> In fact, that’s exactly why the mandates may be working so well. If all the unvaccinated truly believed that vaccines were that dangerous, more of them would have quit. These mandates may be making it possible for those people previously frozen in fear to cross the line, but in a face-saving manner.
I wonder if the author is aware how many families can't afford to miss a paycheck without facing severe consequences (hell, nyt has covered this itself). With that context, the above quote seems more than a little silly.
It feels like you’re arguing their point from the other direction: people hate admitting being wrong, especially if they’re in a community where most of their friends were also wrong, so it’s hard to say “that stuff my uncle shared about vaccines was rubbish, I should have done this 6 months ago” — it’s much easier to save face in that group to say “I wasn’t going to, but I can’t afford to lose my job”.
Sure, some people hate admitting when they're wrong. But I have to imagine that pales in comparison to how much they hate being evicted, risking having their families split up, not being able to afford food or medical care, etc.
It just seems oblivious for the author to say that people complied because deep down they knew it was right, when that author's colleagues have written about the actual dangers these people would face if they lost their income.
This sounds like a misunderstanding: the point is that people knew getting vaccinated was right all along but rather than at some point they probably started to accept that their concerns had been overblown — likely supported by seeing so many people around them get vaccinated with no issues — but having taken a strong position earlier increased the psychological weight of formally reversing it. Here's a sentence right before the quote up-thread:
> They’ve made bad decisions earlier and now may be frozen, part in fear, and unable to admit their initial hesitancy wasn’t a good idea, so they may come back with a version of how they are just doing “more research.”
This kind of decision paralysis can last for ages unless something forces it. Nobody seems to be saying that the consequences of ignoring vaccine mandates aren't real, it's rather quite the opposite: you can come up with hypothetical concerns about any low-probability event but being faced with actually losing something you care about forces that to be put into perspective. It's similar to how a fair number of people worry about air travel but hop on a plane when the alternative is a cross-country drive — rationally looking at crash statistics isn't as effective for those people as the misery factor of a long drive.
So this may just be something that we have differing opinions on. If we say (number of compliers) = (people who wanted to save face and needed an out) + (people who are living paycheck to paycheck) + (whatever other reason), my guess is that the last two components would dominate the equation, but that's just my gut.
The excerpt you quoted also kind of bothered me because it presupposes that getting vaccinated immediately was the right idea. Just because someone slapped the label "vaccine" on something doesn't mean you should jump to receive it as early as possible. Not everyone wants to be an early adopter, and there's good reason for that.
I would characterize the last part a bit differently: many people understandably were hesitant to be the earliest adopters, especially those who had relatively low-risk lifestyles (plenty of 80 year olds were jumping after losing friends), but I think there's a difference between someone who is planning to get it in a few months and someone who takes a public position opposing it. In the latter case, your credibility is on the line and it's very easy to surround yourself with a self-reinforcing bubble of people saying the same things. That acts like a ratchet where at each point it's easier to continue down the path rather than say that was totally overblown.
Yeah, I think we're imagining different people when we read the article. I'm thinking of people who are just quietly going about their lives. It seems like you may be thinking more of people who are vocal about this kind of thing, the crazy uncles on fb, who I tend to think are the minority (just based on what I've seen around me).
What I’m thinking more of are the people I knew who got into a religion/philosophy, even a diet, etc. where they read a bit & trusted some of the people they met who sounded like they knew a lot more. Some of what they said they believed in a lot, some of it was just going along with their group identity.
If you directly confronted them about an inconsistency or them not personally following one of those rules they’d get defensive since at some point they’d staked that out as something they believed but if there was a way to say something had changed or their hand had been forced, they’d take it and move on.
This is projection. There are multiple modes of approaching communication and not everyone uses the mode where communication is an exercise in one-upmanship.
Can you explain why you think that's projection, or one-upmanship? The point wasn't even about communication but how people rationalize the decisions they make — offering people ways to change without admitting fault is a pretty common strategy in many contexts.
Note that I said “admitting” — I personally do prefer becoming more correct over time but it's hardly a novel suggestion that most people do not enjoy having to retract a previous public position. This is everywhere in society from casual use of terms like “saving face” to work by psychologists, economists, etc. on how to support people making better choices rather than being ruled by the sunk cost of past decisions. This is why public retractions have such weight: even people who like being right don't enjoy that part of the process.
This isn't about treating communication as a contest with only one winner but rather about the subjective feeling of the person making these decisions. Having built it up into a big deal increased the costs of reversal but the mandate changes the dynamic and gives them the option of saying the choice was no longer theirs — if they get vaccinated, that's a better outcome for everyone even if they never admit the bad call.
If they're truly convinced that vaccine = death, then would they really choose death in combination with the paycheck?
I guess in this case the threat of those severe consequences is good enough to make them reevaluate, maybe they'll see that maybe a billion people have been vaccinated with the mRNA vaccines and there hasn't been a mass die-out and in their mind this is how they convince themselves it'll be ok...
Some other anti-vaxxers believe in vaccine timebombs (I've seen someone write on FB "Just wait until April 2022 and all the vaccinated will drop dead", just as convinced like the people who believed the world was going to end in December 2012), and I've also read that such timebomb is very unlikely, but hey, if there is such a timebomb, that last paragraph of mine will be very ironic indeed.
> If they're truly convinced that vaccine = death, then would they really choose death in combination with the paycheck?
I think the title of the article applies here. What proportion of the unvaccinated do you think equate the shot with death? If they're worried about potential long term effects (just for one example, whether you believe they're possible or not), it'd be hard to prioritize that over feeding their kids next week.
This may be controversial, but the term "antivaxer" really deserves to be deprecated. It means too many different things to different people. It's a sloppy caricature that leads to sloppy thinking, but we see it being used all over the place.
> In New York, for example, only 42 percent of African Americans of all ages (and 49 percent among adults) are fully vaccinated — the lowest rate among all demographic groups tracked by the city.
Aren't all New York businesses supposed to be checking people for vaccination status? Given that African Americans are the demographic with the lowest vaccination rates, doesn't that policy disproportionately affect them? I thought we weren't supposed to implement systems like that anymore.
It’s the difference between your restaurant asking everyone their status versus only asking Black people because they’re statistically more likely to be at risk. Policies which are evenly applied and based on a clear public health benefit aren’t the problem.
> But the new wisdom is that any policy which disproportionately affects a certain group is racist.
That doesn't sound like an accurate interpretation of that document. Here's the non-strawman version:
> Policies that are purported to be “color-blind” or “race-neutral” have all too frequently been designed to benefit White children and families, and harm children and families of color directly and indirectly.
…
> In the past, public policy has too often been siloed, and policies intended to support children have failed to address the larger struggles their families face. Policy has even actively undermined families in the name of protecting children—as we see with the child welfare system, which disproportionately threatens and separates Black and Indigenous children from their loved ones.
What that's getting at is the idea that there are many cases where policies did not incorporate an explicit racial check but still produce that outcome. For example, if your city has a magnet school which doesn't have good bus service, it could act as a racial filter if a higher percentage of white families can afford to own cars, even if nobody who set the policy had that goal. That policy would be bad because the filtering effect would be real and isn't relevant to the stated goals of the program — whereas having, say, a height threshold for a basketball team is pretty reasonable because that's directly linked to performance, whereas it wouldn't make much sense for, say, a biathlon team.
In the context of that article, this is a notorious problem in the child welfare system where you have major events based on subjective judgements about the quality and safety of the home environment or the ability of families to provide for a child. It doesn't need to have a “Is this person black?” question on a form to still have negative outcomes if there are subjective factors like predominantly white middle-class caseworkers feeling less safe in a poor majority-black neighborhood and that influencing their assessments. That's what they're talking about when they say that polices must recognize how these different factors intersect — it's awareness, not an absolute, and it's an attempt to correct for the way data-driven decisions can still be skewed by societal biases.
