Surgeon General Jerome Adams asks Kylie Jenner to help fight coronavirus by telling fans to 'stay home'
Surgeon General Jerome Adams, one of America's leading physicians, knows that teenagers are more likely to listen to social media icons than their country's officials. This is the reason why he wants to enlist the help of none other than the youngest self-made billionaire in history, Kylie Jenner, to warn youngsters about the seriousness of the pandemic.
“What I really think we need to do [is] get our influencers,” Surgeon General Jerome Adams said on ABC's 'Good Morning America.' “We need to get Kylie Jenner and social media influencers out there, in helping folks understand that look, this is serious, this is absolutely serious. People are dying."
Apart from the 22-year-old 'Keeping Up with the Kardashians' star, he also named infected basketball players such as Kevin Durant and Donovan Mitchell to play a role in making youngsters aware of the situation.
He said that he got the idea from his own kids because “the more I tell them not to do something, the more they want to do it." However, the youth of the nation is bound to listen if the same tips for awareness amid the ongoing pandemic came from a social media influencer such as Jenner, who has 166 million followers on Instagram.
Despite being at a low risk of fatality, Adams said that youngsters are more likely to ignore the advice for self-quarantine and hence contract the virus and pass it over to elderly people around them, who are at greater risk of the disease.
“We are seeing new data from Italy that suggests that young people may be at higher risk than what we previously thought,” he said. “But think about your grandfather, think about your grandmother, think about the fact you’re spreading disease that could ultimately be what kills them."
However, it seems that Jenner is already way ahead of Adams and has already started spreading the message of awareness to her followers.
“I hope everyone is feeling well! It's so important right now to self-quarantine to ensure we aren't endangering ourselves or anyone who can't handle this virus. I’m on day 8. My pregnancy prepared me for this. I didn't leave the house for months,” she posted Instagram Stories on Wednesday, March 18.
The number of people infected with the virus in the US has ballooned to around 9,500 and at least 145 people have been reported dead.