Vaccines are incredibly effective, and we're wasting all that again and children will needlessly suffer and die.
Sweden took a much more pragmatic approach and didn’t suffer for it. They’ve got a lesson we can learn.
It's a small step from there to the people who chided -me- because I said I was no longer willing to discuss in good faith with people who argued about "post birth adoptions" (that they knew to be a lie) or adrenachrome farming from babies in pizza parlor basements. That it was my fault for these views propagating for not being willing to "understand" their perspective.
Their perspectives are a lie They know they're a lie. They just don't. fucking. care.
And then they whine about people being "dismissive" of them.
Notably, Mary Mallon (Typhoid Mary) was never convinced either. This didn't make her less dangerous. The big difference is the average lethality. If we were talking about Polio, people's paranoia is a lot less important.
I don't blame anyone for not trusting the government. Anyone who's read (or lived) history and with a rational mind would scrutinize every single thing coming from them, particularly if their health is involved.
Another thing that doesn't help, but this is almost exclusively a memerican problem, is that people enjoy polarizing these issues to their absolute extremes. Things are either vantablack or HDR-white. And if you happen to be on the other end "you should die or go to prison".
Chill. It's OK to question things.
I happen to have degrees and 15+ yoe doing Bioscience, a couple of those years in virology labs.
Find a better argument, bro. You can still edit your comment or something, lmao.
The more obvious stupidity was around face masks, first by denying they worked at all, and then by acting like coarse weave cloth was as good as N95 or FFP3.
iirc that was the prevailing theory until after the vaccines came out. I don't recall it ever being in the news when it was determined to be airborne. By that time, COVID wasn't even newsworthy.
There were also scary studies coming out of China (though this was later) showing a single positive guy going for a run in a park infecting loads of people. The dynamics have only changed because people have partial immunity now, but it was like wildfire and it is still going up and down in terms of transmission.
To be honest, I think it's fine there was some over-reaction. Millions of people died. I think it's ok to be slightly uncomfortable for a little bit under such extreme circumstances. To be quite honest, there was an under-reaction. We had an opportunity to shut it down and decided not to follow the science like China did because of American exceptionalism. Now we are living with it forever until there is a better vaccine.
China protected their entire population until a vaccine was made available. This means their death rate was likely a third of ours. Their official statistics paint too rosy a picture (they claim only ~60k died), but a simple back of the napkin calculation 0.1% vaccinated die, 1% unvaccinated die, means they did 10x better than let-it-rip. We did something like 3x better than let-it-rip.
The real danger for most people wasn’t the virus, it was the hospitals being so overwhelmed by the virus that they would no longer be able to provide care for other stuff.
China was welding doors shut to keep people from leaving their apartments.
Enforcing public safety rules is hard. Knowing where to draw the line is hard for individual enforcement officers. That's what, in times of public crisis, it's important to overlook edge cases like these because they serve the larger purpose.
Not only that. If the line is way too far on one side or the other, everyone agrees that it is, and then it's shifted. If the line is approximately at the optimum, some agree it is, and those that disagree are about half convinced that it's too far this way, half it's too far that way.
So, having maximum disagreement is in itself arguably an indicator that you got it approximately right.
I played a small role in this that allowed me to see how these decisions were made. I think we should be honest at this point about how much of the policy was driven by vibes and politics. We had better data than people assume and it had almost no bearing on the decisions that were made.
Multiple governments had high-quality models that suggested a much lower IFR than what was widely reported, and in hindsight were proven correct. The news cycle was captured by people pushing doomsday scenarios and many people decided it was politically inconvenient to contradict that prevailing narrative. There weren't any complex motives, it was cowardice mixed with a bit of opportunism. I got to see this from the inside and I have no doubt that it would happen again, which gives me little confidence in the institutions.
There was an enormous amount of pressure to be seen to be doing something from the top in most countries, which led to a lot of the pointless theater that happened.
It is unfortunate but the poor reputation of public health officials due to COVID is well-deserved.
The Canadian COVID response was basically the nail in the coffin of progressives and their quasi-scientific thought. I was advised of all of the following statements upon being notified by the city that I had been in contact with a confirmed COVID patient:
* You are NOT allowed to leave the bounds of your property, under penalty of a $1000/day fine.
