I always thought the US should have been harnessing ad agencies and Hollywood production companies in its public outreach for covid. Instead I think it overrelied on basically politicians or administrative heads of various govt depts appointed by politicians.
I think many people didn't expect US vaccination to be as difficult as it has turned out to be. Anti-vaccine sentiment existed before covid but in a smaller proportion (at least in my eyes). Using hindsight I agree with you and think that could have been more effective.
I don’t disagree that messaging in the US about Covid could have been improved. But I think there’s a reasonable chunk of the population that would assume malicious intent (or at least political intent) in anything coming out of Hollywood. And there might be a fair amount of overlap with folks currently hesitant or outright refusing the vaccine.
I’d be interested in a historian’s take on messaging re: Covid in comparison with messaging re: polio or the like. I think there will be a lot of scholarship in sociology and public health about Covid in the years to come.
To be clear I wasn’t bringing up Hollywood to get celebrities, I was just thinking higher production value public information spots. I don’t think there would be any added particular pushback there - no one rejects high production value Marvel movies just because they from Hollywood.
I’ve wondered this often during the crisis. Normally, to me anyway, in crisis, politicians fall back on a toolbox of propaganda.
I’ve been waiting on the, “Anti- vaccination is un-American. And the conspiracy theories are all a (Russian/Chinese/Iranian) plot to undermine our way of life,” rhetoric. But it never came along.
The propaganda is there, it's just sufficiently well evolved that you can't see it. It even works as you say it does, which is amazing.
Consider the way that Biden keeps blaming lockdowns and government measures on the unvaccinated. He keeps saying, everything can go back to normal, if only those annoying unvaccinated people get the jab. Literally "the unvaccinated are undermining our way of life", as you put it. But that's illogical because if the vaccines worked, there'd be no need for any more measures. People could decide to take it or not and deal with the consequences themselves. Health insurers could take it into account in their premium calculations, if necessary.
Instead they are keeping the measures and using them as an excuse to pit Americans against each other. In reality the measures will never end until people collectively insist they are removed. Israel is a good demonstration of what happens in a country with high levels of compliance: over a million people who thought they were vaccinated, are now having their passes revoked, because they didn't get a booster shot. How many "boosters" are necessary for this particular vaccine? Probably an infinite number. They certainly are not any way to restore life to normal given government attitudes so far.
> But that's illogical because if the vaccines worked, there'd be no need for any more measures.
Your logic seems short there. People are still falling ill and filling up hospitals, and these are primarily the unvaccinated. If the vaccine workee and everyone took it then we can reduce the restrictions, oh hey this is a comment thread about a country that's doing exactly that... does that mean the vaccine is working? Zomg!
Imagine a row of houses, and the ones at the left side are on fire. Firefighters are spraying the houses from the right with retardant so they will only be slightly charred if the fire reached them. In my mind whar you're proposing is analogous to wanting the firefighters to stop spraying the stuff after 60% of the houses got the spray.
"People are still falling ill and filling up hospitals, and these are primarily the unvaccinated"
Most of the stats claiming this are heavily manipulated, for example by using "everyone since the start of the epidemic" as the denominator for unvaccinated people. The US agencies have been especially bad at this, with their 99% claims (not at all true, as their own leaked documents show). Stats that don't play this kind of game show a much less convincing effectiveness.
But even if your point were completely true, it has nothing to do with logic. It's just the latest talking point that will be gone in five minutes. Hospital demand has always been built out to meet demand. If unvaccinated people end up in hospital more often, they could just be charged more via insurers to pay for the additional capacity, same as the obese or those who smoke and get lung cancer or those who do extreme sports. There is no actual reason to force everyone to take a vaccine to manage hospital capacity, and in fact places with relatively low vaccination rates are not experiencing a hospital crisis of any kind (see: Switzerland).
And even if you don't agree with that last paragraph, it's irrelevant because the topic we're discussing in this sub-thread is whether there's been government propaganda! And there certainly has been, vast amounts of it, it's just effective enough that some people can't see it for what it is. The unvaccinated are systematically demonized by governments and painted as dangerous including to the vaccinated, which is upside-down world thinking. It's no different to how people were described as "un-American" when they opposed the war in Iraq.
> "People are still falling ill and filling up hospitals, and these are primarily the unvaccinated"
> Most of the stats claiming this are heavily manipulated
Are you saying the states taking the extraordinary steps of rationing hospital care because of capacity problems don't really have full hospitals but are letting patients die based on manipulated stats? That...is an extraordinary claim that needs some support more than vague handwaving.
1. The hospitals that are busy firing health workers due to vaccine mandates are having capacity problems? Of course they are. That's an inevitable consequence of reducing staffing at a time when you need more. It's the result of bad government policy.
2. Statistical claims being manipulated. Consider the claim that 99% of hospitalizations are in the unvaccinated, made quite recently by US authorities. This stat didn't match stats from any other country, because it was a lie. The CDC's own internal presentations show this, clear as day. See for yourself:
Slide 4. The graph shows that already in May 15% of people hospitalized for COVID were vaccinated. Not 1% at all, although this claim was being made far more recently than May. And, it was climbing quickly, as would be expected from the stats released by other countries.
> You're mixing up two separate things.
> 1. The hospitals that are busy firing health workers due to vaccine mandates are having capacity problems? Of course they are.
You're also mixing things. Sure in your mind these 2 things might be interchangeable, but staff doesn't equal bed. Got any detailed information that links the two? Who knows if the fired staff are even the Covid nurses, or if they're e.g. people who work in the hospital kitchen.
Bed capacity is mostly a synonym for worker capacity. When people talk about hospitals being "full" they don't mean literally physically full - that's why the emergency hospitals that were built never got used even though the press keep telling you that hospitals are overflowing. Here's a random recent example of such an article:
"Across the country, health-care systems that have instituted mandates have seen some workers leave or be terminated over their refusal to get the shot, exacerbating a shortage in skilled nursing and bedside care."
"NEW YORK, Sept 27 (Reuters) - New York hospitals on Monday began firing or suspending healthcare workers for defying a state order to get the COVID-19 vaccine, and resulting staff shortages prompted some hospitals to postpone elective surgeries or curtail services ... Erie County Medical Center in Buffalo suspended elective inpatient surgeries and had stopped accepting intensive-care patients from other hospitals as it prepares to fire hundreds of unvaccinated employees, a spokesman Peter Cutler said."
