As someone currently self-employed in Nashville and trying to figure out how to scale up my network of part-time contractors into a real company, my state legislature making decisions like this (and also needlessly harassing trans folks) is incredibly frustrating.
How can I ask people who work for me to live here?
I realize this is rhetorical, but the answer is that the majority of people aren’t single or double issue voters. They may be seeking to live in TN to avoid downsides of other states, making a tradeoff.
And then there are people who are politically diametric to you who are also great employees; these you probably don’t need to sell the idea of residency as much.
Between these two groups, there are enough such people to sustain job markets in every state.
most people, sure. but I'm trans and I don't think I'd like to live in a state that's harassing me. there's legitimate concerns about how livable places are for certain groups based on state policy and community prejudice.
No matter where you go, those states will still have 2 senators that will affect you. So while I can't dictate what others should do, I would prefer if more people would come and affected the local government instead.
It's easy: don't. I am struggling with the same thing up here in Alberta and it's just impossible to make any headway against an electorate that continues to vote this way. It's not worth your time and it's better to focus on hiring out of state/province or moving.
EDIT: fellow Albertans feel free to email me on my profile (lots of us here!)
Relocating before hiring full-time employees is probably my best move.
I've got a kid, though, so I'm currently trying to assess where we can afford to move that inspires confidence that we can really build something there.
If we have to go, I don't wanna move again before she goes to college in a decade.
Honest question: is North Carolina really any different than Tennessee, especially looking out over the next 10 years? From my U.S. Midwest perspective they appear to have very similar values, sentiments and politics. I'd be afraid that I'd be uprooting my family just to jump from one frying pan to another.
Take a trip and visit it. Rural is rural and it’ll be similar, I imagine. But Raleigh-Durham has a much younger and more liberal feel to it. I have never seen hipsters like NC hipsters :)
Whether this will be comfortable for you or not I can’t say. But I can tell you that it’s worth checking out.
I could make the same amount of money anywhere with internet at this point, so there's no obvious place to move in particular. I loved the idea of hitting the West Coast until the smoke of the last few years caused me to reconsider.
As I consider if climate extremes are likely to keep getting worse, upstate New York or Vermont are seeming more and more viable to me.
Vermont is one of my favorite states in the union. The state motto is "freedom and unity" and you get the feeling that everyone is on the same team there.
New Hampshire's state motto is "live free or die." If you die in New Hampshire, it's probably because someone else was living free.
It always amazes me that so many "freedom" states heavily police individual behaviour more than I have experienced in the Bay Area, which doesn't have that rhetoric.
I can go buy magic mushrooms here, but in so-called Freedomland you can't even eat what you want. Whacky.
I moved to Texas for a short while and hoo boy, Austin is nice, but the peeps in Texas really love to tell the government to tread on them. You can't even get weed brownies here. Talk about big government.
These folks shout "freedom" because shouting "fascism" is too overt.
I remember how some of my family in southern California was so upset that prop 8 (banning gay marriage) was overturned by the supreme court, and I'm honestly impressed by the level of cognitive dissonance they could hold in their head: simultaneously talking about "muH FrE3DomS" yet wanting to curtail the same freedoms to other people that, in those people exercising those freedoms, have zero impact on their lives. When I pointed it out to them, they basically sputtered something incoherent about "well I'll have to explain to cousin Timmy why those MEN are holding hands in Safeway!". idk maybe suck less as a parent?!
Manifest Destiny, Reconstruction, the gold rush, the dust bowl, ellis island, dreamers... there's a bunch. Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free!
I'm confused. Why ask people who work for you to live where you are? Is it actually important or does that opinion just have momentum.
I also live in Tennessee but have been a remote worker for a decade. I deeply disagree with the politics of this place but you know, family's here.
I think they just think they are right, regardless of if their claims are backed by evidence or care / concern for secondary consequences like you are describing.
Flip the seats. If only it were so simple.
P.S. Check out how cringe the Tennessee "quality of life" page reads. Three clicks off of the homepage of TN.gov.
I work in video production and could use an engineer in-studio while I'm broadcasting to deal with tech on the fly. I'm hitting the ceiling on what I can do by myself during a live show.
Living in Chattanooga, and watching as TN politics continue to leave me dumbfounded, I've come to believe that no matter where you are in this country, rural is rural and urban is urban. Upstate NY is just like rural TN. Sure, the state government seems to be more liberal, but it has many scandals and the same political sleaze as TN.
In the end, the best thing we can do is to insulate ourselves and our loved ones from government intervention, focus on local politics, and take control of our own consumption i.e. we can't rely on the government to do what's best for our children.
We should use these high paying remote jobs to buy nice homes with lots of space and access to good schools and healthcare. The rest of it will sort of work itself out.
And if we're being honest, climate change will get us before the government here can /shrug
> In the end, the best thing we can do is to insulate ourselves and our loved ones from government intervention, focus on local politics, and take control of our own consumption i.e. we can't rely on the government to do what's best for our children.
We feel that way too! So why don't you leave us alone? (If you hadn't noticed its not 1992 and nobody is trying to teach your kids abstinence-only education anymore.)
> We feel that way too! So why don't you leave us alone? (If you hadn't noticed its not 1992 and nobody is trying to teach your kids abstinence-only education anymore.)
You made a similar bad-faith false-equalivance elsewhere in this thread.
> > If we allow you adult choices, and you make choices that harm others
> So we can go back to banning adultery and divorce?
Forgive my language, but what utter crap. It's a vaccine against a deadly and contagious virus. You want to be left alone to drink your flavor aid? Be my guest. But you don't get to dump cyanide in the well and claim it's your right to do so.
> You made a similar bad-faith false-equalivance elsewhere in this thread.
What’s up with people throwing “bad faith” around lately? Did some sort of memo go around?
> Forgive my language, but what utter crap. It's a vaccine against a deadly and contagious virus.
I’m not talking about vaccines. The person I was responding to made a more general point about rural areas versus urban areas and localism. I was agreeing with him.
In fact there are still places teaching abstinence-only education and I'm pretty sure that trying to keep the existence of LGBTQ people from being mentioned is not a huge step forward.
Except the places that still teach that want abstinence-only education. That’s my point—the localism proposed by the grandparent poster is a good idea, but it requires everyone to chill out about how other communities choose to teach their kids. Everyone would be a lot happier if they weren’t having to look over their shoulder all the time wondering what the other side would try to foist in their kids. Having been in the receiving end of that in the 1990s I would have expected urban folks to understand that.
I moved me and my company from San Francisco in 2018 and absolutely love it here in Nashville. I suspect we may have clashing world and political views, but that’s not the point. Nashville is an amazing city, opportunity is unlimited, amazing night life, food, culture, and of course music. Southern is way more my style and speed.
> How can I ask people who work for me to live here?
Frankly, there is already enough demand and highly qualified people moving here.
I'm a Yank but my wife and daughter went to Nashville to look at Vanderbilt University - and they loved it, both the University and Nashville. From what I've seen Nashville is beautiful. I've even thought about relocating or longer term retiring to the Nashville area but I have this little voice in my head always saying "but it's the South..." and frankly, stories like this tend to amplify that voice.
P.S. I'm really into music and Nashville's music scene is very appealing, despite the state politics. So I'm definitely conflicted.
Nashville is a really blue dot in a red state that is Tennessee. If Nashville isn't liberal enough for you, then perhaps best to stay on the coasts. I actually feel Nashville is turning into the thing and ideologies I fled (California and San Francisco) with all the people moving here from Illinois, New York, and California.
