It is amazing to me how short our memories are as a species. There are people who are still in congress who had polio. There are an estimated 300,000 people still alive in the US who survived polio. Even with that, the nominated head of Health and Human Services wants to do away with the polio vaccine.
I don’t know what the problem is. Is it a lack of empathy? Is it willingness to swallow the bait surrounding conspiracy theories? Is it just a lack of education? How did we get to the point where it is even remotely okay for the future head of Heath and Human Services to be against the polio vaccine?
If being pro-polio isn’t disqualifying for being the head of HHS, and if he gets confirmed, the U.S. will have very clearly shown that it is in rapid decline. It will have shown that the government is corrupt to its core and is irredeemable.
Is it a lack of empathy?
Yes, it’s a disregard for human life
I think that is true for some of the people involved, but I think it is much more complicated than that. There are many people who think vaccines do more harm than good because they believe conspiracy theories and junk science. Not everyone against vaccines is malicious. Some must be, though, for such bullshit to keep propagating the way that it does.
Most of Trump’s cabinet ranges from morally indifferent to outright hostile to human beings. The only exception I think I see is RFK Jr. who is just batshit insane.
Agreed. It takes more than Trump, his cabinet, and MAGA to get here, though. It requires complicity and complacency from a ton of other people.
Yeah I think those other people are conspiracy theorists, like you said.
Yep. Biden and Harris come to mind, as does the rest of the Democratic establishment. If they didn’t prefer Trump to Bernie, this would be a much sweeter timeline.
Hey! Whoa! Speaking as a member of the batshit insane community, don’t you try to dump him off as one of us! He’s clearly in the “manipulated puppet” camp. Or at the very least the Kennedys camp. Those guys were always their own bunch to begin with. I mean JFK brought us inches away from WWIII and then said “Peace out bitches! I’m dying by suicide!”
Then he faked his own death, and moved to Boston, where nobody would recognize him.
Thank you for the chuckle
I’m just going to keep repeating this. RFK killed 20 Samoan children with an anti vaccine campaign.
Don’t sell RFK Jr short. He might be crazy but he’s also an evil POS.
What is quite scary is that it doesnt have to be vaccines, they could be convinced of anything given time and right approach.
I disagree. People are always assholes first and then look for rationalisations for their assholery. All that conspiracy bullshit always leads back to racism and antisemitism.
Please explain how the earth being flat, birds not being real, bigfoot, ufo’s, and the moonlanding being a hoax have ANYTHING to do with racism and antisemitism.
Even with that, the nominated head of Health and Human Services wants to do away with the polio vaccine.
…I’m sorry, what?
GOD DAMMIT! GET LUIGI MORE BULLETS! THE JOB’S NOT DONE!!!
Oh yeah we’re so fucked. As well as believing that vaccines cause autism, RFK believes that HIV doesn’t lead to AIDS. He literally believes that “something about the gay lifestyle” causes it.
RFK Jr tried this before in 2022. He’s been trying to get the FDA to revoke approval for the vaccine, probably to snowball it into “we need to revoke all vaccine approvals”.
My dad remembers from his childhood occasionally seeing houses placed under quarantine for diseases like measles and then at some point thanks to vaccines measles pretty much just stopped being a thing in most of the US. He got his polio and smallpox vaccines back in the day, and has lived to see smallpox eradicated and polio nearly so.
My grandfather was born a couple years after the 1918 flu pandemic, he had a brother born a couple years before him who died in infancy, he never talked about it much but the timing lines up that his brother was likely a victim of that pandemic. It was certainly something he heard talked about in his childhood just as we’ll probably keep talking about COVID for years to come, and I think it definitely left an impact on him, he always was wary about passing germs along to his grandchildren, he always warned our parents against kissing us and never did himself, the only time he did was on his literal deathbed (cancer, nothing communicable) when he kissed my sister (in a non-creepy familial way) as probably one of his last conscious acts.
He was never one to shy away from a fight, I would have loved to see the hell he would have raised against anti-maskers if he’d lived another decade or so. There are people his age or older still walking among us. These things aren’t even out of living memory, we’re barely a handful of generations removed from them.
