Interesting but I wish they'd included some questions that get to the root of the questions I have about why so many people don't want the vaccine. Things like
Did you hear about the suspension of the J&J vaccine?
Did you hear that the suspension of the J&J vaccine had been lifted?
If the FDA were to grant regular authorization for use of a Covid vaccine how likely would you be to take it?
Thanks for sharing. One thing caught my eye in that report. It says that 57% of Black and 61% of Hispanic respondents claim to have been fully vaccinated. The totals across 40 states in the US are 36% and 41% respectively [1]:
> Less than half of Black and Hispanic people have received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose in nearly all states reporting data, including a number of states where less than a third have received a vaccine
I'm aware that polls have a skew, but I can't figure out how those numbers are so different, especially since the latter numbers are about people who have received at least one dose, not the full dose.
These are two different things. The fact that Black and Hispanic Americans are not getting the vaccine is more due to access than it is to vaccine rejection. See https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-biggest-barri... for a more detailed discussion.
Also observe in Figure 4 of https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/latest-... that while the percentage of whites that have gotten vaccinated his higher than Black and Hispanic groups, the slope of the curve is higher in the latter cases - if trends continue, the lines will cross, just as Canada has exceeded the US vaccination rate, and possibly for similar reasons.
I don't see how that could be true. The Wal-Marts here offer free vaccines for anyone. We seem to be past the point where availability should be a significant hindrance.
What happens when you get the usual reactions to the second shot (knocked low for a couple days) and you lose your job because you can't come in?
EDIT: I'm eating the downvotes on this one, but it's an actual excuse I've seen reported in the wild. Even if they don't lose their job, many people are living very close to the edge and the loss of a couple days salary is a big deal.
I personally was unable to really work for a day and a half, and couldn't have driven myself there (or back) anyway. I'm very lucky in that I work from home and have plenty of paid sick leave, but that's not a situation experienced by lots of people.
There's a difference between Wal-Mart offering free vaccination in fact and members of minorities being informed and believing that is in fact free. The US healthcare system does, sadly, have a bit of a reputation for surprise fees.
It’s free, so there’s no cost barrier. It’s available at every major drug store in America, so it’s not an access problem. Significant money is being spent to reach these communities. Oh and if that’s not enough liberals control congress and the White House.
Where exactly do you see this access problem for black and Hispanic Americans?
I added a link to a Scientific American article as an edit. But it's not primarily the cost of the vaccine itself, it's much more the ability to get time off work, and also the ability to take a sick day to deal with vaccine effects. Most essential workers don't have the same flexibility that us desk workers have on that front.
Walgreens is open till midnight, CVS is open 24 hours in a lot of places. Major cities are also rolling out mobile vaccination units. If essential worker wants to get the vaccine, there’s very little stopping them, it’s easier to get the vaccine that needs to go to the DMV.
One would assume it was the things listed in the article they linked?
Which, it's from March, so a lot of the issues they cited were from early on in the rollout where supply was low, demand was high, and a lot of governments were still getting the kinks worked out. That said, some of the effects cited in the article may still apply. For example,
> Another barrier to getting vaccinated is difficulty in registering for appointments online. Applicants often have to navigate labyrinthine portal systems and fill out multiple pages of documentation before appointments fill up, so it becomes a race for who can load and complete the forms the fastest.
> Getting to vaccination sites can also be a challenge. They are not always near public transit, and not everyone has access to a car.
As someone who spent many years living without a car in the USA, I can personally attest that, "available at every major drug store in America," does not mean the same thing as, "readily accessible." Suburban sprawl doesn't care who won the last election.
Respectfully I remain unconvinced of your argument. There’s enough in the media about the vaccine, and enough outreach to vulnerable populations, but at this point if you are not able to get the vaccine, there’s something else going on. I feel like maybe you’re trying to link this to voter laws or something, and that is just not a comparison that can be made in the situation.
And here we have articles talking about real researchers doing real research, as scientifically as they can, to try and pin down what those other factors might be. And you are rejecting it, not based on its own merits as research, but based on a mix of sweeping statements and political assertions. Here I just pointed out that your most recent argument doesn't follow because it's a blatant strawman, and your response is to suggest that me pointing out that the universal and existential quantifiers are actually two very different logical constructs is somehow an encrypted 4D chess statement about voter laws?
Allow me to suggest that life has a distressing tendency to be neither that simple nor that complicated.
Access in what sense? The vaccination program in the U.S is totally free, with no regard for insurance status or even immigration status. Vaccination locations in most urban areas are more than accessible enough given that many vaccination sites are located smack in the central parts of major cities, with public transport options available for reaching them the one or two times it would be necessary to go get vaccinated during a now months-long window of availability.
It's tiresome to see certain statements about black and Hispanic communities seem to generalize the assumption that these are groups almost entirely without agency or capacity for even minimal personal initiative on simple, inexpensive (by even the most basic standards) things. It's almost condescending, but presented in the name of fighting marginalization. An excusing of all behavior without even considering the possibility that members of a community might just be making a few poor choices of their own.
Those numbers aren't measuring the same thing as the ones quoted in the article, so you really can't use the one set to say much about the other.
It's a bit like trying to say that 4 square meters is less than 6 cubic feet, just based on the numbers alone. It's nonsensical, because units do matter. Perhaps both those figures could play a part in an interesting comparison, depending on what they're actually measuring, but, even if they could, you'd need to bring in some more numbers to get there.
I don’t think you understand those charts on the CDC website. Did you notice that the bars for, eg, fully vaccinated add up to 100 across all groups? Did you look at the table?
Because you're talking about two different things.
The vaccine rejection rate here is the percentage of people who say they won't get the vaccine. That has little to do with how many people have been vaccinated up to this point, which is a function of access and distributed among people who _haven't_ stated categorically they won't get it.
It can both be true that white people are more likely to say they won't ever get the vaccine than black and hispanic people AND that a higher percentage of white people have received vaccine shots SO FAR.
I think vaccine rejection in this context means people who say they will not get it. Whites can be the most vaccinated group and still have the largest subset that refuses it outright.
I don’t have cable so I’m sorry but can you explain that to me?
The only thing I’ve seen a lot of is personalities or people whose others might respect come out and verbally push for it, I haven’t seen anyone carelessly promoting it, it’s quite safe to take. A lot of questions I’ve seen asked, have been asked and answered. Those that chose not take the vaccine seem to be suffering from seeing only what they want to be seeing, no?
What exactly is “carelessly promoting” mean in this context.
Edit: ah OP edited his post, s/carelessly/ceaselessly/
If you live your life as an American citizen or resident, you have the federal government to blame for the exceptionally high quality of life you lead. Perhaps it's because I'm informed and educated, but besides the DoD, I have nothing but good things to say about the current state of the executive and judicial branches, as well as federal agencies.
For a taste of the alternative, book airfare to Haiti, Somalia, or Venezuela.
> you have the federal government to blame for the exceptionally high quality of life you lead
If you were truly informed and educated as you claim you would know that our founding fathers had the foresight to anticipate the badness of government as a necessary evil (their words). We enjoy the high quality of life due to our constitution which enable the freedoms and sacrifice of Americans before us, despite the government's interference along the way.
The media has spent years systematically destroying trust in itself. They have no one but themselves to blame for their trust being at an all time low.
Mostly peaceful protest being the most egregious gaslighting in decades - Bagdad Bob would at least blush with that one
Are there no legitimate criticisms of government largess? Has the media not been complicit in terrible debacles which we now know of, such as selling false pretenses for war?
If you want to take that (partisan?) tack, you might turn it around and observe that both halves of the media take their turns being in opposition.
I noticed that the anti-government line from the right didn't stop when they got into power. This NYT headline sums it up quite nicely: "Trump, Head of Government, Leans Into Antigovernment Message"
>They're not against the government, they speak out against the concept of government itself.
Nothing in that article describes Trump or the Republican Party speaking against the "concept of government itself." That would make them anarchists, which clearly they are not. The article points out numerous pro-government positions by Trump and implies that his position on the legitimate purpose and scope of government, rather than being founded on a rigid anti-government ideological core, is entirely transactional. The same guy who supported political protests against vaccination procedures and his opponent's election was shouting "LAW AND ORDER" from Twitter and sending troops into Portland... to crack down on political protesters.
And as far as the Republicans themselves go, the party is famously pro-military, pro-police, pro hardline stances on drug enforcement and immigration, and pro Constitution. The only form of government they consistently oppose are social programs (with the exceptions of agricultural subsidies and the GI bill), spending related to arts and sciences, public education and anything else they consider "leftist" (or more simply, anything their political opponents support.)
Yes, and as you recall the NYT and other partisan sources spent much of his administration alleging that he was a Russian agent. They also claimed he didn't win the election legitimately. Before that, there was a similar theory advanced that Obama wasn't a citizen. Your point is a partisan one and you use a partisan source to back it up. All while ignoring similar behavior from the opposing side.
Both sides criticize and question the legitimacy of government when in opposition. The point stands.
Separate from the partisan nonsense, it is possible that government overreaches. There are legitimate criticisms of government largess. However, blanketly categorizing these criticisms as anti-government is also nonsense. Especially if it is in pursuit of a nakedly partisan point.
The US media reporting on vaccination has been pretty garbage to be honest. For example, I notice the New York Times was complaining the other day about people refusing to get a vaccine even though they'd caught Covid - rationally speaking, someone who's already been infected is going to get much less benefit from vaccination (maybe even none?) and is at higher risk from side effects, their logic was completely backwards and they hadn't even noticed because how the media talks about vaccination mostly seems to be about ideology over all else. I also remember complaints about someone thinking they didn't need the vaccine because they always wore a mask when leaving the house; gee, maybe that has something to do with the articles last year actively pushing the idea that masks were more effective than vaccines would be? Which the media has of course quietly forgotten.
Indeed.
