs to be blown into, before it’s injected into your body.
This isn’t the first time the federal government has leaned on clumsy gaming references to try to explain elements of our ongoing national health crisis to the public. Decades ago and/or back in March of this year, the White House’s Coronavirus Task Force response coordinator, Dr. Deborah Birx, urged young people to take the pandemic more seriously because their knack for speedrunning games will be a key resource for technological innovation in the future.
Meanwhile, the rate of new confirmed covid cases throughout the country continues to grow, and new tragic milestones are occurring weekly. On December 9, 0ver 3,000 deaths from the virus were reported in a single day, the highest since the start of the pandemic. In the next day or so, the US is set to surpass 300,000 deaths total.
One way in which the covid-19 vaccine and the new Xbox are similar is that both are currently in very short supply. The Trump administration previously passed on locking in an additional 100 million doses of the current Pfizer vaccine, according to a report by The New York Times, and is now scrambling to buy up more from other companies.