O’Leary points out that while vaccines have been used as political tools in recent years, most parents care more about what their medical provider says than any politician. Talking to parents at health visits about the importance of vaccines is important.
That’s assuming we have a working health care system, and people can afford to see the doctor regularly. :/
Lol my brother just moved doctors until he found one that he said “wasn’t allowed to advise me not to get vaccinated but it was clear with how he talked to me”. Pretty sure he just shopped around until he found someone willing to or accidentally spoke in code to him to feed his confirmation bias.
I work with a doctor who is an anti vax, ivermectin prescribing election doubter. Religious exemptions are a regular convo for this person.
Catholicism is a hell of a drug.
Our pediatrician approached the question of COVID vaccination for my daughter very gently with me. As soon as she started I saw her demeanor change and I could tell she was getting ready to change course quickly (presumably) in case I went off on a rant or something.
She immediately snapped back to normal when I told her “Absolutely, yes, if she can get it let’s make it happen.” We had just been waiting for it to be available.
I feel bad for what she likely had to deal with from others. She’s a fricking doctor, trying her best to keep children healthy, and now she is clearly getting enough shit from some parents that she’s gunshy about even bringing up certain important topics. It’s crazy.
I told my pediatrician to give my daughters more vaccines. I want them to be able to walk in a sewer system in the 3rd world and be like Moses parting the Red Sea as pathogens flee from their incredible immune systems.
Science: We’ve eradicated many diseases through vaccines!
Republicans: Hold my beer!
Unfortunately, this particular brand of dumb has found a home on both sides of the isle. Part of the reason it’s been so successful at proliferating and creating problems with reemerging diseases.
Never forget that when asked about vaccines in 2016, Jill Stein gave a tepid answer and did not unequivocally confirm they are safe nor that they don’t cause autism.
Going back maybe a decade or so I remember most anti-vaxers I encountered being real crunchy-granola, hippie liberal types, often the types who would go on about natural remedies, crystals, etc. There was the odd conservative looney in the bunch, but they were more of a fringe minority.
I haven’t personally encountered many of them liberal types lately, it definitely seems like there’s been a pretty significant shift. I’m absolutely certain they’re still out there, but at least in my area in the sorts of groups I’m tuned into, they’ve become a minority.
Annecdotally, I used to have a pretty good track record for being able to sway people’s opinions on vaccines. I have a enough things going for me on both sides of the aisle that liberals and conservatives will both usually give me the benefit of the doubt and a bit of a reputation among people who know me for being fairly knowledgeable about a lot of things. Since the pandemic, that’s not really the case, everyone’s opinion is pretty much set in stone at this point. I have had a couple people I know thank me for straightening them out before COVID hit though so it’s nice to know my lessons stuck and who knows, maybe even saved a life or two.
People are just in general too fucking stupid to keep two ideas in their head.
-
Vaccines WORK and are a fucking miracle of modern science
-
Pharmaceutical companies are fucking for profit and can be evil like any other mega corp
Both can be true. The liberal hippies saw point 2 and jumped onto point point 1 as equally valid.
Life is complicated, with competing interests everywhere and you have to be able think critically to navigate it. But, science literacy is so poor you have hippies trying to cure cancer with bathsalts and Republicans trying to cure covid by shoving bleach up their ass.
I have had many pharm clients over the years. They are incompetent and waste money, they have a level of quality control that shouldn’t be possible for humans to achieve and some of the smartest people I have ever met working there.
Both are true
-
I recall that time, too. Hippies jumped onboard with naturalism and spiritualism too far while conservatives only embraced these as a means to oppose big bad government conspiracies.
Overall those leftists have come around, fortunately.
When it comes to the pandemic, the propaganda being spread online was just insurmountable. My wife and I both work in a hospital and she has had to literally cart the corpses of covid’s victims to the morgue and then you get these supposed nurses who are probably L&D online thinking they have a grasp of what’s going on…
We’ve lost our grounding. Without it, there’s no orientation to truth and falsehood. Until we restore the notion of consensus of expertise, we are screwed on a variety of fronts.