Also getting a vaccine is a serious medical procedure, and acting like it's not a big deal is not helpful long term. I'm in no rush because I'm not in a high risk group, I don't go out that much and I have had allergic reactions to vaccines in the past due to preservatives used and getting reliable information about these vaccines operating under emergency authorization is harder than it would otherwise be for my doctor. Ingredients used can vary by batch - no thanks; I'll wait until things stabilize more.
I'm not opposed to taking the vaccine - I personally have no reason to rush into it. If my situation changes and it makes more sense to get the poke then I will do it.
Acting like anyone choosing to think independently is akin to committing murder as some politicals have espoused is beyond irresponsible and does more to further sow seeds of distrust.
My opinion is that a lot of Americans are uneasy about government, pharmaceutical, and the media, all pushing the same narrative over a virus that has a 99% survival rate. After decades of pushing drugs on us, and using the government to mandate vaccines like HPV, regardless of effectiveness, and the media manipulating us at every turn, trust in these institutions is less than rock bottom. If Americans are not getting vaccinated it’s not the citizens fault, its these institutions that suddenly want us to trust them. Personally I’m waiting as long as possible, let everyone else do the beta testing.
Edit: I have had Covid as-well as everyone in my family.
Surely you jest. Insulin and Lipitor have been studied for decades, both for safety and efficacy. Both are proven life-saving drugs. But I’ll take your point seriously: perhaps in a few years when more studies have been done to show the same efficacy and safety for the vaccine, people might begin to trust it more.
muttantt says >"fixing type 2 diabetes and high cholesterol is a relatively easy with proper nutrition in just a few weeks."<
Leaving "high cholesterol" aside, everything I've read and seen indicates that "fixing type 2 diabetes" is extremely difficult, takes months to years rather than weeks, and is especially difficult to maintain. One of my friends is yo-yoing his weight right now (e.g., down 50 lbs, up 25, down 5,...) in an attempt to cease insulin. I had no idea someone's weight could vary so quickly. His daughter polices his diet carefully, he hides candy bars and other goodies, it's an amazing struggle.
Can you cite any studies that clearly state it is "relatively easy to fix type 2 diabetes"?
> using the government to mandate vaccines like HPV, regardless of effectiveness
What concern do you have about HPV vaccine effectiveness? As far as I can tell this is a non sequitur — vaccination for HPV is effective and a positive health intervention:
> The HPV vaccine works extremely well. In the 10 years after the vaccine was recommended in 2006 in the United States, quadrivalent type HPV infections decreased by 86% in female teens aged 14 to 19 years and 71% in women in their early 20s.
My concern with HPV was that it was suddenly being mandated. For many years the drug companies saw vaccines as a money loser. Suddenly they had this HPV vaccine that had the chance to make a lot of money, but it wasn’t catching on. So the drug companies turn to the government to mandate it. It makes me uneasy when a drug company says we’ve got a drug you must take it, but if you don’t will have the government force you to take it. That goes back to my distrust of the drug companies. I don’t want vaccines to be seen as a profit center.
It makes no sense. It's like arguing against seat belts, just because they are mandatory! I have a family member who is like this: He agrees seat belts are important and save lives but won't wear his out of spite, purely because "I'm not going to let the government tell me what to do!" It is not logical.
That’s a very good point. Drug companies had to be given immunity from civil suit in order to produce them. Look up the national vaccine injury compensation program.
"The government mandated it" is a pretty bold statement, when what you mean is the states of Rhode Island, Virginia, Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico require it (with many other vaccines) for public school attendance.
What country are you in (who is "the government" you're saying is mandating HPV vaccination?). In the U.S., the only mandates are at the state level, and only in Rhode Island, Virginia, and DC, aren't they?
Even if mandated, why wouldn't you want to prevent cervical cancer with such a simple intervention, and why shouldn't the manufacture be compensated for such a miracle?
You are not their audience, who operates from a different mental model. Critical thinking is an essential skill, and not as prevalent as one might think. The flock deeply desires to be led from the pulpit.
They are now (maybe not Trump, but the rest of the republicans).
I don't know if they switched because they're concerned their voters are going to die or if they're worried about getting sued but there's been a sudden switch in their narrative, for whatever reason.
Hang on a moment. Donald Trump has been telling people to get vaccinated both before and after he left office. Hell, endless column inches were spilled by respected publications about how early approval of the vaccines would be an evil conspiracy by Trump to inject the public with untested vaccines. Why do you think he told people not to get vaccinated? The only people I've found he opposes Covid vaccines for is children, and honestly that's well within the range of mainstream opinion despite the media hand-wringing over it; only some countries are planning on mass vaccination of children, and the evidence for the benefits to them outweighing the risks is iffy.
>Hang on a moment. Donald Trump has been telling people to get vaccinated both before and after he left office. Hell, endless column inches were spilled by respected publications about how early approval of the vaccines would be an evil conspiracy by Trump to inject the public with untested vaccines.
eropple nailed it with a comment the other day [1], that it's a breakdown of trust in societal fabric. Reading that comment was my "ah ha" root cause revelation moment. Everything else flows from that: vaccine hesitancy, refusal to wear masks, distrust in government, etc. And that distrust is being weaponized.
I think part of the reluctance to get vaccinated also stems from the age-old "Americans have freedom" ideal, freedom to bear arms, freedom to refuse masks and the vaccine, etc.
Personally, I don't believe I would die from any of the variants. However, I got the vaccine because I don't want to become one of the infected with longer-term problems, including permanently reduced lung capacity.
Could you link to a single study that comes to the same conclusions about long term lung problems? Not an opinion piece, facts. Not Reddit/Twitter posts, an actual, scientific, study.
It's so bizarre. Very few people would argue that they have the freedom to pump chemicals into the air that kill 1% of the population.
You have the freedom to do what you want with your body but when it impacts me then that freedom stops being absolute and becomes more nuanced. If you don't want to be vaccinated then that's fine, but you're not allowed to put me at risk with your choice.
I almost compare it to drunk driving laws. You can get as drunk as you want at home. But when you get into a car, your choices start to impact everyone else, and your right to get as drunk as you want and die in a single-car accident is trumped by my right to not be subject to undue risk when I'm in public. Even if the risk is low, maybe you've driven drunk 1000 times and never killed anyone, my right to be safe trumps your right to drive drunk.
> Very few people would argue that they have the freedom to pump chemicals into the air that kill 1% of the population
The cigarette industry argued this for years past the discovery of passive smoking.
In fact I'd say a large amount of 20th century industrial history has been discovering the long list of things that shave bits and pieces off the lives of people in aggregate and banning them - in the face of opposition saying they have a right to emit this and denying the harm.
> In fact I'd say a large amount of 20th century industrial history has been discovering the long list of things that shave bits and pieces off the lives of people in aggregate and banning them - in the face of opposition saying they have a right to emit this and denying the harm.
Serious movie spoiler alert: this is literally what Soderbergh's latest film is about
I'm afraid we're way past logic in this kind of debate. You can give facts and comparisons and numbers until you drop and the others will just say "nope" and won't even bother to argue - because they already know, mind you.
The age-old saying that "Freedom to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins" is something that Americans have a hard time with.
It's particularly difficult to reason about probability of harm versus the value of exercising their freedom - if they choose to bear arms, for example, and harm people through poor execution, accidental discharge, or kids hurting themselves with found firearms around the home. It's like swinging your fist into the other man's nose and answering "oops, I meant to stop a millimeter short". Maybe you shouldn't be pointlessly swinging your fist in the first place, go find a punching bag somewhere safe instead. It's even more difficult when you want to compel someone to take positive action instead of preventing them from doing something prohibited.
Personally, I don't believe I would die, either. I understand that the possibility of long-term problems is also low, though as an athlete I really value my lung capacity. However, I work with, am friends with, and am related to a lot of people who have far more risk. I believe I would be morally culpable if I failed to wear a mask, socially distance, or get the vaccine, and transmitted the pandemic to someone who did suffer from the illness.
That is true, initially the drug companies were pushing it at the federal level, but there was such a backlash that they backed off and tried to go at it state by state.
> That is true, initially the drug companies were pushing it at the federal level, but there was such a backlash that they backed off and tried to go at it state by state.
Do you have a source for some kind of proposed federal mandate (excluding DOA bills by a backbenchers, because those mean nothing)? As far as I know, vaccine mandates have always been a state/local thing, usually only tied school entry requirements.
The vaccine isn't injected into the veins, it's injected into the muscle.
Tattoos are also injected into the muscles, and if you only had a 99% survival rate on those they'd be illegal and only the craziest of daredevils would risk them.
Anyway, my point is something with a 1% death rate is incredibly dangerous.
> I don't think tattoos are injected into the muscles - they're only skin-deep!
Well rats, there goes that analogy.
But I've got another one: maybe a decade ago I had to give a loved one IM injections regularly (there was a class at the hospital and everything), and if there had been a 1% chance of fatal results the drug wouldn't have made it out of the lab.
They have emergency approval. All major studies are completed, Clinical Study Reports are submitted with all evidence, Case Report Forms, datasets. It is important but largely a bureaucratic and scientific exercise at this point. These vaccines are safer and more effective, with less side effects, than the bulk of all medicines submitted last year. People have been working around the clock for the last 18 months on these treatments in an attempt to save more lives. If the propagandists cared a whit about humanity they would encourage everybody to vaccinate immediately. It is quite possible that a variant will be created by the unvaccinated that is resistant to the vaccines, one that is perhaps even more deadly, instantly turning the world back to lockdown for another year.
The COVID-19 vaccines are all "leaky" in that they don't really prevent infection and transmission but simply attenuate and reduce the severity of symptoms. Therefore, Sars-Cov-2 will continue to evolve in both unvaccinated and vaccinated populations, but the vaccine will put evolutionary pressure on Sars-Cov-2 in the vaccinated population that will select for fitter variants (this has happened before in other "leaky" vaccines, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marek%27s_disease#Prevention and https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou...). I'd argue that fitter, more dangerous variants will probably evolve in the vaccinated population as opposed to the unvaccinated for this reason. Having said that, these new variants will mostly be a threat to the unvaccinated and, if so, I can see a future where we'll be vaccinating kids very early on to prevent serious disease.
