I disagree. While it’s frustrating that people believe politicians and talk show hosts over scientists, it’s reasonable to fear something you don’t understand. What’s immature is a lack of critical thinking which much of the population seems to exhibit by choosing to listen to others or, in doing fact finding, allow for confirmation bias.
This statement is not helpful. If we’re looking to increase the number of people getting vaccinated, shame or embarrassment will likely lower that number further. People have a fear of making the wrong decision. If you share with them that you’ve been vaccinated and leave it at that, that’s someone real who has contradicted the narrative they subscribe to. If they respect you as a role model, they may change their behavior.
Everything republicans do is childish playground bully behavior
Yeah but unfortunately they are doing a lot more harm than beating me up at recess because I’m brown.
It’s definitely regressed to full Nazi behavior unfortunately.
Let’s be honest, its the covid vax being rushed to market and the politics of it that made this happen. Before that it was an issue with total idiots, but now I have “normal” family members not vaxing their children for things eradicated 50 years ago.
I can totally see the skepticism on the covid vax. You really cant trust anything. Lets not pretend the covid vax didnt have issues (and we plebs dont really know for sure how many bad side effects there are/were yet. No matter what you think). And in my opinion government should not control your body. However these people not getting children vaccinated for measles are just absolute idiots.
And now people who think everything is black and white can downvote me to hell!
Every pre-COVID representation of global pandemic: scientists discover a vaccine, everyone vaccinates and lives happily ever after
Real pandemic: people chicken out, start obsessing over 1 in 10000 side effects (vs, you know, a 1 in 50 chance to die of COVID-19 at the time) and then forever tell the story of “it’s not tested enough yet”.
You know what also constantly changes and cannot be tested for decades? Every. Single. Virus. Your flu vaccine is also not tested for side effects forever, because the virus changes all the time.
Before rolling COVID vaccines out, we were very damn sure they work and won’t wreak havoc on you. But as people suddenly decided to go anti-vax, government had to get more assertive, for any vaccine works best when most people are vaccinated. You could normally self-isolate and not take vaccines, though, so it’s up to you, the government’s concern is that you don’t spread this thing further, straining medical system that was already under a heavy load.
Disclaimer: not a medical professional. Had four COVID-19 vaccines though, including Sputnik-V, the very first one.
Never had a flu vaccine. Theyre pointless to me.
I dont believe the 1 in 50 death rate of covid. There’s no way that is true or we would all be dead.
Also the covid vaccine isnt 1 and done. People go in to get boosters multiple times a year. And they still get covid.
I had to get the jab myself, made me feel awful, still feeling heart arrhythmia from it, still got covid anyways.
Now if I was old or sickly, sure id say get it. But I rarely get sick ever.
On the death rate: in some countries, mortality rate went as high as 5%. To be fair, though, this only takes confirmed cases into account, leaving behind those who never reported a case, mostly because it went milder.
https://ourworldindata.org/mortality-risk-covid
On a personal note, my mother lost two colleagues to it, and I lost an acquaintance. All confirmed COVID deaths.
I did get COVID-19 once. It went easy though, and I rapidly recovered after a mild fatigue and headache without long-term consequences. Some of the people I know had long-term effects, like warped smell, chronic fatigie, etc. One got it before vaccines rolled out, and two decided not to vaccinate. None of the vaccinated folks I know had something of this magnitude.
Vaccine is not a protection from infection. It’s a pre-training program for an immune system to quickly beat the hell out of the disease before it gets nasty (and spreads violently).
Sad you got side effects, and I understand how it changes your perception on the matter. Personally, my only bad experience is having weakness in the arm for the first two days after the very first vaccine dose. In any case, I hope it will pass rather soon!
I don’t think its childish not to want the government to mandate bodily choices.
It quickly gets more complicated when it affects others.
Is it your bodily choice to smoke on the street? No, because others have to inhale it. Same idea - no one wants to breathe in your disease-causing microbes.