Going back to this discussion, as I explained the difference is that the policy is clearly linked to a simple, neutral objective (everyone gets sick, nobody wants to) and the way to comply with it is easily available to everyone at no cost. That's not racist because it's not based on fixed attributes which people cannot change and there's no significant barrier to compliance. In contrast, a policy which, say, said people who are at elevated risk of sickle cell anemia couldn't eat a restaurant would be racist because there's no plausible safety justification for such a policy, everyone would know why that one “objective” factor was selected, and there's nothing which an affected person could do change to comply with the policy.
> and there's no significant barrier to compliance
Imagine that you have two part time jobs, and you are just barely covering rent and other expenses. If you get vaccinated, you might have to miss a day or two. As a result, your boss might cut your hours or just fire you outright.
Is that not a significant barrier? Who would you think is more likely to be in this kind of situation?
Again, you have to look at the odds: that person is far more likely to miss work from getting COVID than getting vaccinated — very few people have significant reactions requiring multiple days off of work — and most employers are allowing leave above the legal minimum.
Also, let's not forget the context of this thread: a quote about New York business' vaccination status checks. That person barely getting by working two part-time jobs probably isn't spending their time on the indoor dining, bars, gyms, etc. where that requirement applies:
So to the extent that there's a genuine concern here, I would think it would make more sense to focus on places which have a combination of a vaccination mandate but not a leave requirement. I would be surprised if that was common since typically the politicians opposed to one of those policies would also oppose the other.
> Again, you have to look at the odds: that person is far more likely to miss work from getting COVID than getting vaccinated — very few people have significant reactions requiring multiple days off of work — and most employers are allowing leave above the legal minimum
It's not you or I that have to look at the odds though, it's our hypothetical person. Will they make the same calculation we would?
The point about mandated sick leave is a good one, definitely helps.
> Also, let's not forget the context of this thread: a quote about New York business' vaccination status checks. That person barely getting by working two part-time jobs probably isn't spending their time on the indoor dining, bars, gyms, etc. where that requirement applies:
I don't think I can get behind this part. Maybe somebody takes them out on a date once in a while, their friends want to buy them a drink, they need a quick bite on the way to work. Little things that help make that kind of life a little more bearable. We can't just say well they couldn't afford these things anyway, so what does it matter if we don't allow them in.
Your argument is really disingenous, you're trying to imply the policy is racist due to the fact it'll affect more African Americans.
Well, if the policy was aimed at a property a particular group can't change or easily change (e.g. entry to the club only if your income is higher than $100K, or your postcode is X (where X = the white area of town)), then it is discriminatory. But here the choice to be admitted or not is easily changed by any individual, by choosing to be vaccinated or not.
I’m happy to get the vaccine in ~March 2022 if they are shown to be safe and effective having been deployed for more than one year. At the moment I see rather mixed signals about safety and efficacy.
That’s because you’re getting your news from partisan sources who are misleading you for political or financial reasons.
The vaccines have been in testing since the spring of 2020 and have repeatedly been shown to be both safe and effective at reducing your risk and ability to spread to others. At this point they’ve been given to a billion people – because of the way vaccines work you’re not making yourself safer by waiting a second year and you are far more at risk from getting COVID in the meantime than any reported side effects.
No actually it’s because I use my common sense to know that a vaccine that didn’t even begin testing before spring 2020 does not have a long enough track record to assure safety. I don’t care what you heard on your news.
What scientific education and experience is your common sense based on? If you haven't studied this area, why do you feel more qualified to say it's unsafe than the people who have spent their entire careers focused on it?
For example, what is the longest recorded delay between a vaccine being administered and a side-effect being observed? Vaccines trigger an immune response but aren't in your body for a long period of time, so you typically see reactions within a few hours or days — the record is something like 6 weeks, so multiple years would be quite the outlier.
The other key thing to remember is that this isn't some hypothetical question about risks in absolute: your odds of being one of the very few people who have a significant vaccine side-effect has to be weighed against the much higher probability of having significant health impacts from COVID-19. “Neither” is not an option any of us get to pick.
yet interestingly, if they weigh those odds and come down on the side of waiting for more information, you come after them and tell them they're wrong while simultaneously telling them they must weigh the odds.
You don't actually want them weighing the odds, you just want to imply they're wrong without being histrionic about it.
No, I want them to weigh the odds in a rational manner. We have a ton of data and it's been well analyzed at this point, consistently supporting the vaccines being safe and effective.
When asked, the person I was responding to admitted that they didn't do that but were instead relying on “common sense”. If they had some real data, a concern based on some real mechanism which would explain why it's risky for them personally in a way that doesn't show up in the population-level statistics, etc. that could be something to discuss because there would be a claim which could be evaluated scientifically.
> When asked, the person I was responding to admitted that they didn't do that but were instead relying on “common sense”. If they had some real data, a concern based on some real mechanism which would explain why it's risky for them personally in a way that doesn't show up in the population-level statistics, etc. that could be something to discuss because there would be a claim which could be evaluated scientifically.
They did exactly that, to quote them:
"I use my common sense to know that a vaccine that didn’t even begin testing before spring 2020 does not have a long enough track record to assure safety."
No reasonable person is going to interpret this as "they admitted they didn't weigh the risks".
My favorite part is how you set the bar to "something that can be evaluated scientifically", without also admitting that __"SCIENCE", IS IN THE MIDDLE OF EVALUATING__.
This is the reason no one trusts people like you, your willingness to dishonesty and misrepresentation makes you untrustworthy. Nothing anyone says will change anything other than the bar you claim others should be clearing, said bar just so happening to cause everyone to land on your opinion.
Not even the CDC takes a stance as strong as yours.
> No reasonable person is going to interpret this as "they admitted they didn't weigh the risks".
You know, you can see what I actually wrote in the quote — note the key word missing from this paraphrase: rational. I am certain that they made a subjective assessment of the risks — my point was that they hadn't critically analyzed that decision but still want it to be treated as equal in merit to the scientific consensus.
A key part of science is testing your beliefs: that's what the scientists who've spent decades working on mRNA vaccines did, that's what the extensive trials leading up to approval were for, and it's quite telling that you are both not doing that and trying to claim that ongoing monitoring means that the results of that earlier work are unreliable. Yes, scientists are still evaluating evidence — that's what they do! — but when it consistently points to the same conclusion over a long period of time and has been used to make accurate predictions, it starts to be considered a consensus.
I think the worst part of your entire post is that your argument boils down to it being irrational to wait until more complete information is known.
Let me quote them again so we're clear on the context that started this conversation.
> ... a vaccine that didn’t even begin testing before spring 2020 __does not have a long enough track record to assure safety__.
Lets consider how you responded
"why do you feel more qualified to say it's unsafe than the people who have spent their entire careers focused on it?"
I would love for you to explain why that's a reasonable response to what the other poster said. Or explain how the other posters statement is irrational.
Because that's the major problem people like you have. You even start attacking me for the egregious wrongthink of not calling someone irrational for having the opinion that we can't be assured of its safety __YET__.
And I realize I'm not going to get through to you, but here's an observation for you.
When you start lumping such middle-of-the-road opinions in with people who believe covid can be spread through 5G networks it's possible you're part of the problem.
Haven't there been new black box warnings in the last couple months? That the side effects reveal themselves in the short term on the individual basis is no real comfort when we warn about them after years of testing.
> the record is something like 6 weeks, so multiple years would be quite the outlier.
You have to be very careful with this kind of informal statements, because probability is a tricky thing.
For example, assume that a vaccine has a probability P of causing long-term bad effects and that we observe historically that 1000 vaccines have no long-term bad effects. What can we rationally say about P? It would be tempting to conclude that P is zero or at least negligibly small (maybe 2^(-1000) or something). However, this cannot be the correct answer because if P were 1/1000, you would observe the historical pattern with probability .999^1000 ~= 1/e, or about 1/3 of the time. A more sophisticated analysis would conclude that it is very likely that P is somewhere between 0 and 2/1000, and if you believe a thing called the "Laplace Rule of Succession", the expected value of P is something like 1/1002.