Apologies for off-topic but are you the one who “records as they always do in Nashville, Tennessee”? If so, I want to say thanks so much for your videos - they have been an amazing source of entertainment during my teenage years.
There are two ways you can look at this. What I expect is people will mock and call citizens and lawmakers ignorant, and call for some tougher mechanism to make sure people get vaccinated.
The other is that when you push too hard, you get pushback, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar, etc. We are seeing this in other areas too, where pushing too hard on a liberal democratic (for lack of a better term) agenda leads to populist revolt, and effectively swings the pendulum way back past where most agree it reasonably should be. Until recently, it would only have been an extreme fringe group that was against long standing childhood vaccines. But it's not a surprise that when you start pushing people to do something, they start to become more wary and reject things that they previously would have accepted at face value. There is a pathway to authoritarianism where resistant is met by more and harsher rules, and one to a more enlightened society where people are treated like adults and mostly make the right choice.
> and one to a more enlightened society where people are treated like adults and mostly make the right choice.
We tried that. It was not very effective in the most recent experiment [1]. Nor those before [2] [3]. If we allow you adult choices, and you make choices that harm others (not getting vaccinated for whatever illegitimate reason is put forth), you end up having to be coaxed with policy (mandatory vaccinations by schools and employers) because you are not an adult capable of making adult decisions (you don't qualify for welfare in Australia if you don't get your kids vaccinated, for example [4]).
Harm yourself, by all means, that is your choice to make. Harming others (those who cannot get the vaccine for legitimate reasons) because of your ignorance infringes on their rights, and should under no circumstances be tolerated.
[3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29773050/ (The Importance of Complying with Vaccination Protocols in Developed Countries: "Anti-Vax" Hysteria and the Spread of Severe Preventable Diseases)
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Jab,_No_Pay (The policies grew out of a grassroots campaign championed by News Limited, in 2013. It was boosted by parent activists representing children who had died of preventable disease, notably the families of Riley Hughes and Dana McCaffery, infants who died of pertussis, leading to a backlash of harassment and trolling from anti-vaccination activists. No Jab No Pay was introduced in 2015, and expanded in July 2018. By July 2016, 148,000 children who had not previously been fully immunised, were meeting the new requirements.)
(my note: get your vaccine already if you haven't)
The magnitude of damage done to children by those social ills outstrips COVID, certainly, and all but a handful of contagious diseases. (To be clear, I support vaccinations and also strong penalties for adultery and disincentives for divorce.)
I know there is plenty of evidence that divorce correlates with bad outcomes for kids.
But I don't think there is any rock solid evidence divorce causes that much harm (over living in a house hold with two people that hate each other enough to get divorced).
You’re speculating that the negative outcomes we know exist would have happened absent divorce. Maybe that’s true maybe it’s not. Between my wife and I we’ve seen both, and I don’t know what’s worse mental health wise.
But in terms of just bread and butter issues, divorce is much harder on the kid. It really messes up family finances unless the parents are really well off. There’s a lot of disruption of home life if there is joint custody, and the documented effects of fathers not being present if there isn’t joint custody. If there are boyfriends or girlfriends that come in and out that can be a source of a lot of problems as well.
In the US, most of the childhood vaccines have their liability covered by the US Government under the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. Covid-19 vaccine liability is covered by the US government under the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program.
Drug companies have big pockets, but the US Government has even bigger pockets. I care more about being able to seek redress than who it's coming from.
Its not about compensation. The companies themselves have less skin in the game. Did they lower their internal standards because they now have less to lose?
edit: It doesn't matter if the vaccine manufacturers lowered their standards. It is the perception that they may have.
> … "but the US Government has even bigger pockets."
The thing people often forget about those US Government deep pockets is that they're the pockets of the US taxpayer being badly mis-managed by politicians with zero math skills.
What exactly is being pushed onerously upon these people that’s making them push back? Mask requirements in a pandemic? Taxes? Cancel culture? Seat belt laws? Gun buying restrictions? Brown neighbors? I’m not sure I follow.
edit: I totally misread this. Sorry about that. The rest of the comment just included for context
I feel like this comment and the one it's replying to perfectly articulates the real problem. Vaccination has gotten pulled into the web of politically charged topics. Even just a few years ago the anti vac sentiments didn't really have a home, but now we quickly default to litigating literally the culture war. I know you're replying to someone who brought the wider issues into it, but narcissism is definitely not at the root of a desire to have more people vaccinated.
> but narcissism is definitely not at the root of a desire to have more people vaccinated.
Correct, and I didn't think that's what my comment implied. I argue it's the root cause of why people won't get vaccinated, and why they push back, on taxes, vaccines, cancel culture, seat belt laws, and gun buying restrictions as enumerated by GP. Fragile egos, a grandiose sense of self-importance, believing they are special, and a lack of empathy, high level. There's a reason I linked to the Signs and Symptoms of that wikipedia page.
Whoops, sorry about that, I'll edit my comment to note I just was totally misreading you. I feel like narcissism is often a claim leveled against the more identify politics parts of the left and I went from there
Knowing some of these people and having candid conversations with them, the answers I hear (which I pretty much 100% disagree with) are:
Mask requirements in a pandemic? = attack on personal freedom/liberty
Taxes? = not a problem… trump took care of that.
Cancel culture? = stupid lib tears.
Seat belt laws? = attack on personal freedom/liberty… same as helmet laws for motorcyclists.
Gun buying restrictions? = attack on personal freedom/liberty
Brown neighbors? (actually not a big problem in the south since most neighborhoods are “voluntarily” segregated, but…) = the community will go to hell and property values will decrease.
Those people have totally inconsiderate and unfriendly personal beliefs. America is NOT the place for personal freedom/liberty. And the Boston Tea party was never about taxes.
People don’t want the government to say what they can and can’t do to their own bodies. I can see why people want to draw that particular line in the sand. Despite my personal desire that everyone do the moral, patriotic and practical thing and get vaccinated, I also don’t really want big brother super involved into individuals medical decision making. People should have autonomy over their own body, not the state. It doesn’t seem too unreasonable to think that reducing funding or even eliminating specific state managed health programs might be a great way to curtail such government encroachment and incentivize the massive health care system already in place to do its job so the big brother doesn’t have to step in and break everyone’s freedom.
> What exactly is being pushed onerously upon these people that’s making them push back? Mask requirements in a pandemic? Taxes? Cancel culture? Seat belt laws? Gun buying restrictions? Brown neighbors? I’m not sure I follow.”
Something about this post bothers me. It starts off making an attempt to understand the other side but then the tone shifts and non-sequiturs enter. And I think it’s the “I’m not sure I follow”, said like it’s some punchline that seals the deal.
Do we want to explore the situation or do we want upvotes for taking cheap shots at a straw man?
"I'm not sure I follow" in this context is a kind of low brow rhetorical technique, used to try and make the recipient feel stupid or inferior and drop their argument as a result. I've also seen it used for objection handling by mattress or car salesmen.
There is another way to look at it. The conservative agenda (for lack of a better term) has been pushed aggressively for 30 years, well beyond the point where most people reasonably expect it should be. The “liberal agenda” is the pushback. The last hangers-on want to push even more harshly on their extremism to rally their diminishing base. The phrase “lost cause” comes to mind.
The reason authoritarianism is so popular is because the Dems have not pushed for significant, FDR-style reforms that would materially improve people's lives. If they actually fought for universal healthcare, guaranteed parental leave, police reform, instead of just having Nancy Pelosi take a knee wearing some African garb while making Madoff-level returns on her insider trading, this level of populism would not turn into fascism.