You are fully allowed to smoke in the street. The tuskegee experiment is a prime example of the infallible government doing fuck shit medically. I don’t like being forced to ask HOW HIGH when the government decides to tell me to jump.
Depending on the country, it might be banned, and that’s one obvious example I came with.
And, in my opinion, it must be, no matter what you smoke, tobacco or weed or something else. Why the hell should others inhale terrible chemicals just because you chose to?
Same, why should they be exposed to dangerous microbes just because you are reckless?
Vaccines have side effects. This is a fact not antivax propaganda. The federal government set up the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. Forced to pay out over 5 billion since 1988. This is specifically because getting a vaccine ISN’T risk free and never has been. Then the really fucked up part happened, covid vaccines aren’t included in the national vaccine injury compensation program. Because they were rolled out in a state of emergency, they fall under a different program. Unsurprisingly, the program they fall under is significantly more strict making it extremely difficult to be compensated, although some people still have for nearly half a million dollars. The program covid vaccines is under is called Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program. I am fully vaccinated against everything possible because I chose to take that risk, forcing people to is where I have the issue.
Vaccines have side effects.
No one argues with that. But you know what also has side effects that are orders of magnitude more likely? Diseases.
Forcing people to is where I have the issue
I understand that mandatory policies are to be reviewed with caution, and forcing people to do something that has inherent risks should normally be avoided. But here, by not taking a vaccine, you simply multiply and outsource the risk elsewhere, putting others in danger. If your decisions around vaccination would only hurt you, government would have no business dictating you what to do - yet, someone’s refusal to vaccinate has killed someone else - say, immunodeficient person or a child who couldn’t get vaccinated.
Sometimes we desperately need collective action, so much so that it may be mandated. This is one of such cases. Yes, it would be cool to have more time and do even more testing, to refine the preparations, etc. But when people die by millions, you’re on a short timer.
COVID-19 has demonstrated a level of deadly disorganization in the face of a global crisis. People “mind their own business” so much that it kills others, with governments struggling to keep everyone looking in the same productive direction.
You can’t mandate that you get to infect me.
If you want to be a part of society, then
- vaccinate
- or, wear a mask
- or, keep your distance / stay home when sick
Your bodily choice extends to your body and ONLY your own body
I mean, I would have gotten fired if I didn’t get the shot. I didn’t really have a choice in the matter. I wasn’t given the option to wear a mask or keep distance. I’m not an antivax guy, though I know many. I just don’t like that my workplace forced me to inject something in my body on behalf of the government.
What kind of workplace? Did they have a reason for masks not being enough? Because I know a few scenarios where masking wouldn’t solve the entire problem
Also, most workplaces that implemented their own requirements was not doing it “on behalf of the government” but because they didn’t want their workers to get sick and didn’t want liability for sick customers
What do you think the mask hating whiners are? They’re toddlers with voting rights.
You feel angry. Think about why you feel angry. Is it something you came up with yourself or was it put there?
Ironic that the people with the most predictable responses that perfectly match lies from propaganda campaigns then accuse others of not being able to think for themselves.
You adopted the entire anti-health position wholesale with no critical thinking, and now you’re assuming everybody else is like you?
It was put there by science-denying troglodytes like yourself trying to drag civilization back into the Dark Ages. Enjoy your blood-letting and miasma treatments, don’t forget your nightly mercury applications.
You paint a very black-and-white cartoon
If bloodletting isn’t your thing, maybe you’d prefer a milk transfusion. They’ve made incredible advancements in trepanation if that’s more your speed. Have you tried sacrificing a goat to guarantee good health? I hear it can be really effective, just make sure you pick an in-network deity.
You feel angry. Think about why you need to project your anger onto others. Is it something you naturally do, or do scientific topics tend to stir up resentment in you?
(May I suggest being a bit funnier when rage baiting if thats what youre doing? Can’t tell, could also just be a very silly goose)
Well I’m not the one saying mean stuff, so yes, the rage is on your side.