I missed it when it was hippies. Worked with one and she saw my pack of smokes
People still smoke?
Yes, and people still vaccine their children.
I am going to lie and say that she didn’t look like I kicked her puppy and I didn’t enjoy that.
@Mazdak Let’s stop calling people anti-vaxers and start calling them pro-disease and death morons
As far as I’m concerned, if you opt your kid out of vaccines for any reason besides sound medical concern, you should also be opting your kid out of public education.
I shouldn’t have to put my kids at risk because the people in your dumb little church group are too stupid to inoculate their offspring.
The problem is that punishes the kids a lot more than the parents. Quite frankly, if they send their kids to school unvaccinated without medical documentation, they should be getting vaccinated at school. Parental rights are not absolute. Plenty of kids were vaccinated at my school as a kid, and it was generally ones whose parents couldn’t afford to go to the doctor so nobody made a fuss.
Sadly enough, that problem will take care of itself eventually. Unfortunately it also means that people will suffer who had no say in this or may actually not be eligible for vaccinations.
I dunno, plenty of people continue to do pointlessly unhealthy things despite consequences.
Right, but that doesn’t consider the part where it’s about
people will suffer who had no say in this or may actually not be eligible for vaccinations.
It’s one thing to risk your own health/life, but an entirely different thing to risk others’ health/lives.
People also continue to endanger other’s health and lives despite consequences.
The only way this is fixed is if the government steps in. It won’t fix itself.
Remember folks, all our vaccines are going to make us autistic and mutate multiple new limbs before we zombify and haunt the streets like ghouls.
And somehow all our vaccines will be at fault when the offspring of these mouth breathing fuckers die off en masse. I don’t feel a lick of sympathy.
I do. For the kids. Some of them are organising and finding ways to get vaccinated without their parents’ knowledge. No kids should have to deal with that.
It should be a law that a child can choose to be vaccinated without parental consent.
Well, they say the best way to learn is from experience… ¯\__ _ __ (ツ) __ _ __/¯
I had a family member that nearly died from covid (and one that did). Before they caught it, it was a hoax. After they got it, they were mad that the doctors didn’t prescribe enough ivermectin.
They will learn nothing.
Well yes but also no, learning from experience is all fine for just the people that refuse any kind of vaccine but as soon as they’re actively killing other people then that’s a big no.
The antivaxxers “science and logic” will kill children and adults in all communities.
And they will blame the vaccinated for the surge in tiny coffin sales, with a complete lack of irony or any hint of self awareness.
Only when enough of these ant-vaxxers lose children to these diseases will they reverse course. Then they will blame the experts again for not warning them. I have a 2 yo great-nephew and I shudder to think of him getting some disease that we were close to wiping out. Are there no people left alive that remember polio?
Didn’t you know? If you get polio, it means God is punishing you for your lack of faith.
Polio still circulates in Afghanistan and Pakistan
On May 2, 2011, President Barack Obama announced that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had located and killed Osama Bin Laden. The agency organised a fake hepatitis vaccination campaign in Abottabad, Pakistan, in a bid to obtain DNA from the children of Bin Laden, to confirm the presence of the family in a compound and sanction the rollout of a risky and extensive operation. Release of this information has had a disastrous effect on worldwide eradication of infectious diseases, especially polio.
Pretty sure if I was from that part of the world I would still get vaccinated. It isn’t like the vaccine killed you, it was fake.
You have no idea what you’re talking about.
Did you miss what happened in the US starting in 2020? A major political party convinced a massive swath of the American population to refuse to take any actions to avoid the spread of a disease. This is a highly educated, highly connected, wealthy population in a (sort of) democracy, and you had incidents of violence and murder occurring over a weaponized and mythologized version of reality pushed by religious extremists and the far right. Now picture a community in Pakistan that does not have that education, the level of political and religious freedom, or that access to information. We saw the same dynamic play out in West Africa during the 2014 Ebola outbreak.