The chickenpox vaccine was introduced when I was in elementary school. I remember a lot of children’s shows when I was growing up having a chickenpox episode where one or more of the main characters would get chickenpox, they’d take oatmeal baths and slather on calamine lotion to ease the itching, their parents would discuss having their friends over to get them infected early and give them immunity, etc. It kind of seemed like it was inevitable that many if not most kids would get chickenpox eventually, and at the time it kind of was. The vaccine was still optional at the time, and I remember a lot of discussion about it not being very effective, but a lot of kids in my age range got it, and the number of kids in my school who got chickenpox was probably in the dozens instead of probably hundreds just a few years earlier.
There have been some missteps along the way, my dad had a small hepatitis scare when a blood test turned up antibodies (though no active infection) likely from exposure from reused vaccine needles when he was in the army. The US did a grave disserve to polio vaccination efforts by using them as a cover to track down bin Laden and increased distrust in the vaccine in the process. There have been cases where vaccines have used ingredients that have proven unsafe, where people have had adverse reactions, etc. but still overall, the fact that I have never met anyone who has had smallpox, polio, or measles and probably never will speaks volumes about how much more good than harm vaccines do when 100 years ago I would almost certainly have known people who had died or left disabled or disfigured by those diseases.
Paraphrasing from a recent episode of Behind the Bastards on the Vioxx scandal: There’s a lot of recency bias in humans where it’s difficult to look past the fuckups of the pharma industry. If their “current” MO is to make a shit ton of money at the cost of human lives, then why would someone with lesser critical thinking skills trust them? One needs quite a bit more faculties to separate the capitalism from the good they are doing and tell apart what’s trustworthy and what not.
So pharma fucked their bed spectacularly and aren’t doing fuck all to restore trust. And that’s very sad considering how important they could be if they wanted to.
So pharma fucked their bed spectacularly and aren’t doing fuck all to restore trust.
It goes farther than that, because of how aggressively the US has resisted drug imports and fear mongered against foreign science and development.
The post-COVID “vaccine diplomacy” of European and Chinese state pharmaceutical providers (hell, Cuba even developed a variant) was matched with a flood of early US reporting that amounted to “don’t trust any vaccine that isn’t American!!!” Then there was a dirty war between domestic providers over whose vaccine was the best.
All that propaganda took its toll.
Cuba has some of the best doctors in the world. They have a potential lung cancer vaccine in trials. Imagine what they could do if the sanctions were lifted.
I need to get back to listening to podcasts. I’ve taken a break since the election because many of my favorites were political and I’m currently burying my head in the sand and screaming “I CAN’T HEAR YOU!”.
Maybe I’ll dive back in with BTB. That seems mostly safe…
Behind the Bastards is an amazing podcast.
There are people who are still in congress who had polio.
Mitch has done nothing but enable the incoming administration, and helped to get it in power, so he has no leg to stand on now in all of his hand waving about the polio vaccine.
Mitch as the Repub leader could have prevented all of this, by voting and allowing other R senators to vote to convict in either the first impeachment or the second impeachment, which would have prevented Trump from being able to run again (and the trials against him would likely have been carried out by now). McConnell bears a huge amount of responsibility for where we are right now.
I don’t know what the problem is. Is it a lack of empathy? Is it willingness to swallow the bait surrounding conspiracy theories? I
I think it’s education, so many of us are now "educated ", this makes us confident idiots, a superb pinnacle of that example might be Linus Pauling and vitamin C for example.
If my hypothesis is correct, more education wont help.
Empathy is always lacking, just have to look at the refugee debate, its not new. Jews were turned away when Hitler sent them overseas, telling other countries to take then or he’d start killing them,
Japense interment camps in the US in WW2, slavery, endless wars prosecuted on other countries and participants lionised, it’s part of our makeup that’s difficult for most people to overcome,. I’d posit they don’t want to overcome it. . Then there’s the whole treatment of native peoples all over the world. US, Australia, Sweden, New Zealand, Russia and on and on.
The one thing that unites Demorcats and Republicans ? disdain for the homeless, again a lack of empathy.
If that’s true, you’d expect to see more conspiracy theories among more educated populations. People with PhDs and MDs would be the most likely to be antivaxxers. Do you have statistics to confirm that?
I believe what they are referring to is a high school education. There are still a fuckton of people in the US that still believe that “no one really needs to go to school past 6th or 8th grade.”
The above link will give you the overview of the historical background on antivax movement since vaccine invention.
It basically boils down to two arguments, which feed each other.
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Risk => Vaccine are/can be/will be/may be/ought to be dangerous to someone somewhere, somehow. I don’t understand and I’m scared.
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FrEeDoM => I do not contract and I am free to decide what treatment I get, I am not a sheep and I participate in no herd and the only immunity I accept is from overbearing big government.
