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The punchline to this joke is that vaccines work best at scale. Your 80 year old decrepit ass doesn’t have an immune system that can fully benefit from inoculation. What keeps you safe is that everyone around you has been inoculated, too. They act as a buffer, reducing the speed of transition and the variants that can survive in the population, so that you’re never exposed to the virus to begin with.
As soon as you take down that barrier, every town hall meeting and rubber chicken fundraiser means slapping palms with a bunch of anti-vax assholes who are absolutely dripping with contagion. At the height of COVID, Trumpies were dropping like flies. A 2023 study published in JAMA Internal Medicine found that the excess death rate for Republican voters was 15% higher than for Democratic voters in Florida and Ohio between March 2020 and December 2021. This included three different talk radio personalities: Marc Bernier (A long-time host in Daytona Beach, Florida), Dick Farrel (Formerly a fill-in host on Newsmax, he had hosted shows for several Florida stations), and Phil Valentine (A well-known host based in Nashville, Tennessee).
Ah that just made me nostalgic for the Herman Cain Awards. Yes it was fucked up, but it was a soothing kind of fucked up that made me feel like maybe there was some sort of karma or cosmic justice happening.
Low-key was really hoping that having that sort of demographic representation in the COVID deaths would translate to a different electoral outcome.
But no, we crave fascism I guess. That or the election was stolen in 2024 which I wouldn’t even be surprised if that were true given the level of projection Trump and the GOP/MAGAtards regularly engage in.
Low-key was really hoping that having that sort of demographic representation in the COVID deaths would translate to a different electoral outcome.
Demographics is not, in fact, destiny. Partisanship isn’t hereditary.
We have a fascist national media that keeps cranking up the crazy in the general population. No amount of disease fatality will change that.
That or the election was stolen in 2024
If Biden presided over a stolen election, that’s only further evidence of his party’s unwillingness to govern.
his party’s unwillingness to govern.
Hey, at least they kept the federal government from being used politically.
Same as forgetting that vaccines saved us. Now we’re repeating the same shit we pulled 100-years ago. Great Depression, high tariffs, fascism, all coming around again because every human who remembers is dead.
For example, as a child I was fascinated with grandma’s smallpox vaccine scar. Think I missed the cutoff by a year, because smallpox was fucking extinct. She’d also tell me how thankful her generation was for the polio vaccine, how scared she was as a child. She’s dead, and so is everyone else who can tell those first-hand stories. So it goes.
we crave fascism I guess
It’s got electrolytes!
Electrolytes, techbrorights, what’s the difference /s
Right… A bunch of people die, and then we pocket the cash we saved not paying those long-term medical bills. And eventually, we reach herd immunity. Win-win. This is the system working as intended.
As soon as you take down that barrier, every town hall meeting and rubber chicken fundraiser means slapping palms with a bunch of anti-vax assholes who are absolutely dripping with contagion.
LOL, Republicans have been fleeing from their constituents and mostly refusing to hold those sorts of events for years now already.
They don’t give a shit about herd immunity because they literally only ever interact with other elites.
Who serves them their food?
“We cook your meals, we haul your trash, we connect your calls, we drive your ambulances. We guard you while you sleep. Do not… fuck with us.”
That situation is stressful and increasingly dangerous for them.
They care about it, a lot, they just can’t notice because it would show them their “victory” they sacrificed their souls for isn’t even a real victory.
Herman Cain didn’t vaccinate 👀
See, what I don’t get is that loosening vaccine requirements of the general public means less herd immunity. Elites aren’t entirely immune from diseases. They rely on the rest of the population also not getting sick.
In a way, they’re digging their own grave.
They’re not shoulder-to-shoulder with the rest of us at Costco, or waiting for hours at an overcrowded clinic, or sending their kids to schools packed past capacity. They live in a separate world, where exposure to the mess the rest of us deal with is minimized.
When illness does fall on them, they get top-tier healthcare; faster, smarter, better than anything we’ll ever see. It’s a tiered society, where wealth and influence dictate your caste. They’re not digging graves; they’re building bunkers.
Also, it’s inability to entertain the hypothetical. “What if we didn’t have vaccines?” is literally incompressible to them. There was a Ted talk on it. https://youtu.be/9vpqilhW9uI
It’s fine, they’ll just have twelve kids to have three teenagers. As is tradition.
Speedrun population collapse to mitigate against increasing global warming?
Idiocracy being created in real time.
It’s not a vaccine problem, it’s an education problem. A large portion of Americans are exceptionally gullible to propaganda and Republicans have weaponized it very well. The anti-vax narrative is not present in large portions of the population in other developed nations. We need to look within, not at the solution to disease.
Edit: Unfortunately others are informing me that this is a problem in other countries as well, which is sad. My partners family is from a country in Europe that doesn’t appear to have this issue at scale so I foolishly extrapolated.
I dont know, large portions of other nations are just as gullible and susceptible to propaganda. I mean no one is immune to it, but a lot of the developed nations do believe immigrants and not the rich are causing all their problems, because that’s what the media has told them.
Anti-intellectualism is global.
In the US it is ridiculously blatant because so much of our media thinks subtext is for The Gays. But think about how often the villain is an Evil Scientist or even just A Teacher Who Has It Out For The Protagonist? What began as an active effort has mostly just become the cultural zeitgeist where “people with advanced degrees have no common sense or street smarts” and “too much knowledge turns you into a monster” (see also: The Frankenstein Complex).