While I hear what you're saying, were we all vaccinated, we would quickly reach herd immunity and the virus would stop bouncing around completely, thus rendered a historical footnote like Polio and Smallpox.
> How is a large percentage of people getting the beta an indication that we're past beta testing?
Because testing is giving it to people and seeing what happens. The more people you give it to, the more rare and unusual reactions you can find. IIRC, drug testing involves giving the drug to progressively larger groups of people, to mitigate the damage if there are serious adverse side effects.
> None of the vaccines have FDA approval.
While technically they don't have "full approval," they do have "emergency use approval." At this point, full approval is just a bureaucratic exercise, because the widespread emergency use rollout has tested these vaccines far, far better than any typical pharmaceutical testing program.
Per Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phases_of_clinical_research#Ph...), a Phase III trial involves 300–3,000 test patients. About 50% of the US population has been vaccinated, so you can think of that as a test on 150 million people. That's 50,000 times more than in your typical drug trial.
At this point, refusing the vaccine because it hasn't been tested enough is like refusing a common drug like ibuprofen for the same reason.
That's definitely true for my father. Over the past year he's seen media and government officials go from "masks are useless if you aren't sick" to "if you don't wear a mask you're risking the lives of everyone around you", and "Trump rushing vaccine production could be worse than COVID" to "if you don't get a vaccine, you're going to kill people that can't get vaccinated".
He's got no faith in the government any more, and would rather risk getting sick than try to keep up with whatever narrative is being pushed on any given week.
I think it s because people like your father (and mine), expect faith to guide their opinion of a government. But that sounds very silly to me: you can explain it with reason rather than a faith/betrayal fairytale.
The government is made of imperfect employees like you and me, imbued by a mission to transform tax money into social guidance. At first, there were no mask and no knowledge, they chose to avoid a mask rush that would have led nowhere while inventing excuses to explain it, or nobody would follow. But as everyone they slowly learn and as factories start building the masks, they get easier to enforce. It might yet be another mistake, if at an even deeper level masks are non beneficial, and they might yet change their mind.
You can absolutely just accept faith isnt our guide and follow the best effort estimate of the people we pay for producing it. Dont wear the mask when they think it wont work, wear it when they discover maybe actually it might, remove it when ... you get the point.
Nobody knows, the government is not trying to steal our money with vaccines: they already did with taxes.
It's only a narrative if you choose to believe what you want to while only scraping the surface. Masks were rationed at the beginning until there was supply. There were legitimate concerns about rushing the vaccine under Trump before testing was complete. Then many countries completed testing and approved the vaccine. This was/is basic stuff to anyone who makes an effort to inform themselves.
Moderna, Pfizer, and J&J vaccines are all FDA approved. J&J was paused for a few days out of an abundance of caution due to an extremely rare (~1 in a million) potential side effect, an ordinary part of postmarketing safety monitoring. The FDA decided that the J&J vaccine was still safe and effective and resumed allowing its sale.
You're actively spreading misinformation, and it's disappointing.
No, the guy is actually correct. The vaccines have emergency use authorizations, not approvals. No credible health expert thinks there's anything wrong with the effectiveness or safety of the vaccines but it's still true that the FDA isn't willing to formally say that the vaccines are safe and effective which is causing a lot of problems even besides causing people to think there's something wrong with the vaccines, see
I've found the FDA's lackadaisical attitude towards vaccine approval pretty puzzling during the whole pandemic. Why couldn't they start analyzing the drug company's testing data even before trials completed? Why couldn't they find people to work full time on reviewing the drug approval applications once they were formally in? Moderna, Pfizer, etc were willing to spend extra money and modify procedures to speed up their data collection process so why wasn't the FDA willing to do the same to go over the data they collected more quickly?
They are approved in the real, English language sense of the word. They are actively monitored for safety. If the FDA did not believe they were safe and effective, they would be withdrawn from the market immediately.
The facts are not misinformation--it's the insinuation that because they are "experimental" or that they are not "approved," they are risky. That is the misinformation.
Same with the "99% survival rate" misinformation meme. Even if the fact were true, the insinuation is that a "99%" survival rate means the virus is no big deal, which is false.
The issue is that politicians are better at the art of influence -- it's literally their job. Science is hard for some people to understand, nuanced, and it changes over time. Politicians, on the other hand, know how to harness the power of a strong and definitive statement. To someone who doesn't know better, the arguments that are easier to follow and understand are more believable.
Exactly. I am not anti-vax at all, but I am not eager to take a new class of vaccine developed in less than a year. The state government here has been paying for TV and radio ads nonstop with various doctors talking about how the vaccine is “safe and effective”. Even though it has been beta tested on millions of people I don’t think we can draw any conclusions about long term safety at this point. I also think the effectiveness is highly questionable given the number of high profile people that have been vaccinated and still tested positive.
The new class of vaccine was developed years and years ago for SARS 1 fwiw, was tested and even approved. But by the time it was ready there was no demand. It's not actually new.
There is a big difference between being known about and tested in a lab and being mass produced, approved, and administered to millions of patients. The covid vaccines are the first of this class to be broadly rolled out.
>I also think the effectiveness is highly questionable given the number of high profile people that have been vaccinated and still tested positive.
Sure, the vaccine appears less effective to the delta variant. But that's not a reason to avoid it.
One of the long term effects of not getting the vaccine is death. The recent stories coming out of hospitals where people are dying even though there's a vaccine available is tragic. Let's hope it doesn't happen to you.
I now know 2 people who could have gotten vaccinated and did not, then died of covid. I know another who went to Florida on vacation, contracted covid, and is now stuck in a hotel room hopefully recovering (I wonder about hotel staff). It all seems so tragic and also so maddening, it could have all been avoided. The vaccine could also have prevented the pain and suffering of their remaining families.
Let’s be clear. There is a slim chance of death, particularly if you are younger and/or in good health. There is also a chance that you take the vaccine, get covid, and die anyway. Although I am extremely doubtful that those cases will be talked about very much.
Chance of death is recovered people / dead people. Outcomes, not cases in flight.
About 1 percent now. Was as high as 10 before our medicine improved.
Many are dividing dead people by infected people. This understates the risk due to infections in progress are not yet outcomes, which biases the risk assessment to the very best, idealized case. The assumption is nobody else infected will die, which is a false assumption.
With a vaccine on board, chance of death is a mere, small fraction of 1 percent.
For perspective, ask poker players how sure of a thing 1 in 100 is. That hits way more often than people think!
Still want to gamble? I would never take that risk, unless forced.
And was. Caught covid when the chance of death was about 7 percent. Damn near ended up in a hospital. Scary shit. Chance of longer term symptoms is higher, 5 percent maybe?
Chance of death on a vaccination is much lower, 1 / maybe 100,000 very worst case?
Now, here is the hard part:
Chance of infection?
Well, if we vaccinated everyone, that will go to very good odds. Many may never be infected.
However, since we currently are not doing that, virus mutation means odds are great you will eventually get covid. And it could mutate into forms that are worse and or that nullify vaccinations and we start this crap over.
It is in the world now. We did not catch it in time.
More vaccinated people = less mutation = lower risk for all humans.
This is a when and what risk to take discussion. Very few will avoid this entirely. Odds are overwhelming that will not be you.
Good luck!
When you get covid, do you want to face it with or without the benefit of science?
In my experience those claiming to "sit and wait" when poked will actually reveal they're the entire range of conspiracy theories, so to answer your question I'd dare to say "no they're not".
It's interesting when people say "wait and see" about a tested (in tens of thousands of people), reviewed pharmaceutical product and prefer to take their chances with a random quantity of inhaled bat-poop virus.
99% survival rate is not comforting given the high transmissibility of the virus. For example India had almost 5 million excess deaths during the pandemic
It doesn't. The case-fatality ratio is 2.15%. And this is with preventative actions being taken which allow higher percentages of people to obtain healthcare. If treatment was even more scarce than it has been, the death rate would climb even more.
I picked the specific comparisons I did because few would discount the concerns of a cutaneous anthrax infection or smallpox, variola minor. "Oh it's just a minor case of smallpox" said nobody.
Yes, bad cases of smallpox and anthrax are worse than COVID. And, the flu is pretty bad, but COVID is significantly more deadly than the Influenza A.
When it was new, the "Spanish Flu" (influenza A subtype H1N1) killed as many people as covid killed in 2020, in a far younger, healthier population. Now people have immunity, so even though H1N1 is still around, it's not as deadly as it was in 1918.
So while it's true that covid was more deadly than influenza in 2020, that's not because covid is inherently more deadly, but simply because people weren't immune to it yet.
Now that we have a vaccine, and a significant number of people who've had the disease, covid death rates are much, much lower. Currently about 250 per day in the US, an annual rate of less than 100k per year, not much worse than the flu.
CFR isn’t the same thing as “survival rate”, because the denominator only includes reported cases as opposed to all infections.
What you’re looking for is IFR, which by definition is a smaller proportion.
Anecdotally: my family all tested positive for COVID a few weeks ago via the Abbott at-home test. That test has a relatively large false negative rate (~15% IIRC) but a vanishingly small false positive rate. Of the four of us, I’m the only one who might have been reported to the CDC, because after about a week I called my doctor and asked for a prescription for inhaled steroids to ease my shortness of breath.
Having spoken with older generations, I can tell you their concrete concerns of seeing others die or become disabled from polio is 1 or 2 magnitudes more relevant than vague concerns of government or pharmaceutical industry.
Problem is, people today haven't seen the tough stuff. If every third person had Ebola you wouldn't have the luxury of opining on government unease, because your lived reality would look far different. We've had it good. Maybe people complaining about these things is a concrete sign of how much progress we've made.