In spite of my sarcasm, I do think the second argument has merit, a government should of course be extremely careful with mandatory medical treatment of any kind and bear the burden of proving regularly that the benefits continues to far outweigh any and all alternative.
That reminds me, I have a 10am appointment for my flu shot. Almost forgot.
Yeah, I see the antivax movement as largely a failure of politics and a symptom of the corrosive effects of social media.
People have lost faith in politicians after lies and corruption on mnah topics, and that is undermining all elements of democracy and trust in state intervention…
At the same time, Social Media allows idiots to connect with one another and organise there stupidity into movements. Social Media is largely driven by a desire to keep people on their apps to make money so the whole thing is designed to only show people the content they want and makes them happy, not anything that challenges their world view. They are largely not forums for free speech, instead they are commercial tools to manipulate people in to wasting time by feeding them what they want (including playing to their biases) to maximise advertising revenues.
Social media is the horrific consequence of unfetted capitalism - where all that matters is maximum profits, and the harm done to people and society as a whole is irrelevant.
This is a comment worth saving.
Yes, except the antivax movement predate the internet by a hundred year.
But social media does work as an accelerator. Unfortunately it seems to be very good at accelerating stupidity.
I agree that governments should be careful about what medical treatments they make mandatory. I think the US government has been pretty judicious with their decisions, though. The vaccines that are mandated for school attendance are wildly effective and have been shown to be safe, both via scientific studies and decades of dispensing many of them.
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Sometimes it feels like it’s all done to grab headlines.
It works, they eat cats and dogs.
If something is irredeemable, it’s not the government, it’s the voters.
All of this could be fixed if just enough people understood the truth.
The problem is that we have so little media that is both trusted and trustworthy. That so many people don’t actively seek out reliable information and think critically about it. Many just find a source that confirms their bias and feeds their emotional state, while others just passively absorb from those around them and on social media. And once you’ve bought the lies and misinformation, anyone that tries to tell you the truth becomes suspicious, because you know they are wrong.
And because the never ending stream of bullshit is both a lucrative industry and a source of immense political power, there is a vested interest in keeping it highly polarized and partisan. They have to tie it to your identity and tell you that this is what your country stands for, so that you know that everyone who disagrees is an enemy.
Anti-vaxxers are nothing new, but they were never so openly embraced by a political party (to say nothing of those who have claimed that vaccines are suddenly against their religion, discovering a prohibition that no religion has ever had prior to 2020). They don’t care how many people will suffer or die because of their actions, as long as they can benefit from it politically. Sadly, this is a fairly consistent theme on the right.
There are many influences. One is pure resentment of elites as know-it-alls which propagandists amplify. A bit of Dunning–Kruger effect at the same time as people without specialized training can’t even comprehend what they don’t know. Another is how difficult it is to think probabilistically so that people can’t easily appreciate risk. And as more and more people proclaim conspiracy theories as truth there is peer pressure to confirm.
It’s because polio is a developing world problem now. Until it comes back to the US the only relevancy it has is as foreign aid. And that’s forbidden by these guys unless it’s guns.
Stupidity.
History should be mandatory especially to vote. Some people don’t even remember the holocaust and they’re repeating it again.
I see it as a sign of health that people working with vaccines only use them when they are beneficial, and don’t use them when there are reasons not to.
I don’t know the reasons he has in this case. Would be interesting to know more.
Ooooh no. No, fuck off. This disingenuous “just asking questions” shtick can fuck right off. This is about polio you fucking lunatic, get a fucking grip.
If you want to know more, go read the lawsuit he is associated with to remove FDA approval of the polo vaccine. Essentially, he believes fraudulent research that indicates that vaccines cause autism.
Then, before you take what he says at face value, go read a history of polio.
If you give the materials an honest read, you’ll find that polio is horrific, that the vaccine was one of the greatest medical achievements of the 20th century, and that the evidence indicating that the vaccine causes autism is all junk.
Even if the vaccine caused autism (which it does not), that would still be better than polio.
I 100% agree.
In mild cases of autism, perhaps. It can be severe and debilitating, to the point of requiring life-long 24/7 care.
That said, conspiracy nuts buying that vaccines cause autism and failing to see the actual, real-life conspiracy which lead to the idea of vaccines causing autism would be absolutely fucking hilarious if it hadn’t been the direct cause of countless dead children. Read up on Andrew Wakefield if you don’t know what I’m talking about.