Note: before they were OK, accepting ICU patients and doing elective surgeries. After: they can't handle electives or ICU intake anymore. That isn't being caused by unvaccinated people getting so sick they're flooding out all the other operations, it's caused by hospitals being forced to shed staff.
At any rate, isolated hospitals can easily run out of staffed beds for many reasons and this is a phenomenon that predates COVID. That's why there are stories about overflowing hospitals from the flu in pre-COVID years. As the article notes there were already problems but this is now making it worse.
So staffing levels are not genuinely a COVID problem, let alone an unvaccinated COVID problem. If it were true that unvaccinated COVID = overflow then it'd be the case everywhere. Look at the Swiss dashboard:
COVID utilization is low during the entire pandemic, with ~25% at its peak (but still lots of spare beds, i.e. a lot of these cases are infections of people already there for something else). There has never been a time throughout the whole two years when there wasn't plenty of spare capacity - in fact they've been reducing the number of beds allocated to ICU during 2021 because the level of nursing care required for them is expensive.
Now look at vaccination rate on the same dashboard. Only 64% of the population has even taken one dose. Yet, the hospitals are fine and there are thousands of free beds. There is nothing magical about the Swiss people or hospitals. You can find similar graphs for US regions, I think (I am just less familiar with them). Rather, looking at the raw data tells a very different story to what the press and governments are telling.
Apples and oranges much? Nowadays Switzerland requires digitally signed vaccinated/recovered/tested certificates before you go into a lot of places (bars, restaurants, clubs), meanwhile in the red states, where the infection rates are the worst currently, some governments are even banning such restrictions.
So, are you pro restrictions for the unvaccinated, and pro control of public events with such certificates, then?
Also, to clarify, those thousands of free beds in Switzerland are not ICU beds, they don't even have 1000 ICU beds in total: https://www.covid19.admin.ch/en/hosp-capacity/icu . So, don't confuse those 2 either.
No, the vaccine passes are recent and have made no impact. That is visible in the graphs. Nor can they, given that vaccinated people still get sick and spread it. Regardless it's irrelevant to my point: the hospital system was never even close to being collapsed or overwhelmed, even though it's the same virus everywhere.
Obviously I know the graphs are total capacity and not ICU. I even mentioned that. The point is identical if considering ICU beds.
I guess the answer is no, you won't answer point (2).
So Biden says in July a number which was valid 6 weeks beforehand, before Delta became much more prevalent (feel free to fact-check me there), the PDF in the WaPo URL is from late July. In your conspiracy theorist mind this talking point (he's an old geezer politician using an almost 100% number to shock...) means the government is manipulating statistics across the board.
This stat has been repeated many times, but even in July, the figure was completely wrong, as the leaked CDC docs show very clearly.
Yes, I do think that the President of the USA should - when citing statistics about health to justify forcing people to take medical interventions - actually use accurate statistics. And that such stats should not have to come to light through press leaks. Do you disagree?
"I always thought the US should have produced more consoomer-appealing propaganda. We should have had the Avengers tell us to take the vaccine to defeat Thanos-19."
Would you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN? We ban accounts that do that, and you've unfortunately been doing it a ton. That's seriously not cool here—it's destructive of what the site is supposed to be for.
the article in passing mentions the key difference. People in Portugal don't pathologically question every source of authority. If you had trotted out a military general in uniform in the US talking about the war against vaccines one hour later every talk radio host would have started ranting about how the military has been undermined by the deep state and so on.
Conspiracy logic cannot be argued with because if commitment is strong enough everything that is seen as contrary evidence is just incorporated. "Oh great, now they're pretending they're apolitical!" etc. You've seen it already with other military personnel on different issues.
Also the culture in continental Europe vis-a-vis the military is entirely different. It's not that it's less political but more so, a lot of European countries even in very relative history have been governed by military authority at times. one only needs to look at the shocked "army in the streets" articles after every terror attack in the english-speaking press. I don't think this can be transplanted to the US.
But nobody is "pathologically questioning" anything around vaccines, regardless of what some people may wish to believe. The questions are all very much relevant, on point and - given the untrustworthy nature of public health authorities up to this point - necessary to ask.
Ok, you don't want the health authorities, virologists and experts in pandemics to answer your legit questions about vaccines.
Who do you think that has earned the stripes and the authority to answer your questions then?
FOX news?, a Russian troll farm?, Beyonce?, Jesus?
Please propose somebody that you would trust and why you think that should be seen as an expert in this field, so we can solve this obstacle and move on with our lives.
Presumably, a whole society, even in limited though adequate number, of experts who are capable of reassuring by asking the same questions the subject may raise, and providing convincing answers, and by avoiding acting with the most unconvincing signals. "The incumbent shall have an elephant detector and will positively and publicly acknowledge and properly assess all the specimens found in the rooms s/he will be assigned to".
No prob. I did not mean to be vague, I wanted to specify the principles.
Suppose that John was waiting for the availability of some treatment. Then John is reached by information about side effects of concern. It is normal that John will see something outside initial expectations ("a few days of distress owing to bodily reaction") around him (say, persistent inconveniences of some, maybe a few critical occurrences of somebody else - "Mary has been itching for three months", "Lucy's mother fell out of the window"), and by looking for further information he will reach extreme but unreliable information ("Anon wrote on a web billboard his cousin caught fire within four days of inoculation"). The expectation of John will probably be that these cases will be actively explained by theory and assessed case by case, at least in a representative sample (e.g. subject to active monitoring). What he will encounter will easily be worlds with little and scarcely effective inter-communication: publications for academics containing large number of pages relevant to general topic but none apparently assessing the questions emerging from his experience; "renegade" researchers speaking of toxicity; no mention of said toxicity elsewhere. Adding to that, the scenario is made more complex and/or confusing through the message of articles like "The final nail in the coffin of medical research";, through increasing diffusion of lapidary password constructs (take 'safe and effective' - which is not per se meaningful as its two members are not absolute, yet it is proposed (even here, nearby) as a final judgement); through the usual lunatics making extraordinary claims; through a public debate that obsessively refers to the usual lunatics, factually honouring them as The Interlocutors of choice; through censorship (Lex Fridman denounced it and went on to say that at the MIT researchers have started preferring to remain quiet and silent); through the extension of the same into principles that e.g. forbid the statement that 'vaccines are dangerous' (YouTube), which is a complete reinvention of the language, so even the common ground of communication is gone (as now for "dangerous" an arbitrary threshold is set and in the new vernacular fighting for dominance paracetamol, water, the sun are not dangerous anymore); through a defence of a principle of responsibility about the consequences of how a tick and a mouse may interpret your words (but not the consequences of how intellectual profession and principles bend under the weights of a tick and a mouse).