Well I’m not the one saying mean stuff
Oh no, you hurt their feelings with your scientific argument! Bad science! Bad-
Oh wait.
Facts don’t care about your feelings…
Not really on any side here, nor am I saying mean things either! Was just hoping you’d end up being funny instead of trite but expectations were a bit too high on my end. Have a good one, hope i see you improved one day :)
Unfortunately, due to their lack of any humor I doubt they are a rage baiter and actually one of the many idiots who drink the Kool aid.
once they get diptheria, wooping cough, measles, mumps, rubella, as adults they will be even more scared. also you dont want chickenpox as an adult either.
Will they, though? I mean, the people who directly contract it might realize some regret and the error of their choices, some will be like smokers dying of emphysema that just keep smoking. Nothing will change them. The worst will be the kids that die, they never had a say in their medical treatment. There should be a lot of regret from the parents, but as we’ve seen, there’s plenty of stubbornness and mental gymnastics even then.
I’m still pissed my insurance won’t cover the shingles vax. Took over my right side and hurt like hell for, uh, six years now.
we’ve been begging for the shingles vaccine for years now. they won’t even let us pay out-of-pocket. we’re five years “too young” despite both my wife and i having already had shingles.
Too young? My sister got shingles in highschool! Anyone can get it.
congrats child. you’re at least ten years younger than me
I get you are pissed, but shingles generally is not contagious (exept for people who havent had chickenpox), nor dangerous (for healthy people), so i get that its pretty low on the priority lists.
Alltough if its lasted that long i would be worried why. Getting shingles usually is telltale sign for weakened immunity system, or mark off high stress and both of those are bad things.
What I really dislike is the parents who refuse to vaccinate their children, because big pharma/nature best/other insane arguments, but then take them to an ER when they inevitably get that preventable disease. For fuck’s sake, stay consistent. If you don’t vaccinate, do not go to the hospital later.
Devil’s Advocate: Being sick is an immediately visible problem; vaccinations… viruses are invisible and you don’t see symtoms till its too late
Which is why we have decades of medical science that has gone to great lengths to discover these things. They can’t be seen by the naked eye but they can be seen with a strong enough microscope. We know they exist and we know what they cause. We know how to prevent that from happening.
Yet these mouth breathing troglodytes have been conned into distrusting science on a fundamental level.
Surely we are smart to trust the way we feel more than we trust a talking head on tv.
Da fuck do you think you’re doing when you’re distrusting experts from all over the world and specifically only trusting a small number of serial liars who are known to deliberately hurt people for fun?
Says the twit regurgitating Fox News propaganda with absolutely no basis in fact, no sources, no data, nothing. Go find some credible primary sources for your horseshit - you’ll see there are none.
I don’t watch fox news.
And there’s that anger again. It’s almost like somebody told you to get angry.
Doesn’t mean your talking points aren’t the same.
No one is talking about the “talking heads on TV”. I’m talking about scientific institutions that have dedicated their entire existence to studying these things.
If you’re actually smart, you don’t trust the way you feel because human feeling and intuition is heavily flawed and prone to fallacy unless you have extensive education on a specific subject and even then you still don’t trust it unless you can back it up with evidence.
You trust institutions of authority that have demonstrably shown themselves to be correct with decades of empirically backed evidence and study.
Also, you remember that scene from 1984 where the hero was being tortured? He was told over and over to never trust himself and to only trust the state.
That’s you.
Wow, so not only are you just completely stupid but you also completely lack even a semblance of media literacy.
You do know that scientific institutions and the state are two completely different entities, right? Don’t answer, that was rhetorical, we all know you don’t know a goddamn thing.
For the purposes of my point the difference doesn’t matter. Both are offering themselves as authoritative truth. Both are advising the suppression of personal truth in favor of that authority.
(Now take a breath. Dang!)
The word from the “scientific institutions” arrives at your door in the form of, yes, a talking head. Speaking with great confidence like an AI.