Now, 1000 widely deployed vaccines sounds like a reasonable upper bound to the number of vaccines ever produced, which would suggest that the probability of this vaccine being safe is probably 100% but the error bar is O(1/1000). O(1/1000) is about the same as the probability of the virus killing me, so it is perfectly rational to have doubts.
The risk is certainly not zero but the calculation isn't that simple because the underlying mechanism isn't random. Vaccines work by training your immune system and don't persist in your body; for long-term concerns what we're really looking for is evidence that there's a previously-unknown time delay mechanism for immune responses or evidence of something specific to a disease such as the way Dengue fever can be more severe on a second infection (which is why the vaccine is restricted to people with a prior laboratory-confirmed infection).
Again, I'm not saying that there's no chance of a problem but by now a billion people have been vaccinated and a significant number of people are 18+ months out, with no indication that any of these hypothetical scenarios are actually happening.
I don’t care whatsoever what so-called experts think. This is how I evaluate risk:
1. Are we dealing with complex mechanisms that are not fully understood? (in this case, human biology and immune response)
2. Are we operating in an environment that is itself complex and weakly understood? (in this case, the broader ecosystem including other viruses and new variants)
3. Do we have clear channels/signals of information? (do we have all the reliable and comparable stats we’d like, anything approaching controlled experimental data etc)
4. Are there incentives for people to distort the information? (are their significant monetary and political factors weighing on outcomes)
Left as exercise to the reader to apply this to covid.
The worst part is the other poster claiming you only believe that because of the misinformation of your news sources, not realizing they also have news sources which could be misinforming them.
It's reasonable to be leery of a vaccine produced in such a small amount of time when most vaccines go through much more rigor.
And making claims such as "it's been thoroughly tested" is balderdash. It's like claiming your software has been thoroughly tested because you push straight to production with minimal testing after someone says they won't use your software because they don't want to be the testers of your software.
We're still learning about both the virus and the vaccine. In 10 years we'll be a lot more confident in our knowledge, and what's "known" about it will be a lot more trustworthy.
Considering it's none of your (or society's) business if they choose to get vaccinated or not, you shouldn't be asking those questions.
Also, I'm sure by 2/5/10 years the virus will have mutated down to the point it's endemic and similar enough in nature to the common cold and we won't be needing these experimental vaccines.
The only thing you can do to protect yourself is get vaccinated.
That's the only thing you can control - encouraging governments and employers to force rushed medical treatments upon their citizens, through threats and acts of violence will only further vaccine hesitancy or put a damper on vaccine uptake.
Covid will be around forever and there's nothing anybody can do about it.
Nope, with a vaccination it'll be finally comparable to a bad flu (like all those deniers said in the beginning). Portugal has 98% vaccination and has now dropped most of its restrictions.
As someone who's vaccinated I do wish the governments would drop all the restrictions and let all the refusers deal with their own mess, but luckily for us governments have a duty of care* for all of society, including the beligerent members, and overfull hospitals disadvantage the vaccinated too.
* Although some politicians in power seem to be sacrificing the lives and health of their citizens to sabotage their "enemies", e.g. in Florida and Texas.
For the sake of making clarity, after almost two years of mess: in Portugal over 88% of the population is vaccinated (2% of which only partially), which is 98% of the eligible.
Really depends on the information at that point of time. We can already see clearly that the vaccines don’t prevent infection or contagion, so the urgency to get vaccinated is gone. I remain in a very low risk group. Data on possible vaccine side-effects and excess deaths is worrying. But the wild card is so-called “long covid.”
The first thing reporters should adjust is their honesty. Your fears about how a message could be perceived negatively becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy if a lie is detected. That a lie will be detected in today's world is very high, so calming or noble lies carry a lot of risks.
Additionally it should quickly communicated what people can and cannot know. If an unknown disease breaks out, nobody knows how dangerous or deadly it is and what helps against it or not. You don't even need a good justification if you enact restrictions as a precautionary measure with clear boundaries for reevaluation if civil rights are affected.
I think only high trust countries went through this relatively unscathed.
As a side note, emergencies are taken a lot less serious because of disastrous and incompetent anti-terrorism policies. We had emergency legislation throughout the western world for the last decade and a half.
> Instead, we need to develop a realistic, informed and deeply pragmatic approach to our shortcomings without ceding ground to the conspiracists, grifters, and demagogues
Wrong lesson, you just need to be better sources of information. Trying to silence them is the opposite of a sensible approach. This has been done to a scarily effective degree, people have basically been unpersoned. It did not work, you have a bad result now. That is a fact and needs to be accepted first.
I assume when Covid is done, there will be a long discussion about how effective vaccination has been in retrospective. You might want to stay truthful here since it will affect further trust.
This comment mostly echoes common talking points (all of which I agree with), but I really like this nugget of insight:
> I think only high trust countries went through this relatively unscathed.
Off the top of my head that does sound true – I’m thinking of the Nordic countries as usual. I wonder if anyone has tried to quantify this? Maybe by tabulating vaccination uptake against trust in media polls?
I do think there is a phenomenon somewhat akin to overfitting happening when you compare any country to the US. The US produces such overwhelming cultural exports that it’s impossible to analyze any other culture without considering the US itself as a background variable. For example, maybe Norwegians have higher trust in media than Americans partially because they see the disaster unfolding in America and want to avoid the same fate. In many ways the US media/political culture has become the reality show of the world.
As an aside, it’s bizarre that Americans put any trust in media at all. There are no meaningful qualifications required to become a “journalist” other than the ability to consistently output a few thousand words a month. In fact, in many cases people gravitate to journalism because they don’t know what else to do. That’s certainly what I observed at my college newspaper. Some of them who eventually found a path are now working in industry or otherwise attempting to produce value. But the rest of the highflying newspaper staff? They’re blue check marks on Twitter attracting political bot accounts and being retweeted as the voice of media outlets. I find this amusing in light of my personal knowledge that they’re the last people I’d ever ask for an opinion or advice on any topic.
It’s perplexing to me how much we let these reporters shape the conversation in society. For a world of six billion, we sure do have tunnel vision for the opinions of a self-selected, highly connected and decidedly mediocre minority.
Next time you read one of these think pieces with a word count in a multiple of 400, take a minute to imagine the Kanban board that just funneled some morsel of a talking point into your brain.
> Wrong lesson, you just need to be better sources of information.
Ah yes, the Joe Rogan angle: the only way to fight misinformation is to speak the truth louder and more convincingly. How exactly can one have a good faith debate on say, vaccine effectiveness, against an opponent who believes COVID-19 does not exist?
That is effectively what is being proposed by OP. The pro-vaxx side should 'take the high road' 100% of the time and only engage in good faith debate. Speak the truth loudly and proudly, but don't you dare criticize those who peddle 'alternative facts.'
You’ve not addressed my point. If we are going to penalize one side for failing to engage in a good faith debate 100% of the time, we should hold the other side to the same standard as well.
If you group anyone who takes the opposing view together then it is unfortunately easy to spoil the well with false opponents. If I make statements against the idea of a vaccine mandate should my arguments be construed to represent belief that these vaccines induce 5g tracking? No, so those in power are obliged to accept all arguments on their individual merits.
>those in power are obliged to accept all arguments on their individual merits.
Ok, so if you accept that those in power can address arguments on their individual merits, then what is the problem with a private company (youtube, NYtimes etc) removing content so ludicrous and ungrounded in reality that it could hurt people (eg that vaccines contain 5G chips, that covid can be cured by inhaling hydrogen peroxide, or that ICU doctors are actually killing COVID patients)?
I don't see discussions on natural immunity being censored on youtube et al. Yet our administrators in power play talk to the hand on the subject. There is plenty of scientific acknowledgement of the relative risks based on comorbidities including age, obesity and diabetes. Yet those in power proclaim mandate without differentiation. The strongest arguments towards mandating against someones will seem to hinge on ease of administration. No thanks on that!
> Now, just a few months later, these countries, along with 44 others, have surpassed U.S. vaccination rates. And our failure shows: America continues to have among the highest deaths per capita from Covid.