In all of that John will continue wondering "how and why had Mary been itching for months, and why was not that brought clearly to topic: all of that cannot be normal". John will not only expect explanations that put his experience into theoretical context, but also a slice of some system in which problematic experience is treated as expected: as something pending waiting for answers.
--
Edit: your post now reads, «Its a start at least, but that's still very vague»: you must have edited while I was writing: you know this is not the original poster writing, right?
> Your post now reads, «Its a start at least, but that's still very vague»: you must have edited while I was writing: you know this is not the original poster writing, right?
Just for the record. The original post was: "This is still very vague, can you specify more?"
I think that it sounded a little harsh and I was not the meaning that I wanted to express so I changed it. Is this a problem to you?
No harshness was perceived on the first formulation; the second one with «Its a start at least», creates doubts about "what exactly missed a start, what remained unexplained before that partial disclosure". Among the tentative interpretations of those doubts was that you may have understood that the original poster was replying clarifying his own position, as you elicited.
There is little hidden about what is unconvincing in the situation. I just submitted an article from The Atlantic, "The Myth That Democracies Bungled the Pandemic" (they do not, to the reading of some data by that author), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28748382 , and in providing a few quotations in the opening post I noted a there reported statement from Francis Fukuyama:
> it is not necessarily democracy but “whether citizens trust their leaders, and whether those leaders preside over a competent and effective state” that is crucial to defeating a pandemic
This is another way to express the issue, and another formulation of The Reply to a reading of your post as "what does one demand to trust": trustworthiness.
Sadly, at this point even some published NIH scientists think that the figureheads that dictate the policy on TV have lost the plot (since Delta).
That's what I've been told in a private conversation by a published researcher at NIH, who does mRNA research for therapeutic vaccines.
I don't know what to think of this. Known him for years. I don't think he has any motive here, and he is also fully vaccinated, so no antivaxx angle either.
It would be nice to have trustworthy authorities to answer these questions, but it appears they don't exist. Virologists in particular seem to have spent most of their time covering up evidence that SARS-CoV-2 came from one of their own labs: the exact opposite of the behaviour they should have been engaged in.
Given the absence of that, it is sufficient for people to make their own decisions based on whatever sources they personally find adequate. There is no need for fights over which organization gets to be the anointed provided of truth.
Personally, I don't feel a need for any of these self-proclaimed "experts". The data from public statistics is clear enough, as is evidence collected by talking to people around me.
> But nobody is "pathologically questioning" anything around vaccines, regardless of what some people may wish to believe.
When the USA is having massive numbers of deaths and severe lasting illnesses, due to refusal to take the safe and effective vaccines and other necessary precautions, this opinion is just not tenable.
It's literally causing deadly disease, at scale. If that's not classifiable as "pathological", then I don't know what is.
It is a documented fact that medical authorities in the United States lied to the American people to manipulate their COVID-related behavior.
Specifically, Dr. Fauci discouraged people from wearing masks, not because there was a shortage and they needed to be saved for front-line medical workers (the real reason), but because - he claimed at the time - they were not particularly effective.
"When you're in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it's not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And often there are unintended consequences. People keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face."
At this point, it is dishonest to characterize Americans' distrust of medical authority as pathological. The distrust is well and truly deserved.
So, you're saying that the evolving understanding of the use of _masks_ explains the _vaccine hesitancy_ ? That seems like a loosely-related change of subject to me. Why bring out this talking point?
If you're not happy with nuance, probabilities rather than certainties, and changing understandings of a new situation then the modern world might not be for you.
To be clear, you're saying that the avoidable unvaccinated disease mass casualties, are not pathological, i.e. illness-related, because, that mask guy the one time? That seems more like the kind of bogus reason that people seize upon to explain what they want to believe, than a logical explanation.
The subject hasn't changed - you're just trying to avoid it.
The subject is trustworthiness of the public health authorities. They lie repeatedly in order to manipulate the public, there have been no consequences, and so it's rational to assume they're still doing it. You're trying to claim there's no link between a willingness to lie about one COVID related topic and willingness to lie about others, which is clearly wrong.
But really, why bother. The propaganda has worked on you like a treat: you're arguing the science "evolved"! It did not evolve. That's an attempt to cover up what's really been happening. Public health authorities and scientists directly and knowingly lied about it to achieve policy goals, and in many cases, that's now either been admitted by them directly (with masks, herd immunity thresholds) or it's been proven in other ways (by DRASTIC).
> ut really, why bother. The propaganda has worked on you like a treat: you're arguing the science "evolved"! It did not evolve. That's an attempt to cover up what's really been happening.
Exactly what people were saying about the lab leak theory right up until it was confirmed as among the most plausible explanations.
Stop making personal attacks. Engage with the material, not with the person, or don't engage at all. Calling someone a "pathological conspiracy theorist" is beyond the pale.
Would really appreciate it if you'd review the guidelines and stick to the intended spirit of the site, including editing out any swipes that make it in to your posts. The way I look at this is: even if you don't (or feel you don't) owe the person you're replying to better, you owe the community better if you're participating in it.
This is just absurd. Did our medical establishment not understand at all how masks worked before 2020? They were just guessing the whole time until COVID happened?
This is circular logic. You're quoting claims by the same authorities that have been making false claims since the beginning, as a way to attack anyone who questions claims by those same authorities.
You need to stop doing this. It's against site guidelines and it's an asshole move besides. You don't get to strawman people or put words in their mouths. If you have no genuine desire to discuss these issues and learn from others, but just want to insult people, you should go take a break from the site.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.... Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Do you agree that there is a pandemic, that it is is (still) causing massive numbers of casualties, and that these are now largely avoidable by simply taking the safe effective vaccines, vaccines that are being baselessly "questioned" with terrible consequences?
Or do you think that "nobody is "pathologically questioning" anything around vaccines" ? If so, what part of the above do you disagree with?
Perhaps that's a more nuanced way to put it. Fair warning, I view the first paragraph as a filter for cranks, trolls and the deluded. Those who deny reality.