Oh boy, what do you dispute? That covid is real? Do you dispute that over 600,000 Americans have died from covid? Those are only the ones we know about. And that's with our incredible luck to have lived in a time where we can develop a vaccine with incredible speed and effectiveness. And that's with all the measures we've taken to hold back the virus, with people like you kicking and screaming the entire way. Maybe you're hearing the same "narrative" because it's reality.
We know what would happen if we did nothing - see New York, Iran, Italy last year. I don't know what people like you want. Apparently you want to sit back and pout with your conspiracy theories while the rest of us do our part.
> One in five Americans believes the US government is using the COVID-19 vaccine to microchip the population
I think people should get vaccinated, but admittedly there is a profound lack of trust in institutions these days. misconceptions like this microchip theory would be 100x less likely if the government wasn’t literally surveilling your every movement and communicated word with the help of big tech
The institutions behave in a profoundly untrustworthy way for generations, then people stop trusting them. Society breaks down. It’s that simple. In 30 years this will be amazingly worse unless things change
They funded the development of a quantum dot to track vaccinations. The distinction between that and a microchip to track people is difficult for many to understand.
It's surprising how clueless or indifferent they are about people's privacy concerns.
> all pushing the same narrative over a virus that has a 99% survival rate.
You talk like a 99% survival rate is pretty good and means it's not something to worry about. One percent of the US population is 3.28 million people. Which is oddly enough about the population of the entire metro area I live in.
So Russia could nuke my city and kill everyone, and the US would still have a 99% survival rate.
Cut the number of deaths in half, for a 99.5% survival rate, and you're still taking out a city like Milwaukee.
> and the media manipulating us at every turn, trust in these institutions is less than rock bottom
The media may be manipulating you, but the people who sell the media manipulation narrative are usually do so to manipulate you even more. It's like deciding to eat dogshit because there was a fly in your food. Yeah, there's a problem with the food, but it's still better than dogshit.
The reason the survival rate across all ages is so high is because the elderly are bearing the brunt of this. If I knew grandma and grandpa had basically a dice-roll's chance of dying from COVID I wouldn't be putting too much stock into that 99% number.
I got the vaccine and a lot of my coworkers have not.
I made the mistake of telling them the results. It was 2x 3-days of me bitching and moaning about a sore arm and just feeling aches while the innoculation worked its magic. Since TFG convinced a lot of Americans the virus is no worse than a light flu somehow my achy arm is way worse than any flu. So now the vaccine is not worth taking because those 6 total days of achiness are worse than being in ICU.
It's that fucking dumb.
In hindsight I should have kept my mouth shut and said everything was fine.
35 million people in the US have tested positive with Covid. Additional millions likely had it and weren't tested. What percentage of those tens of millions that caught Covid do you believe would up in the ICU versus having light flu symptoms, or no symptoms at all?
People are downvoting you because you’re saying something in bad faith, knowing full well you can just punch into Google and go down this specific thread of argument all you want. But to keep this on topic, being on the “don’t deal with it” side of a public health crisis is a great example of the limits of contrarianism - it’s always bad faith to be a contrarian in that context, but not all contexts. So you do you!
You're taking the selfish stance of weighing the risks solely for yourself. The facts are that the amount of people who do end up in the hospital and the ones that die is a number that we shouldn't be comfortable with as humans who live in a society where our actions affect others. This lack of empathy and respect for those around you is a poison and you should feel like a selfish asshole because you can't be bothered with minor inconveniences that might help someone around you avoid the worst of this thing.
In the USA, by March 2021, there were 114.6 million estimated total infections, 5.6 million estimated hospitalizations, and 17.5 million estimated asymptomatic infections.
That predicts approximately 1 in 3 Americans were infected with the virus. These numbers make sense to me, and I can show this with back of the napkin math. A few global studies estimated the average infection fatality rate to be between 0.4-0.7%. Using a 0.6% death rate and the reported 600k deaths in the USA, that gives 600,000 / 0.6% = ~100 million infected in the USA. So the CDC numbers look alright.
As I got my first shot, the nurse told me the 2nd one was worse. But like you, I found the cost-benefit analysis compelling, and they likely assumed if I got the first one, I'd probably be a repeat customer.
If someone is TFG (had to look up that abbreviation), talking about the side effects was nowhere near table stakes for their degree of concern and FUD. Had you said nothing, I strongly believe they still wouldn't have anyways.
Is it some kind of Voldemort "he who shall not be named" nonsense?
Apparently it also stands for "Too Far Gone" (as it too nutty to convince of the truth), which sort of made sense in the sentence, but not as much as Trump.
Wait, didn't tfg fast track it and said it would be here by end of 2020 while NYT and others were certain it wouldn't be here until Nov 2023? [0]
Harris said she wouldn't trust the vaccine? [1]
Things seem to be moving very fast. Anyone else have trouble keeping up who's on what side of every issue? Not too long ago people were arguing about the politics of a bean producer. Weird time to be alive
There was a legitimate concern in the fall of 2020 that the FDA would rush the vaccines out prematurely for political reasons. That did not happen, thanks largely to the integrity of FDA Commissioner Hahn, who insisted we follow the science. A major reason this concern was legitimate is that the CDC was compromised in similar ways, with testing slow-walked, communications altered, among other things [1].
Regarding the vaccine timeline, Trump deserves major credit for Operation Warp Speed. To a large extent, we got lucky - the mRNA vaccines are really good, while others (CureVac) did not fare so well.
> Wait, didn't tfg fast track it and said it would be here by end of 2020.
Yes, but he also downplayed the pandemic leading a large number of his followers to believe that COVID is no more threatening than a mild flu.
If you believe that COVID is no worse than a mild flu then there is no more reason to get COVID vaccine than there is to get a flu vaccination. Only about half of Americans get an annual flu vaccination.
It's code language to work around censorship, like antivaxxers calling themselves non-dancers and worrying that the dancer's glitter can rub in and make them sick.
I don’t think not telling them was even close to lying. If you can imagine going a little hard at the gym and feeling it the next day. Then telling your colleagues how hard you worked out. And then your colleagues takeaway is exercise must be dangerous since it hurts.
Besides a sore arm for about 24 hours I really had no other side effects from Pfizer. After the second shot my arm got sore a bit closer to the time of injection, but overall pain was lower.
I felt worse the day after my yearly flu shot in 2020.
The chart does indicate 9% of fully vaccinated people believe that the vaccine microchips the population, with another 9% not sure.
I wish they'd done a follow-up question where they asked that 9% "do you think your vaccine contained microchips" to see if the answers were logically consistent.
The chart in the article labels that 9% as "Definitely / probably true", so not all of those 9% definitely believe it.
Looking at the detailed data[1] gives more info:
> 46E. Belief in Conspiracy Theories — The U.S. government is using the COVID-19 vaccine to microchip the population
> In your opinion, how likely is it that the following scenarios are true?
> Definitely true 5%
> Probably true 15%
> Probably false 19%
> Definitely false 46%
> Not sure 14%
So, of the 9% (who got it despite microchipping) how many are "definitely" and how many are "probably"?
Among all respondents, "probably true" is 3X as common as "definitely true". If those percentages are the same among vaccine refuser respondents, then 2.25% of vaccine refusers believe the microchip thing is definitely true and 6.75% only believe it's probably true.
The "probably true" refusers are not that hard for me to understand. Maybe you feel like it could have a microchip but you don't really know and some other force (fear of the virus, job requirement, pressure from family/friends) pushes you to get it anyway.
The "definitely true" refusers are much harder to explain, but like others I think it could be that some people are not giving honest answers. I suppose some of them might have gotten the vaccination before they came to believe in the microchip theory.
Some of that might be noise, but there are also some people who both trust their doctors and entertain conspiracy theories. Many of the people who entertain crazy theories also entertain reasonable ones as well - they just aren't sure who to believe. I am sure some of that 9% are honest answers, reasoning along the lines of: "I'm not sure but there's nothing I can do about it".
An entire generation has grown up since then. I think WMDs 17yr ago is a lot less less influential in terms of media distrust than a year ago when they were proclaiming there was no/negligible chance of a lab leak and then spent early 2021 trying to simultaneously walk that back with the weakest possible admission that mistakes were made and simultaneously making an equally strong claim that the vaccine is effective and safe. Frankly I'm surprised that the percentage of the population who isn't vaccinated is as low as it is.
For starters COVID 19 is relatively benign compared to the other stuff you vaccinate against. And unlike the other vaccines which were marketed as - I don't want to get polio/my kids to get polio, this was done as moral duty which is to protect others - which not as much people buy in.
Throw in the speedy approval process, the Astra Zenecca feud with Brussels, the media being media with side effects stories and the constant annoying moralizing preaching of the very online crowd, the fact that vaccine is still no reason to ditch the masks - and it is no wonder that hesitancy is so strong.
Got jabbed with Pfizer in February - I don't think it was worth it. I am still forced to wear masks even though there is just no good evidence that vaccinated people could be infectious at any rates comparable to unvaccinated.
No kidding. Also I'm not surprised you are being downvoted despite making some very valid points.
I couldn't believe one of the first nurses they vaccinated at the beginning of the rollout was one prone to fainting - who then fainted.
SERIOUSLY? If they wanted to instill confidence that's NOT the way to do it. It's like they were trying to sow division from the start. And then they wonder why people are distrustful? Changing medical "facts" based on the politics of the moment hasn't done any of the "experts" any favors - from no mask, to masks, to double/triple the masks (freaking clown show, that one) now masks even if you have had it/get the jab (absolutely NO medial basis for that policy) - it's just nuts.
If you want to have a really good time, just look up dear Dr. Fauci and his handling of AIDS in the 80's and SARS in the 90's. How that man still holds the position he does is simply mind boggling. He's less reliable than the local weather forecaster and at least they have a good reason for their accuracy and won't kill people based on being moronically wrong. When you look at how he downplayed AIDS when it was well known he was flat out wrong; how many hundreds of thousands died (especially in the gay community) that didn't have to?
