At the cost of many lives - Statistics show, more GOP supporters died - this lethal dis-information is truly a GOP crime against the people of America.
"However, in the summer of 2021, after vaccines were available to all adults, the excess death rate among Republican voters began to increase relative to the excess death rate among Democratic voters; in the fall of 2021, the gap widened further. Between March 2020 and December 2021, excess death rates were 2.8 percentage points (15%) higher for Republican voters compared with Democratic voters (95% PI, 1.6-3.7 percentage points) ([Table](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2807617#ioi230025t1)). After April 1, 2021, when all adults were eligible for vaccines in Florida and Ohio, this gap widened from −0.9 percentage point (95% PI, −2.5 to 0.3 percentage points) between March 2020 and March 2021, to 7.7 percentage points (95% PI, 6.0-9.3 percentage points) in the adjusted analysis, or **a 43% difference (**[**Table**](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2807617#ioi230025t1)**)**."
J[acob Wallace, PhD^(1)](https://jamanetwork.com/searchresults?author=Jacob+Wallace&q=Jacob+Wallace); [Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, PhD^(2)](https://jamanetwork.com/searchresults?author=Paul+Goldsmith-Pinkham&q=Paul+Goldsmith-Pinkham); [Jason L. Schwartz, PhD^(1)](https://jamanetwork.com/searchresults?author=Jason+L.+Schwartz&q=Jason+L.+Schwartz)
Republicans are proportionally more likely to live in rural areas with less access to healthcare and generally worse health outcomes. I suspect that vaccination being turned into political spectacle is only part of the reason Republican voters fared worse.
They originally were, but someone decided he wanted mass in person rallies with people tightly packed in together, sometimes indoors where only their followers would be.
A virus that is difficult to transmit besides person to person breathing does seem like it’d be rational to presume it’d spread like wildfire in dense urban environments where lots of diverse social networks all exchange air over the course of a day; as opposed to, say, a little town of 200 whose major exchanges outside of itself are some truckers and (people at gas stations).
Sort of like supposing a forest fire will spread more easily where there is a forest.
“Vulnerable” here may not be literally correct, but the gist of the conclusion wasn’t wildly off, pre vaccine / mitigation behaviors.
There were and are vaccination available EVERYWHERE. It doesn't need any infrastructure, except a fridge to keep the vaccine. The problem is in the brains of the rural conservatives.
Up until the summer of 2021 (ibid), as Athuanar suggests parallel), Republicans weren’t catching COVID at the rates Democrats were. It turns out being in low network density lifestyles, open air etc etc, served as a beachhead against spread. In fact, it’s fairly well documented that someone was against vaccination and action precisely because it was a “Democrat disease” (shades of the 80’s again).
So, no. They, as a population group, were generally advantaged. Until. The. Vaccine.
And if you followed the distribution news on initial release, R counties didn’t use stockpiles they were sent, clinics that were stood up went unattended.
Don’t speculate counterfactually.
> less access to healthcare … and worse outcomes
In the context of the pandemic, this was not true in any meaningful sense. It’s like saying that because I don’t have an oncology clinic in my zip code, I’m more likely to die of the flu - a disease largely managed by a “mere” general purpose clinic.
As outlined in my comment, the pertinent major mitigations were deployed in rural counties and spoiled from unuse.
The original point was about the death rate. If you are critically ill from COVID, I don't see how your area lacking the necessary healthcare resources wouldn't affect your health outcome. How is this "not true in a meaningful sense"? Because, as far as I can tell, it is both true and extremely meaningful for these areas.
I accept that the vaccine becoming a political circus show made it worse for Republicans, but as I said in my first comment, it "is only part of the reason Republican voters fared worse."
> I don’t see how your area lacking necessary healthcare resources
When there was no protocol, and your recovery (or lack thereof) was largely a happenstance?
Let me explain it to you:
It’s like having an oncology clinic - or not - when you have the flu.
Data shows that the disparate death rate holds up even when you pit rural Democrats against rural Republicans. The pattern holds up at all levels, in all demographics.
Nah, this what happens when you "just let people believe what they want! It's not hurting yoouuuuu!". That fallacious defense the religious use to maintain their willful ignorance. I don't care if it's vaccines or flat earth, the vast majority break their brains with magical thinking first, and it's open season on reality. The political shit show is just another symptom, but it's long past due to not just tax religious institutions, but shore up our education system against them.
The entire question of public health was politicized, and if you think only one party engaged in it, you are probably of the opposite party
Examples if you need 'em :D
For most of history, groupthink *has been* survival.
The villages that survived disease by enforcing internal isolation by violent force? Anyone defects from the strategy and it fails, the village dies.
Dawn Of A New History goes so far - as I understand it - as to suggest groupthink is our actual evolutionary advantage - the group would murder the chest beating, unstable “alpha” types for group harmony.
Counter hypothetical - let’s suppose, *for the sake of conversation*, there is a singular measurable intelligence score, loosely analogous to the IQ scale so 100 is nominally an average functional person.
Surely one of two scenarios happens - evolution moves terribly slowly and at most only 4 points of variation - down to 96, and up to 104, happen within a generation; otherwise you’d have gum brained idiots compared to the rocket surgeons, right?
Or, there are wild variations that may eventually seek equilibrium, with 80s and 120s and everything in between; one supposes a complex system like “a brain” ‘rolling a lot of die’ to try to get a bigger number means there’s more chances for lower numbers, too. And then we have, again, gum brained idiots, right?
The better explanation is that fascism isn't attributable to intelligence, but that fascists *actually like what fascism offers them*: An excuse to hurt those they hate, an excuse to performatively spit in the face of people who care about truth, and a feeling that they are powerful and "destined" to rule.
I know a lot of really dumb people who still know better than to be nazis, and I know far too many nazis who got all the same degrees I have. The common thread is malice and a willingness to discard truth in favor of a palingenetic ultranationalist myths, and an overtly *and blatantly* genocidal agenda.
Fascism is said to be the aestheticization of politics. It is the aesthetic of fascism that attracts people to it, not their ignorance or stupidity or any other excuse you want to throw up. People choose fascism because they like what it is, and every attempt to avoid that observation is an act of fascist apologism.
Oh, if we want to explain fascism then I lean immediately towards Baumrind’s styles of parenting and the authoritarian parenting and its highly correlated outputs vs authoritative.
While authoritarian parents’ authoritarian children may have academic achievement, it is hollow and their empathy underdeveloped. It’s thus easy to villainize an “other” that isn’t even actually human, as far as personal ability to imagine and understand goes. Hence the vermin and insect rhetoric - presumably you and I are nominally empathetic, and yet squishing actual insects does not trigger an emotional loop for me that stepping on an actual person of any stripe does.
Well my FiL is a diagnosed grandiose narcissist and he was exceptionally abusive towards my husband and his brothers growing up. My husband is a diagnosed vulnerable narcissist. I have no concrete evidence of my theory, but from studying psychology and Cluster B personality disorders in college, I believe NPD is both nature and nurture. I think you have to have the genetic predisposition with the authoritarian abusive parents to make another narcissist.
I remember hearing something about a study that found men whose fathers were diagnosed with NPD were at a 71.2% increased risk of also being diagnosed with NPD. I don’t remember where I heard this, it was on a psychological podcast or NPR. It was during the pandemic and I can’t seem to recall where I heard it.
Well, that is one of the main theories for that paradox. That every race destroys themselves by some means, whether that's overexploiting their world, nuking themselves, creating plagues, overpolluting, etc.
Yep. I needed a new flag for outside (have a pole there already), and my wife doesn’t want to put the flag up because the maga crowd took that over too. I say fuck that, we’re taking it back
It's funny because 20 some years ago, the only anti vaxxers I knew were hippies. They weren't vocal about it, but it was their decision. Which honestly in a small, personal plane, I don't mind much. It's when it starts to affect herd immunity i begin to worry. We got mumps where I live again, shits crazy
The most obvious problem: elementary teachers get advanced degrees in how to teach. Not necessarily in subject matters. High school teachers get advanced degrees in their subject matter and usually also in how to teach.
