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They are not that effective on their own, but 95% herd immunity is enough to make any pandemics unviable, and the very few people that still manage to catch the disease can be isolated and treated. In other words, vaccinating 90% of a population will result in way less than 10% of the original infections/casualties.
The punchline to this joke is that vaccines work best at scale. Your 80 year old decrepit ass doesn't have an immune system that can fully benefit from inoculation. What keeps you safe is that everyone around you has been inoculated, too. They act as a buffer, reducing the speed of transition and the variants that can survive in the population, so that you're never exposed to the virus to begin with.
As soon as you take down that barrier, every town hall meeting and rubber chicken fundraiser means slapping palms with a bunch of anti-vax assholes who are absolutely dripping with contagion. At the height of COVID, Trumpies were dropping like flies. A 2023 study published in JAMA Internal Medicine found that the excess death rate for Republican voters was 15% higher than for Democratic voters in Florida and Ohio between March 2020 and December 2021. This included three different talk radio personalities: Marc Bernier (A long-time host in Daytona Beach, Florida), Dick Farrel (Formerly a fill-in host on Newsmax, he had hosted shows for several Florida stations), and Phil Valentine (A well-known host based in Nashville, Tennessee).
Ah that just made me nostalgic for the Herman Cain Awards. Yes it was fucked up, but it was a soothing kind of fucked up that made me feel like maybe there was some sort of karma or cosmic justice happening.
Def some good schadenfreude in watching the ignorant dumbasses ruining society get the consequences of their own actions. They've the COVID victims you don't have to feel sorry for. It's the people who they got sick and killed that got my sympathy instead
Low-key was really hoping that having that sort of demographic representation in the COVID deaths would translate to a different electoral outcome.
But no, we crave fascism I guess. That or the election was stolen in 2024 which I wouldn't even be surprised if that were true given the level of projection Trump and the GOP/MAGAtards regularly engage in.
Low-key was really hoping that having that sort of demographic representation in the COVID deaths would translate to a different electoral outcome.
Demographics is not, in fact, destiny. Partisanship isn't hereditary.
We have a fascist national media that keeps cranking up the crazy in the general population. No amount of disease fatality will change that.
That or the election was stolen in 2024
If Biden presided over a stolen election, that's only further evidence of his party's unwillingness to govern.
his party’s unwillingness to govern.
Hey, at least they kept the federal government from being used politically.
Same as forgetting that vaccines saved us. Now we're repeating the same shit we pulled 100-years ago. Great Depression, high tariffs, fascism, all coming around again because every human who remembers is dead.
For example, as a child I was fascinated with grandma's smallpox vaccine scar. Think I missed the cutoff by a year, because smallpox was fucking extinct. She'd also tell me how thankful her generation was for the polio vaccine, how scared she was as a child. She's dead, and so is everyone else who can tell those first-hand stories. So it goes.
Right... A bunch of people die, and then we pocket the cash we saved not paying those long-term medical bills. And eventually, we reach herd immunity. Win-win. This is the system working as intended.
As soon as you take down that barrier, every town hall meeting and rubber chicken fundraiser means slapping palms with a bunch of anti-vax assholes who are absolutely dripping with contagion.
LOL, Republicans have been fleeing from their constituents and mostly refusing to hold those sorts of events for years now already.
They don't give a shit about herd immunity because they literally only ever interact with other elites.
Who serves them their food?
"We cook your meals, we haul your trash, we connect your calls, we drive your ambulances. We guard you while you sleep. Do not... fuck with us."
Herman Cain didn't vaccinate 👀
Also, it's inability to entertain the hypothetical. "What if we didn't have vaccines?" is literally incompressible to them. There was a Ted talk on it. https://youtu.be/9vpqilhW9uI
It's fine, they'll just have twelve kids to have three teenagers. As is tradition.
Same shit with covid. People be like "it was a hoax because most people survived" and I just stare at them with no way of knowing how to explain to these geniuses the most basic shit about hygiene and physical distance and how it affects the spread of a potent new virus.
I have a couple of family members who are nurses. One of them being my MiL. She saw the early cases of corona up close and personal and she was very, very, VERY concerned. One of the first patients was a healthy man in his early 50s who was physically active and all that good shit. His lungs were completely destroyed by Delta. Had to get a transplant to survive. Was disabled for life due to other complications caused by the virus.
Every single person I have met who thinks corona was a hoax or doesn't take the virus seriously, are ironically also some of the least educated people on the matter. They also think they know better than medical professionals. They didn't see what this virus was capable of because people like my MiL worked themselves to the bone to save their ungrateful asses.
So when I come across these types in the wild, I just stare at them and think my thoughts about their level of intelligence and move on with my life. Must be nice to be this fucking stupid.
I don't believe the "good/hard times make soft/strong people" trope is entirely true, but I do feel a modicum of adversity or at least exposure to it is good for people. A lot of people truly don't understand adversity until they experience it themselves. Once they do, though, some can apply that lesson to all parts of life.