On balance vaccines are a slam dunk positive; I'm certainly NOT an anti-vaxxer (just got my shingles vaccine - shingles are nasty; don't fool around!). I'm just not in a hurry for the COVID vaccines when I don't have to be - especially when it's still under emergency approval. Heck there are still studies narrowing down the optimal dose size - the smaller you can make it while still being effective greatly diminishes the side effects and it could be as much as half of what they are currently doing according to more than one recent study I have seen. That's a huge difference! I have had allergic reactions in the past so yeah, I have zero problem waiting a bit until more of this stuff gets refined. That's hardly a nutter/denier position, yet there seems to be zero room for nuance in public discourse these days. It's either you are part of the heard/groupthink or you are worse than a nazi, non-human and subject to immediate purge from the planet :p
68% of adults is not what I would call almost all. That number has barely budged in months so it seems there is a good 30% of Americans who will not get vaccinated.
Antibody titers are higher from vaccines as well. "After the second dose of the vaccine, antibody titers were up to 10 times higher than those of patients who had recovered from natural COVID-19 infection, suggesting that even those with prior exposure could benefit from vaccination."
The step from ”I probably won’t get vaccinated because I’m worried about side effects” to “the US government is using the vaccine campaign to microchip people” is… absolutely bloody enormous. Yet a majority of those who reject vaccines think the latter statement is true??
This is what surprises me about the US (if it’s true - I’d like to see more numbers). Not that there is a chunk of sceptics but a chunk of lunatics. Even if you account for troll responses you wouldn’t expect that kind of number. If just one in ten that answered yes actually mean it - that’s still terrifying.
I think it's more likely that a majority of people who reject the corona vaccines feel mildly insulted by the follow up question and decide to give a troll answer.
I'm sure that's part of it. I had to explain to four people that you can't fit a microchip in an mRNA particle or variations if the sort. I'm far from convinced that's the majority.
I have a hard time caring about unvaccinated adults dying because they chose to refuse the Covid vaccine. It's tough on the people who love them and tough on the medical personnel who care for them, but there's nothing I can do about it. I have family who won't get vaccinated and I've told them I'm not coming to their funeral because I need to walk away and set a boundary for my own sanity.
There are a lot of factors that you need to take in account when talking about vaccine hesitant people. Some big ones:
* Risk: people that don't think they are at risk of catching covid are less likely to get the vaccine. Many people in rural areas don't interact with people as much, and likely feel like they are less likely to catch it. You can also see risk evaluation playing out in other countries that didn't have large early cases of Covid (like Japan), where the fall 2020 wave wasn't too bad, so people weren't as worried.
* Trust: There are many that seem to feel squelching discussion that dissents from the CDC guidance is the best way to convince the skeptics. Sadly, those people that are skeptical will see this as more of a reason not to trust the ruling class. Preventing discussion isn't how to fight this fight.
No, equal representation is good, but none of the Senate, the Electoral College, or the House of Representatives feature even roughly equal representation. (The largest house district by population is, IIRC, about 1.75× the size of the smallest, with the same representation, and the range of representation ratios in the other two bodies is much larger.)
Yes, the senate skews congress highly rural. That's the point. It was designed that way. Frankly it works just fine except when electing a president or when doing things at the federal level that should be done at the state level.
At the state level, where most of the day to day stuff that affects people's lives is legislated the urban areas in any given state run the show unless the state is very, very, rural.
Furthermore, class based distinctions are mostly separate and parallel from urban vs rural ones. Both the hick and the hoodrat know full well their elected representatives, whether they voted for or against them, are nothing like them.
It's a bit morbid to think of but this is almost literally natural selection in action:
People with the vaccine accepting phenotype are dying at lower rates than the vaccine hesitant phenotype because they have adapted to their environment better. Whether this leads to adaptation in the broader population remains to be seen.
My guess is that it won't because most of the people who aren't getting vaccinated and dying are 1. too small in number and 2. Primarily past the age of reproduction anyway.
I'll list mine: (as one of the 23% independent who will never get the vaccine)
- I already had long covid (lasted 14 months), and don't want the vaccine to cause a relapse. It did exactly that to a family member who also had long covid, and she's still not better. It's just anecdotal but I've seen on longcovid forums multiple people claiming the vaccine CAUSED their longcovid.
- I don't believe CDC recommendation that increasing antibody titers through vaccination offers better protection against the virus than convalescent immunity through prior infection. Antibody titers are just one aspect of immunity and BCells make antibodies when exposed to a virus again. Actually I'd be worried about training my immune system with only one part of the virus, it's possible that would hurt my robust immunity against variants, not help it.
- CDC is dishonest with numbers by not tracking mild/non-hospitalized breakthrough cases. There is no reason not to track them. From the UK Gov on Page 12... 37 of 73 deaths from Delta variant are vaccinated: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... According to the CDC and media such numbers of deaths among vaccinated would be statistically impossible.
- FDA not approving an inactive virus vaccine is BS. It's a monumental failure of the US government if they want a high % of people vaccinated to only offer DNA/RNA vaccines that are nothing like traditional vaccines people receive as children. China's Sinopharm works at preventing death and is just inactive virus. If required to take a vaccine I'd travel to another country to take that. Actually I'd even pay $10k to have an inactive virus vaccine imported if it prevented me from being discriminated against. I don't know if the US will ever make a law like France just did, but the corporate media's propaganda is definitely pushing people to support it.
- If there was such a thing as "misinformation" then it should be openly mocked, ridiculed and contested with facts. What's happening now with censorship is unprecedented - we even need a dedicated news site to keep track of it: https://reclaimthenet.org/ . Organizations like the EFF should be presenting legal challenges for many of these things but it seems like everyone has gotten on the "misinformation" bandwagon. Doing that will lead to authoritarianism. Health policy should not be political, but opposing forced medical procedures is a fundamental human right, no exceptions.
This is a good question and deserves serious thought, including real empirical data on what people believe, and TFA provides that. I also recommend more perspective from Ed Yong[1], which is empathetic towards the unvaccinated.
But I don't think it's super mysterious. The US is one of the few countries that has a major news network constantly pushing the antivax message (Russia being the other that comes to mind, and that strengthens my point). We also have an erosion of trust in institutions, the media, and authority that goes deeper than in most other places.
We also see evidence here on HN: every Covid thread has a significant number of antivax comments. They are also aggressive on Twitter, and even in the chat of TWiV livestreams.
There is some reason for optimism though. Very recently, there has been something of a turnaround in right-leaning news sources, where they are now advocating the vaccine. I'm not sure if that will hold up, but in any case I expect it will boost vax numbers considerably, and in the process save many thousands of lives.
A deeper question remains: what can we do toward having an information ecosystem that is not so terribly dysfunctional that antivax messages thrive in it?
No, in Russia pro-vaccine propaganda is very high, everyone, absolutely everyone, even Navalny's officers are doing it. For the last half a year around 10 minutes in every evening news programme on major channels is about Sputnik V, shaming not vaccinated and so on. There are wonderful documentaries made by RT about hospitals, talking to lead doctors. There are vaccination centers in malls.
Russia's low rate of vaccination comes from three things:
1) Lack of incentive. Life was going as usual throughout Winter and Spring - everything was open, no one was enforcing masks. Moscow had the requirement to be vaccinated in order to enter restaurants for a few weeks in June-July, that forced people to go get vaccines.
2) Not many people were dying before Delta, so everyone thought it was fading away. And combined with the iron curtain situation between vaccines (Sputnik V not approved in EU and P/M/J&J/AZ not approved in Russia), people thought there was going to be some development, maybe new vaccines, and that it's worth waiting a bit.
3) Many people didn't trust some dying corrupt company to be able to make millions of doses out of nowhere and for it to be effective. It was just too suspicious to be true. But eventually Sputnik proved to work, so this went away.
I’m at the point of not caring anymore. If you don’t want to get vaccinated, fine by me. When you’re dying in a hospital somewhere, complain to someone who cares, because it won’t be me.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 276 ms ] thread[1] https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/w2zmwpzsq0/econTabReport.pdf
> Less than half of Black and Hispanic people have received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose in nearly all states reporting data, including a number of states where less than a third have received a vaccine
I'm aware that polls have a skew, but I can't figure out how those numbers are so different, especially since the latter numbers are about people who have received at least one dose, not the full dose.
[1] https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/latest-...
lol america is fuk
Lie: > Vaccine rejection is higher among whites than it is among black and Hispanic Americans
The data: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccination-demogr...
Also observe in Figure 4 of https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/latest-... that while the percentage of whites that have gotten vaccinated his higher than Black and Hispanic groups, the slope of the curve is higher in the latter cases - if trends continue, the lines will cross, just as Canada has exceeded the US vaccination rate, and possibly for similar reasons.
EDIT: I'm eating the downvotes on this one, but it's an actual excuse I've seen reported in the wild. Even if they don't lose their job, many people are living very close to the edge and the loss of a couple days salary is a big deal.
I personally was unable to really work for a day and a half, and couldn't have driven myself there (or back) anyway. I'm very lucky in that I work from home and have plenty of paid sick leave, but that's not a situation experienced by lots of people.
Where exactly do you see this access problem for black and Hispanic Americans?
Which, it's from March, so a lot of the issues they cited were from early on in the rollout where supply was low, demand was high, and a lot of governments were still getting the kinks worked out. That said, some of the effects cited in the article may still apply. For example,
> Another barrier to getting vaccinated is difficulty in registering for appointments online. Applicants often have to navigate labyrinthine portal systems and fill out multiple pages of documentation before appointments fill up, so it becomes a race for who can load and complete the forms the fastest.
> Getting to vaccination sites can also be a challenge. They are not always near public transit, and not everyone has access to a car.
As someone who spent many years living without a car in the USA, I can personally attest that, "available at every major drug store in America," does not mean the same thing as, "readily accessible." Suburban sprawl doesn't care who won the last election.
These are not unique to minority communities.
Seems likely.