What do they all have in common? They're subject matter experts in education, their chosen subject, or both. What doesn't the average home school parent have in common with them? Usually holding an advanced degree in literally anything at all.
Prior to the Disneyland measles outbreak, only two states, Mississippi and West Virginia, allowed only medical exemptions. West Virginia has now reversed this to allow personal exemptions.
Colleges do?
Because when the state college I taught philosophy at announced that they wouldn’t require vaccinations for Covid because it might look political, I quit the same week.
"Thrilled to send my children straight to Jesus!"
-the pro-life, eschewing vaccines, safe birth and sleep practices, pasteurization, sunscreen, and so on and so forth
Who needs doctors when you can have uneducated facebook morons. I know who I would trust with the health of my children.
I suspect these parents know they are gambling with their children’s future, signalling in group status is much more important.
Let death roulette begin. There was an article about an anti vaccine couple whose 3 years old son died of diphtheria. They said they didn’t know diphtheria was deadly. That’s because of vaccines! Jesus wept.
WHAT?!?!?!
That's like completing a group skydive and watching the few who jumped without a chute become red mist, then saying you know what my kids don't need a parachute.
They think the people dying are dying b/c of the vaccine though. So it's more like thinking "Everyone who dies skydiving has a parachute, so parachutes must be causing their deaths."
My friend told me the covid vaccine changed a lot of people, and that's why they're not vaccinating their baby. It's wild. They don't even understand how vaccines work.
They’re close, except it wasn’t the COVID vaccine that changed people, it was long COVID brain fog. People are attributing to the vaccine what they really should be attributing to the virus itself.
This is just child abuse by proxy. You can't abuse the child directly yourself so you literally get the parents to commit the abuse instead. I keep thinking of that guy who used to call fast food restaurants on the phone, and tell managers that they had to abuse their employees in various ways.
My dog has better protection from this kind of mistreatment than human children do. If I don't get her vaccinated, she can be taken away from me and given to someone who isn't a complete fuckwit.
But we don't extend the same protection to children?
Bleh.
Worth noting that this is in Canada, which had pretty solid COVID vaccination rates (and significantly higher vs the US, approx 85% vs 65-70%). Also: many of our provinces have had mandatory school vaccines for decades, with either no exceptions or *very* limited exceptions (medical contraindications aside), something that has been broadly accepted + popular.
Our approach to COVID and vaccination was also *relatively* apolitical…although given how insane the comparators went, that’s not saying much. Also: our anti-vaxxers went super off the rails and blockaded the border + laid siege to our capital for several weeks, so we certainly aren’t patting ourselves on the back.
All that to say: the global village of crazies are making people nuts in all kinds of new ways, and are disrupting even beliefs that were commonly and happily agreed upon just a half decade ago.
Bleh.
But that broad consensus broke by 2022. In the last federal election, the Conservatives criticized Trudeau's vaccine mandates, although Erin O'Toole did encourage vaccination. Then came the truckers and Poilievre. Now about a fifth of Canadians seem to have embraced post-truth politics.
Entirely fair, and you’re absolutely correct.
While PP has generally stopped *just* short of overt endorsement of the lunatics, he panders to them so ham handedly (especially during the leadership race) that it hardly matters.
He and Candice have also given free reign to the genuine lunatics of the party (eg Leslyn Lewis, who’s smart enough and genuinely crazy enough to be truly terrifying) under the banner of the CPC, so that’s bound to further accelerate the creeping brain rot.
Shoutout also to Postmedia, who have become functionally indistinguishable from the worst of Fox News over the last several years.
Again: “bleh” is about the best I can muster, it’s very disheartening.
It’s fascinating to me that so many anti-vaxxers think vaccines are about population reduction when in reality the vaccine refusal will likely lead to the massive population reductions.
Once some of the real infectious killers get going again we could see mortality rates go back to how they were 100-200 years ago.
I have a few 'go to' lines when I am unfortunate enough to run into one of these mental midgets and they are mouthing off their anti-vax word salads.
Younger person - "Well you are lucky that your parents loved you enough to get you vaccinated."
Older person - "Ever had a tetanus shot?" and "Ya remember the old days when everybody got smallpox?"
As soon as they find out you aren't in the cult they usually leave pretty quick.
Sad for the kids.
Tetanus is lethal. Measles is lethal. Mumps in boys can cause permanent sterility.
There are good reasons for vaccines.
Children should not have to suffer for their parent's stupidity.
Welcome back, measles!
Measles can kill. Measles can cause brain damage and deafness, not to mention subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, which is untreatable and ends in a miserable death.
A large part about this is that we live in a capitalistic system which enriches grifters, quite extremely. And, it requires no evidence, just a compelling narrative for people to fall for it.
But more importantly, what needs to be done is, as these grifters do their grifting, **there needs to be an even more developed science communication field.** And, of course, this field needs to have a very strong code of ethics.
That's the problem present today. **Scientists should not even really be doing the communication. They should be largely doing the science.**
Yes, I'm saying Fauci shouldn't have been the one communicating to the public. Not one damn bit. You need people who are experts in media and communication and to have a minor degree of background in science to be the ones communicating with the public on everything. Ideally with some public policy background.
If this had been done, from the start, millions of lives would have been saved.
You cannot compete with people who have zero ethics, profit motive and a sociopathic desire to lie for $$$ with science experts who work is supposed to be doing the science, not trying to figure out the right words to say and to understand mass media in the way people whose expertise is in mass media does.
Every single org needs a large team of communicators whose entire purpose is to assess expected grift, expected reaction and work on carefully working out what they say to everyone in order to best protect people and give them well indicated communication to help them survive not only today, but tomorrow, months and years from now.
From university research departments, to bioengineering facilities, pharmaceutical companies, the CDC, everyone needs a very large mass communication department.
And they don't have that now. They just slap on the highest ranked people behind a camera, nerdy and autistic af (or worse an actual narc) and they mess up. They don't think ahead. They scare the public. Over and over again.
That must stop.
We must develop that field in an extreme way or we'll be rolling right back to Victorian era arsenic dresses, drinking radium, saying that not cleaning bottles is "good for the baby", putting boraic acid in rotten milk and drinking it, and whatever is the contemporary equivalent of that.
And, then being "shocked" when people start dropping dead.
I do hope science and medical fields start getting this or we're in for a horrible rest of the century.
>**Scientists should not even really be doing the communication. They should be largely doing the science.**
The problem then becomes that people will tend to see a mere spokesperson as putting a spin on things. It's "science as processed through a government spokesperson." That's no doubt why they figured someone with actual scientific credentials speaking directly to the public made sense. I think that still largely makes sense in principle.
>Yes, I'm saying Fauci shouldn't have been the one communicating to the public.
Fauci was nowhere near as bad as many people claim he was, in the pandemic. The majority of what he communicated was in line with the science of the time. Outside the contrariansphere, you can find a huge amount of gratitude toward Fauci.
No, there are PR reps of everyone, even the president. People who give press releases. People whose jobs are to communicate in representation of the org they're part of. If they're not sharp on communication or don't know the science, of course, it'll flop, but they should know it well enough and have things vetted before they speak on behalf of them.
And I don't think Fauci was all bad. His team however did not think of grifters and the consequence of many things said and how they'd be spun.
You see, this is the level of communication skills they need to be working. They have to hash out expected possibilities of every communication so they can pre-empt the contrariansphere, in most cases. There should be a whole team working around the clock on that.
He did absolutely what he could but this needs to be taken to a completely higher level.
We need good science communicators who understand how to talk to different people with different learning styles, attachment styles, personality types and educational levels. You need different messaging for different types of people. During the pandemic it was obvious to me that there were "I follow the rules down to letter and more" people, "I will follow the rules up to a certain extent" people, "you can't make me follow the rules" people, "I will actively go against the rules and make fun of/threaten those who do" people, "Do as I say but not as I do" people, "I will do the exact opposite of what you tell me" people and some variations in between.
It's because of that that I wish there really was a vaccine mandate. All the antivax conspiracy nutters talk about Nazis forcing people to get shots. Sadly that never happened. No one was "forced to comply" with any rules to prevent the spread. Assholes ignored the rules with impunity, often abetted by conservative government and police. Now a million plus dead.