* You MAY however choose to travel to a COVID testing center.
* You MAY NOT take any form of public transit, walking, or cycling, unless you do not have a car.
* If you do not have a car, you MAY walk or cycle to the testing center.
* You MAY NOT walk or cycle around the neighborhood for exercise, under penalty of a $1000/day fine.
All of this while people were out contravening quarantine mandates anyway. Getting haircuts kills grandma - so how come everybody out on the streets was proudly posting pictures of themselves on social media wearing rainbow-colored masks, with perfectly manicured buzz cuts? You know what it actually looks like to observe quarantine and not get a haircut for two years?
Don't try to give me that gaslighting bullshit either where people started to learn to "cut their own hair." Barber's college takes two years. How did everybody magically acquire this skill overnight (spoiler alert: they did not)?
Makes you think - if they can't even muster an internally consistent and scientific, non-contradictory response to a global pandemic, what the fuck else are they lying about? I'm to trust the government's positions on gender in light of this debacle too?
Let me say that again, you (the reader) saw these things with your own eyes, you heard these things with your own ears, not just for a couple days but for more than a year.
You know this is true.
And yet, why would some people choose to ignore that it happened?
To me, this is/was an even greater eye-opener than the disease or the vaccine itself.
You know damn well. Toronto is a city of liars, and I have demonstrated it beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Nobody here will be able to refute this statement in good faith - only downvote it.
They are all completely aligned with a policy reducing non-essential public exposure, with a tiered approach for transport that limits public exposure where better alternatives exist.
Travelling to a testing center almost certainly puts me within proximity of COVID patients at one point, particularly in the waiting room. Sitting in waiting rooms is how I got the case the city notified me of in the first place.
Cycling and exercise is not only a solitary activity, it is also conducted outdoors where we were told risk of airborne transmission was de minimis. It in fact limits public exposure more than travelling to a public place full of probable COVID patients.
I think if COVID times taught us anything, it's that you can make all the "mandates" you want, but if you don't enforce them, they're just suggestions, and the public will mock and ignore them. It was infuriating watching people ignore stay-at-home, deliberately endangering everyone and prolonging the pandemic, and then laughing it up on social media, consequence-free. Absolutely shameful. But because the mandates were never really enforced, people freely acted like assholes.
People are responsible for themselves. Mindlessly doing the opposite of what the government says is as dogmatic as blindly following it.
Not just amplifying them, but literally putting some of them in charge of vaccine policy: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/how-rfk-jr-s-hand-picked...
One position asks you to get jabbed with a needle, the other asks you to do nothing. So people are very happy to do nothing if they're not forced to get jabbed.
- effective, widespread vaccine deployment
- the virus naturally evolving to a less-lethal state
- it all having been overblown from the get-go
My instinct is like 60/30/10, but it would be great to see someone make an actual case based on hard data, of which surely there is plenty.
e.g. this source says 99.7%: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7062568/
Herd immunity matters.
I don't think those people stopped being antivax, if anything they feel vindicated.
Don’t use govt control to suppress speech on social media. It’s not conducive to any sort of trust building.
Before I’m labelled a “maga/trump” talking points peddler - my kids are vaccinated (yes, including the hpv), I haven’t done covid shots more than the one required time. We do flu shots but not picky about it. Kids have had the flu (a & b) and they’ve handled it pretty well.
So then how do you deal with other state actors who have whole machineries spreading lies and disinformation on social networks?
Everything in life has trade offs. Everything.
If you recall, the initial strains of covid for the elderly had a side effect that could occur with shockingly high probability. That side effect was "dead." The very first vaccines were rushed and given to the elderly to prevent this. There was no "misinformation." The media reported information as it came in.
Understanding of the virus and the vaccines did changes fairly quickly during that time, so I get that it could be confusing for people, but there was no secret effort to mislead anyone, and overall the covid vaccine was one of the biggest successes in our lifetime.
mRNA vaccines open up huge possibilities for a range of illnesses, including cancer. The covid vaccine was developed in record time, and was overall pretty damn effective at preventing the side effect of "dead."
