Signs of the times: Who makes the ‘I Got Vaccinated!’ stickers?

March 3, 2021

Excitement and pride can be contagious. Just as Americans have become accustomed to showing off their I Voted! stickers after leaving the polls on Election Day, getting a shot of the COVID-19 vaccine now comes with a similar rite of passage: Proudly affixing an I Got Vaccinated! sticker to your jacket or shirt.

The stickers are a key component of an urgen, nationwide public health campaign. The first version came out of the Centers for Disease Control and now many municipalities and states are making their own—not only to spread joy, but to communicate message that vaccines are safe, accessible, and to signal a potential end to the pandemic, Bustle reports.

Major Holli Nelson—a member of the National Guard and of the communications team for West Virginia’s interagency COVID task force—designed custom West Virginia stickers after seeing the version from the CDC. “‘I Voted’ stickers [show] that people were so proud to have participated in democracy,” recalls Nelson. “So we thought, ‘How about we show off being proud to be vaccinated?’” She and her colleague Dr. Lisa Costello, a pediatrician, rolled out the design in December.

For Nelson, it was critical that her state’s COVID vaccine stickers automatically identify its wearers as West Virginians. “We are a people that rally behind one another to get through the toughest of times — that’s what defines us as a state and those are the values that we carry. We really needed to include that on there so people outside of the state would know that.” She incorporated the state’s colors, blue and gold, an outline of the state map, and the #westvirginiastrong hashtag the National Guard had been using to spread COVID-related information since the pandemic’s start.

In New York City, the Department of Health took a more corporate approach, selecting a winning sticker design from concepts requested from the department’s contracted ad agencies. The stickers are just part of a suite of promotional materials, ranging from billboards to TV ads, supporting the city’s vaccination campaign.

A department spokesperson tells Bustle that New Yorkers had been asking for stickers in particular: “We need our messages and excitement for the vaccine to be more contagious than the virus itself.”

Indeed, while the CDC produced its own I Got My COVID-19 Vaccine! sticker template; it’s up to individual municipalities and vaccine-administering jurisdictions to design, print, and distribute their own stickers, which means you’re not necessarily guaranteed to get one on your vaccination day.

Much like how “I Voted” stickers come from each state, so do vaccine administration plans, which include promotional materials like stickers.

For West Virginia’s original sticker run, rushed to ensure West Virginia state leadership could sport them after their own live TV vaccination, Nelson and Costello printed them themselves at Staples for less than $200. Even now, the two estimate that the state has spent no more than a “couple thousand dollars” on their sticker production and distribution efforts.

“The cost has been minimal compared to the impact,” Nelson says of the countless sticker-bedecked vaxxies she’s seen on social media. Given West Virginia’s notably successful vaccine rollout program, stickers that make people smile feel like one small but well-earned victory lap.

In New York City, the city has invested approximately $5 million into their NYC Vaccine for All campaigns, which includes stickers as well as newspaper, TV, and streaming ad placements in 15 languages, the spokesperson confirms.

At least anecdotally, the investment pays off, if just in good vibes. “When I [hear] pharmacists saying, ‘Don’t forget your sticker!’ at vaccine clinics, people are so happy,” says Nelson. “The people doing the administration of the vaccine are doing so much to make people feel a part of the solution. It’s all these community partners, even at the lowest level, who really drive this home.”

“When I see women I know from church in my hometown posting pictures of their stickers getting their vaccines in the high school gym I used to play basketball in — I see people with a sense of hope after a really long time.”

Research contact: @bustle

March 24, 2023

The world’s top alien hunter is about to embark on his most ambitious—and potentially, historical—mission yet, reports The Daily Beast.

Harvard physicist Avi Loeb is organizing a $1.5-million expedition to Papua New Guinea to search for fragments of a very strange meteorite that impacted just off the coast of the Pacific nation in 2014.

There is compelling evidence that the half-meter-wide meteorite, called CNEOS1 2014-01-08, traveled from outside our solar system. And that it’s made of extremely hard rock or metal—a material that’s hard and tough enough to prove the meteorite isn’t a meteorite at all. Maybe it’s an alien probe.

It’s a long-shot effort. After years of work, Loeb and his team have, with a big assist from the U.S. military, narrowed down CNEOS1 2014-01-08’s likely impact zone to a square kilometer of the ocean floor, nearly two kilometers underwater. But the fragments themselves are probably just a few millimeters in size. It’s worse than looking for a needle in a haystack. Loeb is basically preparing to look for big sand in a square-kilometer patch of small sand.