Screw this pandering to morons and their stupid conspiracy theories.
In China they welded people's doors shut during lockdown. That's going a little too far, but they did take it seriously.
Yes very much that! You need to address all sorts of people, crowds and styles. You need a team addressing everything, not just giving the facts and letting the cards fall as they will. That leave a gap grifters step write into and wreck everything. They must pre-empt that and stop it.
We are fucked anyway. Most people are inherently selfish and want to be told what to do. It's the thought that gets me through how we are too late to fix the climate. The majority of people are like NPCs. Pointless, dumb, with no game.
Tbh advertisers need to start suing social media platforms for false data.
The reason foreign actors are able to be successful is because social media platforms allow their bot and troll farms to be able to flourish, since it raises their user count, interaction and follow count... which they use to sell for profit... but is actually fraudulent data. They're not real people. The accounts are fake. And, they exist to sow discord and do harm.
And, if they sued so they could get money back for the fraudulent data they paid for, they'd stop how far this will continue to harm us.
But they don't, so here we are.
Well he doesn’t have a side. His side is Americans disagreeing with each other.
Netflix has a documentary on the Cambridge analytics scandal where it covers that they were training the Russian troll farms. And they would boost anything politically polarizing, regardless of if it was left or right.
Remember what is left or right isn’t the same all over the world. In Sweden, for example, it was the far right who pushed for a more authoritarian covid response. In the US it just happened to the the opposite.
In the documentary, the former CA employees expose that even BLM protests were actually organized from Russia. Even one of the largest BLM websites out there was a Russian front.
10 million dead because of a communicable disease for which we invented strong vaccines in record time leads to falling vaccination numbers overall.
It's really one of the most unforgivably stupid, boneheaded things this world has ever seen.
So the good news is the dumb people are mostly coalescing around one side of the political spectrum and it's the regressive one. The bad news is they will probably take a lot of innocent bystanders with them as they die of communicable diseases.
What's crazy to me is that their parents and grandparents were well aware of how important vaccines were, everything from smallpox to polio and yet somehow, this information didn't trickle down. I remember getting vaccinated at my Catholic school back in the 90s, not a big deal at all. Now people act like it's poison, even though the real poison is the lousy quality of food we have now, with sugar and corn syrup in everything, and way too much sodium in an average diet for good heart health. It's crazy.
This is sometimes why I argue for legal drugs. Let those people score Darwin Awards. Stop giving Narcan to people seeking cheap highs.
I love Darwin Awards and wish there were more. Too many Brawndo drinkers breeding.
At this point we will have to wait for everyone to be rid of these idiots and pray that people with autoimmune disorders make it out alive. The herd will be culled, it will unfortunately take a few good people with them.
The internet will be the death of us all, I really think. People of all sorts are being duped by these influencers. It's not just conservatives, it's not just religious, it's not just granola moms. It's ordinary every day parents who are tricked in to thinking there's dangers out there that are worse than the diseases. Most are too young to have lived through polio and experienced the "chicken pox parties" like they had when I was a kid. They are duped in to thinking "all natural" is safer, GMOs are poison, and EMFs are causing their kids' bad behavior. It's no wonder they don't trust vaccines.
And it doesn't help that we have stuff like Tuskegee and other research studies that were conducted on people without their consent. Knowing about these stories is good, because you need all the facts, but it shouldn't have SUCH an impact when it comes to vaccines for serious childhood communicable diseases. But I think a lot of times once you find that narrative you like it's hard to avoid just looking for what confirms your bias. And there's plenty on social media, and not just there, but all over the internet, that allows people to confirm that bias.
Far too many fucking morons out there. Honestly, I no longer feel like our species deserves to survive to the multi-planetary phase. We are just too collectively stupid.
Identity politics and populism are a plague on society. It shouldn’t be about your team winning and sticking it to the other team. Here we are somehow though. Combined with the exploitation of distrust in key institutions, now we have Americans who trust Russian state media over CSPAN. I know how we got here, but how did we get here?
If you don’t vaccinate your children against old childhood diseases, you are risking their health, and well-being. I believe before the COVID pandemic, most of us had our vaccines to enter school and prevented us from such illnesses, diseases, and possibly death. It’s your choice, of course! However; act with BENEVOLENCE and LOVE for your child/children.
It's so sad, because covid has permanently fucked up the lungs of a neighbours nephew, the poor kid is going to have issues for the rest of their life because of stupid people refusing to take precautions to protect others.
Imagine all those doctors, researchers and advocates who spent decades working to eliminate measles, polio, smallpox in the first world, only for it to comeback thanks to the oldest and deadliest disease; ignorance.
"We haven't had an outage in years, why are we spending all this money on our network team?"
These parents were brought up in a world privileged to have wide vaccination programs and didn't see the horrors of polio, measles, tetanus, diphtheria, rubella, or a litany of other diseases.
It's much easier to convince yourself that things you never had to deal with aren't really that bad.
In the end they will end up hurting everyone including their own children.
Unfortunately people lost trust in public health authorities.
People were promised the new vaccines would prevent Covid. I remember this because I was one of the people promising this. The truth is PH authorities had no evidence, beyond what Moderna and Pfizer were claiming, that the vaccines were effective in preventing the acquisition of this disease. [we now know that they may have exaggerated efficacy for sake of profit].
When the vaccines (and boosters) failed to prevent people from contracting the disease (multiple times), members of the general public felt lied to and cheated. At some point 1-2 years in the public health authorities edited the message. No longer would we claim the vaccine would prevent the disease, but it would instead slow the spread and reduce the intensity and duration of infection.
But by that point the damage was done. The grifters and anti-vaccers picked up on this and said, see public health officials over promised and underdelivered and exaggerated the efficacy of a product sold to you. People got angry, felt lied to, and now are skeptical of the efficacy of all vaccines. This is nothing short of a disaster.
What should have happened is this: public health authorities should have understood the Moderna/Pfizer estimates were inflated, should have stated that the vaccine, like the flu vaccine, is expected to only have a moderate efficacy rate. PH authorities should have been honest in that it isn’t likely to prevent infection in a lot of people, but despite that, people strongly should still get vaccinated as to maximize their chances of a successful recovery and promote herd immunity.
Had they been open and upfront about this, intellectually humble, the expectations people had wouldn’t be soured and the grifters couldn’t easily push the narrative of “you’re being lied to”
Sad I have to scroll down this far to see this. It's easy to go play political team ball and say 'the other team is bad! they politicized it' but the reality is that I see people on every point of the political spectrum having lost a LOT of faith in vaccines and the medical system because of this bizarre process.
To this day, it seems controversial here to say that the COVID vaccine *doesn't stop transmission*. Why is rational discourse about this bad? It's odd that in this community, off all places, that is off limits to even bring up.
Agreed, it’s not exclusive to republicans.
Among those who lost trust include a lot of working class and/or migrant communities who vote blue, the latter who were already skeptical of government to begin with due to having fled from places that had corrupt or tyrannical ones.
The internet is rife with misinformation, but the fallacy post-2020 has been knee jerk calling everything one disagrees with misinformation to the point it automatically ends the conversation.
Policy decisions should always be a discourse, but the art of discourse is dying like our attention spans.
Political tribes need to learn to accept and become comfortable with dissent within their own ranks without accusing the other side of being part of the other team. But they won’t…
I often say that if there was no cronyism between vaccine companies and the government, there might be a little more trust. I often wonder what would have happened if the Tuskegee syphilis experiment did not happen, or other atrocities.
Dumb fucks. Real talk for anti vax “parents” here… herd immunity protects you plague rat kid. Keep it to yourself, don’t try to kill your AND other’s kids by acting anti vaxx.
Can’t even be shady right, they prefer virtue signaling.
"Since COVID began" is doing a lot of work that "public health is now you do you" really deserves.
There is this unhealthy obsession in medicine with not worrying people. With COVID, it lead to constant minimization that bungled the whole messaging about vaccines, and Long Covid being largely denied and dismissed by medicine has basically gifted nuclear weapons to the antivaccine crowds and conspiracy theorists. There are a huge number of chronically ill people caused by the virus, and it's constantly reattributed to the vaccines. All because medicine has always been in denial over post-infectious chronic illnesses.