I rarely get sick. I haven't had flu or even a cold in at least 10 years. I don't get flu vaccines because in my estimation I don't need them. By contrast, for something like tetanus vaccines, I do get those periodically as my hobbies expose me to cuts and dirt.
This is not a fact, and spreading this misinformation is very concerning.
This makes mandates very controversial, especially when combined with the wrongthink suppression/deplatforming of discussions under the guise of 'misinformation' (eg origins of COVID and lab leak hypothesis) that happened on major social media platforms like YouTube and Facebook.
We can swap one off studies all day, but the fact remains that there wasn't compelling enough evidence to justify making the vaccine mandated.
Doesn't this assume they were/are never exposed to COVID? It seems unlikely to be the case at this point.
But as you can assume that COVID is widespread enough that almost everyone will get it at some point, the risk from the vaccine is not larger than that from the infection, likely it is much lower (especially if we include more than myocarditis).
It has been affirmed that the risks of the vaccine are less than the risks of the virus. Still, we shouldn’t shout “the vaccines are safe” so loudly that we can’t document and discuss real side effects and relative risks between competing solutions.
We’ve ultimately reached the correct outcome here, removing an inferior product from the market.
[1]: https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/coronavirus-vaccine-blood-...
The federal government lied about masks. Local governments lied about lockdowns. Nobody lied about vaccines.
The folks who can’t be fucked to not get and spread measles weren’t tipped over the edge by the mask lies because they’re the same folks who wouldn’t follow a mask mandate.
“In early 2020, Fauci and other public health officials advised against mask use by the general public, citing both doubts about efficacy and a need to preserve limited supplies for healthcare workers” [1]. That second part brings it close to a lie. (There was no need to advise against mask use.)
America fucked up thrice: the mask misinformation in March, talking down the lab-release hypothesis (which would have motivated right-wing nutters into being less selfish), and not regulating local jurisdictions who took specific measures (e.g. no public outdoor gatherings in San Francisco, or vaccine mandates in open-air venues in New York).
Otherwise, we did pretty well. And I’m sceptical someone willing to put their family and community at risk would see things differently if any of the above changed.
[1] https://case.hks.harvard.edu/a-noble-lie-dr-anthony-fauci-an...
Huge stretch to consider this intent to deceive. This is as much of a lie as imposing rations during wartime. And not even that much, since Fauci's statements were suggestions and not mandates. They were basically saying, "We're not yet sure if they work well, but we're looking into it. But for now, supplies are limited, so let's not deprive healthcare workers who actually need them."
That is not known for sure.
Disclaimer for those who missed Rational Debate 101: this does not mean they are connected.
Same. The way the COVID vaccine was used as a political wedge issue contributed to suspicions. I hope lessons were learned on both sides but I doubt it.
I wish I had cataloged all of the stuff I read and listened to in 2020. There are things where the references are basically impossible to find. All of it mainstream news sources. There was concern expressed in 2020 that the covid vaccine could trigger resistance to other existing vaccines, and that's exactly what happened.
Also worth name dropping one of the most interesting books I've ever read: _The Pox of Liberty: How the Constitution Left Americans Rich, Free, and Prone to Infection_. Apparently so obscure that Amazon tries to auto correct the search.
I don't think so. Biden pushed the Covid vaccines even harder than Trump did. If Trump had been in the White House I don't think Covid vaccines would have been mandated.
I looked up that article. Nowhere does it indicate that papers like the NYT were opposed to speeding up the development, approval, and distribution of vaccines.
Are you implying that if it were Democrats in the white house we would've had protracted approval?
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/04/opinion/coronavirus-vacci...
==
Vaccines often take 10 years to bring to market. We want a new vaccine as fast as possible, where each month matters.
The fact is that starting from the early stages of development, most vaccines fail. We cannot afford to fail, so we need to plan for success. To do that, we must think and invest as ambitiously as we can — and that means in a Covid vaccine advance market commitment.