Tying deaths per capita to vaccination rates in such a direct fashion is a bit disingenuous.
The US also has high rates of comorbidities known to increase the likelihood of death from COVID, namely obesity and diabetes.
> The report found that every country where less than 40% of the population was overweight had a low Covid-19 death rate of no more than 10 people per 100,000.
If the government _really_ wanted to do something about the effects of the pandemic (now and beyond), they'd be promoting healthy lifestyle living, encouraging exercising, health education, etc.
They're not - and I'm not too sure how to feel about it.
> The remarkable success of vaccine mandates shows that for many, it is not firm ideological commitments that have kept everyone from getting vaccinated
Yes, if you threaten someone’s livelihood they will do things they don’t want to do, even going against their own conscience.
Why do people pretend like a mandate is a small thing and not a nuclear weapon? For many people they risk not only losing their job, but their benefits (teachers) or even future job prospects (dishonorable discharge).
I know somebody who's very personal to me who took the vaccine because they were threatened with termination of employment.
They live paycheck to paycheck and have a wife and 3 kids to support. They're going to have to live with themselves violating their own personal bodily autonomy because they didn't want their kids ending up on the street.
I personally find it morally reprehensible for any level of "seniority"/"authority" (be it employer, government, peers, etc) to use threats of violence (threatening with loss of employment _is_ an act of violence, I'm not swaying on that).
I don't like how society has gotten very "us vs. them" in the past couple of decades.
> Why do people pretend like a mandate is a small thing and not a nuclear weapon?
Why do people pretend like an extraordinarily contagious novel virus that commonly causes long-term organ damage is a small thing and not the next best thing to a bioweapon?
Why do people pretend that the healthcare system is not collapsing? Why do people pretend that refrigerator trucks full of corpses wasn’t a thing? Why do people pretend that children’s surgeries aren’t currently being canceled in Saskatchewan and Alberta?
Vaccine mandates are, in all reality, “playing nice.” The mandates allow you a number of vaccination choices, you pick the place and time. The “nuclear weapon” is when the state uses its military to enforce compliance: no alternatives, no choices.
The choice is between our society having a functioning healthcare system, or having too many people remain unvaccinated.
> Relentless propaganda against public health measures no doubt contributes to erosion of trust. However, that mistrust may also be fueled by the sorry state of health insurance in this country and the deep inequities in health care — at a minimum, this could make people more vulnerable to misinformation.
The cathedral of government and media will never admit that it has done any wrong. It will always claim that it knows best, and then after conflicting information comes out it will rewrite its own history to claim that it already knew. The thought that major U.S. institutions themselves have lost trust among members of the public through incompetence and condescension is unthinkable to them.
That's cool, because the people I know will never admit they were wrong about hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin.
But that's cool. They can refuse the vaccine at this point but they are 0 for 3 now. And the only thing they ever point to is a couple of weeks where some officials didn't want N95 masks to be hoarded and they made a bad call.
But they were antimask (and still are antimask) despite using this example. So hypocrisy knows no bounds.
Here are some things that I thought that at the time were called "misinformation", "conspiracy theories", and had "no data to support that claim":
Jan. 2020
- The illness in China is much worse than the Chinese are letting on
- The Chinese government is disappearing whistleblowers
Feb. 2020
- The illness in China will become a global pandemic
- The only way to stop the pandemic is to act immediately and enforce full international travel bans, inter-state lockdowns, and invest heavily in virus testing
- COVID-19 is far worse than the flu
- The illness is already in the US even though there aren't confirmed cases yet
Mar. 2020
- People need to withdraw from public life if they can
Apr. 2020
- There is a significant chance that the virus was partially studied or modified in a Wuhan laboratory
Mar. 2021
- The vaccines clearly lead to side effects in certain cases, including neural effects, heart problems, and interactions with the reproductive system
EVERY single time I told people who "trust the science" and "believe the experts" about these topics, it was before any mainstream government or media sources had caught on to these ideas. These ideas, now common knowledge, were derided as misinformation and anyone who believed them were mocked as ignorant at best and deliberately fear-spreading at worst.
I am not fully anti-vaccine; I had the first dose of Pfizer and later had my spike antibodies tested. I haven't had any positive COVID-19 tests because I locked down until eventually taking the vaccine.
I don't care about the idiots you know, I care that the scientific and political institutions in control of this country are attention-seeking frauds that never take responsibility for making incorrect predictions.
> EVERY single time I told people who "trust the science" and "believe the experts" about these topics, it was before any mainstream government or media sources had caught on to these ideas.
This is the hydroxychloroquine dude. This is the political group that has gone towards ivermectin. This political group is __STILL__ making false and misleading claims on a mass scale today.
> I care that the scientific and political institutions in control of this country are attention-seeking frauds that never take responsibility for making incorrect predictions.
Why don't you dig a little deeper? Figure out the forces that caused the problem and blame them a little bit more? Playing down the virus was Trumps reelection plan, and provably so. This coincides with all the other misinformation (hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, and anti-vax attitudes) going on today.
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Look, its cute that you're making issues about what people knew or didn't know in January / February 2020. But I have coworkers who refuse to mask up _TODAY_ and I know people who think that there's a "vaccine timebomb" where everyone will get cancer in like 3 or 4 years because they took the vaccine.
The question you are trying to ask is "why do my coworkers listen to the GOP establishment (who are telling lies), instead of Democratic leadership and the scientific establishment (who are telling the truth)"?
I am trying to answer you: "because Democratic leadership and the scientific establishment are dishonest, partisan, and incompetent". Do not accuse me of supporting Trump or the GOP; I believe that anyone who chooses to represent the GOP is a coward and a fool, and that nothing the GOP has done or said in the past three decades has had a positive effect on this country. One would think that I am in the exact correct mindset to believe "the good authorities", the same ones that you believe, and yet I do not.
I again point to the line from the original article:
> Relentless propaganda against public health measures no doubt contributes to erosion of trust. However, that mistrust may also be fueled by the sorry state of health insurance in this country and the deep inequities in health care — at a minimum, this could make people more vulnerable to misinformation.
Whoever authored that line holds a deep faith in the scientific and Democratic establishment. They would never label anything their preferred authorities said as "misinformation", even their authorities spread information that was incorrect and stopped people from making good decisions, which they did. That they would ever question their own faith in those establishments is unthinkable. I would bet $50 that whoever wrote that line believed that the anti-masking protests of 2020 were dangerous COVID-spreading opportunities, but supported the George Floyd protests of 2020 as a matter of social necessity without bringing up COVID spreading once.
Supporters of the GOP like your coworkers may be blind to the logical failings and dishonesty of their own preferred authorities, but they are not blind to the logical failings and dishonesty of your preferred authorities. That is why they do not believe your authorities. The propaganda and misinformation spread by the GOP that you linked is an excuse for conservatives to revolt against the scientific establishment, as they already wanted to do, not the cause of their revolt. If GOP leadership fell in line with the scientific establishment and started spreading pro-vaccine, pro-mask, anti-COVID information, their supporters would abandon them. Didn't you hear the protestors on January 6th chanting "Hang Mike Pence"? Are you so blind to the nature of the standard American conservative that you believe that they only take orders from their leaders, and that changing what their leaders are saying would bring them back into heel?
As I explained earlier, your preferred authorities are incapable of believing themselves at fault for anything, or admitting that they were wrong. They broke public trust by their incompetence and dishonesty, and they will never regain it. Have you seen the videos of Democratic politicians, who faithfully follow the "COVID guidelines" and spread pro-vaccine and pro-mask information, interacting unmasked off-camera and then putting their masks on when the news broadcast starts rolling? Did you see Nancy Pelosi get her hair cut and hold dinner parties while at the same time advocating for stricter anti-COVID measures, and make extremely successful stock trades through her husband as the economy began to crash and recover? The "good guys" aren't real. That's why I commented.