Autism is a superpower.
Fuck all the way off, asshole! What possible reasons are there to avoid the fucking polio vaccine??
I see it as a sign of health that people working with vaccines only use them when they are beneficial, and don’t use them when there are reasons not to.
Citation needed…
Seems rational, and I assume they almost always use them since they are overwhelmingly beneficial.
Yeah, in case of polio and pox, there’s no question of if it will be beneficial
I think I can understand your reasoning but I disagree with it.
A few years back, a vaccine was removed from our national vaccination plan. It was deemed as unnecessary, as the disease was considered erradicated. The decision was mostly political, with our National Healthcare Council keeping a very terse silence on the matter.
Precisely two years after the alteration, a sudden, unpredictable, with no known vector of origin, series of cases surged. Luckily, no child died, as the our NHS is robust enough to handle this kind of situation but there was a swift public backlash from the National Healthcare Council, on why the withdrawal of the vaccine had opened doors to a ressurgence of the disease. The vaccine was quickly reintroduced.
Smallpox was erradicated because of vaccination efforts. Many more could have been, if wasn’t for stupidity and religious fanaticis. Having an openly admitted vaccine denier take office is a sad joke, made at the expense of who knows how many lifes.
Could you give an example of what would be “a reason not to”?
There are actual reasons not to: allergies to a component, compromised immune system.
Somehow I don’t think that’s what he means though.
Maybe we’re going about this the wrong way. We know what kind of country we live in, a nation of proud, almost patriotic willful ignorance. By design. An laborer ignorant to who is fucking them is a dependable laborer, after all.
So in the spirit of playing to the audience we have, have we tried rebranding the “vaccines” as, and I’m just spitballing here, Freedom Blessings, Robert E Lee Juice, The Joe Rogan Vein Experience, or the Prove You Hate Commies Test?
I had a thought along the same lines. I was thinking we should coin the term “immunition,” and tell people it was a way to arm your immune system to defend itself. It’s not even all that misleading.
I think it has more to do with an authority figure telling them to do something. I think we’d have to distract them like we do children getting a shot. Instead of a toy beer we could use a talking revolver?
Instead of a toy beer we could just give them a real beer.
I think it has more to do with an authority figure telling them to do something
Which is weird, because they love authority figures
They love authority figures telling other people what to do. Freedom is me being free to do what I want and you being free to do what I want.
children getting a shot. Instead of a toy beer
I think we should stop with the toy beer. Next thing you know they’ll move on to toy heroin.
Get the NRA (the New Resistance Augmentation) into supporting immunition imports!
I can find no fault in this whatsoever. Nothing else seems to get through to them, not even death.
Vaccines protect the workforce and allow individuals to produce more. People being against vaccines cannot be good for capitalism, can it?
It’s more important to the owners to keep us largely uneducated and ignorant for their own continued dominance than it is to maximize our longevity. Also they would have to pay honet to God taxes to fund public education, something they’ve spent decades installing loopholes to get out of, despite profiting directly from a pre-literate workforce Pool.
Just look at our for profit deathcare system, you would think, as they demand Healthcare largely be tied to employment to keep their employees desperately loyal, that it would be in their best interests to approve claims and keep their labor force healthy enough to labor, but it’s a numbers game and there’s just too much profit to be had, just as with their tax loopholes, in letting laborers die when they get sick or injured rather than approve their claims and letting them eventually recover. That’s a lot of lost profit when they can just replace them with someone ready to work tomorrow.
Keeping America unhealthy and stupid is good for Russia. Republicans also benefit because they get to keep stupid people on their side, instead of realizing that they should pair up with poor people on the left. Democrats also benefit because splitting the class across two parties helps maintain the status quo.
Congrats, even this you managed to turn into a class struggle.
Every struggle is either created by or exacerbated by class struggle.
Many cannot be addressed at all without first addressing class inequity.
Antivaxxers were largely made ignorant by for profit media.
Everything is a class struggle for us poor folk.
How about we rearrange a little and try Joe Rogan Juice? Joe Juice for short. It makes your immune system swole.
In 1955… Most people personally knew someone aflicted with polio. They knew how bad it was
In Appalachia, it was unlikely to not know someone on a vent or dead from Covid, yet…
Fox News tells you not to believe your eyes, and conservatives trust Fox News more than their own eyes.
Their final, most essential command.