And here we have articles talking about real researchers doing real research, as scientifically as they can, to try and pin down what those other factors might be. And you are rejecting it, not based on its own merits as research, but based on a mix of sweeping statements and political assertions. Here I just pointed out that your most recent argument doesn't follow because it's a blatant strawman, and your response is to suggest that me pointing out that the universal and existential quantifiers are actually two very different logical constructs is somehow an encrypted 4D chess statement about voter laws?
Allow me to suggest that life has a distressing tendency to be neither that simple nor that complicated.
It's tiresome to see certain statements about black and Hispanic communities seem to generalize the assumption that these are groups almost entirely without agency or capacity for even minimal personal initiative on simple, inexpensive (by even the most basic standards) things. It's almost condescending, but presented in the name of fighting marginalization. An excusing of all behavior without even considering the possibility that members of a community might just be making a few poor choices of their own.
It's a bit like trying to say that 4 square meters is less than 6 cubic feet, just based on the numbers alone. It's nonsensical, because units do matter. Perhaps both those figures could play a part in an interesting comparison, depending on what they're actually measuring, but, even if they could, you'd need to bring in some more numbers to get there.
How do you go from one to the other here?
The vaccine rejection rate here is the percentage of people who say they won't get the vaccine. That has little to do with how many people have been vaccinated up to this point, which is a function of access and distributed among people who _haven't_ stated categorically they won't get it.
It can both be true that white people are more likely to say they won't ever get the vaccine than black and hispanic people AND that a higher percentage of white people have received vaccine shots SO FAR.
Here, imagine you can divide a box into four quadrants:
One is measuring A/(A+B), the other is measuring A/(A+C).What exactly is “carelessly promoting” mean in this context.
Edit: ah OP edited his post, s/carelessly/ceaselessly/
ADVERB Continuously and without end.
‘a former policeman who has campaigned ceaselessly on his daughter's behalf’
I despise all mainstream media, but if there's any one entity to chiefly blame for that, it's the federal government itself.
For a taste of the alternative, book airfare to Haiti, Somalia, or Venezuela.
If you were truly informed and educated as you claim you would know that our founding fathers had the foresight to anticipate the badness of government as a necessary evil (their words). We enjoy the high quality of life due to our constitution which enable the freedoms and sacrifice of Americans before us, despite the government's interference along the way.
If you want to take that (partisan?) tack, you might turn it around and observe that both halves of the media take their turns being in opposition.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/20/us/politics/trump-coronav...
They're not against the government, they speak out against the concept of government itself.
Nothing in that article describes Trump or the Republican Party speaking against the "concept of government itself." That would make them anarchists, which clearly they are not. The article points out numerous pro-government positions by Trump and implies that his position on the legitimate purpose and scope of government, rather than being founded on a rigid anti-government ideological core, is entirely transactional. The same guy who supported political protests against vaccination procedures and his opponent's election was shouting "LAW AND ORDER" from Twitter and sending troops into Portland... to crack down on political protesters.
And as far as the Republicans themselves go, the party is famously pro-military, pro-police, pro hardline stances on drug enforcement and immigration, and pro Constitution. The only form of government they consistently oppose are social programs (with the exceptions of agricultural subsidies and the GI bill), spending related to arts and sciences, public education and anything else they consider "leftist" (or more simply, anything their political opponents support.)
Both sides criticize and question the legitimacy of government when in opposition. The point stands.
Separate from the partisan nonsense, it is possible that government overreaches. There are legitimate criticisms of government largess. However, blanketly categorizing these criticisms as anti-government is also nonsense. Especially if it is in pursuit of a nakedly partisan point.
I'm not opposed to taking the vaccine - I personally have no reason to rush into it. If my situation changes and it makes more sense to get the poke then I will do it.
Acting like anyone choosing to think independently is akin to committing murder as some politicals have espoused is beyond irresponsible and does more to further sow seeds of distrust.
Edit: I have had Covid as-well as everyone in my family.
1% death rate is pretty bad for a single disease everyone is going to get eventually. And the hospitalization rate is much higher than 1%
Too late.
Leaving "high cholesterol" aside, everything I've read and seen indicates that "fixing type 2 diabetes" is extremely difficult, takes months to years rather than weeks, and is especially difficult to maintain. One of my friends is yo-yoing his weight right now (e.g., down 50 lbs, up 25, down 5,...) in an attempt to cease insulin. I had no idea someone's weight could vary so quickly. His daughter polices his diet carefully, he hides candy bars and other goodies, it's an amazing struggle.
Can you cite any studies that clearly state it is "relatively easy to fix type 2 diabetes"?
"
What concern do you have about HPV vaccine effectiveness? As far as I can tell this is a non sequitur — vaccination for HPV is effective and a positive health intervention:
> The HPV vaccine works extremely well. In the 10 years after the vaccine was recommended in 2006 in the United States, quadrivalent type HPV infections decreased by 86% in female teens aged 14 to 19 years and 71% in women in their early 20s.
The impact is a solid percentage of us basically unable to think in basic group, or class terms.
Why would capitalism not apply to vaccines?
are there other things you fear to say about your government?
Even if mandated, why wouldn't you want to prevent cervical cancer with such a simple intervention, and why shouldn't the manufacture be compensated for such a miracle?
Here's a bit of a thought experiment for you. Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump are vaccinated. Why would they tell you not to get vaccinated?
I don't know if they switched because they're concerned their voters are going to die or if they're worried about getting sued but there's been a sudden switch in their narrative, for whatever reason.
Correct.
Biden, Harris, and Pelosi all said they won't trust any Trump vaccine. (<https://www.newsweek.com/anti-vaccine-covid-trust-skepticism...>)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27911793
Personally, I don't believe I would die from any of the variants. However, I got the vaccine because I don't want to become one of the infected with longer-term problems, including permanently reduced lung capacity.
Respiratory function in patients post-infection by COVID-19: a systematic review and meta-analysis
DOI: 10.1016/j.pulmoe.2020.10.013
You have the freedom to do what you want with your body but when it impacts me then that freedom stops being absolute and becomes more nuanced. If you don't want to be vaccinated then that's fine, but you're not allowed to put me at risk with your choice.
I almost compare it to drunk driving laws. You can get as drunk as you want at home. But when you get into a car, your choices start to impact everyone else, and your right to get as drunk as you want and die in a single-car accident is trumped by my right to not be subject to undue risk when I'm in public. Even if the risk is low, maybe you've driven drunk 1000 times and never killed anyone, my right to be safe trumps your right to drive drunk.
The cigarette industry argued this for years past the discovery of passive smoking.
In fact I'd say a large amount of 20th century industrial history has been discovering the long list of things that shave bits and pieces off the lives of people in aggregate and banning them - in the face of opposition saying they have a right to emit this and denying the harm.
Serious movie spoiler alert: this is literally what Soderbergh's latest film is about
It's particularly difficult to reason about probability of harm versus the value of exercising their freedom - if they choose to bear arms, for example, and harm people through poor execution, accidental discharge, or kids hurting themselves with found firearms around the home. It's like swinging your fist into the other man's nose and answering "oops, I meant to stop a millimeter short". Maybe you shouldn't be pointlessly swinging your fist in the first place, go find a punching bag somewhere safe instead. It's even more difficult when you want to compel someone to take positive action instead of preventing them from doing something prohibited.
Personally, I don't believe I would die, either. I understand that the possibility of long-term problems is also low, though as an athlete I really value my lung capacity. However, I work with, am friends with, and am related to a lot of people who have far more risk. I believe I would be morally culpable if I failed to wear a mask, socially distance, or get the vaccine, and transmitted the pandemic to someone who did suffer from the illness.
It is worth noting that the HPV vaccine is effective: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/hpv/hcp/safety-effectivenes...
As far as I am aware, mandates have been implemented in only a few places, at the state and local level.
Do you have a source for some kind of proposed federal mandate (excluding DOA bills by a backbenchers, because those mean nothing)? As far as I know, vaccine mandates have always been a state/local thing, usually only tied school entry requirements.
The chances of getting in a car accident in any given trip is way less than 99%, that doesn't mean I'm not going to wear seatbelts.
Tattoos are also injected into the muscles, and if you only had a 99% survival rate on those they'd be illegal and only the craziest of daredevils would risk them.
Anyway, my point is something with a 1% death rate is incredibly dangerous.
But good on the 1%!
Well rats, there goes that analogy.
But I've got another one: maybe a decade ago I had to give a loved one IM injections regularly (there was a class at the hospital and everything), and if there had been a 1% chance of fatal results the drug wouldn't have made it out of the lab.
Imagine insulin with a 1% fatality rate.
Technically that's what clinical testing is. Further we're long past beta testing with a large percentage of people being vaccinated.
Anti-vaxxers have done more damage to the country by scaring people from getting the vaccine without providing any serious proof.
How is a large percentage of people getting the beta an indication that we're past beta testing? None of the vaccines have FDA approval.
https://www.fda.gov/emergency-preparedness-and-response/coro...
And if you care to read it, the decision memo is here.
https://www.fda.gov/media/144416/download
Granted that's the Pfizer vaccine. Google is your friend here for other vaccines approved by the FDA.
Because testing is giving it to people and seeing what happens. The more people you give it to, the more rare and unusual reactions you can find. IIRC, drug testing involves giving the drug to progressively larger groups of people, to mitigate the damage if there are serious adverse side effects.
> None of the vaccines have FDA approval.
While technically they don't have "full approval," they do have "emergency use approval." At this point, full approval is just a bureaucratic exercise, because the widespread emergency use rollout has tested these vaccines far, far better than any typical pharmaceutical testing program.
Per Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phases_of_clinical_research#Ph...), a Phase III trial involves 300–3,000 test patients. About 50% of the US population has been vaccinated, so you can think of that as a test on 150 million people. That's 50,000 times more than in your typical drug trial.
At this point, refusing the vaccine because it hasn't been tested enough is like refusing a common drug like ibuprofen for the same reason.
He's got no faith in the government any more, and would rather risk getting sick than try to keep up with whatever narrative is being pushed on any given week.
