About us
My name Is Art Fox and I live in the Chicago, IL area. Until I retired (sort of), I made my living as an actor, writer, marketing professional and writing teacher at DePaul University. I say “sort of” because I still teach, and an actor never really retires until he can’t remember his lines or hit his mark, which I can still do. I’m obsessed with golf, recently got back to playing the guitar after many years away from it, and am studying Spanish. I’m fortunate to have a wide social circle, with friends ranging in age from their 20s to their 80s.
When Covid came along, the last thing I wanted to do was lose my health, my activities, any of my friends, or even my life.
I was 72 when the Covid vaccine became available in the early spring of 2021, and I couldn’t wait to get my shots. America has always been a leader in providing vaccinations to its citizens, so I was stunned when I found out that about 1/3 of the American population refused to get vaccinated – a fact made even more incredible since vaccines for polio, mumps, measles, chicken pox, shingles, seasonal influenza (the flu), hepatitis, tetanus, rabies, TB, rubella and many others have been safely protecting millions of Americans for decades.
At first I felt nothing but anger at those who refused the vaccine and dismissed them as stupid. But I quickly realized that was a simple answer to a complex problem, and it was just mental laziness on my part to react that way. I started researching why people were refusing the vaccine, and most of the reasons have to do with believing mis-information. I also realized that focusing on my anger shut off my brain and didn’t enable me to take action to help fix the problem.
I started thinking about how mis-information works, why it’s so effective and where it comes from.
I realized it’s because it creates fear which works in combination with the false impression that anyone who resists the vaccine is part of a community of people who know something the rest of us don’t. In other words, people who believe mis-information about the Covid vaccine are succumbing to emotional social pressure that reduces factual information to background noise.
But maybe more importantly, there is now credible evidence that Russia is behind a lot of misinformation about the vaccine. If this is true, it’s obvious their goal is to weaken our country by keeping our people sick and our economy on the ropes.
So I decided to use social pressure to create change in the right direction and help make us all a lot safer. I created http://www.PatriotForTheVax.com to offer products that help people show they’re proud to be vaccinated in the hope that if unvaccinated people see lots of us wearing PatriotForTheVax stuff, they’ll change their minds about getting vaccinated.
The longer Covid lives in the American population, the more likely it is to mutate and become even more dangerous. We’ve already seen that with the Delta Variant, and since viruses are constantly mutating, there’s nothing to stop Covid from evolving into something even worse.
I hope you’ll help me save some lives, maybe a lot of lives, by helping me convince 1,000,000 Americans to get their vaccines.