> The question you are trying to ask is "why do my coworkers listen to the GOP establishment (who are telling lies), instead of Democratic leadership and the scientific establishment (who are telling the truth)"?
And you assume I'm a Democrat, which is not the case. I'm a Republican who has rejected what the party has done over the past year.
Rejecting the Republicans doesn't mean accepting the Democrats. It just means rejecting the crap that comes out of our party (at least until the Republicans figure out how to start telling the truth again on simple matters).
There are fewer-and-fewer Republicans who are willing to tell the truth on various matters. But they still exist. There's a fundamental issue with our party where telling the "hard truths" gets you run out (see Liz Cheney), and where telling the "easy lies" gets you lots of support (see Ted Cruz's "COVID19 will disappear when Democrats get elected").
I'll support the few Republicans who have managed to stay sane in this difficult juncture of our party. But the number continues to dwindle, and I fear that the party won't have any good leaders left in a few short years.
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What's your plan, moving forward, to restore the Republican party to sanity? Because frankly, I'm not seeing any. There needs to be someone out there pushing for smaller government and balancing the budget, but if it includes all this anti-mask / anti-vax insanity (which historically was a crappy left-wing thing) I dunno, its not worth it to me.
There wasn't any fiscal responsibility in 2016 when tax cuts were announced: there weren't any budget cuts coinciding with those tax cuts. So what am I, the lone Republican who is feeling increasingly isolated from my party, to do?
The most straightforward tactic I'm going for is this: point out Republican flaws, and remind people that I am coming in from a conservative, pro-market perspective. That's my political ideology, by and large.
Roughly: mask up when numbers increase. Remove masks as numbers decrease.
Not really that hard of a concept. USA has several states that ran out of hospital space and entered triage of care. They needed to mask up roughly 3 weeks before that happened, to mitigate the peaks that overwhelm hospitals.
If you are in an area where hospitals are reaching critical levels (which is a fair number of states) you need to do everything in your power to save work from the nurses.
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When elective medical procedures return, masks come off. Sound fair? If people aren't getting their cancer surgeries because there's too many COVID-19 patients filling the place, do something about it.
No that doesn't sound fair. It sounds like pointless virtue signaling.
Numbers increasing are meaningless. Which numbers? We all know that official case counts bear little relation to the true number of infections. Case numbers are trending up in Denmark but they haven't reintroduced any mask mandates.
> No that doesn't sound fair. It sounds like pointless virtue signaling.
Whether or not hospitals are full is virtue signaling?
> Numbers increasing are meaningless. Which numbers?
Hospitalization bed numbers. If you run out of beds, life gets really difficult, not only for nurses, but also for people who get into car accidents or otherwise have activities completely unrelated to COVID19.
Like that train derailment episode a couple of weeks ago, which caused a lot of undue stress looking for hospital space around Montana.
> 71 percent of the vaccinated trust hospitals and doctors “a lot,” for example, while only 39 percent of the unvaccinated do
And finally here is the key: ~70% of the vaccinated is trusting, while ~40% of the unvaccinated is - and 40% of individuals stating that trust is already a surprisingly high number, massive badges of systemic "success" probably only valid for regions of high professional selection.
So, the important part of the solution is: remember that empowered error that claimed days ago "The hacker will be prosecuted" about a reporter who noticed an institutional website sent around sensitive information in the webpages markup? Those errors are to be removed from active society. People will trust when the empowered will be trustworthy. Otherwise, societal costs will remain massive. The very first step to achieve such hard goal is to call those "errors", empowered inadequate, unacceptable.
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 68.9 ms ] threadI wonder if the author is aware how many families can't afford to miss a paycheck without facing severe consequences (hell, nyt has covered this itself). With that context, the above quote seems more than a little silly.
It just seems oblivious for the author to say that people complied because deep down they knew it was right, when that author's colleagues have written about the actual dangers these people would face if they lost their income.
> They’ve made bad decisions earlier and now may be frozen, part in fear, and unable to admit their initial hesitancy wasn’t a good idea, so they may come back with a version of how they are just doing “more research.”
This kind of decision paralysis can last for ages unless something forces it. Nobody seems to be saying that the consequences of ignoring vaccine mandates aren't real, it's rather quite the opposite: you can come up with hypothetical concerns about any low-probability event but being faced with actually losing something you care about forces that to be put into perspective. It's similar to how a fair number of people worry about air travel but hop on a plane when the alternative is a cross-country drive — rationally looking at crash statistics isn't as effective for those people as the misery factor of a long drive.
The excerpt you quoted also kind of bothered me because it presupposes that getting vaccinated immediately was the right idea. Just because someone slapped the label "vaccine" on something doesn't mean you should jump to receive it as early as possible. Not everyone wants to be an early adopter, and there's good reason for that.
If you directly confronted them about an inconsistency or them not personally following one of those rules they’d get defensive since at some point they’d staked that out as something they believed but if there was a way to say something had changed or their hand had been forced, they’d take it and move on.
This is projection. There are multiple modes of approaching communication and not everyone uses the mode where communication is an exercise in one-upmanship.
I guess you can continue to deny this kind of person exists; but it doesn't really matter what you think.
This isn't about treating communication as a contest with only one winner but rather about the subjective feeling of the person making these decisions. Having built it up into a big deal increased the costs of reversal but the mandate changes the dynamic and gives them the option of saying the choice was no longer theirs — if they get vaccinated, that's a better outcome for everyone even if they never admit the bad call.
I guess in this case the threat of those severe consequences is good enough to make them reevaluate, maybe they'll see that maybe a billion people have been vaccinated with the mRNA vaccines and there hasn't been a mass die-out and in their mind this is how they convince themselves it'll be ok...
Some other anti-vaxxers believe in vaccine timebombs (I've seen someone write on FB "Just wait until April 2022 and all the vaccinated will drop dead", just as convinced like the people who believed the world was going to end in December 2012), and I've also read that such timebomb is very unlikely, but hey, if there is such a timebomb, that last paragraph of mine will be very ironic indeed.
I think the title of the article applies here. What proportion of the unvaccinated do you think equate the shot with death? If they're worried about potential long term effects (just for one example, whether you believe they're possible or not), it'd be hard to prioritize that over feeding their kids next week.
This may be controversial, but the term "antivaxer" really deserves to be deprecated. It means too many different things to different people. It's a sloppy caricature that leads to sloppy thinking, but we see it being used all over the place.
Aren't all New York businesses supposed to be checking people for vaccination status? Given that African Americans are the demographic with the lowest vaccination rates, doesn't that policy disproportionately affect them? I thought we weren't supposed to implement systems like that anymore.
https://cssp.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Principles-for-A...
So if I make a males only club, is it also racist? Nah, that's sexist.
Anyone can remove themselves from being negatively affected by this policy, by getting a vaccination. Calling it racist is just misapplying logic.
That doesn't sound like an accurate interpretation of that document. Here's the non-strawman version:
> Policies that are purported to be “color-blind” or “race-neutral” have all too frequently been designed to benefit White children and families, and harm children and families of color directly and indirectly. … > In the past, public policy has too often been siloed, and policies intended to support children have failed to address the larger struggles their families face. Policy has even actively undermined families in the name of protecting children—as we see with the child welfare system, which disproportionately threatens and separates Black and Indigenous children from their loved ones.
What that's getting at is the idea that there are many cases where policies did not incorporate an explicit racial check but still produce that outcome. For example, if your city has a magnet school which doesn't have good bus service, it could act as a racial filter if a higher percentage of white families can afford to own cars, even if nobody who set the policy had that goal. That policy would be bad because the filtering effect would be real and isn't relevant to the stated goals of the program — whereas having, say, a height threshold for a basketball team is pretty reasonable because that's directly linked to performance, whereas it wouldn't make much sense for, say, a biathlon team.