The core issue isn't with "antivaxxers" but with the continual erosion of trust that created the sentiment in the first place. The foundation of being willing to inject yourself with something that you personally can't verify the effectiveness or safety of is trust. At every level our social institutions: the government, large corporations, and academia, have continually chipped away at the foundations of social trust necessary for these things.
People have lower trust in doctors, hospitals and pharma companies because people they do trust (Trump, RFK and the parade of misfits now running US health policy) lie to them to get them to distrust doctors and pharma companies. It’s not some complicated bank shot.
Moderna has no opioid division.
And while Mennonites have a multinational drug problem [1][2], I see no evidence they were “disproportionately” impacted by opioids.
This sounds like post hoc rationalisation, not causation. These folks were never going to get vaccinated.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-jan-28-me-18060...
People have knee-jerk reaction to arguments like yours: oh so you don't trust the government, but choose to trust random facebook and youtube posts?
Unfortunately this is the exact problem. Governments think they have an infinite amount of trust to spend because "at least it's not random facebook posts."
The moment some people see a single slip up from the latter, they distrust them forever, but you can show study after study debunking autism links, for example, and those same people either disregard the evidence or merely move the goal posts.
In other words: these people are intellectually dishonest. They start with a conclusion and will contort or discard any facts that threaten said conclusion.
They'd never lie and conspire for years and years. That couldn't possibly happen.
The reproducibility crisis also doesn't really affect vaccine safety data.
We continually see people online who step outside the line and are torn down by downvotes, comments, etc. And these cultural viewpoints lack all nuance so you are forced to either shove yourself into the box wholly or be ridiculed. Even if you are 90% onboard with the popular viewpoint, you cannot let that questioning 10% show. The end result is a bunch of people wandering around with their secret "bad" thoughts being driven further against whatever populist issue they should be jumping into next.
They don't make opiods.
I’ve sort of accepted society will bifurcate into diseased and undiseased branches. As long as the latter don’t have to pay for the former’s stupidity, I’m over it.
(By analogy: “the ‘stupid motorist law’ is a law in the U.S. state of Arizona that states that any motorist who becomes stranded after driving around barricades to enter a flooded stretch of roadway may be charged for the cost of their rescue” [1].)
Vaccines in principle are good, not all implementations are equally good.
Are we too dumb to believe some vaccines are life saving miracles and that others may not be necessary? Why is it so all or none?
Especially given things like most European nations not vaccinating against RSV, Hep A or Varicella. Are they all psycho anti-vax nutjobs? It seems much better to go through them one by one, and say: "Measles is universally recommended, has saved countless lives, lets do that one. Covid-19 vaccine for a 6 month old, USA is the only country still recommending it, skip it."
The Lancet started it with that stupid Wakefield "study" that it refused to retract for a decade, which launched something that was associated with crystal healing into the mainstream; the destruction of the reputation of the integrity of medical research through bribery of scientists and doctors continued it; and covid lies made it permanent. It's over. Not vaccines, but any trust in medicine. We've gone from trusting the "consensus" far too much, to realizing how the "consensus" is constructed and not trusting anything any more. Just drifting with no moorings.
It's no different than when the US used fake vaccination programs in order to find Osama bin Laden, which led to local vaccination volunteers being murdered, and many people in the Middle East deciding that vaccination was a Western plot. You may not know about this because people in the West don't care when other people die unless it is socially useful for them; don't care unless it affects us and our lifestyles. Even during covid, the US launched a multimillion dollar antivax propaganda program in the Philippines in order to convince people that Sinovax would kill them just to get one up on China. Harris explained in a speech (and she wasn't alone) how she would be wary to take any vaccine from any Trump administration-directed program.
This fanatical chauvinism is only important in the West in order to get one up on other people. To display that you're more supportive of institutions than your stupid, evil populist neighbor. To show that there's nothing that they can do to kill your loyalty, because you understand subtlety. You're pragmatic, you know that the dummies need to be lied to to be herded into the right direction.
But if you're loyal no matter what and avoid talking about public failures when they are most relevant, even beatifying the architects of those failures, who has been herded? Take your vaccines and ask people if they're vaccinated before you let them around your infants. Don't pretend that your lording it over others is out of concern for them, though. It's just snotty, ultra-partisan ego inflation.