The government is made of imperfect employees like you and me, imbued by a mission to transform tax money into social guidance. At first, there were no mask and no knowledge, they chose to avoid a mask rush that would have led nowhere while inventing excuses to explain it, or nobody would follow. But as everyone they slowly learn and as factories start building the masks, they get easier to enforce. It might yet be another mistake, if at an even deeper level masks are non beneficial, and they might yet change their mind.
You can absolutely just accept faith isnt our guide and follow the best effort estimate of the people we pay for producing it. Dont wear the mask when they think it wont work, wear it when they discover maybe actually it might, remove it when ... you get the point.
Nobody knows, the government is not trying to steal our money with vaccines: they already did with taxes.
You're actively spreading misinformation, and it's disappointing.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/vaccine-fda-approve
I've found the FDA's lackadaisical attitude towards vaccine approval pretty puzzling during the whole pandemic. Why couldn't they start analyzing the drug company's testing data even before trials completed? Why couldn't they find people to work full time on reviewing the drug approval applications once they were formally in? Moderna, Pfizer, etc were willing to spend extra money and modify procedures to speed up their data collection process so why wasn't the FDA willing to do the same to go over the data they collected more quickly?
Same with the "99% survival rate" misinformation meme. Even if the fact were true, the insinuation is that a "99%" survival rate means the virus is no big deal, which is false.
They paused it while they investigated a rare side effect, then resumed a few weeks later with a new warning about that.
It's very much on the market (or would be if Emergent wasn't such a fuckup).
Sure, the vaccine appears less effective to the delta variant. But that's not a reason to avoid it.
One of the long term effects of not getting the vaccine is death. The recent stories coming out of hospitals where people are dying even though there's a vaccine available is tragic. Let's hope it doesn't happen to you.
Without vaccines you're basically guaranteed to catch it eventually.
The risk that you die while fully vaccinated is tremendously low.
About 1 percent now. Was as high as 10 before our medicine improved.
Many are dividing dead people by infected people. This understates the risk due to infections in progress are not yet outcomes, which biases the risk assessment to the very best, idealized case. The assumption is nobody else infected will die, which is a false assumption.
With a vaccine on board, chance of death is a mere, small fraction of 1 percent.
For perspective, ask poker players how sure of a thing 1 in 100 is. That hits way more often than people think!
Also, there is much more than 1% chance of very serious life long complications.
Still want to gamble? I would never take that risk, unless forced.
And was. Caught covid when the chance of death was about 7 percent. Damn near ended up in a hospital. Scary shit. Chance of longer term symptoms is higher, 5 percent maybe?
Chance of death on a vaccination is much lower, 1 / maybe 100,000 very worst case?
Now, here is the hard part:
Chance of infection?
Well, if we vaccinated everyone, that will go to very good odds. Many may never be infected.
However, since we currently are not doing that, virus mutation means odds are great you will eventually get covid. And it could mutate into forms that are worse and or that nullify vaccinations and we start this crap over.
It is in the world now. We did not catch it in time.
More vaccinated people = less mutation = lower risk for all humans.
This is a when and what risk to take discussion. Very few will avoid this entirely. Odds are overwhelming that will not be you.
Good luck!
When you get covid, do you want to face it with or without the benefit of science?
Good luck then I guess.
relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/2397/
625k deaths in the US over 35147k cases, a death rate of 1.78%
Current US population is about 328M. 1.78% death rate across 328M is close to 6M.
deaths have also been likely undercounted a bit although 625k is a lot closer to the current 700k estimate of excess deaths than it used to be.
It doesn't. The case-fatality ratio is 2.15%. And this is with preventative actions being taken which allow higher percentages of people to obtain healthcare. If treatment was even more scarce than it has been, the death rate would climb even more.
* 215% deadlier than anthrax.
* 2150% deadlier than polio.
* about the same as the average death rate between the two smallpox strains, and on-par with the spanish flu
Smallpox, variola major has a 30% CFR.
Both are much worse than either covid or the flu.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_disease_case_fat...
Yes, bad cases of smallpox and anthrax are worse than COVID. And, the flu is pretty bad, but COVID is significantly more deadly than the Influenza A.
So while it's true that covid was more deadly than influenza in 2020, that's not because covid is inherently more deadly, but simply because people weren't immune to it yet.
Now that we have a vaccine, and a significant number of people who've had the disease, covid death rates are much, much lower. Currently about 250 per day in the US, an annual rate of less than 100k per year, not much worse than the flu.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-covid-deaths-7-day?...
New data coming out seems to show that the rate of hospitalizations and deaths are increasing with the Delta variant.
A troubling sign of what to come is the outbreak in Arkansas. https://arkansascovid.com/2021/07/covid-19-hospitalizations-...
What you’re looking for is IFR, which by definition is a smaller proportion.
Anecdotally: my family all tested positive for COVID a few weeks ago via the Abbott at-home test. That test has a relatively large false negative rate (~15% IIRC) but a vanishingly small false positive rate. Of the four of us, I’m the only one who might have been reported to the CDC, because after about a week I called my doctor and asked for a prescription for inhaled steroids to ease my shortness of breath.
Problem is, people today haven't seen the tough stuff. If every third person had Ebola you wouldn't have the luxury of opining on government unease, because your lived reality would look far different. We've had it good. Maybe people complaining about these things is a concrete sign of how much progress we've made.
Oh boy, what do you dispute? That covid is real? Do you dispute that over 600,000 Americans have died from covid? Those are only the ones we know about. And that's with our incredible luck to have lived in a time where we can develop a vaccine with incredible speed and effectiveness. And that's with all the measures we've taken to hold back the virus, with people like you kicking and screaming the entire way. Maybe you're hearing the same "narrative" because it's reality.
We know what would happen if we did nothing - see New York, Iran, Italy last year. I don't know what people like you want. Apparently you want to sit back and pout with your conspiracy theories while the rest of us do our part.
I think people should get vaccinated, but admittedly there is a profound lack of trust in institutions these days. misconceptions like this microchip theory would be 100x less likely if the government wasn’t literally surveilling your every movement and communicated word with the help of big tech
The institutions behave in a profoundly untrustworthy way for generations, then people stop trusting them. Society breaks down. It’s that simple. In 30 years this will be amazingly worse unless things change
https://www.gatesfoundation.org/our-work/programs/global-hea...
They funded the development of a quantum dot to track vaccinations. The distinction between that and a microchip to track people is difficult for many to understand.
It's surprising how clueless or indifferent they are about people's privacy concerns.
You talk like a 99% survival rate is pretty good and means it's not something to worry about. One percent of the US population is 3.28 million people. Which is oddly enough about the population of the entire metro area I live in.
So Russia could nuke my city and kill everyone, and the US would still have a 99% survival rate.
Cut the number of deaths in half, for a 99.5% survival rate, and you're still taking out a city like Milwaukee.
> and the media manipulating us at every turn, trust in these institutions is less than rock bottom
The media may be manipulating you, but the people who sell the media manipulation narrative are usually do so to manipulate you even more. It's like deciding to eat dogshit because there was a fly in your food. Yeah, there's a problem with the food, but it's still better than dogshit.
E.g. the US government had a role in the opioid crisis.
Personally, I don't know why anyone would take that bet when they don't have to.
Yeah, no surprise there lol
Thanks for beta-testing covid-19 for us though.
I made the mistake of telling them the results. It was 2x 3-days of me bitching and moaning about a sore arm and just feeling aches while the innoculation worked its magic. Since TFG convinced a lot of Americans the virus is no worse than a light flu somehow my achy arm is way worse than any flu. So now the vaccine is not worth taking because those 6 total days of achiness are worse than being in ICU.
It's that fucking dumb.
In hindsight I should have kept my mouth shut and said everything was fine.
Indeed, contrarian to what, exactly?
In the USA, by March 2021, there were 114.6 million estimated total infections, 5.6 million estimated hospitalizations, and 17.5 million estimated asymptomatic infections.
That predicts approximately 1 in 3 Americans were infected with the virus. These numbers make sense to me, and I can show this with back of the napkin math. A few global studies estimated the average infection fatality rate to be between 0.4-0.7%. Using a 0.6% death rate and the reported 600k deaths in the USA, that gives 600,000 / 0.6% = ~100 million infected in the USA. So the CDC numbers look alright.
So yeah, a lot. Go google "2021 life expentancy us" and see.the shithole.we are in, even if a lot of other dearh causes went down (like driving)
If someone is TFG (had to look up that abbreviation), talking about the side effects was nowhere near table stakes for their degree of concern and FUD. Had you said nothing, I strongly believe they still wouldn't have anyways.
My wife requires care and those days were difficult when we both were sick. I had to take paracetamol on last night to clean and cook.
I assume someone dependent on day wage would think twice and possibly would not choose the best option for the comfortable one.
TFG?
Apparently it also stands for "Too Far Gone" (as it too nutty to convince of the truth), which sort of made sense in the sentence, but not as much as Trump.
Harris said she wouldn't trust the vaccine? [1]
Things seem to be moving very fast. Anyone else have trouble keeping up who's on what side of every issue? Not too long ago people were arguing about the politics of a bean producer. Weird time to be alive
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/30/opinion/coron...
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/05/politics/kamala-harris-not-tr...
Regarding the vaccine timeline, Trump deserves major credit for Operation Warp Speed. To a large extent, we got lucky - the mRNA vaccines are really good, while others (CureVac) did not fare so well.
[1]: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/covid-19-was-always-goi...
Yes, but he also downplayed the pandemic leading a large number of his followers to believe that COVID is no more threatening than a mild flu.
If you believe that COVID is no worse than a mild flu then there is no more reason to get COVID vaccine than there is to get a flu vaccination. Only about half of Americans get an annual flu vaccination.
I felt worse the day after my yearly flu shot in 2020.
But I'd totally do it again if it's necessary to keep my immunity.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...
If you told me that one in ten people would troll someone conducting a survey I would be surprised the number is that low.