It’s worth the risk, Loeb told The Daily Beast. Any fragments the team recovers could turn out to be “technological”—that is, clearly manufactured and thus strong evidence of the existence of aliens. Or maybe they’re not artificial, but are made of some super-strong material that we’ve never observed until now. A rare metal forged in the hearts of neutron stars, for example.

In any event, “we will learn something new,” Loeb said.

The expedition is almost ready to depart for Papua New Guinea. “We have a boat,” Loeb wrote in on a post on Medium on January 27. “We have a dream team, including some of the most experienced and qualified professionals in ocean expeditions. We have complete design and manufacturing plans for the required sled, magnets, collection nets and mass spectrometer.

“And most importantly,” he wrote, “today we received the green light to go ahead,” referring to the approval of Papua New Guinea’s for the mission.

The plan, Loeb said, is to deploy a variety of custom sand-sifters—some with magnets, others like huge sieves—and methodically search the seafloor for two weeks. The main reason it’s taken eight years to organize the mission is that, first, Loeb and his team had to figure out where the meteorite’s fragments came down to Earth.

It was easier said than done, since no single instrument precisely captured CNEOS1 2014-01-08’s journey to the seafloor. But if anyone was motivated to try, it was Loeb. While these days more and more scientists are coming around to the idea that we’re probably not alone in the universe, Loeb was banging that drum even when it was unpopular.

When a very odd, shiny, football-field-size object streaked across then out of the solar system in 2017, Loeb was among the first scientists to say out loud what others may only have been thinking: This object, which scientists later named ’Oumuamua ( Hawaiian for “scout”), might be an alien probe.

And Loeb isn’t afraid to put his money—well, his donors’ money—where his mouth is. In addition to studying strange interstellar objects such as ’Oumuamua, Loeb through his Galileo Project is painstakingly building humanity’s first global network of small telescopes , which will scan the sky for alien craft, or at least the remains of alien craft.

To narrow down CNEOS1 2014-01-08’s impact zone, Loeb needed data from two sets of instruments. The first set was from U.S. military missile-warning satellites that, thanks to their sensitive infrared sensors, tend to also detect meteorites while scanning for missile-launches.

These satellites can not only provide at least a vague indication of where a meteorite is heading; they also capture images of the fireball that results from a meteorite’s fast, hot trip through Earth’s atmosphere. The timing and intensity of a fireball can tell us a lot about a meteorite’s composition. Basically, the longer it takes for the atmosphere to ignite a meteor, the tougher the meteor is.

After much wheedling, Loeb convinced the Pentagon to release the full fireball data for CNEOS1 2014-01-08. They indicated the 2014 meteorite might be the hardest meteorite on record.

The second set of data Loeb needed was much more precise telemetry for the meteorite’s path than the military could provide. So, he checked on nearby earthquake sensors. “We found that the blast wave from the meteor explosion generated a high-quality signal in a seismometer located at Manus Island,” which is part of Papua New Guinea, Loeb wrote at Medium.

Armed with the two data sets, Loeb and his team were able to narrow the likely impact zone from 100 square kilometers to just one square kilometer. “This reduction in the geographic uncertainty of the … fireball improves the search efficiency in the forthcoming ocean expedition to recover its fragments,” Loeb and company wrote in a study, not yet peer-reviewed, that appeared online on March 13.

After having arranged funding and manpower, narrowing the search zone, and getting the Papua New Guinean government’s approval, Loeb and his team are now putting the finishing touches on their special sand-sifting equipment for recovering magnetic meteoritic debris from the seafloor.

Once it’s all ready, hopefully this summer, Loeb and his team will set sail.

Expectations are running high. But Loeb said he’s bracing for disappointment. “There is a chance it will fail,” he said of his expedition. Even success could be something of a letdown, if the team recovers fragments, but those fragments turn out to be natural in origin rather than artificial.

It’s important to frame even that secondary discovery as a major advancement, Ravi Kopparapu, an astronomer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, told The Daily Beast. “This could give us more confidence on the nature of the interstellar meteor—and could point to whether this meteor is unique or a new class of meteorites.”

Maybe Loeb and his team will go to all that trouble to find the remains of CNEOS1 2014-01-08, only to confirm it isn’t an alien probe. But don’t expect a setback like that to cause Loeb to give up his search for evidence of extraterrestrials. He said he understands how convincing the proof needs to be, and how hard it might be to find it. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” he said.

Research contact: @thedailybeast

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