If you don't believe me, you can find videos of these trump idiots screeching in some town hall about "over regulation" and "tyranny" and "socialism!" but they then say "and keep your hands off my medicare and social security!".
Human beings can’t definitively define good or bad without human defined boundary conditions. Be VERY careful with these two words in their general meaning.
Minors can't give consent, so their parents grant consent on their behalf. The salient difference between vaccines (or any medical treatment) and making your child drink alcohol is that one is good for them and the other is abuse.
There's an overwhelmingly large body of law dedicated to this.
The article mentions receiving postcards and other information at the minor's home, which is presumably their guardian's home. Is the state of Tennessee not allowed to address children by their name when informing a household that a minor is due for a vaccine?
> Postcards will still be sent to adults, but teens will be excluded from the mailing list so the postcards are not “potentially interpreted as solicitation to minors,” the report states.
I'm not sure about what the state of Tennessee is allowed to do but our pediatrician addresses reminders, calls, etc to the parents, not the children. Because again, kids can't consent but I can and do on their behalf.
The fact that they address it doesn't change the fact that it's a ridiculous distinction to make.
The idea that you can even "solicit" a child to receive vaccines (as if they're an addictive pharmaceutical rather than a baseline preventative measure in the developed world) is farcical. Making the state's medical infrastructure contort itself to avoid referring to children in the second person reeks of politics over public health.
In this case, I think it's used as in "advertising" or "pitching" versus "encouraging illegal behavior" so I think they're using it neutrally vs nefarious.
Which begs the question: if it's strictly neutral, why is it a problem to tell minors that they're due for a vaccine? They're still held to the same standard of consent as before, so why the extra indirection?
Even "advertising" and "pitching" are misleading framings. Vaccines are public health policy, notifying people of their eligibility falls squarely within the state's basic obligation to notify its citizens.
It's not "indirection" because most kids can't consent. The ones who can - according to the Mature Minor Doctrine - must also have evaluation+approval from a healthcare provider.
Adults can usually tell the difference between can, should, and must but many kids implicitly trust adults, especially those who seem important - see: Milgram experiment for an adult example - so an official postcard may be taken as a demand instead of an opportunity.
Similarly, the police shouldn't talk to your kids without your consent either. It protects everyone.
"Tennessee county health departments follow Tennessee law and provide medical
treatment and vaccinations to patients as young as 14 without parental consent if the individual provider determines that the patient meets the definition of a “mature minor” in accordance with Tennessee law."
and what normally constitutes a healthcare professional making that evaluation. If it normally takes that kid's family doctor/PA who has a long standing relationship, access to medical history, etc, then changing from that standard is challenging.
They did not end advertising to minors. They also ended using school facilities for vaccination events, and at least some kinds of advertising aimed at parents. This decision is crazy and unjustifiable.
> Minors can't legally give consent, therefore asking them to is likely illegal.
Minors can legally give consent to lots of things; the precise scope varies among jurisdictions. Notably, in Tennessee (see citation in toepfactory’s sibling comment), for most medical procedures including vaccinations, minors 14 and up presumptively have the capacity to consent and parental consent is not required.
> Like it or not, it sounds like sensible legal reasoning.
You’ve created a superficially attractive chain of reasoning beginning with false premises.
> If we follow that premise, then advertising or giving alcohol to minors should be illegal too.. and it is!
Alcohol and Tobacco etc are generally regulated substances.
They cannot be obtained even by Adults in all circumstances, for example legislation may prohibit the sale of alcohol at certain venues or require a license to do so. The premise on advertising has less to do with consent I would say, but rather the health and social implications of such substances.
While the issue at hand with the vaccines maybe one of consent, it is a different situation.
This also seems to step farther than this, in its intent to restrict the use of school property to host vaccination drives. This serves no public good as far as I can imagine, it has nothing to do with consent either.
While the concept of consent should be obtained by parents in many situations, the idea that this is solicitation is a long bow and goes in general against the public good.
I think using school property makes sense. After all, many schools have polling locations for elections. It's an easy, distributed place with highly predictable usage to host those sorts of things.
That said, vaccinations - like any prescription meds - are regulated far beyond alcohol and tobacco to the point where you need approval from specific people to buy them.
Making exceptions for parental consent is extremely risky now and into the future. While some make sense - like in an immediate emergency (ie. car accident, broken bones, etc) - this doesn't meet those criteria.
It’s amazing to see how vaccines have become a political football in the last 25 years. It makes me pretty cynical about the long-term prospects of humanity, that so much of the population is vulnerable to self-destructive memes like this. It’s like finding out that all your Bitcoin is on a fleet of unpatched Windows 98 machines that can’t be upgraded.
I think it's the new version of starting a war. Similarly, it's completely unconscionable that someone would start a war and send thousands or millions of their own people to kill other people and/or die for any reason other than to stop some massively worse event from happening, but our presidents do it constantly.
It was only 12 years before my birth that the US stopped forcing 18 year olds to join the military and fight overseas and we've started & joined in plenty of non-necessary wars since then.
Nothing is off limits when unlimited power & financial gain are at stake, I guess.
I spent a while considering whether to submit this and decided to submit because this seems civilizationally significant. Adjacent as this is to current politics (and therefore outrage/indignation), please: let's keep the discussion within the guidelines and befitting this community.
Anyone have a good theory here? Last I heard from Trump he was urging everyone to “take the great American vaccines” (that he, Trump, sped along, he said)
So this isn’t the Republican following the siren song of Trump. They seem to be doing their own thing. And in so doing, making their own job harder because they’ll see more infections.
What is this: a grassroots competition to pander to their base which has lumped vaccines in with other pandemic measured they like?
I have not delved into their narratives so I’m out of the loop and confused on what is driving things. It isn’t Trump that I can tell.
Trump has encouraged a general sentiment of opposition to experts, and he's been kind of lukewarm on promoting the vaccines compared to Democrat leaders.
Unfortunately, the GOP has increasingly embraced conspiratorial thinking, and that includes vaccine skepticism and hesitation.
> Trump has encouraged a general sentiment of opposition to experts
Trump knew since May 2020 that Fauci was lying - he had the DOE LLNL investigate the lab leak theory, and LLNL reported that COVID-19 was possibly from a lab. So yeah, he doesn't believe experts who can't stop lying.
Republicans/Trumpists believe in personal choice, so I wouldn't expect him to be a cheerleader for getting a shot.
> the GOP has increasingly embraced conspiratorial thinking,
After Fauci lying for over a year, 2 failed impeachments, being deplatformed on social media, being told they have no standing to dispute elections, being told CRT doesn't exist - half of the country knows what a Marxist conspiracy feels like first-hand, and they're pissed.
Most of the major stories about Trump since 2019 on CNN, MSNBC and WaPo have been retracted in 2021 (after the election). I suggest you stop reading those sources and spend a couple months reading Fox and NTD - I can't think of anything they're retracted.
Do a Youtube search for "cpac trump full speech 2021" - the only full version is on Sky Australia's channel - for now. All the copies on US channels have been blocked or prevented.
I am more and more disappointed in HN to constantly devolve into "blame GOP" for everything politics. Before elections, majority of media was singing the opposite tunes of what they are singing now. I will quote all left leaning media to make my point.