I would. I live out in the country and the people in my area believe some absolutely bonkers stuff.
I wish they'd done a follow-up question where they asked that 9% "do you think your vaccine contained microchips" to see if the answers were logically consistent.
The chart in the article labels that 9% as "Definitely / probably true", so not all of those 9% definitely believe it.
Looking at the detailed data[1] gives more info:
> 46E. Belief in Conspiracy Theories — The U.S. government is using the COVID-19 vaccine to microchip the population
> In your opinion, how likely is it that the following scenarios are true?
> Definitely true 5%
> Probably true 15%
> Probably false 19%
> Definitely false 46%
> Not sure 14%
So, of the 9% (who got it despite microchipping) how many are "definitely" and how many are "probably"?
Among all respondents, "probably true" is 3X as common as "definitely true". If those percentages are the same among vaccine refuser respondents, then 2.25% of vaccine refusers believe the microchip thing is definitely true and 6.75% only believe it's probably true.
The "probably true" refusers are not that hard for me to understand. Maybe you feel like it could have a microchip but you don't really know and some other force (fear of the virus, job requirement, pressure from family/friends) pushes you to get it anyway.
The "definitely true" refusers are much harder to explain, but like others I think it could be that some people are not giving honest answers. I suppose some of them might have gotten the vaccination before they came to believe in the microchip theory.
---
[1] See p. 132 at https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/w2zmwpzsq0/econTabReport.pdf
There's lots more examples like that, but that's a big one and is illustrative.
For starters COVID 19 is relatively benign compared to the other stuff you vaccinate against. And unlike the other vaccines which were marketed as - I don't want to get polio/my kids to get polio, this was done as moral duty which is to protect others - which not as much people buy in.
Throw in the speedy approval process, the Astra Zenecca feud with Brussels, the media being media with side effects stories and the constant annoying moralizing preaching of the very online crowd, the fact that vaccine is still no reason to ditch the masks - and it is no wonder that hesitancy is so strong.
Got jabbed with Pfizer in February - I don't think it was worth it. I am still forced to wear masks even though there is just no good evidence that vaccinated people could be infectious at any rates comparable to unvaccinated.
I couldn't believe one of the first nurses they vaccinated at the beginning of the rollout was one prone to fainting - who then fainted.
SERIOUSLY? If they wanted to instill confidence that's NOT the way to do it. It's like they were trying to sow division from the start. And then they wonder why people are distrustful? Changing medical "facts" based on the politics of the moment hasn't done any of the "experts" any favors - from no mask, to masks, to double/triple the masks (freaking clown show, that one) now masks even if you have had it/get the jab (absolutely NO medial basis for that policy) - it's just nuts.
If you want to have a really good time, just look up dear Dr. Fauci and his handling of AIDS in the 80's and SARS in the 90's. How that man still holds the position he does is simply mind boggling. He's less reliable than the local weather forecaster and at least they have a good reason for their accuracy and won't kill people based on being moronically wrong. When you look at how he downplayed AIDS when it was well known he was flat out wrong; how many hundreds of thousands died (especially in the gay community) that didn't have to?
On balance vaccines are a slam dunk positive; I'm certainly NOT an anti-vaxxer (just got my shingles vaccine - shingles are nasty; don't fool around!). I'm just not in a hurry for the COVID vaccines when I don't have to be - especially when it's still under emergency approval. Heck there are still studies narrowing down the optimal dose size - the smaller you can make it while still being effective greatly diminishes the side effects and it could be as much as half of what they are currently doing according to more than one recent study I have seen. That's a huge difference! I have had allergic reactions in the past so yeah, I have zero problem waiting a bit until more of this stuff gets refined. That's hardly a nutter/denier position, yet there seems to be zero room for nuance in public discourse these days. It's either you are part of the heard/groupthink or you are worse than a nazi, non-human and subject to immediate purge from the planet :p
Edit: “almost all” changed to “most”
Antibody titers are higher from vaccines as well. "After the second dose of the vaccine, antibody titers were up to 10 times higher than those of patients who had recovered from natural COVID-19 infection, suggesting that even those with prior exposure could benefit from vaccination."
https://www.contagionlive.com/view/immune-response-from-mrna...
How many lives would it save?
Would we be willing to do that?
A change in the ad campaign could work, appeal to republican values but without alienating democrats in the process
Get a free stars and Stripes flag with every injection.
Conversely, using that name would have caused many others to not want it. Biden, Harris, and Pelosi all said they won't trust any Trump vaccine. (<https://www.newsweek.com/anti-vaccine-covid-trust-skepticism...>)
This is what surprises me about the US (if it’s true - I’d like to see more numbers). Not that there is a chunk of sceptics but a chunk of lunatics. Even if you account for troll responses you wouldn’t expect that kind of number. If just one in ten that answered yes actually mean it - that’s still terrifying.
There are a lot of factors that you need to take in account when talking about vaccine hesitant people. Some big ones:
* Risk: people that don't think they are at risk of catching covid are less likely to get the vaccine. Many people in rural areas don't interact with people as much, and likely feel like they are less likely to catch it. You can also see risk evaluation playing out in other countries that didn't have large early cases of Covid (like Japan), where the fall 2020 wave wasn't too bad, so people weren't as worried.
* Trust: There are many that seem to feel squelching discussion that dissents from the CDC guidance is the best way to convince the skeptics. Sadly, those people that are skeptical will see this as more of a reason not to trust the ruling class. Preventing discussion isn't how to fight this fight.
Where did you get the idea that in this country, rural people aren’t ruling the country? Have you looked at the senate lately?
No, equal representation is good, but none of the Senate, the Electoral College, or the House of Representatives feature even roughly equal representation. (The largest house district by population is, IIRC, about 1.75× the size of the smallest, with the same representation, and the range of representation ratios in the other two bodies is much larger.)
Yes, the senate skews congress highly rural. That's the point. It was designed that way. Frankly it works just fine except when electing a president or when doing things at the federal level that should be done at the state level.
At the state level, where most of the day to day stuff that affects people's lives is legislated the urban areas in any given state run the show unless the state is very, very, rural.
Furthermore, class based distinctions are mostly separate and parallel from urban vs rural ones. Both the hick and the hoodrat know full well their elected representatives, whether they voted for or against them, are nothing like them.
People with the vaccine accepting phenotype are dying at lower rates than the vaccine hesitant phenotype because they have adapted to their environment better. Whether this leads to adaptation in the broader population remains to be seen.
My guess is that it won't because most of the people who aren't getting vaccinated and dying are 1. too small in number and 2. Primarily past the age of reproduction anyway.
- I already had long covid (lasted 14 months), and don't want the vaccine to cause a relapse. It did exactly that to a family member who also had long covid, and she's still not better. It's just anecdotal but I've seen on longcovid forums multiple people claiming the vaccine CAUSED their longcovid.
- I don't believe CDC recommendation that increasing antibody titers through vaccination offers better protection against the virus than convalescent immunity through prior infection. Antibody titers are just one aspect of immunity and BCells make antibodies when exposed to a virus again. Actually I'd be worried about training my immune system with only one part of the virus, it's possible that would hurt my robust immunity against variants, not help it.
- CDC is dishonest with numbers by not tracking mild/non-hospitalized breakthrough cases. There is no reason not to track them. From the UK Gov on Page 12... 37 of 73 deaths from Delta variant are vaccinated: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... According to the CDC and media such numbers of deaths among vaccinated would be statistically impossible.
- FDA not approving an inactive virus vaccine is BS. It's a monumental failure of the US government if they want a high % of people vaccinated to only offer DNA/RNA vaccines that are nothing like traditional vaccines people receive as children. China's Sinopharm works at preventing death and is just inactive virus. If required to take a vaccine I'd travel to another country to take that. Actually I'd even pay $10k to have an inactive virus vaccine imported if it prevented me from being discriminated against. I don't know if the US will ever make a law like France just did, but the corporate media's propaganda is definitely pushing people to support it.
- If there was such a thing as "misinformation" then it should be openly mocked, ridiculed and contested with facts. What's happening now with censorship is unprecedented - we even need a dedicated news site to keep track of it: https://reclaimthenet.org/ . Organizations like the EFF should be presenting legal challenges for many of these things but it seems like everyone has gotten on the "misinformation" bandwagon. Doing that will lead to authoritarianism. Health policy should not be political, but opposing forced medical procedures is a fundamental human right, no exceptions.
But I don't think it's super mysterious. The US is one of the few countries that has a major news network constantly pushing the antivax message (Russia being the other that comes to mind, and that strengthens my point). We also have an erosion of trust in institutions, the media, and authority that goes deeper than in most other places.
We also see evidence here on HN: every Covid thread has a significant number of antivax comments. They are also aggressive on Twitter, and even in the chat of TWiV livestreams.
There is some reason for optimism though. Very recently, there has been something of a turnaround in right-leaning news sources, where they are now advocating the vaccine. I'm not sure if that will hold up, but in any case I expect it will boost vax numbers considerably, and in the process save many thousands of lives.
A deeper question remains: what can we do toward having an information ecosystem that is not so terribly dysfunctional that antivax messages thrive in it?
[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/07/unvaccina...
Russia's low rate of vaccination comes from three things:
1) Lack of incentive. Life was going as usual throughout Winter and Spring - everything was open, no one was enforcing masks. Moscow had the requirement to be vaccinated in order to enter restaurants for a few weeks in June-July, that forced people to go get vaccines.
2) Not many people were dying before Delta, so everyone thought it was fading away. And combined with the iron curtain situation between vaccines (Sputnik V not approved in EU and P/M/J&J/AZ not approved in Russia), people thought there was going to be some development, maybe new vaccines, and that it's worth waiting a bit.
3) Many people didn't trust some dying corrupt company to be able to make millions of doses out of nowhere and for it to be effective. It was just too suspicious to be true. But eventually Sputnik proved to work, so this went away.
If you won’t get vaccinated, you’re a write-off.