In the context of that article, this is a notorious problem in the child welfare system where you have major events based on subjective judgements about the quality and safety of the home environment or the ability of families to provide for a child. It doesn't need to have a “Is this person black?” question on a form to still have negative outcomes if there are subjective factors like predominantly white middle-class caseworkers feeling less safe in a poor majority-black neighborhood and that influencing their assessments. That's what they're talking about when they say that polices must recognize how these different factors intersect — it's awareness, not an absolute, and it's an attempt to correct for the way data-driven decisions can still be skewed by societal biases.
Going back to this discussion, as I explained the difference is that the policy is clearly linked to a simple, neutral objective (everyone gets sick, nobody wants to) and the way to comply with it is easily available to everyone at no cost. That's not racist because it's not based on fixed attributes which people cannot change and there's no significant barrier to compliance. In contrast, a policy which, say, said people who are at elevated risk of sickle cell anemia couldn't eat a restaurant would be racist because there's no plausible safety justification for such a policy, everyone would know why that one “objective” factor was selected, and there's nothing which an affected person could do change to comply with the policy.
Imagine that you have two part time jobs, and you are just barely covering rent and other expenses. If you get vaccinated, you might have to miss a day or two. As a result, your boss might cut your hours or just fire you outright.
Is that not a significant barrier? Who would you think is more likely to be in this kind of situation?
Also, let's not forget the context of this thread: a quote about New York business' vaccination status checks. That person barely getting by working two part-time jobs probably isn't spending their time on the indoor dining, bars, gyms, etc. where that requirement applies:
https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-vaccines-keyton...
Note also that they required to be allowed up to 8 hours of paid sick leave to get vaccinated:
https://portal.311.nyc.gov/article/?kanumber=KA-02909
So to the extent that there's a genuine concern here, I would think it would make more sense to focus on places which have a combination of a vaccination mandate but not a leave requirement. I would be surprised if that was common since typically the politicians opposed to one of those policies would also oppose the other.
It's not you or I that have to look at the odds though, it's our hypothetical person. Will they make the same calculation we would?
The point about mandated sick leave is a good one, definitely helps.
> Also, let's not forget the context of this thread: a quote about New York business' vaccination status checks. That person barely getting by working two part-time jobs probably isn't spending their time on the indoor dining, bars, gyms, etc. where that requirement applies:
I don't think I can get behind this part. Maybe somebody takes them out on a date once in a while, their friends want to buy them a drink, they need a quick bite on the way to work. Little things that help make that kind of life a little more bearable. We can't just say well they couldn't afford these things anyway, so what does it matter if we don't allow them in.
Well, if the policy was aimed at a property a particular group can't change or easily change (e.g. entry to the club only if your income is higher than $100K, or your postcode is X (where X = the white area of town)), then it is discriminatory. But here the choice to be admitted or not is easily changed by any individual, by choosing to be vaccinated or not.
The vaccines have been in testing since the spring of 2020 and have repeatedly been shown to be both safe and effective at reducing your risk and ability to spread to others. At this point they’ve been given to a billion people – because of the way vaccines work you’re not making yourself safer by waiting a second year and you are far more at risk from getting COVID in the meantime than any reported side effects.
For example, what is the longest recorded delay between a vaccine being administered and a side-effect being observed? Vaccines trigger an immune response but aren't in your body for a long period of time, so you typically see reactions within a few hours or days — the record is something like 6 weeks, so multiple years would be quite the outlier.
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/concerns-history....
The other key thing to remember is that this isn't some hypothetical question about risks in absolute: your odds of being one of the very few people who have a significant vaccine side-effect has to be weighed against the much higher probability of having significant health impacts from COVID-19. “Neither” is not an option any of us get to pick.
You don't actually want them weighing the odds, you just want to imply they're wrong without being histrionic about it.
When asked, the person I was responding to admitted that they didn't do that but were instead relying on “common sense”. If they had some real data, a concern based on some real mechanism which would explain why it's risky for them personally in a way that doesn't show up in the population-level statistics, etc. that could be something to discuss because there would be a claim which could be evaluated scientifically.
They did exactly that, to quote them:
"I use my common sense to know that a vaccine that didn’t even begin testing before spring 2020 does not have a long enough track record to assure safety."
No reasonable person is going to interpret this as "they admitted they didn't weigh the risks".
My favorite part is how you set the bar to "something that can be evaluated scientifically", without also admitting that __"SCIENCE", IS IN THE MIDDLE OF EVALUATING__.
This is the reason no one trusts people like you, your willingness to dishonesty and misrepresentation makes you untrustworthy. Nothing anyone says will change anything other than the bar you claim others should be clearing, said bar just so happening to cause everyone to land on your opinion.
Not even the CDC takes a stance as strong as yours.
You know, you can see what I actually wrote in the quote — note the key word missing from this paraphrase: rational. I am certain that they made a subjective assessment of the risks — my point was that they hadn't critically analyzed that decision but still want it to be treated as equal in merit to the scientific consensus.
A key part of science is testing your beliefs: that's what the scientists who've spent decades working on mRNA vaccines did, that's what the extensive trials leading up to approval were for, and it's quite telling that you are both not doing that and trying to claim that ongoing monitoring means that the results of that earlier work are unreliable. Yes, scientists are still evaluating evidence — that's what they do! — but when it consistently points to the same conclusion over a long period of time and has been used to make accurate predictions, it starts to be considered a consensus.
We are all aware you are certain.
I think the worst part of your entire post is that your argument boils down to it being irrational to wait until more complete information is known.
Let me quote them again so we're clear on the context that started this conversation.
> ... a vaccine that didn’t even begin testing before spring 2020 __does not have a long enough track record to assure safety__.
Lets consider how you responded
"why do you feel more qualified to say it's unsafe than the people who have spent their entire careers focused on it?"
I would love for you to explain why that's a reasonable response to what the other poster said. Or explain how the other posters statement is irrational.
Because that's the major problem people like you have. You even start attacking me for the egregious wrongthink of not calling someone irrational for having the opinion that we can't be assured of its safety __YET__.
And I realize I'm not going to get through to you, but here's an observation for you.
When you start lumping such middle-of-the-road opinions in with people who believe covid can be spread through 5G networks it's possible you're part of the problem.
[Imagine Staff of Aeskulapius here] http://biochemical-pathways.com/#/map/2
Vaguely remembering things from
[·] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_Biology_of_the_Cell_...
which I've read about 1997 while designing and implementing compute-clusters for a biotech startup,
I've come to the conclusion it would be wise to wait.
While I'm not up to date on biotech anymore, I'm still sceptic.
My strategy so far is to avoid unnecessary contact with the beta-testers, wearing masks, and so on.
OTOH I've never had a flu-shot. But also no flu since eons.
Maybe because I'm bicycling in all weather?
I don't care. Call me a member of the control group :-)
What you are effectively telling him is, shut up and listen to the "experts". That's not how freedom of choice works.
You have to be very careful with this kind of informal statements, because probability is a tricky thing.
For example, assume that a vaccine has a probability P of causing long-term bad effects and that we observe historically that 1000 vaccines have no long-term bad effects. What can we rationally say about P? It would be tempting to conclude that P is zero or at least negligibly small (maybe 2^(-1000) or something). However, this cannot be the correct answer because if P were 1/1000, you would observe the historical pattern with probability .999^1000 ~= 1/e, or about 1/3 of the time. A more sophisticated analysis would conclude that it is very likely that P is somewhere between 0 and 2/1000, and if you believe a thing called the "Laplace Rule of Succession", the expected value of P is something like 1/1002.
Now, 1000 widely deployed vaccines sounds like a reasonable upper bound to the number of vaccines ever produced, which would suggest that the probability of this vaccine being safe is probably 100% but the error bar is O(1/1000). O(1/1000) is about the same as the probability of the virus killing me, so it is perfectly rational to have doubts.
Again, I'm not saying that there's no chance of a problem but by now a billion people have been vaccinated and a significant number of people are 18+ months out, with no indication that any of these hypothetical scenarios are actually happening.
It also increases the selection pressure, thereby creating even more new mutations(In this case).
Isn't that hot? Always on the run for another shot!
Ka-Ching!
