Microblog Memes

See, what I don't get is that loosening vaccine requirements of the general public means less herd immunity. Elites aren't entirely immune from diseases. They rely on the rest of the population also not getting sick.

In a way, they're digging their own grave.

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).

It's fine, they'll just have twelve kids to have three teenagers. As is tradition.

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.

They also think they know better than medical professionals.

Bingo.

I mean, people have always been this way to some extent…

But I think a combination of institutional skepticism and the ‘I found this on Facebook!’ phenomenon (or TV, or podcasts, anything) lead a ton of the public to think they know better instead of just nodding along to what some dedicated professional say, compared to decades past.

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.

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.

Yes, but also no.

You can't educate people who won't listen, believe the information you give them, or learn.

Willful ignorance is extremely common. I work in tech and I have persistent memories of people refusing to learn the most basic shit to help themselves, or change their behavior because "their way" doesn't work anymore, then insist I find a workaround so they can continue to do it whatever backwards way they've been doing it.

I once asked a user to open a folder on a shared drive on a server and I shit you not, they opened fucking word, went to open and browsed from there to the server.

That's the only way that they knew to get to the fucking files.

People are fucking stupid, won't learn, refuse to be taught, and want to remain as uneducated as they possibly can, knowing just enough to continue being employed.

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.

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".