Here's CNN in March 2020:
> The timetable for a coronavirus vaccine is 18 months. Experts say that's risky: Eighteen months might sound like a long time, but in vaccine years, it's a blink. That's the long end of the Trump administration's time window for developing a coronavirus vaccine, and some leaders in the field say this is too fast -- and could come at the expense of safety.
> Fauci said it will take 12 to 18 months to get a coronavirus vaccine in the US. Experts say a quick approval could be risky. Some experts say reaching that target may be challenging, because vaccines require a lot of testing. One worry is "immune enhancement," normally spotted in animal testing, whereby a vaccine actually weakens a person's response to the virus. Even a year-and-a-half would be staggeringly fast for vaccine development, and some experts have voiced concerns that a vaccine produced on that timeline could hurtle too quickly through safety trials.
> Past vaccine disasters show why rushing a coronavirus vaccine now would be 'colossally stupid'. On April 12, 1955 the government announced the first vaccine to protect kids against polio. Within days, labs had made thousands of lots of the vaccine. Batches made by one company, Cutter Labs, accidentally contained live polio virus and it caused an outbreak. More than 200,000 children got the polio vaccine, but within days the government had to abandon the program. "Forty thousand kids got polio. Some had low levels, a couple hundred were left with paralysis, and about 10 died," said Dr. Howard Markel, a pediatrician, distinguished professor, and director of the Center for the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan. The government suspended the vaccination program until it could determine what went wrong.
> From 1955 to 1963, between 10% and 30% of polio vaccines were contaminated with simian virus 40 (SV40).
> "The way they would grow the virus was on monkey tissues. These rhesus macaques were imported from India, tens of thousands of them," medical anthropologist S. Lochlann Jain said. "They were gang caged and in those conditions, the ones that didn't die on the journey, many got sick, and the viruses spread quickly," added Jain, who taught a history of vaccines course at Stanford and is working on a publication about the incident. Scientists wrongly thought the formaldehyde they used would kill the virus. "It was being transferred to millions of Americans," Jain said. "Many believe this issue wasn't adequately pursued," Jain said. Some studies showed a possible link between the virus and cancer. The US Centers for Disease Control website, however, said most studies are "reassuring" and find no link.
> The government launched the program in about seven months and 40 million people got vaccinated against swine flu, according to the CDC. That vaccination campaign was later linked to cases of a neurological disorder called Guillain-Barre syndrome, which can develop after an infection or, rarely, after vaccination with a live vaccine. "Unfortunately, due to that vaccine, and the fact that it was done so hastily, there were a few hundred cases of Guillain-Barre, although it's not definitive that they were linked," Kinch said. The CDC said the increased risk was about 1 additional case of Gullain-Barre for every 100,000 people who got the swine flu vacc...
Give me a break. These articles have journalists quoting medical experts speculating on possible and past documented problems resulting from a rushed vaccine process, and the (then factually unjustified) lab leak theory that experts in field also declined to give airtime to because there was no evidence to support it.
It's in no way equivalent or even comparable to what GOP leaders around the country are doing right now. 99 percent of people dying of COVID right now are unvaccinated and for huge numbers of those people it was a choice. That's blood on the anti-vax crowd's hands plain and simple.
It's interesting that even six months since he left office you're still searching for reasons to blame him. But to answer your question - some people are distrustful of the government. I think even the most tankie pro-government-interverntionalists will recognize the United States Federal Government does not have a clean slate record. These distrusting people tend to vote towards the party or group that markets itself as small government (regardless of actual voting history or policy). If you want to tie that to President Trump, he did run on "draining the swamp" of the corrupt people in said government.
Realistically, though, it has little to do with him. He was a symptom, not a cause.
No, I was trying to prevent poor quality replies that blamed him. Because most people’s first instinct for a lot of general pandemic countermeasures skepticism is to think “trump”. I actually think Trump’s vaccine procurement was one of the best things his administration did.
As for your theory, is isn’t that convincing. Lots of government skeptic states had vaccination programs. Only now that that has become political are they cutting them.
I’m wondering how it came to be so political and more specifically how the politicians purposefully make their own lives harder.
Something like business lockdowns or a mask mandate at the least have costs: you get pandemic control but restrict people.
However, bringing vaccines to people who want them is basically a free lunch for a govt: you save much more than you spend and coerce no one. So what are the incentives driving this?
I think it's more useful to look at propaganda channels that have wide reach, rather than Trump. For example, Tucker Carlson is doing full-on death cult antivax.
I wish I knew, and that would shed much light on the disinformation landscape if it were known. He's almost certainly vaccinated himself (he refuses to say, and Rupert Murdoch is), so it's unlikely he believes his own bullshit.
The big propaganda channels are google, facebook, reddit, twitter, apple. They severely limited free speech and only promoted the official narrative. By making it harder to find legitimate opposition sources, people have turned to less legitimate ones.
Tucker Carlson is just riding the wave and tell his viewers what they want to hear. Many conservatives abandoned him after his refusal to to publish the Hunter Biden Laptop information.
People don't like the government telling them how to live their lives. They especially don't like the government telling them how to parent. And they extra especially don't like the government going behind their backs and telling their kids that their parents don't know how to parent.
The wording is "stop vaccine outreach to kids" not "stop vaccine outreach to parents"
One theory is that Trump feels like he didn't get enough credit for the vaccines so he and the GOP politicians and media are trying to discredit them entirely. It's not clear that he's directing this but check out any republican news station or politician talking about vaccines in the last month, it's unreal. Republican & far right influencers, some of the widest reaching influencers in any category, are publicly pushing back on vaccines daily now.
Another theory is that vaccines are an increasingly easy topic for victim complex radicalization. People like to think they are smarter than their doctor, there was already a growing grift industry pushing vaccine skepticism, plus it's new. There's probably no easier way to radicalize someone already in your base than to say, "Hey you know how you already didn't trust that new guy in office (and I've been saying he didn't really win for months)? Now he is forcing you get a shot you don't need!"
It's pretty wild to think that there are people today actively encouraging people not to vaccinate against this thing but then again there have been people pushing against basically every vaccine for many years. All of them selling something: books, event tickets, snake oil type "health" products or just pulling in YouTube ad revenue.
Some people will do literally anything to get what they want in life, I guess it's really not different from a president starting a war for personal or shallow political reasons or a destructive industry leader burying a damning report but it's still super surprising to see it in real time as opposed to decades after the fact.
> Anyone have a good theory here? Last I heard from Trump he was urging everyone to “take the great American vaccines” (that he, Trump, sped along, he said).
Over on Gab, TheDonald, and similar places I've seen people reconcile that with their anti-vaccination beliefs in a couple ways:
1. It's part of his long term 4D chess plan to eliminate the Libs and to MAGA. Libs will respond to pro vaccination messages, get the 5G microchip DNA rewriting population control injection being pushed under the guise of a COVID vaccine, and there will be no more Libs next generation. Patriots are smart enough to recognize this for a fake out to eliminate the Libs and avoid the vaccine, or
She said she wouldn’t take any vaccine Trump promoted if independent scientists didn’t also promote it. Her reasoning being Trump had lied so much about COVID at that point, there was no reason to trust anything he said.
In fact she did take one of the vaccines Trump promoted, and she did so publicly, because they were independently verified to work. Interestingly Trump got his shot in private and never revealed that fact.
Someone thought this memo, which was a technical legal document distributed to medical providers, was undermining parents choice. A lot of Tennessians agreed, called their state senators, etc, and now this happens.
The argument that it undermines parental authority is stupid, and I won't talk about that. What's more interesting is that this is a very clear cut case of the real-world harm social media can do.