Why wouldn’t they trust Fox News over their own eyes? Fox News is the most trusted name in news. At least that’s what the viewers get told when they come back from commercial breaks. It’s not like Fox would lie to them. They are the most trusted name in news after all…
Circular logic at its finest.
I didn’t see anybody die of covid. 2 relatives died after getting the shot tho, of apparently unrelated cause.
Tell me what to believe.
Believe the mass graves and filled ERs.
I didn’t actually see mass graves or filled ERs.
You’re not alone. I also didn’t see either of those things, or know anyone that died from it.
I’m also not denying those things exist, I’m simply affirming your reality.
I guess you can’t see if your eyes are closed.
Hrm, the full ERs were easy to find though, news were coming up multiple times a day which hospital is rejecting patients and of doctors and nurses collapsing from 40-80 hours continuous work.
Mass graves… trickier. We tend to not want to be faced with mass deaths in general, which is why we tend to not glorify this as much as we do personal death. They were in the news though, and of course travel to any poorer country and they were/are easy to find.
We were discussing “seeing with your own eyes” vs “being told what to think by various propaganda organs”. The latter being less good.
deleted by creator
Ugh, that’s rough.
That being said, like you said, people die. I can’t imagine how shitty it feels but given how the COVID vaccine is the most-empirically-tested-and-documented vaccine and as a result of it’s absolutely insane number uses uses (beaten only by the likes of Aspirin and Ibuprofene and so on), it’s hopefully understandable that we not only know but know with beyond-certainty that it’s side effects are insanely rare and extremely mild.
The reason people can extremely rarely die from a vaccination (and then it happens ~directly after getting it!) is a reaction to the actual injection, not what you get injected with. This has happened in the past, it’s just extremely improbably. There’s also the chance of an allergic reaction but for most healthy adults we would know about this as COVID would be far from our first vaccine we’re getting, and with multiple billions of uses, we know that the COVID vaccine as a whole has no allergic interactions beyond standard ones.
That’s not to downplay your loss, sorry if it sounds that way - english is not my primary language. Not at all. Just trying to illustrate how impossible it’d be for COVID to have a lethal effect without millions~tens-of-millions showing this, simply because we have such an amount of data points.
That is to say, someobody could get a vaccine shot, then go home, and fry themselves an egg in a new pan they bought on the way home. There is a multiple orders of magnitude higher chance of poisoning from the pan because of an undocumented chemical in the coating than from the shot. We don’t have that much data on any particular pan, not even IKEA ones. Orders of magnitude less data.
The statistics and the science, not the anecdotes and inadequate sample size.
I knew three people who died from COVID and another after they recovered from COVID, unfortunately unless it’s their direct family they would just assume ‘theyre just making it all out to be covid’
I assume most people would blame social media for this, but here’s my c/unpopularopinions take, it’s inevitable with a profit oriented news platform, where they try to scaremonger in both ‘we are all going to die’ and ‘government is putting chips in our bloodstream’ directions
In other nations, unless a blunder by government policy, they werent as affected by the anti vaccine shenanigans, even though they were as affected by social media and such
Dude my grandmother died of Covid in August pf 2020, and yet my father and his sister who is a nurse and gave her the dease arge to this day weather covid is bullshit or not. AT HER funeral they argued about mask mandates. Maga brains will watch millions die from covid, and polio and still call it fake news.
And then there’s my ex who after COVID took nearly 9 months (!) to get normal use of their lung again. Fuck people who go all “COVID is bullshit”.
Trust me. I’ve been along live enough to recognize that if people don’t want to believe something, then they won’t.
i mean unless you were like 10, chances are everyone was aware of fdr
I used to think one of the biggest reasons there’s so many antivaxx people is that, because they’re so effective, people no longer have the fear of seeing their children in an iron lung, struggling to breathe. Then Covid respirators happened and antivaxx fucks somehow got worse
Most people on this planet are idiots.
The average person is quite stupid and about half the people are even stupider (sic)
😆 what do you mean dude
It’s also why Trump is president-elect currently. People are stupid and are forgetting just how bad things can be.
They forgot about 4 years ago.
I doubt this will compare to four years ago. It’s going to be much worse.
I’m hoping he keels over in the next month and we get President Vance. I know three things about him.
He’s really condescending towards people who didn’t “escape” rural areas (from his book).
He’s close with Peter Thiel.
He doesn’t believe anything political he says. He previously said Trump is a dictator. He says what he needs to say to gain power.There’s a non-zero chance that he’s full of shit, and then turns out to be a great president. Either way, an unknown quantity is better than the one we’re about to get. Hopefully it happens before the appointments, since the appointments can’t be worse. Trump is what, 78?
