• UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      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).

      • jballs@sh.itjust.works
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        6 days ago

        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.

      • LePoisson@lemmy.world
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        6 days ago

        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.

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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          6 days ago

          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.

          • Serinus@lemmy.world
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            6 days ago

            his party’s unwillingness to govern.

            Hey, at least they kept the federal government from being used politically.

        • shalafi@lemmy.world
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          6 days ago

          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.

      • AreaKode@lemmy.world
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        6 days ago

        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.

      • grue@lemmy.world
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        6 days ago

        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.

          • shalafi@lemmy.world
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            6 days ago

            “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.”

        • JaggedRobotPubes@lemmy.world
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          6 days ago

          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.

    • Resonosity@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      5 days ago

      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.

      • ContriteErudite@lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        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.