The tide of outrage and ignorance can be powerful and is unchecked by its own absurdity. The emotional appeal to Trumpians who already feel victimized, bitter, and antagonistic to government, especially WRT healthcare, is unmistakable. It doesn't matter if it makes sense logically, or is inconsistent with Trumps own statements. The outrage is the point. The people in power who encourage ride these tidal waves of dangerous ignorance endanger us all in a very real way. Since all forms of self-restraint are now passe, apparently, it's time to consider options for restraining them.
What facilitates this is combination of ideology, vested-interests and rumor-spreading/news-crafting. The satanic child abuse scare of the 90s is an example of this sort of thing, as were most of the actual lynching that occurred in the first of half of 20th century.
I'm curious, do you still not believe that vaccine injury is real? The FDA and CDC have now repeatedly acknowledged it's existence with the COVID-19 vaccines.
If you do believe that it's real with respect to the COVID-19 vaccines, what is your reasoning for advocating for "restraining" people who are concerned about this issue?
Driving is dangerous but we still teach teenagers to drive. We weigh the risks and the benefits and, despite the risks, do it anyway.
It is a degenerate form of the straw-man fallacy to bring up only the risks. Additionally, this kerfuffle is predicated on the totally false assertion that the state is taking parents out of the decision-making loop.
There is NO substance here. NOTHING.
There. You made me talk about the stupid thing. I hope you're happy.
There is a daily, constant conversation about the benefits of vaccines. I don't need to bring that up. It is implied.
There are people whose lives have been destroyed by vaccines. That isn't nothing. It seems they are just too much of a minority for you to care. Or you don't believe they exist. And that's why I asked you that question, because we can't have a conversation without understanding where each of us is coming from.
If you don't want to talk then don't talk. But don't attack and insult me. I'm not making you do anything.
There are 500k+ Americans dead. Even if the vaccine killed 50K people it would be worth it. I will insult you and your ilk because it is under the guise of respectable reasonable discussion that you do your damage. I'm done pretending you don't have blood on your hands, and that I don't hate you for it.
I was nearly killed by a series of vaccine injuries. It was excruciating and slow. I'm alive today because I'm a biochemist and was able to pursue experimental treatment.
I'm going to do what I need to survive. I will not be a sacrifice for your fake greater good.
There are several practical options for defending against respiratory infections. There are no practical options for defending against serious vaccine injury. We either cure ourselves or our lives are destroyed. We do not get any healthcare.
So you won the shit lottery, and now you want people to stop playing, to protect them, is that it? So if you get MRSA in a hospital are you going to tell people to stop going to the hospital? And if someone called you an asshole for doing that, would you also claim that they are treating you as a "sacrifice for a fake greater good?"
You are blinded by rage, self-pity, and a false sense that you are protecting others. Because you won the shit lottery, you think its more likely than it is, and it colors your perspective on vaccination. You have a better justification for your cognitive bias than most anti-vaxxers, but you're still just as wrong, dishonest, and deadly. Signing off.
I'm not telling anyone to do anything. If people want to get vaccinated that's fine by me.
I do not believe that I'm "protecting" people, and I certainly would not waste my time trying to protect able-bodied people who are fully capable of protecting themselves.
But I do work hard to help disabled people when they ask for help, particularly those with similar experiences to myself.
To be clear, I think vaccines do far more harm than good. I agree that serious, acute vaccine injury is very rare, but I would argue that a slow, debilitating degradation of health from vaccines is very very common. There is a rapidly growing body of research and real-world data indicating that vaccines significantly reduce our immune systems ability to defend against evolving viral threats. Short term, some vaccines appear to be a good idea, but long-term they may be a net-negative.
I miss the good old days when conservatives would argue "Stop painting conservatives as anti-science! Don't you see how many anti-vaxxers are coastal liberals?"
Anyone else feel like this is quite the devils choice they faced: either they kept recommending vaccinations based on the strong data that it is best for nearly everyone’s health[no citation needed] against fears that this will undermine trust in the agency due to ignoring political pressure, or stop recommending it based on pressure from the public, and thus proving they aren’t trustworthy to make public health recommendations based on scientific data and study.
I feel kinda bad for the whole situation this year. It is just so disheartening both ways.
Honestly, this is a great natural experiment you can't run otherwise ethically. A populace have chosen this for themselves. That has so many advantages. What if MMR-2 and friends actually do ruin shit. My prior on this is low, but also I am willing to observe others sacrifice their kids to this to protect against the long tail event.
I'm pretty pro-vax but I'm also very pro-freedom, and I am particularly pro the freedom for other people to put themselves in risky situations when I can extract knowledge from it.
I think Tennesseans overall will probably react to requests to go pro-vax by doubling down, so it's probably best to do that. Makes the experiment stronger. And creates a viable population in case we all drop dead ten years from now, or it turns out vaccines reduce sperm count or some random shit like that.
To put it simply: "Some of you may die, but that's a sacrifice I am willing to make".
This is a very utilitarian, but very good, point. My parents chose not to vaccinate me, I had most of the childhood diseases, and life went on. I would be happy to answer some surveys about my general health for the purpose of actually comparing vaccinated versus unvaccinated people.
Healthcare has also advanced vastly since vaccines were introduced, so even if someone gets a severe case of measles, they're still likely to survive. The same principle applies to STDs like Syphilis. It used to be a death sentence, now it's annoying.
Except coronavirus aint polio for kids, you are comparing apples and oranges, coronavirus affects old and obese and we know this already for year, yet pharmalobby and politicians keep pushing vaccines to healthy people especially children at basically zero risk.
166 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 221 ms ] threadHow can I ask people who work for me to live here?
Alternately, ensure they have sufficient pay and benefits to ignore the GOP restrictions and then hope they help vote them out.
I dunno what to tell you. After touring almost all of our great states, the only constant seems to be that you get what your neighbors vote for.
And then there are people who are politically diametric to you who are also great employees; these you probably don’t need to sell the idea of residency as much.
Between these two groups, there are enough such people to sustain job markets in every state.
EDIT: fellow Albertans feel free to email me on my profile (lots of us here!)
https://338canada.com/alberta/polls.htm
I've got a kid, though, so I'm currently trying to assess where we can afford to move that inspires confidence that we can really build something there. If we have to go, I don't wanna move again before she goes to college in a decade.
Whether this will be comfortable for you or not I can’t say. But I can tell you that it’s worth checking out.
As I consider if climate extremes are likely to keep getting worse, upstate New York or Vermont are seeming more and more viable to me.
New Hampshire's state motto is "live free or die." If you die in New Hampshire, it's probably because someone else was living free.
I can go buy magic mushrooms here, but in so-called Freedomland you can't even eat what you want. Whacky.
I moved to Texas for a short while and hoo boy, Austin is nice, but the peeps in Texas really love to tell the government to tread on them. You can't even get weed brownies here. Talk about big government.
I remember how some of my family in southern California was so upset that prop 8 (banning gay marriage) was overturned by the supreme court, and I'm honestly impressed by the level of cognitive dissonance they could hold in their head: simultaneously talking about "muH FrE3DomS" yet wanting to curtail the same freedoms to other people that, in those people exercising those freedoms, have zero impact on their lives. When I pointed it out to them, they basically sputtered something incoherent about "well I'll have to explain to cousin Timmy why those MEN are holding hands in Safeway!". idk maybe suck less as a parent?!