1. Are we dealing with complex mechanisms that are not fully understood? (in this case, human biology and immune response)
2. Are we operating in an environment that is itself complex and weakly understood? (in this case, the broader ecosystem including other viruses and new variants)
3. Do we have clear channels/signals of information? (do we have all the reliable and comparable stats we’d like, anything approaching controlled experimental data etc)
4. Are there incentives for people to distort the information? (are their significant monetary and political factors weighing on outcomes)
Left as exercise to the reader to apply this to covid.
It's reasonable to be leery of a vaccine produced in such a small amount of time when most vaccines go through much more rigor.
And making claims such as "it's been thoroughly tested" is balderdash. It's like claiming your software has been thoroughly tested because you push straight to production with minimal testing after someone says they won't use your software because they don't want to be the testers of your software.
We're still learning about both the virus and the vaccine. In 10 years we'll be a lot more confident in our knowledge, and what's "known" about it will be a lot more trustworthy.
Also, I'm sure by 2/5/10 years the virus will have mutated down to the point it's endemic and similar enough in nature to the common cold and we won't be needing these experimental vaccines.
That's the only thing you can control - encouraging governments and employers to force rushed medical treatments upon their citizens, through threats and acts of violence will only further vaccine hesitancy or put a damper on vaccine uptake.
Covid will be around forever and there's nothing anybody can do about it.
I agree.
> and there's nothing anybody can do about it.
Nope, with a vaccination it'll be finally comparable to a bad flu (like all those deniers said in the beginning). Portugal has 98% vaccination and has now dropped most of its restrictions.
As someone who's vaccinated I do wish the governments would drop all the restrictions and let all the refusers deal with their own mess, but luckily for us governments have a duty of care* for all of society, including the beligerent members, and overfull hospitals disadvantage the vaccinated too.
* Although some politicians in power seem to be sacrificing the lives and health of their citizens to sabotage their "enemies", e.g. in Florida and Texas.
For the sake of making clarity, after almost two years of mess: in Portugal over 88% of the population is vaccinated (2% of which only partially), which is 98% of the eligible.
The first thing reporters should adjust is their honesty. Your fears about how a message could be perceived negatively becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy if a lie is detected. That a lie will be detected in today's world is very high, so calming or noble lies carry a lot of risks.
Additionally it should quickly communicated what people can and cannot know. If an unknown disease breaks out, nobody knows how dangerous or deadly it is and what helps against it or not. You don't even need a good justification if you enact restrictions as a precautionary measure with clear boundaries for reevaluation if civil rights are affected.
I think only high trust countries went through this relatively unscathed.
As a side note, emergencies are taken a lot less serious because of disastrous and incompetent anti-terrorism policies. We had emergency legislation throughout the western world for the last decade and a half.
> Instead, we need to develop a realistic, informed and deeply pragmatic approach to our shortcomings without ceding ground to the conspiracists, grifters, and demagogues
Wrong lesson, you just need to be better sources of information. Trying to silence them is the opposite of a sensible approach. This has been done to a scarily effective degree, people have basically been unpersoned. It did not work, you have a bad result now. That is a fact and needs to be accepted first.
I assume when Covid is done, there will be a long discussion about how effective vaccination has been in retrospective. You might want to stay truthful here since it will affect further trust.
> I think only high trust countries went through this relatively unscathed.
Off the top of my head that does sound true – I’m thinking of the Nordic countries as usual. I wonder if anyone has tried to quantify this? Maybe by tabulating vaccination uptake against trust in media polls?
I do think there is a phenomenon somewhat akin to overfitting happening when you compare any country to the US. The US produces such overwhelming cultural exports that it’s impossible to analyze any other culture without considering the US itself as a background variable. For example, maybe Norwegians have higher trust in media than Americans partially because they see the disaster unfolding in America and want to avoid the same fate. In many ways the US media/political culture has become the reality show of the world.
As an aside, it’s bizarre that Americans put any trust in media at all. There are no meaningful qualifications required to become a “journalist” other than the ability to consistently output a few thousand words a month. In fact, in many cases people gravitate to journalism because they don’t know what else to do. That’s certainly what I observed at my college newspaper. Some of them who eventually found a path are now working in industry or otherwise attempting to produce value. But the rest of the highflying newspaper staff? They’re blue check marks on Twitter attracting political bot accounts and being retweeted as the voice of media outlets. I find this amusing in light of my personal knowledge that they’re the last people I’d ever ask for an opinion or advice on any topic.
It’s perplexing to me how much we let these reporters shape the conversation in society. For a world of six billion, we sure do have tunnel vision for the opinions of a self-selected, highly connected and decidedly mediocre minority.
Next time you read one of these think pieces with a word count in a multiple of 400, take a minute to imagine the Kanban board that just funneled some morsel of a talking point into your brain.
Ah yes, the Joe Rogan angle: the only way to fight misinformation is to speak the truth louder and more convincingly. How exactly can one have a good faith debate on say, vaccine effectiveness, against an opponent who believes COVID-19 does not exist?
Ok, so if you accept that those in power can address arguments on their individual merits, then what is the problem with a private company (youtube, NYtimes etc) removing content so ludicrous and ungrounded in reality that it could hurt people (eg that vaccines contain 5G chips, that covid can be cured by inhaling hydrogen peroxide, or that ICU doctors are actually killing COVID patients)?
Tying deaths per capita to vaccination rates in such a direct fashion is a bit disingenuous.
The US also has high rates of comorbidities known to increase the likelihood of death from COVID, namely obesity and diabetes.
Per https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/04/health/obesity-covid-death-ra...:
> The report found that every country where less than 40% of the population was overweight had a low Covid-19 death rate of no more than 10 people per 100,000.
They're not - and I'm not too sure how to feel about it.
Yes, if you threaten someone’s livelihood they will do things they don’t want to do, even going against their own conscience.
Why do people pretend like a mandate is a small thing and not a nuclear weapon? For many people they risk not only losing their job, but their benefits (teachers) or even future job prospects (dishonorable discharge).
They live paycheck to paycheck and have a wife and 3 kids to support. They're going to have to live with themselves violating their own personal bodily autonomy because they didn't want their kids ending up on the street.
I personally find it morally reprehensible for any level of "seniority"/"authority" (be it employer, government, peers, etc) to use threats of violence (threatening with loss of employment _is_ an act of violence, I'm not swaying on that).
I don't like how society has gotten very "us vs. them" in the past couple of decades.
Why do people pretend like an extraordinarily contagious novel virus that commonly causes long-term organ damage is a small thing and not the next best thing to a bioweapon?
Why do people pretend that the healthcare system is not collapsing? Why do people pretend that refrigerator trucks full of corpses wasn’t a thing? Why do people pretend that children’s surgeries aren’t currently being canceled in Saskatchewan and Alberta?
Vaccine mandates are, in all reality, “playing nice.” The mandates allow you a number of vaccination choices, you pick the place and time. The “nuclear weapon” is when the state uses its military to enforce compliance: no alternatives, no choices.
The choice is between our society having a functioning healthcare system, or having too many people remain unvaccinated.
The cathedral of government and media will never admit that it has done any wrong. It will always claim that it knows best, and then after conflicting information comes out it will rewrite its own history to claim that it already knew. The thought that major U.S. institutions themselves have lost trust among members of the public through incompetence and condescension is unthinkable to them.
But that's cool. They can refuse the vaccine at this point but they are 0 for 3 now. And the only thing they ever point to is a couple of weeks where some officials didn't want N95 masks to be hoarded and they made a bad call.
But they were antimask (and still are antimask) despite using this example. So hypocrisy knows no bounds.