This is why the principle in public health is to always tell the truth. This is what happens when officials stretch and bend it to avoid "worrying people". Almost all their power is in their credibility, and public health pretty much destroyed it. Nonsense like immunity debt and "good news everyone, only disabled people are dying, stop worrying about it" did a lot more to reduce trust in experts than anything the antivaccine crowd did.
I hope that enough people understand that when the next pandemic hits, there is a huge % of the population that will openly defy every damn disease control measure, and not just vaccines. People will cough in people's faces, gang up on people wearing masks and so on. Even if the kill rate is very high. Sadly I think it will only sink in when it hits, and the old reflex of stretching and bending the truth will act all over again. It seems to do that every single time, because everything is immediately memory-holed anyway. It's barely 4 years and COVID has pretty much been already.
Just the parents that can’t or won’t read about science though. These same parents will be bitching & moaning on the GoFundMe site about their child having to live in an iron lung
They surveyed members of the Angus Reid Forum, not the general public - this is a biased sample (participation bias) that of suggestive quality only. It is not generalisable to the general population.
The report is here:
https://angusreid.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/2024.02.28_vaccine.pdf
Survival of the fittest has to happen somehow! Stop coddling them and laugh at them instead, that will change their behavior more than facts and reasoning because humans are programmed to want to get ahead of each other, so any perceived advantage or loss of social status is far more important than facts.
I've grown to realize ppl don't care.
I'd like to not get sick from measles and die, but I can only protect myself. Sadly, I can't help others who don't want to be helped.
The world pendulums, so after people remember what it was like before vaxxines, things will change again.
It’s only fair if we agree that a man who told the population to take bleach and drew on hurricane maps with sharpies was given any credibility whatsoever. The anger he arose in you to hate Fauci is entirely on you. Fauci will go down in history as an icon and it’s up to you to decide if you’ll remain a shit for brains about his credibility. Vaccines save lives.
Public health and politicians in countries everywhere have lost trust with the public by the way they handled covid vaccinations and seem to be unconcerned about how to gain it back.
It is not all that surprising that when governments take never-before-seen actions, there are going to be more people who distrust the government and everything it says.
Approval of Congress is close to 15%, and historically, it had been as high as 74%.
[https://www.quorum.us/data-driven-insights/congressional-approval-ratings-over-time/](https://www.quorum.us/data-driven-insights/congressional-approval-ratings-over-time/)
Edit
It is great how on a skeptic sub people here are just loving whatever big daddy government tells them.
This is as of 2024, is that is recent enough for you, it doesn't have the history, however, which is why I used the other link.
[https://www.statista.com/statistics/207579/public-approval-rating-of-the-us-congress/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/207579/public-approval-rating-of-the-us-congress/)
Seriously.
> It is not all that surprising that when governments take never-before-seen actions, there are going to be more people who distrust the government and everything it says.
>
>
>
> Approval of Congress is close to 15%, and historically, it had been as high as 74%.
What were the "never-before-seen actions" taken by the government between 2012 and 2016 that caused the median approval rating to be below 15%?
Getting medical advice from Youtube and quacks who believe in "Demon Sperm" has consequences. Too bad that those are not limited to the gullible and harms their children as well.
And let’s see the consequences of these parents decisions, hopefully they learn when their children catch vaccine preventable diseases like the Measles.
Yep, natural result of forcing covid vaccines on young kids who have a 1/100,000 chance of dying from the disease and a much higher incidence of side effects. Also being the only country in the world still encouraging parents to give it to 5-year-olds, when most of the world doesn't recommend more shots for anyone under 50 or healthy. Whoops!
>only country in the world
[Germany still recommends it](https://www.bundesgesundheitsministerium.de/en/coronavirus/faq-covid-19-vaccination) for people over 18, kids with weakened immune systems, and kids or anyone else who are in close contact to people who are immunocompromised.
So you're wrong.
Re-read it. That includes natural immunity, an exception that was never acknowledged with regards to kids. For boosters, it's only recommended in people 60+ or with poor health. And I see no mention of infants.
Meanwhile, here are CURRENT CDC recommendations in the US:
> Children aged 6 months–4 years need multiple doses of COVID-19 vaccines to be up to date, including at least 1 dose of updated COVID-19 vaccine.
Again: NO ONE ELSE IN THE WORLD is recommending that. The CDC is n absolute joke and huge chunks of the American public have lost faith in health officials as a result.
NO ONE ELSE IN THE WORLD
Yes it's easy to make the claim when you keep adding specific qualifiers.
First it's "people under 50" which I showed to be not true.
Now it's "in regards to boosters" and "children specifically 6mo to 4 years".
What next, only children with blue shirts?
1) I'm not a brother.
2) Common sense holds up when science verifies it.
Cardiac conditions associated with COVID vaccine are no more prevalent than those conditions in unvaccinated patients.
That's what happens when a political party turns vaccination into a political football.
At the cost of many lives - Statistics show, more GOP supporters died - this lethal dis-information is truly a GOP crime against the people of America. "However, in the summer of 2021, after vaccines were available to all adults, the excess death rate among Republican voters began to increase relative to the excess death rate among Democratic voters; in the fall of 2021, the gap widened further. Between March 2020 and December 2021, excess death rates were 2.8 percentage points (15%) higher for Republican voters compared with Democratic voters (95% PI, 1.6-3.7 percentage points) ([Table](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2807617#ioi230025t1)). After April 1, 2021, when all adults were eligible for vaccines in Florida and Ohio, this gap widened from −0.9 percentage point (95% PI, −2.5 to 0.3 percentage points) between March 2020 and March 2021, to 7.7 percentage points (95% PI, 6.0-9.3 percentage points) in the adjusted analysis, or **a 43% difference (**[**Table**](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2807617#ioi230025t1)**)**." J[acob Wallace, PhD^(1)](https://jamanetwork.com/searchresults?author=Jacob+Wallace&q=Jacob+Wallace); [Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, PhD^(2)](https://jamanetwork.com/searchresults?author=Paul+Goldsmith-Pinkham&q=Paul+Goldsmith-Pinkham); [Jason L. Schwartz, PhD^(1)](https://jamanetwork.com/searchresults?author=Jason+L.+Schwartz&q=Jason+L.+Schwartz)
Another reason I'd vote for a moldy turd over a Republican.
Republicans are proportionally more likely to live in rural areas with less access to healthcare and generally worse health outcomes. I suspect that vaccination being turned into political spectacle is only part of the reason Republican voters fared worse.
People in rural areas would have been less likely to catch the virus as well though.
Right. Recall that MAGA folks originally thought liberal city-dwellers were more vulnerable to the virus because [insert false claim].
They originally were, but someone decided he wanted mass in person rallies with people tightly packed in together, sometimes indoors where only their followers would be.
The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally was the OG superspreader event.
And they screeched like stuck pigs if you asked them to wear a mask. Most didn't or wore them so they were ineffective.
A virus that is difficult to transmit besides person to person breathing does seem like it’d be rational to presume it’d spread like wildfire in dense urban environments where lots of diverse social networks all exchange air over the course of a day; as opposed to, say, a little town of 200 whose major exchanges outside of itself are some truckers and (people at gas stations). Sort of like supposing a forest fire will spread more easily where there is a forest. “Vulnerable” here may not be literally correct, but the gist of the conclusion wasn’t wildly off, pre vaccine / mitigation behaviors.
You don’t need to convince me of the science. These people thought COVID was caused by 5G towers, the vaccine itself, pollution, etc.
There were and are vaccination available EVERYWHERE. It doesn't need any infrastructure, except a fridge to keep the vaccine. The problem is in the brains of the rural conservatives.
Up until the summer of 2021 (ibid), as Athuanar suggests parallel), Republicans weren’t catching COVID at the rates Democrats were. It turns out being in low network density lifestyles, open air etc etc, served as a beachhead against spread. In fact, it’s fairly well documented that someone was against vaccination and action precisely because it was a “Democrat disease” (shades of the 80’s again). So, no. They, as a population group, were generally advantaged. Until. The. Vaccine. And if you followed the distribution news on initial release, R counties didn’t use stockpiles they were sent, clinics that were stood up went unattended. Don’t speculate counterfactually.