> the vaccine is useless in stopping transmission.
This is factually incorrect. it is dangerous scaremongering to say "the vaccine is useless".
"imperfect" not the same as "useless". This is simplistic, binary, "all or nothing" thinking that should have no place in this discussion.
As stated before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28699570
This is a no true Scotsman statement. Questioning authority is okay as long as it’s just questioning, but any question can be dismissed as pathological questioning and forbidden.
If you want to use some qualification of ‘pathologically questioning’ you’ll have to define what it is. So it’s clear what kind of questions you want forbidden.
This is a no true "no true Scotsman" statement: yet there are Scotsmen; there are still always excess of anything; despite the caveat that this can be abused as "any question can be dismissed as pathological". Do not overthink it into pretzel-logic. My other comment outlines the situation that I think clearly qualifies.
> Also the culture in continental Europe vis-a-vis the military is entirely different. It's not that it's less political
In this case, it is. Now that the Vice-Admiral is done with the vaccinations, all he wants is to be promoted to Admiral (which led to a kerfuffle between the President and the Government). He wants no political post whatsoever.
In fact, there was a doctor ahead of vaccination task force before, but he was pushed aside after supporting one of the losing candidates for president.
I was in Portugal last week and was surprised by how safe it felt.
Everyone still wears masks indoors and in built up areas, sanitiser was available everywhere, people checked our vaccination status when sitting indoors.
They're not major points but it definitely felt like people went out of their way to be conscious of others and the virus which is different to how I feel people in the UK treat the virus now (eg mask usage on the tube is virtually non existent).
Most of this is largely anecdotal on my part but I feel countries that continue to do a little now will get long term benefits (eg mandatory mask use in public transport)
> I was in Portugal last week and was surprised by how safe it felt.
That may be because you didn't know how many of those around you got their 2nd shot before last spring, and that masks don't significantly help. But it's important how you "feel", I get that.
It may be that they feel safe because they are about as safe as before COVID existed. When I have examined the data of countries compared to their vaccination rate the substantially lower death rate has been very clear. Israel's quick Pfizer roll out had additional break through cases, but continued spread primarily cost non-vaccinated lives. For the rest of us we have a different flu season now.
You mean how authoritarian it felt. I can't believe people's brains have devolved over the past 18 months to the point that seeing a society live in constant fear and have to present papers gestapo-style to participate in society is perceived as "wow I feel safe here". You'd have loved to live under fascism, because of how "safe" you would feel under your extreme government authority.
Not only that, but everyone has now had a chance to get the vaccine. If you catch COVID now and end up with complications you are either a very small edge case (which is bad but there are edge cases in using motorways, sports, and other diseases), or you’ve chosen to not be vaccinated.
To force entire societies into compliance with all sorts of insane rules, because some people haven’t vaccinated is insane. Because that’s what this is.
Even if you think you are making your society safe by following all your redirections, you are basically accepting authoritarianism because of anti vaxxers and edge cases. Is it worth it?
Nope, Portugal has always been like that. Being humble and caring for other is ingrained in their culture. Portuguese have also a privileged connection with Brazil and are well aware of the dangers of acting stupid.
Fascism, brains turning into cheese and people acting like a flock of sheep is the definition of Qanon. Couldn't be more alien to Portuguese society.
The interesting question is why other countries don't understand the idea.
> Fascism, brains turning into cheese and people acting like a flock of sheep is the definition of Qanon.
How true! It's so odd that these people believe themselves to be the enlightened critical thinkers. Sadly their evidence-gathering stops at the first blog with a URL like covidtruth.news that tells them what they want to hear.
A hallmark of facism is the deliberate suppression of nuance. Every single thing is distorted to align with a particular narrative of fear. Fear of Jews, communists, or secret cabals of lefties using masks to destroy freedom.
There is more nuance to masks. They cover your face! They make it easier to avoid surveillance. Maybe the purpose is to prevent snot and phlegm from becoming air born. Because they are a terribe mechanism of control.
People can make personal choices to comply without it being driven by fear. But your attitude is driven by fear.
I'd love for someone like yourself to explain to me what your vision of the future is, or what you see as a "good" world in the next few years.
At what point can we go back to pre covid regulations/laws? What level of booster effectiveness would make you feel comfortable?
Do you even want things to go back to pre covid? Or would you prefer everyone wear masks for common colds and flu (common colds kill the elderly too btw).
What death rate is acceptable to you for covid before things get back to normal? Should we lock down on severe flu seasons in the future?
I'd genuinely like to understand how you see the future, I'm not trolling you.
We already have tools for evaluating risk in health outcomes. We generally spend more to keep people healthy than merely alive, spend more on people with longer life expectancies etc
I work on the assumption that every nation's experts are working from similar frameworks.
We already encourage people to get flu vaccines, to be allowed time off work when infectious, run education campaigns on what does and doesn't help with flu, sanitize our hands when entering hospitals or care homes, wash our hands when preparing food and enforce a thousand minor laws, regulations and social customs around that to help keep people healthy from flu and a bunch of other things. All that takes money and time and we do it because the alternative would be worse.
It becoming common in more places to wear masks on public transport during flu season seems entirely reasonable to me and not something I'm particularly worried about especially as it might help with the next Covid, avian flu etc.
> I'd love for someone like yourself to explain to me what your vision of the future is, or what you see as a "good" world in the next few years.
Well, for one thing the rational choices are limited - it's not only up to us and our "vision of the future", there's a deadly pandemic that constrain us, and it doesn't care about the politics of masks, it's just looking for warm cells to infect.
It's foolish to think that we "can we go back to pre covid regulations" in a "vision" without evidence that the disease is under firm control. Getting it under control is step 1 to "good" - if that doesn't happen then the rest is noise;
None of our tools are perfect, but you must know the saying "You go to war with the army you have, not the army you want to have".
The places that are getting towards that good state are generally highly vaccinated and use the other measures a lot. Compare California to Texas for instance.
So my question for the people who don't like vaccines and vaccine mandates, and somehow also don't like masks and mask mandates is, what do you like in that regard? What is your plan?
> Or would you prefer everyone wear masks for common colds and flu
Some eastern countries have been doing this for a long time. Why would it be a bad idea if some western countries followed suit?
It is perfectly possible that face mask wearing is overcautious. That does not support your suggestion of facism.