I think there’s zero chance he turns out to be a great president, but there’s probably a decent chance he’d turn out to be a mediocre president
The most important thing is that Vance wouldn’t have the hold over the whole party to be able to make them bow to his every whim like Trump does. Yes, they would still try to get project 2025 implemented, but they’d be less likely to be able to keep enough of their party in line to do it.
I’ve just been hoping for the long shot that a plane carrying both of them will go down before the electoral college meets. If it also takes Musk, Johnson, Kennedy, and a bunch of others from his inner circle, so much the better.
He’s not my first choice, but if the choice is Trump, Vance, or Johnson, I’d choose Vance.
That’s four things.
they think because he inherited a recovering economy, that he himself had some major part in it.
I used to think one of the biggest reasons there’s so many antivaxx people is that, because they’re so effective, people no longer have the fear of seeing their children in an iron lung, struggling to breathe.
Yes, I think that’s absolutely right. The antivaxxers are people who didn’t experience what it was like before vaccines.
Then Covid respirators happened and antivaxx fucks somehow got worse
I think part of it is that the effects of Covid were hidden from the public. The hospitals didn’t let anyone in to see the rows of beds with people on respirators, so the public didn’t see that on the news. They showed the refrigerated trucks but not the bodies in the trucks. So in the “pics or it didn’t happen” timeline we’re in, people didn’t believe it was that bad. Even the aftereffects of long covid are barely recognized or mentioned. The whole thing has been bizarre.
In olden times, everyone saw the dead bodies openly carried off on carts, or saw piles of them buried in mass graves. Their relatives died right there in front of them, not hidden away in a hospital where they themselves weren’t allowed to enter. Before, everyone directly experienced the crisis and suffering it caused. This time, the ugly reality was hidden from most of us other than the direct caregivers.
Side note: during the Vietnam war, reporters and camera crews were there and it was all shown on TV, the bodies, the wounded, the chaos. But the powers that be learned lessons from the horrified reaction of the public: do not show your failures on TV; keep your population in the dark. And we never saw our war casualties on TV again. Cameras were there, but we were shown nothing but scripted “reality TV”, if anything at all.
They followed the same script with Covid. This is supposed to be the information age but we’re more in the dark than ever. Real information is either not provided or is buried in misinformation. Remember the Florida whistleblower who leaked how the State was skewing their covid statistics and was quickly arrested and smeared?
My brother had to be convinced to get the vaccine.
He’s legitimately removed (I’m trying to say “re-tar-ded”, but apparently it automatically saying “removed.” Seriously? We’re not allowed to say “re-tar-ded”, a completely accurate medical term?) and had to go to a special school because of it.
I think a lot of conservatives fall into this camp, but don’t realize it because of how poor social programs are in red states.
Quite the difference from how half the US population reacted to a Covid vaccine. The power of political propaganda and social media conspiracy theories.
And how those same people are cheering about Captain Brainworm’s intentions to discontinue the polio vaccine.
Behold the power of mass lead poisoning. We truly live in the most stupid timeline.
I think this is just the US returning to its pre super power roots. More and more it seems like the last 80 years were seen exception and now they are returning back to where they were before the world wars.
Don’t give them ideas!
The rise of the middle class in the 50s has definitely been proven to be an anomaly in our history.
(edit: I think I misunderstood your comment so deleting my comment which wouldn’t have made sense)
Haha, no worries. I did find it a bit confusing. All good though.
I think if COVID was leaving people paralyzed it would never have been what it became. The fallout from COVID was bad but maybe not bad enough.
I remember semi trailers being used as morgue extensions at hospitals. Every ventilator in the nation being claimed. People rasping out a good bye over FaceTime before going on a ventilator to probably die. It claimed a million people and the only reason that isn’t the official number is because Trump and the GOP refused to count the bodies.
It was absolutely bad enough. But humans are capable of great self deception.
The problem was it was too quick: if you died of COVID, you were dead. You could be memory-holed and everyone would simply forget you and move on.
If you had Polio, though, you were paralyzed and stuck in a metal tube and kept alive.
Can’t forget your not-dead kid who lives in a tube, and thus it was treated as more of a thing that should be fought because there was a clear and visible reminder of what this disease was doing to everyone’s kids.
If COVID left a couple million people living in tubes, then we absolutely would have treated it differently, but it didn’t.