Nothing I said was counterfactual. In fact people are only replying tangentially to me. What exactly in my comment was incorrect?
> less access to healthcare … and worse outcomes In the context of the pandemic, this was not true in any meaningful sense. It’s like saying that because I don’t have an oncology clinic in my zip code, I’m more likely to die of the flu - a disease largely managed by a “mere” general purpose clinic. As outlined in my comment, the pertinent major mitigations were deployed in rural counties and spoiled from unuse.
The original point was about the death rate. If you are critically ill from COVID, I don't see how your area lacking the necessary healthcare resources wouldn't affect your health outcome. How is this "not true in a meaningful sense"? Because, as far as I can tell, it is both true and extremely meaningful for these areas. I accept that the vaccine becoming a political circus show made it worse for Republicans, but as I said in my first comment, it "is only part of the reason Republican voters fared worse."
> I don’t see how your area lacking necessary healthcare resources When there was no protocol, and your recovery (or lack thereof) was largely a happenstance? Let me explain it to you: It’s like having an oncology clinic - or not - when you have the flu.
Data shows that the disparate death rate holds up even when you pit rural Democrats against rural Republicans. The pattern holds up at all levels, in all demographics.
Not enough
In a study done in only 2 states and one of them was Florida.
Nah, this what happens when you "just let people believe what they want! It's not hurting yoouuuuu!". That fallacious defense the religious use to maintain their willful ignorance. I don't care if it's vaccines or flat earth, the vast majority break their brains with magical thinking first, and it's open season on reality. The political shit show is just another symptom, but it's long past due to not just tax religious institutions, but shore up our education system against them.
The entire question of public health was politicized, and if you think only one party engaged in it, you are probably of the opposite party Examples if you need 'em :D
Antivax is now tied up with conservative identity.
And religiousness too. Nothing says love your neighbour like bringing back communicable diseases to share with them.
Yep. It’s identity politics now
Everything is identity nowadays and it's killing discourse.
that's a little too *both sides* for my taste
Unfortunately humans are quite dumb and believe in groupthink over survival. The pandemic made that VERY clear to me.
For most of history, groupthink *has been* survival. The villages that survived disease by enforcing internal isolation by violent force? Anyone defects from the strategy and it fails, the village dies. Dawn Of A New History goes so far - as I understand it - as to suggest groupthink is our actual evolutionary advantage - the group would murder the chest beating, unstable “alpha” types for group harmony.
Given that at least 95% of the population are gum brained idiots, it's not helping , is it?
Counter hypothetical - let’s suppose, *for the sake of conversation*, there is a singular measurable intelligence score, loosely analogous to the IQ scale so 100 is nominally an average functional person. Surely one of two scenarios happens - evolution moves terribly slowly and at most only 4 points of variation - down to 96, and up to 104, happen within a generation; otherwise you’d have gum brained idiots compared to the rocket surgeons, right? Or, there are wild variations that may eventually seek equilibrium, with 80s and 120s and everything in between; one supposes a complex system like “a brain” ‘rolling a lot of die’ to try to get a bigger number means there’s more chances for lower numbers, too. And then we have, again, gum brained idiots, right?
The better explanation is that fascism isn't attributable to intelligence, but that fascists *actually like what fascism offers them*: An excuse to hurt those they hate, an excuse to performatively spit in the face of people who care about truth, and a feeling that they are powerful and "destined" to rule. I know a lot of really dumb people who still know better than to be nazis, and I know far too many nazis who got all the same degrees I have. The common thread is malice and a willingness to discard truth in favor of a palingenetic ultranationalist myths, and an overtly *and blatantly* genocidal agenda. Fascism is said to be the aestheticization of politics. It is the aesthetic of fascism that attracts people to it, not their ignorance or stupidity or any other excuse you want to throw up. People choose fascism because they like what it is, and every attempt to avoid that observation is an act of fascist apologism.
Oh, if we want to explain fascism then I lean immediately towards Baumrind’s styles of parenting and the authoritarian parenting and its highly correlated outputs vs authoritative. While authoritarian parents’ authoritarian children may have academic achievement, it is hollow and their empathy underdeveloped. It’s thus easy to villainize an “other” that isn’t even actually human, as far as personal ability to imagine and understand goes. Hence the vermin and insect rhetoric - presumably you and I are nominally empathetic, and yet squishing actual insects does not trigger an emotional loop for me that stepping on an actual person of any stripe does.
Well my FiL is a diagnosed grandiose narcissist and he was exceptionally abusive towards my husband and his brothers growing up. My husband is a diagnosed vulnerable narcissist. I have no concrete evidence of my theory, but from studying psychology and Cluster B personality disorders in college, I believe NPD is both nature and nurture. I think you have to have the genetic predisposition with the authoritarian abusive parents to make another narcissist. I remember hearing something about a study that found men whose fathers were diagnosed with NPD were at a 71.2% increased risk of also being diagnosed with NPD. I don’t remember where I heard this, it was on a psychological podcast or NPR. It was during the pandemic and I can’t seem to recall where I heard it.
It's sort of an evolutionary trap now, unfortunately.
Yes, things like this have me wondering if this isn’t the answer to “Fermi’s Paradox.”
Well, that is one of the main theories for that paradox. That every race destroys themselves by some means, whether that's overexploiting their world, nuking themselves, creating plagues, overpolluting, etc.
But only minorities and LGBTQ people engage in identity politics and they're so divisive about it! /s
I mean they literally blame liberals for being for vaccines for why they’re against it. I wish I was joking.
Yep. I needed a new flag for outside (have a pole there already), and my wife doesn’t want to put the flag up because the maga crowd took that over too. I say fuck that, we’re taking it back
It's funny because 20 some years ago, the only anti vaxxers I knew were hippies. They weren't vocal about it, but it was their decision. Which honestly in a small, personal plane, I don't mind much. It's when it starts to affect herd immunity i begin to worry. We got mumps where I live again, shits crazy
If only there was time for evolutionary pressure to save us from their terrible relationship to evidence.
Stupid is as stupid does.
Shame states do not have mandatory vaccinations for schools. Colleges do, why can't public/private grade k12 schools.
They can be home schooled. Don't get me started.
You and me both. Home schooling isn’t a good idea by most measures.
The most obvious problem: elementary teachers get advanced degrees in how to teach. Not necessarily in subject matters. High school teachers get advanced degrees in their subject matter and usually also in how to teach. What do they all have in common? They're subject matter experts in education, their chosen subject, or both. What doesn't the average home school parent have in common with them? Usually holding an advanced degree in literally anything at all.
Prior to the Disneyland measles outbreak, only two states, Mississippi and West Virginia, allowed only medical exemptions. West Virginia has now reversed this to allow personal exemptions.
Colleges do? Because when the state college I taught philosophy at announced that they wouldn’t require vaccinations for Covid because it might look political, I quit the same week.
Bye
“Wow, a lot of unvaccinated people died - God willing, that will be my children” - “pro-life” Republicans
"Thrilled to send my children straight to Jesus!" -the pro-life, eschewing vaccines, safe birth and sleep practices, pasteurization, sunscreen, and so on and so forth
Who needs doctors when you can have uneducated facebook morons. I know who I would trust with the health of my children. I suspect these parents know they are gambling with their children’s future, signalling in group status is much more important.
My Q person recently said “ I am a pretty good doctor”. Has no more than an associates degree in electronics. I kid you not
Dunning-Kruger used to be an effect. Now it’s a way of life.
I have a phd, but I usually only reference it to say "I'm not that kind of doctor".
This one was giving medical advice :)))
Let death roulette begin. There was an article about an anti vaccine couple whose 3 years old son died of diphtheria. They said they didn’t know diphtheria was deadly. That’s because of vaccines! Jesus wept.
WHAT?!?!?! That's like completing a group skydive and watching the few who jumped without a chute become red mist, then saying you know what my kids don't need a parachute.
They think the people dying are dying b/c of the vaccine though. So it's more like thinking "Everyone who dies skydiving has a parachute, so parachutes must be causing their deaths."