I also experienced some COVID consequences: it killed my lunatic antivaxxer father. Even though we literally watched him die on a ventilator, some relatives were adamant it "had to have been something else". Certainly it couldn't have been the novel respiratory virus killing thousands of people! Those people...they won't learn.
Having no real adversity in your life creates a situation where you never really learn to cope with with it as an adult. However, actual hard times just create generational trauma.
I just looked it up and the global cumulative deaths from COVID is around 7 million people.
"Only" 0.1% of the humans living on earth, died, so it's not bad, right?
.... And I'm very positive the data is confirmed deaths by COVID, so it's likely a very low figure compared to how many people died from COVID, or died from other things that were complicated by COVID, or died by complications of COVID directly, or died because the hospitals and medical care systems were too overwhelmed by COVID patients to care for them.
I'd estimate that number is probably double if you took all of the associated deaths into account.
It's very very likely that you know someone or are someone who lost someone to COVID. Yet these uneducated chucklefucks think they know better than PhD doctors, researchers, and scientists, that have been studying this shit their entire fucking lives, have qualifications up the ass, and who have dedicated years of their lives to even understanding what a virus is, nevermind any specific virus' behavior. A nontrivial number of them have been working the problem longer than some of these fucks have been drawing back oxygen. Yet, they're not to be believed because reasons.
These kinds of people can get fucked. I hope that they, and their dumbass offspring get a preventable disease and fucking croak, so the world can be less goddamned stupid.
Every single person I have met who thinks corona was a hoax or doesn't take the virus seriously, are ironically also some of the least educated people on the matter.
That isn't ironic. That's exactly what I would expect.
It's ironic in the sense that they consider themselves to be of superior intellect and are very stubborn in that world view. Text probably doesn't communicate sarcasm super well, but that was what I was aiming for.
Also, I agree with you hehe.
When covid started and seeing news reports of many people dying I was so scared. They had no idea what it was then or any infection vectors. I recall seeing something from Italy and it was horrific. This was maybe early spring late or winter 2020 (maybe I got the country wrong but I don't think so). Anyone who could have seen that and not understood what that means has no right to an opinion on the impact of viruses or on how a society needs to be run. Mean didn't NYC have freezer trucks at one point?
Man we have degenerated as a society to let that happen in the world's strongest military power (mean we can't all have the propaganda might Russia does). But sure let's give the person who did the worst a welcome mat to the Presidential position again. Ugh I thought we could have learned better.
I am not American but understand the impacts the orange dictator does in his name (only say it that way cause his brain is no better than potato salad, fuck project 2025 and Miller).
But long but this whole world situation is very frustrating. Like it's right there for everyone to see but let's blame neighbors not the people who've been in charge.
Edit forgot to add, as scared as I was I made a decision to do the best for my household, when reccomdations came through I followed them as best I could. I wanted to make sure the people I cared about were safe. It's a shame that many of the people who figured that out are shunned these days.
It’s not a vaccine problem, it’s an education problem. A large portion of Americans are exceptionally gullible to propaganda and Republicans have weaponized it very well. The anti-vax narrative is not present in large portions of the population in other developed nations. We need to look within, not at the solution to disease.
Edit: Unfortunately others are informing me that this is a problem in other countries as well, which is sad. My partners family is from a country in Europe that doesn’t appear to have this issue at scale so I foolishly extrapolated.
I dont know, large portions of other nations are just as gullible and susceptible to propaganda. I mean no one is immune to it, but a lot of the developed nations do believe immigrants and not the rich are causing all their problems, because that's what the media has told them.
Anti-intellectualism is global.
In the US it is ridiculously blatant because so much of our media thinks subtext is for The Gays. But think about how often the villain is an Evil Scientist or even just A Teacher Who Has It Out For The Protagonist? What began as an active effort has mostly just become the cultural zeitgeist where "people with advanced degrees have no common sense or street smarts" and "too much knowledge turns you into a monster" (see also: The Frankenstein Complex).
Hell, for something more blatant: Go look at the various threads about the US changing its COVID vaccination guidelines. Plenty of Europeans will pop in and say "Yeah. That lines up with what we have. You don't need a booster every year if you are healthy". I'll leave it to the experts as to what defines "need" but... as someone who has somehow managed to catch COVID three or four times, I want those boosters in my muscles because it is the difference between a weekend of "I feel kinda shitty and have a headache in the center of my eyes and... fuck" versus being curled up in a bed coughing and hoping I lose consciousness for a few hours.
I promise you, anti-vax sentiments are alive and well in many countries. I'm from the UK, the birth place of Andrew Wakefield and in some areas, rates of uptake of the MMR vaccine is as low as 60% and the National average for England currently sits at 88%, down from 93% 10 years ago.
You don't miss the water until the well runs dry.