(Alternately, if COVID had killed 10 or 20 million people, we would have also treated it seriously: it just wasn’t sufficiently deadly OR left a wake of broken, but living, people.)
Also, older people were more prone to dying from Covid. That left a lot of room for conspiracy theories regarding what actually killed them. Heard of lot of conservative family members say “oh, it was probably just a bad flu that killed them.” And when the vaccines came out that quickly changed to “the vaccine killed them.”
My dad died due to COVID and one of the dipshits we hired to help load his stuff into a moving truck kept going on about how incredulous he was that anyone would die from “the flu”. These people, they are not intelligent.
Yeah, I remember the ‘grandma wanted to die for the economy!’ ghouls.
And the ‘it’s just a flu!’ people pissed me the fuck off. Like have you morons never HAD the flu? It’s not like the flu is somehow pleasant and fun. You don’t want the flu! Nobody wants the flu! You idiots got a flu shot, get your damn covid shot.
And the ‘it’s just a flu!’ people pissed me the fuck off.
I think many people haven’t actually had the flu or have had it after a vaccination or a during mild year.
That shit is awful, and it can and has killed. Hell, 100 years before COVID there was the 1918 Flu Epidemic which killed nearly three times as many people as COVID. So when some chucklefuck prattles on about “it’s just the flu,” my response is always, “that doesn’t make it safer.”
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome might not be quite as bad as paralysis, but it is pretty fucking scary…
COVID is leaving people dead…and long COVID is definitely a thing as well.
NGL, I was choked up in my car when I was lined up for my very first COVID jab.
Honestly thought it was over, and the events since have informed much of my cynicism about our species.
Polio can’t be compared to COVID when you talk about vaccines.
COVID mutates like the flu, meaning a vaccine was never meant to eradicate it. It simply can’t.
COVID vaccines still help to prevent severe illness, but it was never a permanent cure.
People were morons, but even if we all did what we were told to do, COVID would still exist.
My favorite thing about social media is people who argue for no good reason other than to entertain themselves.
No I don’t.
/s
To be fair, there was a chance. If 8 billion humans observed quarantine properly and vaccinated we would destroy all forms of influenza.
In theory yes, but it’s just not realistic for the whole world. In the western world, yes, we can isolate us if we want. It’s just not that easy everywhere.
I said a chance. Not that it was a big one.
Didn’t we do that? Now my kid is bringing home a different strain every other day
You going too deep with it.
I don’t know about the US, but here in Germany covid is just part of life now, like the flu. My neighbor is an intensive care nurse and she says there are no covid patients anymore or if there are, they’re on the same level as influenca.
If you have been vaccinated, then the current strains are about as deadly as the flu. We still need to keep ready for new strains and for sudden surges that can quickly overwhelm a single location’s health care capacity. This is true of influenza as well, a new strain hitting a small contained community can cause issues.
Absolutely. That’s what I was talking about. We keep on monitoring covid like the flu-variants, but we don’t change our lives for covid any more than we do for the common flu.
It has gotten a lot better 😀
Choked up? Like a rando strangled you?
Honestly thought it was over
You didn’t know it could mutate?
“We’re not gonna make it, are we? Humans I mean” -John Connor- Terminator 2
“It’s in your nature to destroy yourselves”
-the terminator
I could feel my dread go as I heard that lines over the years, as a young teen? Of course we will we always have, we endure. As a middle aged adult? I’m not so sure we aren’t going to shove ourselves back to the cave man era and not enough people will listen to anyone with survival knowledge for the species to survive.
Then I think about how many species that must have and will happen to in this vast universe, so we’ll probably be an average result heh in the grand scheme of things that is.
Okay, so we’re roughly in the middle…Are we on the left or the right of Fermi’s bell curve?
RFK jr is going to kill and cripple a lot more kids if he gets the chance to. He’ll make pretend polio / measles is eradicated and then somebody will get on a plane where there are cases, and it will spread amongst the unvaxxed and kids will die. When this happens he should be charged with negligent homicide but I doubt that will happen.
But he don’t care, because:
- It mostly kills poor people
- He is vaccinated
- His kids are vaccinated
- He couldn’t give any less fucks about people if you paid him for it. And he is being paid to not give a fuck about people’s lives.
RFK and conspiracy thinking right alongside Luigi are ALL symptoms indicating the same problem: a health care system that enriches CEOs at the bankruptcy and death of the masses.