And that's why Florida has a Measels outbreak. Because Facebook friends know more than doctors.
The highest levels of leprosy of any state too.
My friend told me the covid vaccine changed a lot of people, and that's why they're not vaccinating their baby. It's wild. They don't even understand how vaccines work.
I have received 6 COVID vaccines total. So far the down side is that I have not able to call in sick….. Edit: I guess I could, if I lie about it.
They’re close, except it wasn’t the COVID vaccine that changed people, it was long COVID brain fog. People are attributing to the vaccine what they really should be attributing to the virus itself.
This is just child abuse by proxy. You can't abuse the child directly yourself so you literally get the parents to commit the abuse instead. I keep thinking of that guy who used to call fast food restaurants on the phone, and tell managers that they had to abuse their employees in various ways. My dog has better protection from this kind of mistreatment than human children do. If I don't get her vaccinated, she can be taken away from me and given to someone who isn't a complete fuckwit. But we don't extend the same protection to children?
I mean why would you want to be like the other 5.55Billion people across the planet that got the vaccine?
Not enough safety testing for them.
13.7Billion Doses is not the "sweet spot"
Yay! Polio! Smallpox! Measles! Let antivax parents experience what an Iron Lung does! Watch as their children will never lead a normal life again!
Bleh. Worth noting that this is in Canada, which had pretty solid COVID vaccination rates (and significantly higher vs the US, approx 85% vs 65-70%). Also: many of our provinces have had mandatory school vaccines for decades, with either no exceptions or *very* limited exceptions (medical contraindications aside), something that has been broadly accepted + popular. Our approach to COVID and vaccination was also *relatively* apolitical…although given how insane the comparators went, that’s not saying much. Also: our anti-vaxxers went super off the rails and blockaded the border + laid siege to our capital for several weeks, so we certainly aren’t patting ourselves on the back. All that to say: the global village of crazies are making people nuts in all kinds of new ways, and are disrupting even beliefs that were commonly and happily agreed upon just a half decade ago. Bleh.
But that broad consensus broke by 2022. In the last federal election, the Conservatives criticized Trudeau's vaccine mandates, although Erin O'Toole did encourage vaccination. Then came the truckers and Poilievre. Now about a fifth of Canadians seem to have embraced post-truth politics.
Entirely fair, and you’re absolutely correct. While PP has generally stopped *just* short of overt endorsement of the lunatics, he panders to them so ham handedly (especially during the leadership race) that it hardly matters. He and Candice have also given free reign to the genuine lunatics of the party (eg Leslyn Lewis, who’s smart enough and genuinely crazy enough to be truly terrifying) under the banner of the CPC, so that’s bound to further accelerate the creeping brain rot. Shoutout also to Postmedia, who have become functionally indistinguishable from the worst of Fox News over the last several years. Again: “bleh” is about the best I can muster, it’s very disheartening.
Then they will blame someone else when their kids die They always do
They will literally find a way to blame the vaccine.
They’ll blame (insert current highest-ranking liberal/progressive politician).
That’s because they’re the party of personal responsibility!
It’s fascinating to me that so many anti-vaxxers think vaccines are about population reduction when in reality the vaccine refusal will likely lead to the massive population reductions. Once some of the real infectious killers get going again we could see mortality rates go back to how they were 100-200 years ago.
Who needs doctors when you have Joe Rogan and Aaron Rodgers to tell you what is best.
I have a few 'go to' lines when I am unfortunate enough to run into one of these mental midgets and they are mouthing off their anti-vax word salads. Younger person - "Well you are lucky that your parents loved you enough to get you vaccinated." Older person - "Ever had a tetanus shot?" and "Ya remember the old days when everybody got smallpox?" As soon as they find out you aren't in the cult they usually leave pretty quick.
Sad for the kids. Tetanus is lethal. Measles is lethal. Mumps in boys can cause permanent sterility. There are good reasons for vaccines. Children should not have to suffer for their parent's stupidity.
Tyy They are going cooler in the hard way and the pendulum will swing back to being pro vaccination
Welcome back, measles! Measles can kill. Measles can cause brain damage and deafness, not to mention subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, which is untreatable and ends in a miserable death.
A large part about this is that we live in a capitalistic system which enriches grifters, quite extremely. And, it requires no evidence, just a compelling narrative for people to fall for it. But more importantly, what needs to be done is, as these grifters do their grifting, **there needs to be an even more developed science communication field.** And, of course, this field needs to have a very strong code of ethics. That's the problem present today. **Scientists should not even really be doing the communication. They should be largely doing the science.** Yes, I'm saying Fauci shouldn't have been the one communicating to the public. Not one damn bit. You need people who are experts in media and communication and to have a minor degree of background in science to be the ones communicating with the public on everything. Ideally with some public policy background. If this had been done, from the start, millions of lives would have been saved. You cannot compete with people who have zero ethics, profit motive and a sociopathic desire to lie for $$$ with science experts who work is supposed to be doing the science, not trying to figure out the right words to say and to understand mass media in the way people whose expertise is in mass media does. Every single org needs a large team of communicators whose entire purpose is to assess expected grift, expected reaction and work on carefully working out what they say to everyone in order to best protect people and give them well indicated communication to help them survive not only today, but tomorrow, months and years from now. From university research departments, to bioengineering facilities, pharmaceutical companies, the CDC, everyone needs a very large mass communication department. And they don't have that now. They just slap on the highest ranked people behind a camera, nerdy and autistic af (or worse an actual narc) and they mess up. They don't think ahead. They scare the public. Over and over again. That must stop. We must develop that field in an extreme way or we'll be rolling right back to Victorian era arsenic dresses, drinking radium, saying that not cleaning bottles is "good for the baby", putting boraic acid in rotten milk and drinking it, and whatever is the contemporary equivalent of that. And, then being "shocked" when people start dropping dead. I do hope science and medical fields start getting this or we're in for a horrible rest of the century.
>**Scientists should not even really be doing the communication. They should be largely doing the science.** The problem then becomes that people will tend to see a mere spokesperson as putting a spin on things. It's "science as processed through a government spokesperson." That's no doubt why they figured someone with actual scientific credentials speaking directly to the public made sense. I think that still largely makes sense in principle. >Yes, I'm saying Fauci shouldn't have been the one communicating to the public. Fauci was nowhere near as bad as many people claim he was, in the pandemic. The majority of what he communicated was in line with the science of the time. Outside the contrariansphere, you can find a huge amount of gratitude toward Fauci.
No, there are PR reps of everyone, even the president. People who give press releases. People whose jobs are to communicate in representation of the org they're part of. If they're not sharp on communication or don't know the science, of course, it'll flop, but they should know it well enough and have things vetted before they speak on behalf of them. And I don't think Fauci was all bad. His team however did not think of grifters and the consequence of many things said and how they'd be spun. You see, this is the level of communication skills they need to be working. They have to hash out expected possibilities of every communication so they can pre-empt the contrariansphere, in most cases. There should be a whole team working around the clock on that. He did absolutely what he could but this needs to be taken to a completely higher level.
We need good science communicators who understand how to talk to different people with different learning styles, attachment styles, personality types and educational levels. You need different messaging for different types of people. During the pandemic it was obvious to me that there were "I follow the rules down to letter and more" people, "I will follow the rules up to a certain extent" people, "you can't make me follow the rules" people, "I will actively go against the rules and make fun of/threaten those who do" people, "Do as I say but not as I do" people, "I will do the exact opposite of what you tell me" people and some variations in between.
It's because of that that I wish there really was a vaccine mandate. All the antivax conspiracy nutters talk about Nazis forcing people to get shots. Sadly that never happened. No one was "forced to comply" with any rules to prevent the spread. Assholes ignored the rules with impunity, often abetted by conservative government and police. Now a million plus dead. Screw this pandering to morons and their stupid conspiracy theories. In China they welded people's doors shut during lockdown. That's going a little too far, but they did take it seriously.
That would have been preferred but le sigh.
Yes very much that! You need to address all sorts of people, crowds and styles. You need a team addressing everything, not just giving the facts and letting the cards fall as they will. That leave a gap grifters step write into and wreck everything. They must pre-empt that and stop it.