What I am hearing is that you want people to stop wearing masks so that you feel safer. That the suggestion of a different perspective on something is fear inducing to you.
Maybe what is nice about Portugal is that people are less fearful in general than Anglo countries. People can exist without every little thing being turned into culture war scariness.
So now that everyone is vaccinated we can just accept that the goalposts are infinitely far away and masks will be demanded forever. And anyone who doesn’t want that is a crazy conspiracy theorist who thinks it’s because of the secret cabal.
I am objecting to the ad hominem attack on mask wearers and the suggestion that it is indicative of some kind of moral failing. That does not mean I want masks forever (I don't). Or that I have a problem with people who choose not to wear a mask (I don't). Or that I even support legislation (I don't).
Ah yeah, the Gestapo Covid police, do they also go around and quietly make people disappear? Sure there are arrests for gross violations of the new rules, but even if you're a denier that the virus exists, imagine it does, and ask yourself if the laws make sense?
Yeah I know a lot of the anti-authoritarians think this is just the start, the global elite is herding the dumb sheep right? For what end? It seems like the existing capitalism was already fucking the working class very efficiently enough, with said working class willingly participating...
Some feel safe when they see that people are attentive - and only when people are attentive. Masks, sanitizers and checks are a formal practice that can easily be overlaid on radically dumb individuals and masses (for example, through conformity). That the acts are there, but not the presence, is still in the family of "superstition" (the ideas that survive their forgotten grounds and reasons).
Only minutes ago "a friend of mine" was forced to partial exposure because somebody in the street wanted to have a conversation, but while smoking, so mask on the chin: that means not having understood one meagre shard. This is not root-wise the behaviour of those who remove the mask when they want to speak and put it back when they have finished, which is more of a sign of deficiency of quantitative intelligence: it is instead a sign of defective presence to general contexts and specific situations - of shallow assimilation, together with radical inattentiveness. Very many people here show that.
Other words could be spent for those who assume that vaccination equals immunity (hence behave irresponsibly).
One will feel safe when the population will pass the basics of understanding their own behaviour.
Portuguese will basically suck up anything that says "freedom" in it... The idea passed around is that the vaccine allows you to freely go anywhere and with that everyone just went because staying home or staying at distance is just something the Portuguese don't really like.
They don't have an opinion on anything since 1974... Everything and anything you place in front of them they take without question.
Trust me... I'm portuguese but I've ascended from that brainwashed nation of ours.
Because I openly criticize my own nation and people? Maybe... You forgot to copy the "of ours" part...
Sorry if you got hurt out of my comment, it was not my objective to hurt any feelings but only state what's really happening and that most might not realize as they're not in contact with it.
You should very probably make sure that your statements do not seem to come from Eliza. Substantiate them, ground them, make them defensible - and not oracular: if there are signs of, contextually, «brainwash[ing]» in the poster's statements, make them explicit. Eliza could have written what you did. And with that, you have been gratuitously offensive.
For those who could not immediately interpret the number in the title (before reading the article): the vaccinated in Portugal are 88% of the total population, and 98% of those eligible (principally owing to age).
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[ 6.2 ms ] story [ 240 ms ] threadI don’t disagree that messaging in the US about Covid could have been improved. But I think there’s a reasonable chunk of the population that would assume malicious intent (or at least political intent) in anything coming out of Hollywood. And there might be a fair amount of overlap with folks currently hesitant or outright refusing the vaccine.
I’d be interested in a historian’s take on messaging re: Covid in comparison with messaging re: polio or the like. I think there will be a lot of scholarship in sociology and public health about Covid in the years to come.
I’ve been waiting on the, “Anti- vaccination is un-American. And the conspiracy theories are all a (Russian/Chinese/Iranian) plot to undermine our way of life,” rhetoric. But it never came along.
Consider the way that Biden keeps blaming lockdowns and government measures on the unvaccinated. He keeps saying, everything can go back to normal, if only those annoying unvaccinated people get the jab. Literally "the unvaccinated are undermining our way of life", as you put it. But that's illogical because if the vaccines worked, there'd be no need for any more measures. People could decide to take it or not and deal with the consequences themselves. Health insurers could take it into account in their premium calculations, if necessary.
Instead they are keeping the measures and using them as an excuse to pit Americans against each other. In reality the measures will never end until people collectively insist they are removed. Israel is a good demonstration of what happens in a country with high levels of compliance: over a million people who thought they were vaccinated, are now having their passes revoked, because they didn't get a booster shot. How many "boosters" are necessary for this particular vaccine? Probably an infinite number. They certainly are not any way to restore life to normal given government attitudes so far.
Your logic seems short there. People are still falling ill and filling up hospitals, and these are primarily the unvaccinated. If the vaccine workee and everyone took it then we can reduce the restrictions, oh hey this is a comment thread about a country that's doing exactly that... does that mean the vaccine is working? Zomg!
Imagine a row of houses, and the ones at the left side are on fire. Firefighters are spraying the houses from the right with retardant so they will only be slightly charred if the fire reached them. In my mind whar you're proposing is analogous to wanting the firefighters to stop spraying the stuff after 60% of the houses got the spray.
Most of the stats claiming this are heavily manipulated, for example by using "everyone since the start of the epidemic" as the denominator for unvaccinated people. The US agencies have been especially bad at this, with their 99% claims (not at all true, as their own leaked documents show). Stats that don't play this kind of game show a much less convincing effectiveness.
But even if your point were completely true, it has nothing to do with logic. It's just the latest talking point that will be gone in five minutes. Hospital demand has always been built out to meet demand. If unvaccinated people end up in hospital more often, they could just be charged more via insurers to pay for the additional capacity, same as the obese or those who smoke and get lung cancer or those who do extreme sports. There is no actual reason to force everyone to take a vaccine to manage hospital capacity, and in fact places with relatively low vaccination rates are not experiencing a hospital crisis of any kind (see: Switzerland).
And even if you don't agree with that last paragraph, it's irrelevant because the topic we're discussing in this sub-thread is whether there's been government propaganda! And there certainly has been, vast amounts of it, it's just effective enough that some people can't see it for what it is. The unvaccinated are systematically demonized by governments and painted as dangerous including to the vaccinated, which is upside-down world thinking. It's no different to how people were described as "un-American" when they opposed the war in Iraq.