Says who? The median American lives 18 miles away from their mom.
https://depts.washington.edu/moving1/
I also live in Tennessee but have been a remote worker for a decade. I deeply disagree with the politics of this place but you know, family's here.
I think they just think they are right, regardless of if their claims are backed by evidence or care / concern for secondary consequences like you are describing.
Flip the seats. If only it were so simple.
P.S. Check out how cringe the Tennessee "quality of life" page reads. Three clicks off of the homepage of TN.gov.
TLDR: Tennessee, "we keep it cheap"
https://tnecd.com/advantages/quality-of-life/
In the end, the best thing we can do is to insulate ourselves and our loved ones from government intervention, focus on local politics, and take control of our own consumption i.e. we can't rely on the government to do what's best for our children.
We should use these high paying remote jobs to buy nice homes with lots of space and access to good schools and healthcare. The rest of it will sort of work itself out.
And if we're being honest, climate change will get us before the government here can /shrug
The future is FEMA
We feel that way too! So why don't you leave us alone? (If you hadn't noticed its not 1992 and nobody is trying to teach your kids abstinence-only education anymore.)
You made a similar bad-faith false-equalivance elsewhere in this thread.
> > If we allow you adult choices, and you make choices that harm others
> So we can go back to banning adultery and divorce?
Forgive my language, but what utter crap. It's a vaccine against a deadly and contagious virus. You want to be left alone to drink your flavor aid? Be my guest. But you don't get to dump cyanide in the well and claim it's your right to do so.
What’s up with people throwing “bad faith” around lately? Did some sort of memo go around?
> Forgive my language, but what utter crap. It's a vaccine against a deadly and contagious virus.
I’m not talking about vaccines. The person I was responding to made a more general point about rural areas versus urban areas and localism. I was agreeing with him.
In fact there are still places teaching abstinence-only education and I'm pretty sure that trying to keep the existence of LGBTQ people from being mentioned is not a huge step forward.
Sorry, I don’t understand. Who is “we” and “you” in this scenario and what are “we” doing to bother “you”?
Not in Hawaii. We have a weird blend of Democrat in name and somewhat Conservative and Liberal function almost everywhere in the state.
I chuckle whenever any one claims Democrats are liberals. They clearly haven't been to our meetings.
The only thing Democrats agree on is opposing Republicans. And even that isn't a hard rule.
After that, policy wise, we fight about everything. No issue, or point of fact, too small to start a blood feud over.
> How can I ask people who work for me to live here?
Frankly, there is already enough demand and highly qualified people moving here.
P.S. I'm really into music and Nashville's music scene is very appealing, despite the state politics. So I'm definitely conflicted.
Are you kidding me?
How can you ask other people to fund this outreach for the benfit of your and your employees?
You are responsible for your being informed. Nobody prevents you or your family or workers from being vaccinated.
What has this world come to...
The other is that when you push too hard, you get pushback, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar, etc. We are seeing this in other areas too, where pushing too hard on a liberal democratic (for lack of a better term) agenda leads to populist revolt, and effectively swings the pendulum way back past where most agree it reasonably should be. Until recently, it would only have been an extreme fringe group that was against long standing childhood vaccines. But it's not a surprise that when you start pushing people to do something, they start to become more wary and reject things that they previously would have accepted at face value. There is a pathway to authoritarianism where resistant is met by more and harsher rules, and one to a more enlightened society where people are treated like adults and mostly make the right choice.
What type of "outreach" programs can be described as being closer to "vinegar" than "honey"?
They shared a memo stating that they could vaccinate minors without parental consent.
We tried that. It was not very effective in the most recent experiment [1]. Nor those before [2] [3]. If we allow you adult choices, and you make choices that harm others (not getting vaccinated for whatever illegitimate reason is put forth), you end up having to be coaxed with policy (mandatory vaccinations by schools and employers) because you are not an adult capable of making adult decisions (you don't qualify for welfare in Australia if you don't get your kids vaccinated, for example [4]).
Harm yourself, by all means, that is your choice to make. Harming others (those who cannot get the vaccine for legitimate reasons) because of your ignorance infringes on their rights, and should under no circumstances be tolerated.
[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/why-the-delta-variant-is... (PBS: Why the delta variant is causing an explosion of cases among the unvaccinated)
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6657116/ (Anti-Vaccine Decision-Making and Measles Resurgence in the United States)
[3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29773050/ (The Importance of Complying with Vaccination Protocols in Developed Countries: "Anti-Vax" Hysteria and the Spread of Severe Preventable Diseases)
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Jab,_No_Pay (The policies grew out of a grassroots campaign championed by News Limited, in 2013. It was boosted by parent activists representing children who had died of preventable disease, notably the families of Riley Hughes and Dana McCaffery, infants who died of pertussis, leading to a backlash of harassment and trolling from anti-vaccination activists. No Jab No Pay was introduced in 2015, and expanded in July 2018. By July 2016, 148,000 children who had not previously been fully immunised, were meeting the new requirements.)
(my note: get your vaccine already if you haven't)
So we can go back to banning adultery and divorce?
But I don't think there is any rock solid evidence divorce causes that much harm (over living in a house hold with two people that hate each other enough to get divorced).
But in terms of just bread and butter issues, divorce is much harder on the kid. It really messes up family finances unless the parents are really well off. There’s a lot of disruption of home life if there is joint custody, and the documented effects of fathers not being present if there isn’t joint custody. If there are boyfriends or girlfriends that come in and out that can be a source of a lot of problems as well.
"We tried letting people choose but those rascals didn't choose what we wanted! So instead now we will just force them into making the better choice"
You sort of wonder why at that point a choice was ever provided.
Drug companies have big pockets, but the US Government has even bigger pockets. I care more about being able to seek redress than who it's coming from.
edit: It doesn't matter if the vaccine manufacturers lowered their standards. It is the perception that they may have.
The thing people often forget about those US Government deep pockets is that they're the pockets of the US taxpayer being badly mis-managed by politicians with zero math skills.
Same thing when the vaccines get full FDA approval.
Narcissistic [1] tendencies when faced with challenges of fragile egos which shakes their self.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disor...
I feel like this comment and the one it's replying to perfectly articulates the real problem. Vaccination has gotten pulled into the web of politically charged topics. Even just a few years ago the anti vac sentiments didn't really have a home, but now we quickly default to litigating literally the culture war. I know you're replying to someone who brought the wider issues into it, but narcissism is definitely not at the root of a desire to have more people vaccinated.
Correct, and I didn't think that's what my comment implied. I argue it's the root cause of why people won't get vaccinated, and why they push back, on taxes, vaccines, cancel culture, seat belt laws, and gun buying restrictions as enumerated by GP. Fragile egos, a grandiose sense of self-importance, believing they are special, and a lack of empathy, high level. There's a reason I linked to the Signs and Symptoms of that wikipedia page.
Mask requirements in a pandemic? = attack on personal freedom/liberty
Taxes? = not a problem… trump took care of that.
Cancel culture? = stupid lib tears.
Seat belt laws? = attack on personal freedom/liberty… same as helmet laws for motorcyclists.
Gun buying restrictions? = attack on personal freedom/liberty
Brown neighbors? (actually not a big problem in the south since most neighborhoods are “voluntarily” segregated, but…) = the community will go to hell and property values will decrease.
Something about this post bothers me. It starts off making an attempt to understand the other side but then the tone shifts and non-sequiturs enter. And I think it’s the “I’m not sure I follow”, said like it’s some punchline that seals the deal.
Do we want to explore the situation or do we want upvotes for taking cheap shots at a straw man?