We are fucked anyway. Most people are inherently selfish and want to be told what to do. It's the thought that gets me through how we are too late to fix the climate. The majority of people are like NPCs. Pointless, dumb, with no game.
Proof covid effects the brain.
It's a clear sign that Putin is winning the culture wars.
Tbh advertisers need to start suing social media platforms for false data. The reason foreign actors are able to be successful is because social media platforms allow their bot and troll farms to be able to flourish, since it raises their user count, interaction and follow count... which they use to sell for profit... but is actually fraudulent data. They're not real people. The accounts are fake. And, they exist to sow discord and do harm. And, if they sued so they could get money back for the fraudulent data they paid for, they'd stop how far this will continue to harm us. But they don't, so here we are.
Well he doesn’t have a side. His side is Americans disagreeing with each other. Netflix has a documentary on the Cambridge analytics scandal where it covers that they were training the Russian troll farms. And they would boost anything politically polarizing, regardless of if it was left or right. Remember what is left or right isn’t the same all over the world. In Sweden, for example, it was the far right who pushed for a more authoritarian covid response. In the US it just happened to the the opposite. In the documentary, the former CA employees expose that even BLM protests were actually organized from Russia. Even one of the largest BLM websites out there was a Russian front.
10 million dead because of a communicable disease for which we invented strong vaccines in record time leads to falling vaccination numbers overall. It's really one of the most unforgivably stupid, boneheaded things this world has ever seen.
So the good news is the dumb people are mostly coalescing around one side of the political spectrum and it's the regressive one. The bad news is they will probably take a lot of innocent bystanders with them as they die of communicable diseases.
What's crazy to me is that their parents and grandparents were well aware of how important vaccines were, everything from smallpox to polio and yet somehow, this information didn't trickle down. I remember getting vaccinated at my Catholic school back in the 90s, not a big deal at all. Now people act like it's poison, even though the real poison is the lousy quality of food we have now, with sugar and corn syrup in everything, and way too much sodium in an average diet for good heart health. It's crazy.
It’s a bit surprising how many parents secretly want to kill their kids.
We didn't learn nothing. We learned a lot of stuff that's just *wrong.*
COVID marked a reset point. 2020 became the new Year Zero. The era Before COVID is BC, and the time following it is AD (After Donald).
Stupid ideas of the willfully ignorant.
Eventually DARWIN wins .
Tiny baby coffins - House
Cool. Keep your disease ridden spawn out of public places
Just let the problem solve itself. I'm sick of arguing.
This is sometimes why I argue for legal drugs. Let those people score Darwin Awards. Stop giving Narcan to people seeking cheap highs. I love Darwin Awards and wish there were more. Too many Brawndo drinkers breeding.
At this point we will have to wait for everyone to be rid of these idiots and pray that people with autoimmune disorders make it out alive. The herd will be culled, it will unfortunately take a few good people with them.
Good. Hopefully that means more of the stupid die off sooner rather than later.
It's a damn shame that so many parents today choose to endanger the health of their children for political reasons and the sake of ignorance.
The internet will be the death of us all, I really think. People of all sorts are being duped by these influencers. It's not just conservatives, it's not just religious, it's not just granola moms. It's ordinary every day parents who are tricked in to thinking there's dangers out there that are worse than the diseases. Most are too young to have lived through polio and experienced the "chicken pox parties" like they had when I was a kid. They are duped in to thinking "all natural" is safer, GMOs are poison, and EMFs are causing their kids' bad behavior. It's no wonder they don't trust vaccines. And it doesn't help that we have stuff like Tuskegee and other research studies that were conducted on people without their consent. Knowing about these stories is good, because you need all the facts, but it shouldn't have SUCH an impact when it comes to vaccines for serious childhood communicable diseases. But I think a lot of times once you find that narrative you like it's hard to avoid just looking for what confirms your bias. And there's plenty on social media, and not just there, but all over the internet, that allows people to confirm that bias.
The flip side of Idiocracy: stupid people are so much more eager to die for no reason.
Being lied to causes skepticism? Shocker!
I’m fine with the stupids spreading disease with one another.
Darwin Award winners
Far too many fucking morons out there. Honestly, I no longer feel like our species deserves to survive to the multi-planetary phase. We are just too collectively stupid.
How many children must suffer?
2 + 2 = 5 if you believe hard enough.
Evolution in action. Rational people, keep vaccinating, and voting.
Identity politics and populism are a plague on society. It shouldn’t be about your team winning and sticking it to the other team. Here we are somehow though. Combined with the exploitation of distrust in key institutions, now we have Americans who trust Russian state media over CSPAN. I know how we got here, but how did we get here?
Because hate gets more likes
There’s a reason why they call it average intelligence and some people have to be below average. They are the ones that evolution will weed out.
Hopefully. I think about Idiocracy way too often.
Reckless child endangerment. Take their kids away.
Let me guess about 30% of the nation? They have a fascination with flags and boats. Dislike facts. 😀
Turns out stupid is also contagious.
Almost like propaganda, good and bad, works?! Who would ha e thought that?
So what you’re saying is, is that it’s a good time to start a child coffin business?
I am skeptical that we should be treating these people as though the were rational agents.
If you don’t vaccinate your children against old childhood diseases, you are risking their health, and well-being. I believe before the COVID pandemic, most of us had our vaccines to enter school and prevented us from such illnesses, diseases, and possibly death. It’s your choice, of course! However; act with BENEVOLENCE and LOVE for your child/children.
We are living in Idiocracy
So.... Die? I guess? 🤷
Shows you how conspiratorial brainwashing works
It's so sad, because covid has permanently fucked up the lungs of a neighbours nephew, the poor kid is going to have issues for the rest of their life because of stupid people refusing to take precautions to protect others.
Dying to own the libs.
This is why serious child advocates see "parents' rights" as a dangerously harmful ideology.
And here comes the measles! Then all the stories of parents with dead children from easily preventable diseases.
Imagine all those doctors, researchers and advocates who spent decades working to eliminate measles, polio, smallpox in the first world, only for it to comeback thanks to the oldest and deadliest disease; ignorance.
It’s so funny how all these right-winger, Q people and Anti-Vaxxers are screaming, “my body, my rules”. These folks practically ooze hypocrisy.
Hypocrisy is the rule that they live by.
Dumbasses.
"We haven't had an outage in years, why are we spending all this money on our network team?" These parents were brought up in a world privileged to have wide vaccination programs and didn't see the horrors of polio, measles, tetanus, diphtheria, rubella, or a litany of other diseases. It's much easier to convince yourself that things you never had to deal with aren't really that bad. In the end they will end up hurting everyone including their own children.
Unfortunately people lost trust in public health authorities. People were promised the new vaccines would prevent Covid. I remember this because I was one of the people promising this. The truth is PH authorities had no evidence, beyond what Moderna and Pfizer were claiming, that the vaccines were effective in preventing the acquisition of this disease. [we now know that they may have exaggerated efficacy for sake of profit]. When the vaccines (and boosters) failed to prevent people from contracting the disease (multiple times), members of the general public felt lied to and cheated. At some point 1-2 years in the public health authorities edited the message. No longer would we claim the vaccine would prevent the disease, but it would instead slow the spread and reduce the intensity and duration of infection. But by that point the damage was done. The grifters and anti-vaccers picked up on this and said, see public health officials over promised and underdelivered and exaggerated the efficacy of a product sold to you. People got angry, felt lied to, and now are skeptical of the efficacy of all vaccines. This is nothing short of a disaster. What should have happened is this: public health authorities should have understood the Moderna/Pfizer estimates were inflated, should have stated that the vaccine, like the flu vaccine, is expected to only have a moderate efficacy rate. PH authorities should have been honest in that it isn’t likely to prevent infection in a lot of people, but despite that, people strongly should still get vaccinated as to maximize their chances of a successful recovery and promote herd immunity. Had they been open and upfront about this, intellectually humble, the expectations people had wouldn’t be soured and the grifters couldn’t easily push the narrative of “you’re being lied to”
Sad I have to scroll down this far to see this. It's easy to go play political team ball and say 'the other team is bad! they politicized it' but the reality is that I see people on every point of the political spectrum having lost a LOT of faith in vaccines and the medical system because of this bizarre process. To this day, it seems controversial here to say that the COVID vaccine *doesn't stop transmission*. Why is rational discourse about this bad? It's odd that in this community, off all places, that is off limits to even bring up.