Jan. 2020
- The illness in China is much worse than the Chinese are letting on
- The Chinese government is disappearing whistleblowers
Feb. 2020
- The illness in China will become a global pandemic
- The only way to stop the pandemic is to act immediately and enforce full international travel bans, inter-state lockdowns, and invest heavily in virus testing
- COVID-19 is far worse than the flu
- The illness is already in the US even though there aren't confirmed cases yet
Mar. 2020
- People need to withdraw from public life if they can
Apr. 2020
- There is a significant chance that the virus was partially studied or modified in a Wuhan laboratory
Mar. 2021
- The vaccines clearly lead to side effects in certain cases, including neural effects, heart problems, and interactions with the reproductive system
EVERY single time I told people who "trust the science" and "believe the experts" about these topics, it was before any mainstream government or media sources had caught on to these ideas. These ideas, now common knowledge, were derided as misinformation and anyone who believed them were mocked as ignorant at best and deliberately fear-spreading at worst.
I am not fully anti-vaccine; I had the first dose of Pfizer and later had my spike antibodies tested. I haven't had any positive COVID-19 tests because I locked down until eventually taking the vaccine.
I don't care about the idiots you know, I care that the scientific and political institutions in control of this country are attention-seeking frauds that never take responsibility for making incorrect predictions.
Yeah. Except we know why that happened: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-told-bob...
This is the hydroxychloroquine dude. This is the political group that has gone towards ivermectin. This political group is __STILL__ making false and misleading claims on a mass scale today.
> I care that the scientific and political institutions in control of this country are attention-seeking frauds that never take responsibility for making incorrect predictions.
Why don't you dig a little deeper? Figure out the forces that caused the problem and blame them a little bit more? Playing down the virus was Trumps reelection plan, and provably so. This coincides with all the other misinformation (hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, and anti-vax attitudes) going on today.
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Look, its cute that you're making issues about what people knew or didn't know in January / February 2020. But I have coworkers who refuse to mask up _TODAY_ and I know people who think that there's a "vaccine timebomb" where everyone will get cancer in like 3 or 4 years because they took the vaccine.
I can also point you out to some pretty abhorrent misinformation going on in July 2020, months after your dates: https://twitter.com/BadCOVID19Takes/status/13306662813480304...
This misinformation crap is happening right now, today, still going on. And I'm a little bit tired of it.
The question you are trying to ask is "why do my coworkers listen to the GOP establishment (who are telling lies), instead of Democratic leadership and the scientific establishment (who are telling the truth)"?
I am trying to answer you: "because Democratic leadership and the scientific establishment are dishonest, partisan, and incompetent". Do not accuse me of supporting Trump or the GOP; I believe that anyone who chooses to represent the GOP is a coward and a fool, and that nothing the GOP has done or said in the past three decades has had a positive effect on this country. One would think that I am in the exact correct mindset to believe "the good authorities", the same ones that you believe, and yet I do not.
I again point to the line from the original article:
> Relentless propaganda against public health measures no doubt contributes to erosion of trust. However, that mistrust may also be fueled by the sorry state of health insurance in this country and the deep inequities in health care — at a minimum, this could make people more vulnerable to misinformation.
Whoever authored that line holds a deep faith in the scientific and Democratic establishment. They would never label anything their preferred authorities said as "misinformation", even their authorities spread information that was incorrect and stopped people from making good decisions, which they did. That they would ever question their own faith in those establishments is unthinkable. I would bet $50 that whoever wrote that line believed that the anti-masking protests of 2020 were dangerous COVID-spreading opportunities, but supported the George Floyd protests of 2020 as a matter of social necessity without bringing up COVID spreading once.
Supporters of the GOP like your coworkers may be blind to the logical failings and dishonesty of their own preferred authorities, but they are not blind to the logical failings and dishonesty of your preferred authorities. That is why they do not believe your authorities. The propaganda and misinformation spread by the GOP that you linked is an excuse for conservatives to revolt against the scientific establishment, as they already wanted to do, not the cause of their revolt. If GOP leadership fell in line with the scientific establishment and started spreading pro-vaccine, pro-mask, anti-COVID information, their supporters would abandon them. Didn't you hear the protestors on January 6th chanting "Hang Mike Pence"? Are you so blind to the nature of the standard American conservative that you believe that they only take orders from their leaders, and that changing what their leaders are saying would bring them back into heel?
As I explained earlier, your preferred authorities are incapable of believing themselves at fault for anything, or admitting that they were wrong. They broke public trust by their incompetence and dishonesty, and they will never regain it. Have you seen the videos of Democratic politicians, who faithfully follow the "COVID guidelines" and spread pro-vaccine and pro-mask information, interacting unmasked off-camera and then putting their masks on when the news broadcast starts rolling? Did you see Nancy Pelosi get her hair cut and hold dinner parties while at the same time advocating for stricter anti-COVID measures, and make extremely successful stock trades through her husband as the economy began to crash and recover? The "good guys" aren't real. That's why I commented.
And you assume I'm a Democrat, which is not the case. I'm a Republican who has rejected what the party has done over the past year.
Rejecting the Republicans doesn't mean accepting the Democrats. It just means rejecting the crap that comes out of our party (at least until the Republicans figure out how to start telling the truth again on simple matters).
There are fewer-and-fewer Republicans who are willing to tell the truth on various matters. But they still exist. There's a fundamental issue with our party where telling the "hard truths" gets you run out (see Liz Cheney), and where telling the "easy lies" gets you lots of support (see Ted Cruz's "COVID19 will disappear when Democrats get elected").
I'll support the few Republicans who have managed to stay sane in this difficult juncture of our party. But the number continues to dwindle, and I fear that the party won't have any good leaders left in a few short years.
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What's your plan, moving forward, to restore the Republican party to sanity? Because frankly, I'm not seeing any. There needs to be someone out there pushing for smaller government and balancing the budget, but if it includes all this anti-mask / anti-vax insanity (which historically was a crappy left-wing thing) I dunno, its not worth it to me.
There wasn't any fiscal responsibility in 2016 when tax cuts were announced: there weren't any budget cuts coinciding with those tax cuts. So what am I, the lone Republican who is feeling increasingly isolated from my party, to do?
The most straightforward tactic I'm going for is this: point out Republican flaws, and remind people that I am coming in from a conservative, pro-market perspective. That's my political ideology, by and large.
Denmark removed all their mask rules back in August. They're doing fine.
Not really that hard of a concept. USA has several states that ran out of hospital space and entered triage of care. They needed to mask up roughly 3 weeks before that happened, to mitigate the peaks that overwhelm hospitals.
If you are in an area where hospitals are reaching critical levels (which is a fair number of states) you need to do everything in your power to save work from the nurses.
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When elective medical procedures return, masks come off. Sound fair? If people aren't getting their cancer surgeries because there's too many COVID-19 patients filling the place, do something about it.
Numbers increasing are meaningless. Which numbers? We all know that official case counts bear little relation to the true number of infections. Case numbers are trending up in Denmark but they haven't reintroduced any mask mandates.
Whether or not hospitals are full is virtue signaling?
> Numbers increasing are meaningless. Which numbers?
Hospitalization bed numbers. If you run out of beds, life gets really difficult, not only for nurses, but also for people who get into car accidents or otherwise have activities completely unrelated to COVID19.
Like that train derailment episode a couple of weeks ago, which caused a lot of undue stress looking for hospital space around Montana.
https://www.ktvq.com/news/local-news/colstrip-man-taken-to-w...
When hospital space starts to get scarce, things start to get bad for your local community.
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Democrats don't have a monopoly on hospital bed statistics ya know. A lot of these statistics are coming in from Republican administrations.
And finally here is the key: ~70% of the vaccinated is trusting, while ~40% of the unvaccinated is - and 40% of individuals stating that trust is already a surprisingly high number, massive badges of systemic "success" probably only valid for regions of high professional selection.
So, the important part of the solution is: remember that empowered error that claimed days ago "The hacker will be prosecuted" about a reporter who noticed an institutional website sent around sensitive information in the webpages markup? Those errors are to be removed from active society. People will trust when the empowered will be trustworthy. Otherwise, societal costs will remain massive. The very first step to achieve such hard goal is to call those "errors", empowered inadequate, unacceptable.
> Some key research on the unvaccinated
> It may well be that some of the unvaccinated are a bit like cats stuck in a tree
What a silly bunch, the unvaccinated