If you don't believe me, you can find videos of these trump idiots screeching in some town hall about "over regulation" and "tyranny" and "socialism!" but they then say "and keep your hands off my medicare and social security!".
Not really true...
https://xkcd.com/357/
If we follow that premise, then advertising or giving alcohol to minors should be illegal too.. and it is!
Like it or not, it sounds like sensible legal reasoning.
There's an overwhelmingly large body of law dedicated to this.
The article mentions receiving postcards and other information at the minor's home, which is presumably their guardian's home. Is the state of Tennessee not allowed to address children by their name when informing a household that a minor is due for a vaccine?
> Postcards will still be sent to adults, but teens will be excluded from the mailing list so the postcards are not “potentially interpreted as solicitation to minors,” the report states.
I'm not sure about what the state of Tennessee is allowed to do but our pediatrician addresses reminders, calls, etc to the parents, not the children. Because again, kids can't consent but I can and do on their behalf.
The idea that you can even "solicit" a child to receive vaccines (as if they're an addictive pharmaceutical rather than a baseline preventative measure in the developed world) is farcical. Making the state's medical infrastructure contort itself to avoid referring to children in the second person reeks of politics over public health.
In this case, I think it's used as in "advertising" or "pitching" versus "encouraging illegal behavior" so I think they're using it neutrally vs nefarious.
Even "advertising" and "pitching" are misleading framings. Vaccines are public health policy, notifying people of their eligibility falls squarely within the state's basic obligation to notify its citizens.
Adults can usually tell the difference between can, should, and must but many kids implicitly trust adults, especially those who seem important - see: Milgram experiment for an adult example - so an official postcard may be taken as a demand instead of an opportunity.
Similarly, the police shouldn't talk to your kids without your consent either. It protects everyone.
[1]https://www.tn.gov/content/dam/tn/health/documents/Mature_Mi...
https://www.tn.gov/content/dam/tn/health/documents/Mature_Mi...
Then it would seem to come down to this section:
"Tennessee county health departments follow Tennessee law and provide medical treatment and vaccinations to patients as young as 14 without parental consent if the individual provider determines that the patient meets the definition of a “mature minor” in accordance with Tennessee law."
and what normally constitutes a healthcare professional making that evaluation. If it normally takes that kid's family doctor/PA who has a long standing relationship, access to medical history, etc, then changing from that standard is challenging.
Stepping outside of precedents is hard and risky.
whether a 14 year old is actually able to make that decision is another discussion,
but the issue isn't about government forcing their will, but allowing minors to decide on their own.
Minors can legally give consent to lots of things; the precise scope varies among jurisdictions. Notably, in Tennessee (see citation in toepfactory’s sibling comment), for most medical procedures including vaccinations, minors 14 and up presumptively have the capacity to consent and parental consent is not required.
> Like it or not, it sounds like sensible legal reasoning.
You’ve created a superficially attractive chain of reasoning beginning with false premises.
Alcohol and Tobacco etc are generally regulated substances.
They cannot be obtained even by Adults in all circumstances, for example legislation may prohibit the sale of alcohol at certain venues or require a license to do so. The premise on advertising has less to do with consent I would say, but rather the health and social implications of such substances.
While the issue at hand with the vaccines maybe one of consent, it is a different situation.
This also seems to step farther than this, in its intent to restrict the use of school property to host vaccination drives. This serves no public good as far as I can imagine, it has nothing to do with consent either.
While the concept of consent should be obtained by parents in many situations, the idea that this is solicitation is a long bow and goes in general against the public good.
That said, vaccinations - like any prescription meds - are regulated far beyond alcohol and tobacco to the point where you need approval from specific people to buy them.
Making exceptions for parental consent is extremely risky now and into the future. While some make sense - like in an immediate emergency (ie. car accident, broken bones, etc) - this doesn't meet those criteria.
It was only 12 years before my birth that the US stopped forcing 18 year olds to join the military and fight overseas and we've started & joined in plenty of non-necessary wars since then.
Nothing is off limits when unlimited power & financial gain are at stake, I guess.
So this isn’t the Republican following the siren song of Trump. They seem to be doing their own thing. And in so doing, making their own job harder because they’ll see more infections.
What is this: a grassroots competition to pander to their base which has lumped vaccines in with other pandemic measured they like?
I have not delved into their narratives so I’m out of the loop and confused on what is driving things. It isn’t Trump that I can tell.
Unfortunately, the GOP has increasingly embraced conspiratorial thinking, and that includes vaccine skepticism and hesitation.
Trump knew since May 2020 that Fauci was lying - he had the DOE LLNL investigate the lab leak theory, and LLNL reported that COVID-19 was possibly from a lab. So yeah, he doesn't believe experts who can't stop lying.
https://wjla.com/news/nation-world/exclusive-classified-stud...
> he's been kind of lukewarm on promoting the vaccines compared to Democrat leaders
Trump's Warpspeed (Spring 2020) funded the vaccines. I haven't heard him say any negative things about them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed
Republicans/Trumpists believe in personal choice, so I wouldn't expect him to be a cheerleader for getting a shot.
> the GOP has increasingly embraced conspiratorial thinking,
After Fauci lying for over a year, 2 failed impeachments, being deplatformed on social media, being told they have no standing to dispute elections, being told CRT doesn't exist - half of the country knows what a Marxist conspiracy feels like first-hand, and they're pissed.
Most of the major stories about Trump since 2019 on CNN, MSNBC and WaPo have been retracted in 2021 (after the election). I suggest you stop reading those sources and spend a couple months reading Fox and NTD - I can't think of anything they're retracted.
Do a Youtube search for "cpac trump full speech 2021" - the only full version is on Sky Australia's channel - for now. All the copies on US channels have been blocked or prevented.
Don't fall into the nuclear family 'parent trap': What kids need most is love
https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/14/health/kids-parents-love-well...
Here's CNN in March 2020:
> The timetable for a coronavirus vaccine is 18 months. Experts say that's risky: Eighteen months might sound like a long time, but in vaccine years, it's a blink. That's the long end of the Trump administration's time window for developing a coronavirus vaccine, and some leaders in the field say this is too fast -- and could come at the expense of safety.
https://archive.is/TJhly
Here's Business Insider in Apr 1, 2020:
> Fauci said it will take 12 to 18 months to get a coronavirus vaccine in the US. Experts say a quick approval could be risky. Some experts say reaching that target may be challenging, because vaccines require a lot of testing. One worry is "immune enhancement," normally spotted in animal testing, whereby a vaccine actually weakens a person's response to the virus. Even a year-and-a-half would be staggeringly fast for vaccine development, and some experts have voiced concerns that a vaccine produced on that timeline could hurtle too quickly through safety trials.
https://archive.is/hPiFW
Here's CNN in September 2020:
> Past vaccine disasters show why rushing a coronavirus vaccine now would be 'colossally stupid'. On April 12, 1955 the government announced the first vaccine to protect kids against polio. Within days, labs had made thousands of lots of the vaccine. Batches made by one company, Cutter Labs, accidentally contained live polio virus and it caused an outbreak. More than 200,000 children got the polio vaccine, but within days the government had to abandon the program. "Forty thousand kids got polio. Some had low levels, a couple hundred were left with paralysis, and about 10 died," said Dr. Howard Markel, a pediatrician, distinguished professor, and director of the Center for the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan. The government suspended the vaccination program until it could determine what went wrong.
> From 1955 to 1963, between 10% and 30% of polio vaccines were contaminated with simian virus 40 (SV40).