Medical science has lost the trust of the Western public because it has become completely overwhelmed by bribery and cronyism just like every other Western institution. Complete recycling of those institutions is the only way to get that trust back, and it's what the institutionalists spend all their time fighting against. Generally this is because they draw their middle-class salaries from these institutions and were active participants in these frauds - at the least dutifully shunning their families, friends and strangers for questioning them.
Funny thing is, same day I didn’t get the vaccine the grocery store receipt starting offering a free shot and $10 store credit with “most insurances” so I didn’t qualify lol.
This sorta thing that keeps Everyone safe with herd immunity you’d really think they’d want to make as easy as possible
https://www.cvs.com/immunizations/flu?icid=immunizations-lp-...
Under the "How much does a flu shot cost?" section it says $75 for a standard dose.
Publix supermarkets will literally pay you to get it. I think it's a $10 gift card this year.
This was my local CVS though, from other comments maybe other places are cheaper.
Also I miss pubsubs so much <333
"Previously, Moore shared that this outbreak in Ontario was traced back to a Mennonite wedding in New Brunswick, and is spreading primarily in Mennonite and Amish communities where vaccination rates lag. The vast majority of those cases are in southwestern Ontario."
"Most cases this year are in regions where local vaccination rates are as low as 30 percent.
Those towns are home to a culturally conservative Mennonite group with ties to Mexico that has historically been less likely to accept vaccines. The group primarily speaks Plautdietsch, a Low German dialect spoken almost entirely by Mennonites."
Most of the cases in Texas are in school-age children between ages 5 and 17 who are either unvaccinated or have unknown vaccination status, and a few are among children who received a single dose of the MMR vaccine.
What is known about this outbreak and the community where it’s occurring?
This outbreak started in a Mennonite community in West Texas where there are low vaccination rates. Many of the children are homeschooled or attend smaller private schools, and many are unvaccinated.
This is not atypical for the larger outbreaks that we’ve seen in the United States in the recent past. In 2019, the U.S. saw 1,274 measles cases, including a large outbreak of slightly more than 900 cases in an Orthodox Jewish community in New York. In 2014, there was a measles outbreak of 383 cases in an Amish community in Ohio.
Dense groups of unvaccinated people are just waiting for a biological match to be lit...
So I don't know what drives the anti-vaxx view for Mennonites, but from what this man was saying it doesn't seem to be something that is inherent to being a Mennonite (like blood transfusions for JWs).
> Public health officials say it started when an international traveller attended a wedding in New Brunswick last October. New Brunswick's outbreak ended in January, but guests at that wedding had already brought the virus to southwestern Ontario, where that province's outbreak was concentrated among closely knit Mennonite communities.
International travel + spread among low-vaccination communities.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/livestory/canada-measles-elim...
Certain religious and cultural groups, including Mennonite populations — where the first outbreak began on Oct. 27, 2024, after an international traveller from Thailand attended a wedding in New Brunswick and guests then returned to southwestern Ontario — and Amish populations, were disproportionately affected.see https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-measles-outbre...
or non-paywalled version
https://web.archive.org/web/20250922034906/https://www.thegl...
or if you want to watch/listen
A good example if the ultra-orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn for whom a gloosy booklet seems to bear a lot of responsibility [1] and this predates Covid. It's particularly interesting because certain preventable diseases can cause male infertility.
This became such a big problem that Israel had to counter this misinformation so ultra-Orthodox communities would get Covid vaccines [2].
None of this came from any form of Judaism.
[1]: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/brooklyn-measles-outbre...
[2]: https://www.npr.org/2021/04/22/988812635/how-israel-persuade...
The link states most of the outbreaks are linked to a gathering in New Brunswick, and then Southern Ontario, before eventually making its way to Alberta.
Alternatively, we could ban the sale or posession of contraceptive devices, because condoms are murder. And then watch the HIV infection rate spike, weakening immune responses and paving the way for measles to flourish.
thinkingkong•2h ago
The challenge is that solving this is easier but only if people are willing to get vaccinated.
mullingitover•1h ago
giarc•17m ago