Except in this case, the CIA was actively involved. Imagine 2022 if it turned out that Biden’s vaccination program turned out to be run by Chinese Ministry for State Security and they were using the program as a way of gathering intelligence on Americans. As it was you had armed militias and paramilitary groups seizing statehouses and plotting kidnappings and political murders.
So maybe you would be that one brave soul in a deep red Alabama town who wears their mask despite being assaulted, getting spit on, and having their family threatened. It’s statistically unlikely, but maybe you’re just the type of person who would walk down the street in the same town dressed head to heels in drag knowing you’re going to get beat up, if you’re lucky. It just means that your brain - your physical brain - is wired up differently. Congratulations - maybe go join Doctors Without Borders or something.
The CIA and other American intelligence agencies have been long barred from participating in aid programs to prevent this very thing. They wouldn’t even allow agency people to retire and join government aid agencies without a significant waiting period. It’s the same reason it was considered very outside of bounds for intelligence officers to pose as members of the press. It puts lives in danger. The US has dispatched foreign medical aid using uniformed military assets, but it is done openly. A naval ship will pull up with medical equipment, field hospitals will be set up, and so on.
Anything else gets people killed - both the aid workers and the community whose distrust forces them to reject the aid.
Why not just vaccinate them for real if you were doing this.
You can still get the DNA and have an ulterior motive and also not 100% trash any credibility, you’d still trash it but nowhere near as bad.
You’re too optimistic. Anti-vaxxers can and do still blame everyone and everything else before changing their minds. Only select few will have the awareness to change. People were literally on their deathbeds dying of covid still cursing the doctors who were supposedly killing them. The children and other people they spread to, they don’t deserve to die. But I have no patience left for contrarian wilful assholes, they deserve(d) their deaths.
They won’t reverse course at that point. Because at that point they would lose face.
Bold of you assume that there will be enough dead children to change their minds. See also: guns.
Only when enough of these ant-vaxxers lose children to these diseases will they reverse course
They absolutely won’t. This is a group of people willing to put their kids through ‘treatments’ like chelation, HBOT and bleach enemas to get rid of ‘the toxins’ and kids have died from some of these alternative treatments. All that their own kids dying guarantees is a spot as a parent-martyr on some antivaxx podcast and a handshake from Jenny McCarthy.
The interesting thing about polio, is if I understand it right, it’s very similar to covid in terms of what a non serious case looks like in additon to asymptomatic people. It would easily be brushed off as not serious.
If Polio killed people like covid, and didn’t give the public the chance to see the damage it does with all these paralyzed people on the streets, I don’t know if we’d ever have a chance of stopping it.
It’s hard to argue with kids in wheelchairs vs deaths of people you don’t know.
COVID was just a warmup, there’s going to be all sorts of fun stuff with all the tropical stuff moving into broader regions.
Honestly, this is what scares the fuck out of me. I feel like COVID was just a sample of what’s to come. Between anti-vaxxers and climate change we are going to be in for a wild ride.
I think it is a mixed bag. Maybe there are people who are god damn idiots especially looking at these parents trying to deny “proven” vaccines, this isn’t a comment on the covid vaccines, I’m vaxxed and had the most recent booster but I can at least in a way understand people’s fear around it. I think Covid was able to slip on by because “2% VeRy SmAlL NuMbEr, StOp BeInG CoWaRdS!” maybe I’m wrong and this whole thing was a trial run for the next super bug that will come out in the coming decade but I think a disease with a mortality rate comparable to the black death (30-60%) with a spreadability of covid though may lead to people taking it slightly more seriously. There will be obvious exceptions, hell I imagine many industrial leaders will still push the front line staff saying its “fake news” so they keep making profit while not caring about their people. Then again a disease with that kind of mortality rate would probably collapse modern society for better or worse at the bare minimum greatly reform it, the after effects of black death are fascinating read.
Nah don’t be afraid. Just keep on investing in better gear. The antivaxxers will be dying in the street and you can walk over their corpses.
You think people or even anti-vaxxers will quietly die in the streets?