> Most of the stats claiming this are heavily manipulated
Are you saying the states taking the extraordinary steps of rationing hospital care because of capacity problems don't really have full hospitals but are letting patients die based on manipulated stats? That...is an extraordinary claim that needs some support more than vague handwaving.
1. The hospitals that are busy firing health workers due to vaccine mandates are having capacity problems? Of course they are. That's an inevitable consequence of reducing staffing at a time when you need more. It's the result of bad government policy.
2. Statistical claims being manipulated. Consider the claim that 99% of hospitalizations are in the unvaccinated, made quite recently by US authorities. This stat didn't match stats from any other country, because it was a lie. The CDC's own internal presentations show this, clear as day. See for yourself:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/context/cdc-breakthrough-infe...
Slide 4. The graph shows that already in May 15% of people hospitalized for COVID were vaccinated. Not 1% at all, although this claim was being made far more recently than May. And, it was climbing quickly, as would be expected from the stats released by other countries.
You're also mixing things. Sure in your mind these 2 things might be interchangeable, but staff doesn't equal bed. Got any detailed information that links the two? Who knows if the fired staff are even the Covid nurses, or if they're e.g. people who work in the hospital kitchen.
Bed capacity is mostly a synonym for worker capacity. When people talk about hospitals being "full" they don't mean literally physically full - that's why the emergency hospitals that were built never got used even though the press keep telling you that hospitals are overflowing. Here's a random recent example of such an article:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/covid-vaccine-mandate-h...
"Across the country, health-care systems that have instituted mandates have seen some workers leave or be terminated over their refusal to get the shot, exacerbating a shortage in skilled nursing and bedside care."
Another: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/new-york-hospitals-face-sta...
"NEW YORK, Sept 27 (Reuters) - New York hospitals on Monday began firing or suspending healthcare workers for defying a state order to get the COVID-19 vaccine, and resulting staff shortages prompted some hospitals to postpone elective surgeries or curtail services ... Erie County Medical Center in Buffalo suspended elective inpatient surgeries and had stopped accepting intensive-care patients from other hospitals as it prepares to fire hundreds of unvaccinated employees, a spokesman Peter Cutler said."
Note: before they were OK, accepting ICU patients and doing elective surgeries. After: they can't handle electives or ICU intake anymore. That isn't being caused by unvaccinated people getting so sick they're flooding out all the other operations, it's caused by hospitals being forced to shed staff.
At any rate, isolated hospitals can easily run out of staffed beds for many reasons and this is a phenomenon that predates COVID. That's why there are stories about overflowing hospitals from the flu in pre-COVID years. As the article notes there were already problems but this is now making it worse.
So staffing levels are not genuinely a COVID problem, let alone an unvaccinated COVID problem. If it were true that unvaccinated COVID = overflow then it'd be the case everywhere. Look at the Swiss dashboard:
https://www.covid19.admin.ch/en/hosp-capacity/total
COVID utilization is low during the entire pandemic, with ~25% at its peak (but still lots of spare beds, i.e. a lot of these cases are infections of people already there for something else). There has never been a time throughout the whole two years when there wasn't plenty of spare capacity - in fact they've been reducing the number of beds allocated to ICU during 2021 because the level of nursing care required for them is expensive.
Now look at vaccination rate on the same dashboard. Only 64% of the population has even taken one dose. Yet, the hospitals are fine and there are thousands of free beds. There is nothing magical about the Swiss people or hospitals. You can find similar graphs for US regions, I think (I am just less familiar with them). Rather, looking at the raw data tells a very different story to what the press and governments are telling.
So, are you pro restrictions for the unvaccinated, and pro control of public events with such certificates, then?
Also, to clarify, those thousands of free beds in Switzerland are not ICU beds, they don't even have 1000 ICU beds in total: https://www.covid19.admin.ch/en/hosp-capacity/icu . So, don't confuse those 2 either.
Obviously I know the graphs are total capacity and not ICU. I even mentioned that. The point is identical if considering ICU beds.
I guess the answer is no, you won't answer point (2).
https://api.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/jul/22/joe-biden/...
So Biden says in July a number which was valid 6 weeks beforehand, before Delta became much more prevalent (feel free to fact-check me there), the PDF in the WaPo URL is from late July. In your conspiracy theorist mind this talking point (he's an old geezer politician using an almost 100% number to shock...) means the government is manipulating statistics across the board.
Yeah ok mate, believe what you want.
Yes, I do think that the President of the USA should - when citing statistics about health to justify forcing people to take medical interventions - actually use accurate statistics. And that such stats should not have to come to light through press leaks. Do you disagree?
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Conspiracy logic cannot be argued with because if commitment is strong enough everything that is seen as contrary evidence is just incorporated. "Oh great, now they're pretending they're apolitical!" etc. You've seen it already with other military personnel on different issues.
Also the culture in continental Europe vis-a-vis the military is entirely different. It's not that it's less political but more so, a lot of European countries even in very relative history have been governed by military authority at times. one only needs to look at the shocked "army in the streets" articles after every terror attack in the english-speaking press. I don't think this can be transplanted to the US.
If someone would try to make too much of right wing kind of stuff, "April never again" would be chanted on the streets.
Unfortunately, when my generation is gone, that kind of resistance will be gone as well.
Who do you think that has earned the stripes and the authority to answer your questions then?
FOX news?, a Russian troll farm?, Beyonce?, Jesus?
Please propose somebody that you would trust and why you think that should be seen as an expert in this field, so we can solve this obstacle and move on with our lives.
Presumably, a whole society, even in limited though adequate number, of experts who are capable of reassuring by asking the same questions the subject may raise, and providing convincing answers, and by avoiding acting with the most unconvincing signals. "The incumbent shall have an elephant detector and will positively and publicly acknowledge and properly assess all the specimens found in the rooms s/he will be assigned to".