At base it’s like the Hepatitis C cure when it rolled out. A $ amount is put on this cure, only X number of people get it each month, up to a certain $ amount across all claimants, and the rest are SOL. Healthcare itself is like that. We did 18 NICU babies already this month, or we did 32 cardiac cath procedures this month, time to delay, deny, defend.
Wouldn’t it be cool if you could figure a way around needing that healthcare? If you could do 6 simple steps that are entirely under your own power, cheaply or for free, and fix your health on your own? What a dream that would be. This need for health independence is as predictable as a Luigi.
RFK is like a cherry on the shit sundae of our present system. He’s symbolic of the need for something other that we can maybe have more control over. Unfortunately, drinking raw milk has a higher potential of adding more problems.
drinking raw milk
will be the least of our problems from RFK. He killed more than 20 children in Samoa with his smallpox vaccine denial.
This deserves a link.
Although I think this article downplays his involvement by using weasel words. I started to look for one that stated it more clearly but then I’m no better than idiots looking to have their bias confirmed.
Luigi didn’t do it
If you could do 6 simple steps that are entirely under your own power, cheaply or for free, and fix your health on your own?
This is so specific that i would be remiss if I didn’t ask what those 6 things were…
It’s a mimic of how most charlatans start their pitch for bullshit solutions.
People have opposed vaccines since they were first introduced. I find your explanation just trying to force it into the current discussion around health insurance.
I would argue that it’s primarily because some people can’t fathom that the world is a chaotic place and shit just happens without sinister forces making it happen. Its exactly why the devil is such a popular theme in Christianity, because they need some evil force acting behind the scenes to justify the fact that absolutely terrible things happen while also believing in some supremely powerful and benevolent God.
With the pandemic, and people losing their shit because they were in lock down, the idea that this evil force was making it happen and fucking with them really took hold…and that made the “freedom” from it, a vaccine, a very good target for people pushing their conspiracy theories that this was a good way to push some sinister agenda…and with the amount of fear at the time, people were susceptible. Once you’ve opened the door for vaccines being a vehicle for sinister agenda, that just opens the door for questioning previous vaccines as well.
Everything you’ve said is correct. The basic chaos and statistics of life is too much to process for some people. However, the number of vaccine deniers is now a movement, and growing, and being given lip service by people in charge. That doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
We are both correct in our main assertions.
That doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
I agree. And I think that non-vacuum isn’t that our health system is whack, but that we just went through a traumatizing time as a society that left people very fearful and looking for answers. It’s a convenient and easy one that the conmen are more than happy to advantage of for their personal gain.
I guess I see our positions as very different. . .you attribute it to people trying to avoid our healthcare system, I see it as people just looking for something to blame for how crappy shit was during the pandemic; our healthcare system has been shit for a long time, but the rise to prominence of this anti-vaccine movement happened during the pandemic. I don’t think the timing is coincidental.
But I appreciate the cordial response.
As someone inside the healthcare system, I can confidently state that COVID simply brought out a lot of festering problems that already existed. The pandemic didn’t create those problems, it revealed them.
The one “but” here is that COVID did help speed up the timeline on doctor/nurse/caregiver burnout as well and create a bottleneck in getting care due to sheer numbers which is still happening right now. How long are you waiting for your next PCP appointment, or to get established with one? (One example).
And as another “but”. What I just said above was already the trajectory of the system. We simply had a little healthcare “inflation” that sped all of that up.
5G hadn’t been invented yet. They had nothing to worry about back then.
/s
We are entering a stupid age, for which we may never recover.
I’d argue we ushered in the Stupid Age in November of 1980.
I agree though, we never recovered.
for which we may never recover.
um, it’s FROM which, not “for which”
you wouldn’t say “I’ll never recover for this”, would you?
I’ll never recover for this comment
You’ll never recover for this
On the other hand, half a century earlier-
So I guess the stupid waxes and wanes?
Something something smart people make good times that makes stupid people that make hard times that makes smart people?
You know I wonder how much of this is because we stopped doing pubic service announcements for a while?
Oh how humanity hath fallen
Never experienced hardship… Boomers.
And too foolish to learn from the experience of others. Personal experience isn’t required if you develop wisdom. Americans, wise? Naaah.
Not all of humanity. Mostly America and some Europe with the epidemic of willful ignorance
Can anyone find independent reports of this massive celebration for the announcement of the results of the Francis Field Trial in 1955?
And then we ingested a bunch of lead through our lungs