Nah that's an education problem
No, it's a willful denial of reality problem. How they work, why they're needed are basic things taught in almost every school in the states. Students intentionally ignore it.
if only we had a longstanding social practice and institution specifically designed for corroborating people having different views of reality… a place where people could learn about everything that’s already been argued about so they don’t waste time on things we’ve either already considered or decided aren’t worth considering.. perhaps we’d call it learnification…
nah i jest. i appreciate you bringing up the fact that the issue now is not necessarily an education issue as people classically think of it. people aren’t stupid. we’ve lost our agreed upon meanings for what the signs and symbols we share are.
the problem is that we need to rebuild reason itself to function again in the modern world. with all that said, this becomes an education problem when you attempt to apply any of it in practice.
you see hoards of people decrying tools like ChatGPT for ruining education and rotting kids’ brains, when really all they’ve done is shone a bright spotlight on exactly how worthless what most of the standard Western curricula have developed into is. the weird focus on memorization, essay writing, and other such skills and the neglect of more important skills like teaching actual rationalism, along with logic and reasoning abilities is what has caused this boiling frog of a situation to come to pass. the students complained for decades that the quality of their education was slipping and nobody listened. kids complained they “hated” or didn’t understand math for decades, and again nobody fucking listened. now we’re here and it’s somehow their fault again for merely doing what anyone does and following the path of least resistance. if you design a course and you can easily pass it by use of an LLM, it wasn’t fucking testing anything of value in the first place. LLMs cannot think the way we can. AI can either be this scary, capable boogeyman capable of undermining all of established pedagogy or not but it can’t be both at the same time like universities have been fearmongering lately. if current AI technologies are not capable agents yet (they’re not), but they still present a threat to teachers and professors… then that is 101% a fault of the course design and the professors responsible for it. why should students be held accountable for anything here when they’re the ones forking over years of capital only to get presented with an “education” that can be easily aced by a fucking bot?
when will those who actually pull the levers of power here be held responsible? how many people need to have their careers needlessly ruined due to byzantine policies in academia before enough is enough?? it’s all just fucking smoke and mirrors, none of it is real anymore. maybe it never was…
people will act like you’re being a petulant child if you even bring this up in virtually any context but i think it’s time we start seriously discussing how traditional academia can either be reformed or retired for something that actually works for the modern individual.
To be fair practically everything boils down to an education problem.
Well, yes, but if you see people die in front of you, that's another form of "education".
So weird to think there’s such a thing as “too comfortable.” Excessive privilege is really something.
What I don’t get is that people will chose the terrible effects of the disease over the chance of having side effects from the vaccine when they’re orders of magnitude different levels of effect.
Well, I know a senior person, retired epidemiologist who is anti covid vaccine because "no vaccine developed so fast can be safe".
It hard containing my self from telling her that from her time as an epidemiologist to now, technology has changed and that they've studied mRNA vaccines for a long time so fighting a particular strain of virus is easier as the whole process has already been successfully tested. However, her family trusts her, she has the credentials and I don't, so it should be up to another epidemiologist with proper credentials to explain that. Not me.
It's like an old engineer saying that current structural calculations in buildings can't be trusted because it used to take months/years of hard work and now they can be done in a fraction of the time with computers.
🤦♂️
That's what I've been saying. Vaccines are too effective for our own good. Smallpox alone is estimated to have killed 250-500 million during the 1900's. But a generation or two passes without that personal experience and the danger is not treated with the care it deserves.
The umbrella roof is so tight people start to forget it's raining.
We should really make anti-vaxers walk through a cemetery with deaths from the last 50-100 years vs one from the last 100-200 years and note the differences in dead children/infants.
"How do I know there are really dead people buried here and not just a buncha headstones?"
"How do I know the cause of death isn't another libtard lie?"
We can just keep drawing it out until:
"How do I know what I'm seeing and feeling is real or not?"
"How do I know that reality isn't another libtard lie?"
Except they did, COVID. That first year saw quite a lot of death. Granted, the experience difference between healthcare and people hunkering down at home would be miles apart.
There would have to be a disconnect there, with the visitor bans. Necessary, but it may have contributed to the fallout of skepticism and conspiracy theory.
You see a loved one go in, get some screen time with them in a hospital bed, maybe, then a phone call from a nurse or doctor telling you your loved one is dead, no you can’t come in, the body will be delivered to the funeral home, do you have one picked out?. Then you see a body at the funeral home. No experience, no visual of real time decline in between, a black hole of time between alive and this dead body in a strange funeral home.
Denial is part of grief. You could even say it’s a normal part of grief. Combine that with the black hole of time between alive and dead, sprinkle with personal tendencies to conspiracy theories, and you have yourself a fake illness.
In addition, other people hunkering at home with nothing but time, screaming into the void in their grief, add fuel to the notion.
I guess COVID doesn’t count. I can only add partial sarcasm to that sentence.