I’ll keep trusting myself, thanks. It has served me well so far.
When you find yourself agreeing with the mob, that’s a good sign that you’re under the influence.
If you only use secondary and tertiary sources and never bother to look into the primary sources of information then you’re incredibly ignorant.
Fuck off, delusional moron. You are a walking ball of fallacy and Dunning-Kruger. It is clear how sorely lacking you are in education. Spoiled rotten idiot who has lived a life of relative safety thanks to the very science you try to dismiss.
You’re engaging with a ragebait account
There’s the anger. That’s what we inspire with our propaganda. Stop thinking and raaaaaaage!
Some of us consider a narrative presented by the media to be more substantial than the way we feel. In fact such people might be in the majority.
Most people don’t understand vaccines and being afraid of what you don’t understand is completely reasonable.
When you have influencers feeding on that fear and making it grow then it becomes an issue.
Add to that we’re constantly being lied to it’s hard to know what the truth is and what isn’t unless you deeply research a topic, and honestly:
Most vaccine hesitant people use Facebook or YouTube to research which compounds the problem.
This is why people using biased AI to ask questions terrifies me.
Maybe the AI will be less salty than the foreign actors. If I had to chose, Id go with AI. AI is a product that needs to be reliable if it is to succeed. Foreign actors hate my guts for exsisting.
AI is programmed by foreign actors. And on top of that it trains you not to think for yourself and believe what you read. It shuts down critical thought and makes you even easier to manipulate.
AI isn’t programmed its trained. Just look at all the trouble Elon is having trying to red pill grok.
And they can choose what data to use to train it. It trains you to rely on it instead of thinking for yourself. Once you rely on it they enshittify and subvert it. It’s dangerous to rely on a source of information solely controlled by a billionaire with ulterior motives.
Look at what Google has become. Or the news/media industry. Get your information from trustworthy sources. AI is not.
AI is a product that needs to be reliable if it is to succeed.
They’re doing a shit poor job of making it reliable so far.
Meh, its an emerging technology
It’s a way of using mass amounts of power to make billionaires richer I don’t think it’ll ever be reliable.
“Being afraid of what you don’t understand is completely reasonable”
No it isn’t… It’s common, but not reasonable, and it’s a big factor in so much bad about humanity. We need to teach people to specifically NOT be afraid of stuff they don’t understand and instead learn more about that those things, and to never have strong opinions (which includes fear) about things they know nothing or little about.
Being afraid of what you dont understand is instilled to us by our own evolution. We lived tens of thousands of years in a state where unfamiliar berry or strange animal could mean death.
But you are right. School system svould be better in explaining what vaccines do and how they work and society should be better shooting misinformation down.
Also instead of ridiculing the antivacciners people should try to be polite and try to help them understand what vaccines are. Being hostile or condesending just makes people to withdraw in to their own safe belives
Na a bunch of them are actually afraid of the pointy needle.
Gear of medical debt comes up for some too, but since the covid vaccines were free they had to pretend they weren’t afraid of the needles instead.
Wow stone cold take right there.
It’s a shower thought, not a hot take. It completes with other thrilling thoughts, such as “it sure is wet in here” and “time to wash my butthole”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study#Public_trust
There’s been a systematic undermining of public trust in health and safety instructions going on for decades.
Some of this distrust is earned as with Tuskegee, the bungled Anthrax vaccine, the Reagan Era response to the AIDS epidemic, scandals with weight loss drugs like Fen-phen and Redux, Oxycodone, etc.
Some of it is purely manufactured, with the CIA-sponsored agitation against the Chinese COVID vaccine being a major font of modern day anti-vax Truther Lore.
But to no-sell skepticism as just “you’re a little baby who is scared of needles” really under plays the shift in attitude nationally. We used to be a country that whole heartedly embraced a preventative for small pox, polio, and influenza. Now we’re more terrified of kids getting the shot that gives you bad grades in school than getting measels.