> "The way they would grow the virus was on monkey tissues. These rhesus macaques were imported from India, tens of thousands of them," medical anthropologist S. Lochlann Jain said. "They were gang caged and in those conditions, the ones that didn't die on the journey, many got sick, and the viruses spread quickly," added Jain, who taught a history of vaccines course at Stanford and is working on a publication about the incident. Scientists wrongly thought the formaldehyde they used would kill the virus. "It was being transferred to millions of Americans," Jain said. "Many believe this issue wasn't adequately pursued," Jain said. Some studies showed a possible link between the virus and cancer. The US Centers for Disease Control website, however, said most studies are "reassuring" and find no link.
> The government launched the program in about seven months and 40 million people got vaccinated against swine flu, according to the CDC. That vaccination campaign was later linked to cases of a neurological disorder called Guillain-Barre syndrome, which can develop after an infection or, rarely, after vaccination with a live vaccine. "Unfortunately, due to that vaccine, and the fact that it was done so hastily, there were a few hundred cases of Guillain-Barre, although it's not definitive that they were linked," Kinch said. The CDC said the increased risk was about 1 additional case of Gullain-Barre for every 100,000 people who got the swine flu vacc...
It's in no way equivalent or even comparable to what GOP leaders around the country are doing right now. 99 percent of people dying of COVID right now are unvaccinated and for huge numbers of those people it was a choice. That's blood on the anti-vax crowd's hands plain and simple.
Realistically, though, it has little to do with him. He was a symptom, not a cause.
As for your theory, is isn’t that convincing. Lots of government skeptic states had vaccination programs. Only now that that has become political are they cutting them.
I’m wondering how it came to be so political and more specifically how the politicians purposefully make their own lives harder.
Something like business lockdowns or a mask mandate at the least have costs: you get pandemic control but restrict people.
However, bringing vaccines to people who want them is basically a free lunch for a govt: you save much more than you spend and coerce no one. So what are the incentives driving this?
>you [...] coerce no one.
I disagree with that point. Where I live, there has been a very strong coercion angle. It's very obviously government sponsored.
What’s driving Carlson’s incentives?
Tucker Carlson is just riding the wave and tell his viewers what they want to hear. Many conservatives abandoned him after his refusal to to publish the Hunter Biden Laptop information.
The wording is "stop vaccine outreach to kids" not "stop vaccine outreach to parents"
This really doesn't seem that surprising to me.
Another theory is that vaccines are an increasingly easy topic for victim complex radicalization. People like to think they are smarter than their doctor, there was already a growing grift industry pushing vaccine skepticism, plus it's new. There's probably no easier way to radicalize someone already in your base than to say, "Hey you know how you already didn't trust that new guy in office (and I've been saying he didn't really win for months)? Now he is forcing you get a shot you don't need!"
It's pretty wild to think that there are people today actively encouraging people not to vaccinate against this thing but then again there have been people pushing against basically every vaccine for many years. All of them selling something: books, event tickets, snake oil type "health" products or just pulling in YouTube ad revenue.
Some people will do literally anything to get what they want in life, I guess it's really not different from a president starting a war for personal or shallow political reasons or a destructive industry leader burying a damning report but it's still super surprising to see it in real time as opposed to decades after the fact.
Over on Gab, TheDonald, and similar places I've seen people reconcile that with their anti-vaccination beliefs in a couple ways:
1. It's part of his long term 4D chess plan to eliminate the Libs and to MAGA. Libs will respond to pro vaccination messages, get the 5G microchip DNA rewriting population control injection being pushed under the guise of a COVID vaccine, and there will be no more Libs next generation. Patriots are smart enough to recognize this for a fake out to eliminate the Libs and avoid the vaccine, or
2. The Jews got to him.
In fact she did take one of the vaccines Trump promoted, and she did so publicly, because they were independently verified to work. Interestingly Trump got his shot in private and never revealed that fact.
"Cigarette smoking is responsible for more than 480,000 deaths annually."
"Unhealthy diet contributes to approximately 678,000 deaths each year in the U.S."
But forget all that. The real issue is Covid.
Someone thought this memo, which was a technical legal document distributed to medical providers, was undermining parents choice. A lot of Tennessians agreed, called their state senators, etc, and now this happens.
The argument that it undermines parental authority is stupid, and I won't talk about that. What's more interesting is that this is a very clear cut case of the real-world harm social media can do.
The tide of outrage and ignorance can be powerful and is unchecked by its own absurdity. The emotional appeal to Trumpians who already feel victimized, bitter, and antagonistic to government, especially WRT healthcare, is unmistakable. It doesn't matter if it makes sense logically, or is inconsistent with Trumps own statements. The outrage is the point. The people in power who encourage ride these tidal waves of dangerous ignorance endanger us all in a very real way. Since all forms of self-restraint are now passe, apparently, it's time to consider options for restraining them.
(Something along those lines)
If you do believe that it's real with respect to the COVID-19 vaccines, what is your reasoning for advocating for "restraining" people who are concerned about this issue?
It is a degenerate form of the straw-man fallacy to bring up only the risks. Additionally, this kerfuffle is predicated on the totally false assertion that the state is taking parents out of the decision-making loop.
There is NO substance here. NOTHING.
There. You made me talk about the stupid thing. I hope you're happy.
There are people whose lives have been destroyed by vaccines. That isn't nothing. It seems they are just too much of a minority for you to care. Or you don't believe they exist. And that's why I asked you that question, because we can't have a conversation without understanding where each of us is coming from.
If you don't want to talk then don't talk. But don't attack and insult me. I'm not making you do anything.
I'm going to do what I need to survive. I will not be a sacrifice for your fake greater good.
There are several practical options for defending against respiratory infections. There are no practical options for defending against serious vaccine injury. We either cure ourselves or our lives are destroyed. We do not get any healthcare.
You are blinded by rage, self-pity, and a false sense that you are protecting others. Because you won the shit lottery, you think its more likely than it is, and it colors your perspective on vaccination. You have a better justification for your cognitive bias than most anti-vaxxers, but you're still just as wrong, dishonest, and deadly. Signing off.
I do not believe that I'm "protecting" people, and I certainly would not waste my time trying to protect able-bodied people who are fully capable of protecting themselves.
But I do work hard to help disabled people when they ask for help, particularly those with similar experiences to myself.
To be clear, I think vaccines do far more harm than good. I agree that serious, acute vaccine injury is very rare, but I would argue that a slow, debilitating degradation of health from vaccines is very very common. There is a rapidly growing body of research and real-world data indicating that vaccines significantly reduce our immune systems ability to defend against evolving viral threats. Short term, some vaccines appear to be a good idea, but long-term they may be a net-negative.
I feel kinda bad for the whole situation this year. It is just so disheartening both ways.
I'm pretty pro-vax but I'm also very pro-freedom, and I am particularly pro the freedom for other people to put themselves in risky situations when I can extract knowledge from it.
I think Tennesseans overall will probably react to requests to go pro-vax by doubling down, so it's probably best to do that. Makes the experiment stronger. And creates a viable population in case we all drop dead ten years from now, or it turns out vaccines reduce sperm count or some random shit like that.
To put it simply: "Some of you may die, but that's a sacrifice I am willing to make".
Life didn't go on for many children in the control groups unfortunately.
It seems they came very close to completely eradicating it from the world. But it seems crazy religious people prevented it.
Reading something like this is just very sad. When one of the kids catches Polio, they will soon realize the importance of vaccination.