Suppose that John was waiting for the availability of some treatment. Then John is reached by information about side effects of concern. It is normal that John will see something outside initial expectations ("a few days of distress owing to bodily reaction") around him (say, persistent inconveniences of some, maybe a few critical occurrences of somebody else - "Mary has been itching for three months", "Lucy's mother fell out of the window"), and by looking for further information he will reach extreme but unreliable information ("Anon wrote on a web billboard his cousin caught fire within four days of inoculation"). The expectation of John will probably be that these cases will be actively explained by theory and assessed case by case, at least in a representative sample (e.g. subject to active monitoring). What he will encounter will easily be worlds with little and scarcely effective inter-communication: publications for academics containing large number of pages relevant to general topic but none apparently assessing the questions emerging from his experience; "renegade" researchers speaking of toxicity; no mention of said toxicity elsewhere. Adding to that, the scenario is made more complex and/or confusing through the message of articles like "The final nail in the coffin of medical research";, through increasing diffusion of lapidary password constructs (take 'safe and effective' - which is not per se meaningful as its two members are not absolute, yet it is proposed (even here, nearby) as a final judgement); through the usual lunatics making extraordinary claims; through a public debate that obsessively refers to the usual lunatics, factually honouring them as The Interlocutors of choice; through censorship (Lex Fridman denounced it and went on to say that at the MIT researchers have started preferring to remain quiet and silent); through the extension of the same into principles that e.g. forbid the statement that 'vaccines are dangerous' (YouTube), which is a complete reinvention of the language, so even the common ground of communication is gone (as now for "dangerous" an arbitrary threshold is set and in the new vernacular fighting for dominance paracetamol, water, the sun are not dangerous anymore); through a defence of a principle of responsibility about the consequences of how a tick and a mouse may interpret your words (but not the consequences of how intellectual profession and principles bend under the weights of a tick and a mouse).
In all of that John will continue wondering "how and why had Mary been itching for months, and why was not that brought clearly to topic: all of that cannot be normal". John will not only expect explanations that put his experience into theoretical context, but also a slice of some system in which problematic experience is treated as expected: as something pending waiting for answers.
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Edit: your post now reads, «Its a start at least, but that's still very vague»: you must have edited while I was writing: you know this is not the original poster writing, right?
Just for the record. The original post was: "This is still very vague, can you specify more?"
I think that it sounded a little harsh and I was not the meaning that I wanted to express so I changed it. Is this a problem to you?
There is little hidden about what is unconvincing in the situation. I just submitted an article from The Atlantic, "The Myth That Democracies Bungled the Pandemic" (they do not, to the reading of some data by that author), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28748382 , and in providing a few quotations in the opening post I noted a there reported statement from Francis Fukuyama:
> it is not necessarily democracy but “whether citizens trust their leaders, and whether those leaders preside over a competent and effective state” that is crucial to defeating a pandemic
This is another way to express the issue, and another formulation of The Reply to a reading of your post as "what does one demand to trust": trustworthiness.
That's what I've been told in a private conversation by a published researcher at NIH, who does mRNA research for therapeutic vaccines.
I don't know what to think of this. Known him for years. I don't think he has any motive here, and he is also fully vaccinated, so no antivaxx angle either.
Given the absence of that, it is sufficient for people to make their own decisions based on whatever sources they personally find adequate. There is no need for fights over which organization gets to be the anointed provided of truth.
Personally, I don't feel a need for any of these self-proclaimed "experts". The data from public statistics is clear enough, as is evidence collected by talking to people around me.
When the USA is having massive numbers of deaths and severe lasting illnesses, due to refusal to take the safe and effective vaccines and other necessary precautions, this opinion is just not tenable.
It's literally causing deadly disease, at scale. If that's not classifiable as "pathological", then I don't know what is.
Specifically, Dr. Fauci discouraged people from wearing masks, not because there was a shortage and they needed to be saved for front-line medical workers (the real reason), but because - he claimed at the time - they were not particularly effective.
"When you're in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it's not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And often there are unintended consequences. People keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face."
At this point, it is dishonest to characterize Americans' distrust of medical authority as pathological. The distrust is well and truly deserved.
If you're not happy with nuance, probabilities rather than certainties, and changing understandings of a new situation then the modern world might not be for you.
To be clear, you're saying that the avoidable unvaccinated disease mass casualties, are not pathological, i.e. illness-related, because, that mask guy the one time? That seems more like the kind of bogus reason that people seize upon to explain what they want to believe, than a logical explanation.
The subject is trustworthiness of the public health authorities. They lie repeatedly in order to manipulate the public, there have been no consequences, and so it's rational to assume they're still doing it. You're trying to claim there's no link between a willingness to lie about one COVID related topic and willingness to lie about others, which is clearly wrong.
But really, why bother. The propaganda has worked on you like a treat: you're arguing the science "evolved"! It did not evolve. That's an attempt to cover up what's really been happening. Public health authorities and scientists directly and knowingly lied about it to achieve policy goals, and in many cases, that's now either been admitted by them directly (with masks, herd immunity thresholds) or it's been proven in other ways (by DRASTIC).
You are a pathological conspiracy theorist.
Stop making personal attacks. Engage with the material, not with the person, or don't engage at all. Calling someone a "pathological conspiracy theorist" is beyond the pale.
Citation needed. I am very sceptical of that, even with the caveats of "among the most plausible".
> Stop making personal attacks
if you're going to go there, why not start with "The propaganda has worked on you like a treat"
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I've just seen this, and I don't recall any previous occurrences.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25394614 (Dec 2020)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20418617 (July 2019)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9748856 (June 2015)
Would really appreciate it if you'd review the guidelines and stick to the intended spirit of the site, including editing out any swipes that make it in to your posts. The way I look at this is: even if you don't (or feel you don't) owe the person you're replying to better, you owe the community better if you're participating in it.
None of these posts, including parent here, are editable or even deletable by me.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This is just absurd. Did our medical establishment not understand at all how masks worked before 2020? They were just guessing the whole time until COVID happened?
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/07/why-arent...
And an interesting read today: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/10/why-ameri...
>there is still much to learn about the effectiveness of masking.
So in summary, no, it's not absurd at all. Why would you say that?
As per parent comment that dwelling on the masks was veering off topic, could you address _vaccine hesitancy_ in this context?
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.... Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Or do you think that "nobody is "pathologically questioning" anything around vaccines" ? If so, what part of the above do you disagree with?
Perhaps that's a more nuanced way to put it. Fair warning, I view the first paragraph as a filter for cranks, trolls and the deluded. Those who deny reality.
This is factually incorrect. it is dangerous scaremongering to say "the vaccine is useless".
"imperfect" not the same as "useless". This is simplistic, binary, "all or nothing" thinking that should have no place in this discussion. As stated before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28699570
If you want to use some qualification of ‘pathologically questioning’ you’ll have to define what it is. So it’s clear what kind of questions you want forbidden.
It would be nice to state in advance that you have abandoned logic and that any discussion with you is pointless.