We used to be a country that whole heartedly embraced a preventative for small pox, polio, and influenza
Yea, no… you got a very rosy image of history in your mind. There were massive protests and constant public pushback against vaccines for as long as vaccines have existed.
The fight for widespread adoption of vaccination has been rough fought against the tides of the confidently ignorant who let their irrational emotions control them.
There were massive protests and constant public pushback against vaccines for as long as vaccines have existed.
There were a handful of outspoken reactionary groups in the early 19th century who registered outsized alarm. But when you look at the data, the rapid decline in smallpox over the century was the direct result of the success of inoculation domestically. By 1898, the mandatory imposition of vaccinations was functionally unnecessary, due to the near complete eradication of the disease on the island. People were - by and large - more than happy to undergo inoculation at a level that provided herd immunity.
The fight for widespread adoption of vaccination has been rough fought against the tides of the confidently ignorant who let their irrational emotions control them.
Confident ignorance has been as much a benefit to vaccine campaigns as an opposition to it. People are, by and large, trusting and appreciative of advancements in medical science, especially when they are subject to regular and repeated trauma from a chronic malady.
Quackery succeeds on this sense of naive desperation. Vaccination does, too (with the added benefit that it actually works). A straightforward solution to an immediate problem is an easy sell.
The real detriment to vaccination policy is its own success. Once you’ve systematically eliminated a disease, the social memory of the disease’s consequences fades through generations. People aren’t afraid of Polio because they don’t have a President in a wheelchair who fell victim to it. People aren’t afraid of measles because they’ve never experienced it, or had to care for children suffering from the disease.
The rapid adoption of prophylactics in the sex work community comes from people who are regularly faced with the threat of STIs, both personally and in their peer groups. People with little direct or indirect exposure to recreational sex are a much harder sell. And so we see STIs flood through religiously insular communities (ex. the sudden surge in Syphilis in Salt Lake City) that had historically shown very low rates of incidence.
This tends to set off a rebalancing of behaviors, as the community rapidly adopts the techniques for prevention. When news of an outbreak spreads, vaccine hesitancy collapses in its wake
America doesn’t just do this domestically. They have interfered in other nations public health perceptions as well. The CIA undermined polio vaccination programs in Pakistan when global eradication actually seemed possible.
America doesn’t just do this domestically.
They do. It’s just tied up in the private sector. Tons of quackery on American TV and in news journals. Everything from “Head On, Apply Directly to The Forehead” to Dr Oz shilling ginseng as a panacea to the social media conspiracies about MedBeds that Trump himself retweeted.
The CIA undermined polio vaccination programs in Pakistan when global eradication actually seemed possible.
Can’t let the wrong kind of people benefit
There’s been a systematic undermining of public trust in health and safety instructions going on for decades.
A lot of it perpetrated by those very industries themselves. It’s the natural consequence of letting every facet of societal motivation be dictated by profit maximization.
Like I said in another comment, I think what the antivaxers are incapable of understanding and expressing is that they are not actually questioning the science, they are questioning the health care industry and the systems meant to keep them honest. And in that I would agree with them, if only they were able to articulate it.
I think what the antivaxers are incapable of understanding and expressing is that they are not actually questioning the science, they are questioning the health care industry and the systems meant to keep them honest.
A lot of the opposition to vaccination reads like fad diets and self-help trends from 20 or 30 years ago. You can prevent autism by fumbles around playing Motzart to your baby in utero? Meditating during Yoga? Eating chocolate? Pick your Oprah-sponsored poison.
But, like, why are we seeing a fixation on a proven medical treatment and not some generic “don’t let your kids eat jelly beans” or “do headstands to get the blood flowing to the brain” hookum?
I think that’s where you get to people really running afoul of an increasingly dysfunctional health media ecosystem. One whose reputation is bloated with empty promises about The Perfect Cancer / Alzheimer’s Cure or Living Forever With Blood Transfusions. And then it’s colliding with an actual system that just seems to throw enormous bills at you for pain killers and palliative care.