Hell, for something more blatant: Go look at the various threads about the US changing its COVID vaccination guidelines. Plenty of Europeans will pop in and say “Yeah. That lines up with what we have. You don’t need a booster every year if you are healthy”. I’ll leave it to the experts as to what defines “need” but… as someone who has somehow managed to catch COVID three or four times, I want those boosters in my muscles because it is the difference between a weekend of “I feel kinda shitty and have a headache in the center of my eyes and… fuck” versus being curled up in a bed coughing and hoping I lose consciousness for a few hours.
I promise you, anti-vax sentiments are alive and well in many countries. I’m from the UK, the birth place of Andrew Wakefield and in some areas, rates of uptake of the MMR vaccine is as low as 60% and the National average for England currently sits at 88%, down from 93% 10 years ago.
It’s not an education problem. Education isn’t happening because idiots decided it was their enemy, so their entire life is “attack this thing”.
Until they see that doesn’t help them, they’ll continue making that same mistake. They’d learn just fine if they decided to do it instead of fight it.
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There’s more. Lack of war desensitizes to it, lack of starvation makes it seem abstract etc.
Good times create weak men, weak men create bad times.
Alas it’s terrifying how it works irl. Doubly so because people who love that saying would call Trump a strong man xD
Yes. Sadly there is a lot of great truth to the idea behind that phrase, which instead usually just is treated as some cringe bullshit about being muscular and killing people
I don’t think the existence of vaccines makes people anti-science, though. There’s a lot more going on there.
You don’t miss the water until the well runs dry.
So weird to think there’s such a thing as “too comfortable.” Excessive privilege is really something.
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Well, I know a senior person, retired epidemiologist who is anti covid vaccine because “no vaccine developed so fast can be safe”.
It hard containing my self from telling her that from her time as an epidemiologist to now, technology has changed and that they’ve studied mRNA vaccines for a long time so fighting a particular strain of virus is easier as the whole process has already been successfully tested. However, her family trusts her, she has the credentials and I don’t, so it should be up to another epidemiologist with proper credentials to explain that. Not me.
It’s like an old engineer saying that current structural calculations in buildings can’t be trusted because it used to take months/years of hard work and now they can be done in a fraction of the time with computers.
🤦♂️
What I don’t get is that people will chose the terrible effects of the disease over the chance of having side effects from the vaccine when they’re orders of magnitude different levels of effect.
The “side effect” (autism) they are terrified of, isn’t actually a potential side effect of vaccines, no matter how much they want it to be.
Yeah:
- Autism isn’t caused by vaccines
- Autism Isn’t a punishment
I’d rather be a person with autism than whatever they’ve got going.
The umbrella roof is so tight people start to forget it’s raining.
That’s what I’ve been saying. Vaccines are too effective for our own good. Smallpox alone is estimated to have killed 250-500 million during the 1900’s. But a generation or two passes without that personal experience and the danger is not treated with the care it deserves.
See also: Fascism and World Wars
See also: Great Depression, ruinous tariffs.
We should really make anti-vaxers walk through a cemetery with deaths from the last 50-100 years vs one from the last 100-200 years and note the differences in dead children/infants.
Isn’t this just a lengthy explanation for suvivorship bias?
Not really. Survivorship bias is saying “measles aren’t that bad, both my parents had it as kids”. Because if either of you parents had died from measles then you obviously wouldn’t be able to make that statement. Because you wouldn’t exist.
I guess it’s more of a recency bias? Maybe? Or incompleteness fallacy?
Except they did, COVID. That first year saw quite a lot of death. Granted, the experience difference between healthcare and people hunkering down at home would be miles apart.
There would have to be a disconnect there, with the visitor bans. Necessary, but it may have contributed to the fallout of skepticism and conspiracy theory.
You see a loved one go in, get some screen time with them in a hospital bed, maybe, then a phone call from a nurse or doctor telling you your loved one is dead, no you can’t come in, the body will be delivered to the funeral home, do you have one picked out?. Then you see a body at the funeral home. No experience, no visual of real time decline in between, a black hole of time between alive and this dead body in a strange funeral home.
Denial is part of grief. You could even say it’s a normal part of grief. Combine that with the black hole of time between alive and dead, sprinkle with personal tendencies to conspiracy theories, and you have yourself a fake illness.
In addition, other people hunkering at home with nothing but time, screaming into the void in their grief, add fuel to the notion.
I guess COVID doesn’t count. I can only add partial sarcasm to that sentence.
It’s really on the developed, privileged richer countries that there are significant number of anti-vaxxers. But in the developing ones, especially the global south, they overwhelmingly believe in vaccines because these countries are in the tropical who have to deal with nastier and frequent diseases than those in the colder global north where diseases are more or less subdued by colder climate.
A suprise to be sure, that people in countries with continual and consistent access to vaccines, where 90+ % of the population of the last 50+ years has been fully vaccinated, is where antivaxxers have sprouted up, while people in less developed countries with inconsistent access to vaccines and medical care, believe in vaccines, where most of their population in the last 50 years has struggled to get vaccines or gone unvaccinated and they’ve seen first hand the horrors of the diseases that vaccines prevent…
What a shocker.
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