As I said, "Anything taken to excess is a flaw" - there is always a limit somewhere. That does not in itself make everything "no true scotsman!"
In this case, it is. Now that the Vice-Admiral is done with the vaccinations, all he wants is to be promoted to Admiral (which led to a kerfuffle between the President and the Government). He wants no political post whatsoever.
In fact, there was a doctor ahead of vaccination task force before, but he was pushed aside after supporting one of the losing candidates for president.
Everyone still wears masks indoors and in built up areas, sanitiser was available everywhere, people checked our vaccination status when sitting indoors.
They're not major points but it definitely felt like people went out of their way to be conscious of others and the virus which is different to how I feel people in the UK treat the virus now (eg mask usage on the tube is virtually non existent).
Most of this is largely anecdotal on my part but I feel countries that continue to do a little now will get long term benefits (eg mandatory mask use in public transport)
That may be because you didn't know how many of those around you got their 2nd shot before last spring, and that masks don't significantly help. But it's important how you "feel", I get that.
"Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine antibodies gone by 7 months for many" - https://news.trust.org/item/20211001194329-xkwip
You may sometime want to consider the cost of government policies that has to be borne by other, unwilling participants in those schemes.
You mean how authoritarian it felt. I can't believe people's brains have devolved over the past 18 months to the point that seeing a society live in constant fear and have to present papers gestapo-style to participate in society is perceived as "wow I feel safe here". You'd have loved to live under fascism, because of how "safe" you would feel under your extreme government authority.
To force entire societies into compliance with all sorts of insane rules, because some people haven’t vaccinated is insane. Because that’s what this is.
Even if you think you are making your society safe by following all your redirections, you are basically accepting authoritarianism because of anti vaxxers and edge cases. Is it worth it?
Fascism, brains turning into cheese and people acting like a flock of sheep is the definition of Qanon. Couldn't be more alien to Portuguese society.
The interesting question is why other countries don't understand the idea.
How true! It's so odd that these people believe themselves to be the enlightened critical thinkers. Sadly their evidence-gathering stops at the first blog with a URL like covidtruth.news that tells them what they want to hear.
There is more nuance to masks. They cover your face! They make it easier to avoid surveillance. Maybe the purpose is to prevent snot and phlegm from becoming air born. Because they are a terribe mechanism of control.
People can make personal choices to comply without it being driven by fear. But your attitude is driven by fear.
Wasn’t the promise in most countries that once that level of vaccination is achieved we can go back to normal?
Or can we just be clear that it’s masks for everyone forever from now on, because that’s what people who want to feel safe want.
This isn’t about COVID any more. It can’t be, because everyone’s had a chance to get vaccinated.
At what point can we go back to pre covid regulations/laws? What level of booster effectiveness would make you feel comfortable?
Do you even want things to go back to pre covid? Or would you prefer everyone wear masks for common colds and flu (common colds kill the elderly too btw).
What death rate is acceptable to you for covid before things get back to normal? Should we lock down on severe flu seasons in the future?
I'd genuinely like to understand how you see the future, I'm not trolling you.
I work on the assumption that every nation's experts are working from similar frameworks.
We already encourage people to get flu vaccines, to be allowed time off work when infectious, run education campaigns on what does and doesn't help with flu, sanitize our hands when entering hospitals or care homes, wash our hands when preparing food and enforce a thousand minor laws, regulations and social customs around that to help keep people healthy from flu and a bunch of other things. All that takes money and time and we do it because the alternative would be worse.
It becoming common in more places to wear masks on public transport during flu season seems entirely reasonable to me and not something I'm particularly worried about especially as it might help with the next Covid, avian flu etc.
Well, for one thing the rational choices are limited - it's not only up to us and our "vision of the future", there's a deadly pandemic that constrain us, and it doesn't care about the politics of masks, it's just looking for warm cells to infect.
It's foolish to think that we "can we go back to pre covid regulations" in a "vision" without evidence that the disease is under firm control. Getting it under control is step 1 to "good" - if that doesn't happen then the rest is noise;
None of our tools are perfect, but you must know the saying "You go to war with the army you have, not the army you want to have".
The places that are getting towards that good state are generally highly vaccinated and use the other measures a lot. Compare California to Texas for instance.
So my question for the people who don't like vaccines and vaccine mandates, and somehow also don't like masks and mask mandates is, what do you like in that regard? What is your plan?
> Or would you prefer everyone wear masks for common colds and flu
Some eastern countries have been doing this for a long time. Why would it be a bad idea if some western countries followed suit?
What I am hearing is that you want people to stop wearing masks so that you feel safer. That the suggestion of a different perspective on something is fear inducing to you.
Maybe what is nice about Portugal is that people are less fearful in general than Anglo countries. People can exist without every little thing being turned into culture war scariness.
Exactly! Just like how we were still wearing masks from the Spanish Flu outbreak 100 years ago.
You do realize your argument is a textbook example of a slippery slope fallacy?
With the start of October, three days ago, masks are only mandatory in Portugal in select high-risk places: https://www.theportugalnews.com/news/2021-09-24/new-rules-fo...
Yeah I know a lot of the anti-authoritarians think this is just the start, the global elite is herding the dumb sheep right? For what end? It seems like the existing capitalism was already fucking the working class very efficiently enough, with said working class willingly participating...
https://twitter.com/ritapanahi/status/1442259246339346432?s=...
Some feel safe when they see that people are attentive - and only when people are attentive. Masks, sanitizers and checks are a formal practice that can easily be overlaid on radically dumb individuals and masses (for example, through conformity). That the acts are there, but not the presence, is still in the family of "superstition" (the ideas that survive their forgotten grounds and reasons).
Only minutes ago "a friend of mine" was forced to partial exposure because somebody in the street wanted to have a conversation, but while smoking, so mask on the chin: that means not having understood one meagre shard. This is not root-wise the behaviour of those who remove the mask when they want to speak and put it back when they have finished, which is more of a sign of deficiency of quantitative intelligence: it is instead a sign of defective presence to general contexts and specific situations - of shallow assimilation, together with radical inattentiveness. Very many people here show that.
Other words could be spent for those who assume that vaccination equals immunity (hence behave irresponsibly).
One will feel safe when the population will pass the basics of understanding their own behaviour.
And it is not just about epidemics.
Are you sure that you aren't the brainwashed one?
So, where do you see "brainwashing" there?