On the one end, there’s supposed to be a recipe for perfect health if you have enough money. On the other, I can get a flu shot and still get the flu? How unfair.
I’m only scared of vaccines because they’re delivered via a needle. At this point I really shouldn’t be acted of needles any more after injecting myself every week for ages, but for some reason I am 🤷♀️
I’m also a needle-weenie. I tell a different nurse each time and we joke about it – despite getting like 9 shots in one day in Basic. Then I wince a bit as I get the shot, put my stereotypically plaid coat back on and off I go.
those blood test needles are the real scary shit
my brother is a 45 , socially he acts like a 8 year old all the time. Of course he worships trumps and refuses to get vaccinated ( even telling my elderly mom to not get the flu and covid shot) . This is why I only see him one day out of the year, and that will turn to Zero days of any time when my mom dies and he has no reason to come over for one day a year.
What I think antivaxers can’t articulate is that what they don’t actually trust is the health care industry, not the science behind vaccines themselves.
Which would be a valid concern, but that is not what they are saying.
You can trust medical science yet don’t trust the providers, history is rife with examples of big business endangering the public for higher profit margins.
They know that American healthcare providers in the past experimented on blacks and other PoC without telling them and they don’t want it done to them now that we’ve pushed to make everyone equal under the law.
This is why they’re so scared of equality as well - we’re all game for the unethical experimentation and exploitation of some of us aren’t in the protected class.
To really break the programming we need to get through that those lines are drawn on class, not on race as they appear, and that no class of divine human exists.
Yep, this, my mom doesn’t trust doctors. Apparantly, according to her, doctors in PRC was corrupt and always try to extort as much money as possible by doing “unnecessary ‘treatments’”, according to her.
She told me that both my older brother and I were both C-Section and like she doubted if it was even necessary, she believed that the doctors were just trying to make extra money because surgery costed more… but she had no choice but go along with it… because she had no idea if the fetus (aka: me and my older brother) were at risk.
As for vaccines… government policy… I guess both the collectivist society and pressure from government
US Government definitely required vaccination records before giving us immigration visas…
Its kinda funny, does the currnt admin allow immigrants without vaccinations? Or make it stricter to make immigration harder?
[Insert 2 red button meme here]
Women who have been through childbirth have certainly earned the right to be skeptical of doctors/ medicine. Women are still being mistreated and discounted in hospitals today, especially women of color. You have to get lucky to get nurses and doctors who treat your body as worthy of care, and you as worthy of belief and autonomy.
Being afraid of needles is fine though, right?
My mother has become, in her later years, a “well idk if they definitely cause autism but I did vaccinate all of you and I do have a kid with autism…” which like. whatever. I’ve been over talking to them for a while now anyway.
But when I was younger and getting vaccinated she always said,“you’re gonna look at the wall in the other direction, it’s gonna hurt for a few seconds then it’ll be over and there’s an ice cream place next door.” And I have almost 0 medical anxiety, like I’ll let new grads I’m precepting practice on me before I let them stick a real patient.
vs I remember when I was a swimming instructor in my early 20s sometimes a kid would start crying and their parent would come over to scream at them to behave and then it would take waaay longer to get their body to relax enough to float.
So while I’m sure it doesn’t make or break every fear of needles or medical anxiety, I do think a LOT of it comes down to how the parent handles and ideally normalizes routine medical care.
Frankly, I think that’s it. When I got shots, my parents would constantly remind me of how much it would hurt and laugh at me over my fear. I’m still scared of needles nowadays, even if by all objective measures they really don’t hurt at all
Psychology is weird and the brain holds on to a lot of baggage. The brain is a very irrational and illogical meat computer, after all. It doesn’t care about objective reality, only our perception of it.
I hope so. Irrational fears are really hard to control.
There is reasons to be afraid of needles. Courage is not having no fear, its facing your fear.
I remember the nurses just belittling me when I was like 10 and like I was scared of needles…
Something something “boys need to be brave” or something