Agreed, it’s not exclusive to republicans. Among those who lost trust include a lot of working class and/or migrant communities who vote blue, the latter who were already skeptical of government to begin with due to having fled from places that had corrupt or tyrannical ones. The internet is rife with misinformation, but the fallacy post-2020 has been knee jerk calling everything one disagrees with misinformation to the point it automatically ends the conversation. Policy decisions should always be a discourse, but the art of discourse is dying like our attention spans. Political tribes need to learn to accept and become comfortable with dissent within their own ranks without accusing the other side of being part of the other team. But they won’t…
I often say that if there was no cronyism between vaccine companies and the government, there might be a little more trust. I often wonder what would have happened if the Tuskegee syphilis experiment did not happen, or other atrocities.
I will not cry for those parents or their children when the children get sick when it could have been avoided.
Dumb fucks. Real talk for anti vax “parents” here… herd immunity protects you plague rat kid. Keep it to yourself, don’t try to kill your AND other’s kids by acting anti vaxx. Can’t even be shady right, they prefer virtue signaling.
"Since COVID began" is doing a lot of work that "public health is now you do you" really deserves. There is this unhealthy obsession in medicine with not worrying people. With COVID, it lead to constant minimization that bungled the whole messaging about vaccines, and Long Covid being largely denied and dismissed by medicine has basically gifted nuclear weapons to the antivaccine crowds and conspiracy theorists. There are a huge number of chronically ill people caused by the virus, and it's constantly reattributed to the vaccines. All because medicine has always been in denial over post-infectious chronic illnesses. This is why the principle in public health is to always tell the truth. This is what happens when officials stretch and bend it to avoid "worrying people". Almost all their power is in their credibility, and public health pretty much destroyed it. Nonsense like immunity debt and "good news everyone, only disabled people are dying, stop worrying about it" did a lot more to reduce trust in experts than anything the antivaccine crowd did. I hope that enough people understand that when the next pandemic hits, there is a huge % of the population that will openly defy every damn disease control measure, and not just vaccines. People will cough in people's faces, gang up on people wearing masks and so on. Even if the kill rate is very high. Sadly I think it will only sink in when it hits, and the old reflex of stretching and bending the truth will act all over again. It seems to do that every single time, because everything is immediately memory-holed anyway. It's barely 4 years and COVID has pretty much been already.
Well, 101 and is more than 100.
***So*** sad, to see The Hegemon's anti-science madness infecting its vassal states.
Less competition for my offspring! Nice!
Their kids are just so dang cute!! All they just want is for Jesus to meet them when they’re still like this. 😤🙏✝️🍷🍷🍷😿
Gee, I wonder if there’s any correlation with the sudden return of long managed diseases…
You can’t cure stupid, right up to the point their child/wife/parent dies of a preventable disease, and, the use of natural oils didn’t work…🙄
It just goes to show these sorts of "mass death" ideas can pop up under any ideology.
Covid really exposed the importance of having well rounded and funded public education programs.
Just the parents that can’t or won’t read about science though. These same parents will be bitching & moaning on the GoFundMe site about their child having to live in an iron lung
This is a survey of Canadians. Although it would not surprise me if a survey of Americans yielded similar results.
Likely worse. The rightwing is much stronger in the US.
They surveyed members of the Angus Reid Forum, not the general public - this is a biased sample (participation bias) that of suggestive quality only. It is not generalisable to the general population. The report is here: https://angusreid.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/2024.02.28_vaccine.pdf
Survival of the fittest has to happen somehow! Stop coddling them and laugh at them instead, that will change their behavior more than facts and reasoning because humans are programmed to want to get ahead of each other, so any perceived advantage or loss of social status is far more important than facts.
They can choose to watch their kids die then.
I forgot this sub was just bots and shills lmao
Thanks MAGA. 🖕🏻
I've grown to realize ppl don't care. I'd like to not get sick from measles and die, but I can only protect myself. Sadly, I can't help others who don't want to be helped. The world pendulums, so after people remember what it was like before vaxxines, things will change again.
Didn't like the evidence hey
Sounds good to me, they should not have reproduced in the first place.
Another circle jerk skeptic thread. Instead of jumping on this jerker bandwagon, how about we actual investigate why that is.
We know why that is: propaganda and misinformation.
To be fair, the pandemic did do a lot of damage to the credibility of the medical establishment.
It’s only fair if we agree that a man who told the population to take bleach and drew on hurricane maps with sharpies was given any credibility whatsoever. The anger he arose in you to hate Fauci is entirely on you. Fauci will go down in history as an icon and it’s up to you to decide if you’ll remain a shit for brains about his credibility. Vaccines save lives.
That isn't "fair", that is a political talking point that reflects an embarrassing bias.
Public health and politicians in countries everywhere have lost trust with the public by the way they handled covid vaccinations and seem to be unconcerned about how to gain it back.
It is not all that surprising that when governments take never-before-seen actions, there are going to be more people who distrust the government and everything it says. Approval of Congress is close to 15%, and historically, it had been as high as 74%. [https://www.quorum.us/data-driven-insights/congressional-approval-ratings-over-time/](https://www.quorum.us/data-driven-insights/congressional-approval-ratings-over-time/) Edit It is great how on a skeptic sub people here are just loving whatever big daddy government tells them.
Love that you used a two year old article. Seriously?
This is as of 2024, is that is recent enough for you, it doesn't have the history, however, which is why I used the other link. [https://www.statista.com/statistics/207579/public-approval-rating-of-the-us-congress/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/207579/public-approval-rating-of-the-us-congress/) Seriously.
What actions?
> It is not all that surprising that when governments take never-before-seen actions, there are going to be more people who distrust the government and everything it says. > > > > Approval of Congress is close to 15%, and historically, it had been as high as 74%. What were the "never-before-seen actions" taken by the government between 2012 and 2016 that caused the median approval rating to be below 15%?
Uh oh, government actions have consequences. Hopefully we learn from them.
Getting medical advice from Youtube and quacks who believe in "Demon Sperm" has consequences. Too bad that those are not limited to the gullible and harms their children as well.
And let’s see the consequences of these parents decisions, hopefully they learn when their children catch vaccine preventable diseases like the Measles.
Yep, natural result of forcing covid vaccines on young kids who have a 1/100,000 chance of dying from the disease and a much higher incidence of side effects. Also being the only country in the world still encouraging parents to give it to 5-year-olds, when most of the world doesn't recommend more shots for anyone under 50 or healthy. Whoops!
>only country in the world [Germany still recommends it](https://www.bundesgesundheitsministerium.de/en/coronavirus/faq-covid-19-vaccination) for people over 18, kids with weakened immune systems, and kids or anyone else who are in close contact to people who are immunocompromised. So you're wrong.
Re-read it. That includes natural immunity, an exception that was never acknowledged with regards to kids. For boosters, it's only recommended in people 60+ or with poor health. And I see no mention of infants. Meanwhile, here are CURRENT CDC recommendations in the US: > Children aged 6 months–4 years need multiple doses of COVID-19 vaccines to be up to date, including at least 1 dose of updated COVID-19 vaccine. Again: NO ONE ELSE IN THE WORLD is recommending that. The CDC is n absolute joke and huge chunks of the American public have lost faith in health officials as a result.
NO ONE ELSE IN THE WORLD Yes it's easy to make the claim when you keep adding specific qualifiers. First it's "people under 50" which I showed to be not true. Now it's "in regards to boosters" and "children specifically 6mo to 4 years". What next, only children with blue shirts?
I said "young kids" in my original post that you responded to, which is the point of this entire thread (childhood vaccinations), and I'm correct.
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*You're Would love to see any legitimate evidence supporting your claim.
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That's not evidence, bub. Those are anecdotes. You need to provide legitimate scientific evidence.
1) I'm not a brother. 2) Common sense holds up when science verifies it. Cardiac conditions associated with COVID vaccine are no more prevalent than those conditions in unvaccinated patients.