Why won’t Americans get vaccinated?
today.yougov.com
today.yougov.com
Edit: I have had Covid as-well as everyone in my family.
1% death rate is pretty bad for a single disease everyone is going to get eventually. And the hospitalization rate is much higher than 1%
Too late.
Leaving "high cholesterol" aside, everything I've read and seen indicates that "fixing type 2 diabetes" is extremely difficult, takes months to years rather than weeks, and is especially difficult to maintain. One of my friends is yo-yoing his weight right now (e.g., down 50 lbs, up 25, down 5,...) in an attempt to cease insulin. I had no idea someone's weight could vary so quickly. His daughter polices his diet carefully, he hides candy bars and other goodies, it's an amazing struggle.
Can you cite any studies that clearly state it is "relatively easy to fix type 2 diabetes"?
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What concern do you have about HPV vaccine effectiveness? As far as I can tell this is a non sequitur — vaccination for HPV is effective and a positive health intervention:
> The HPV vaccine works extremely well. In the 10 years after the vaccine was recommended in 2006 in the United States, quadrivalent type HPV infections decreased by 86% in female teens aged 14 to 19 years and 71% in women in their early 20s.
The impact is a solid percentage of us basically unable to think in basic group, or class terms.
Why would capitalism not apply to vaccines?
are there other things you fear to say about your government?
Even if mandated, why wouldn't you want to prevent cervical cancer with such a simple intervention, and why shouldn't the manufacture be compensated for such a miracle?
Here's a bit of a thought experiment for you. Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump are vaccinated. Why would they tell you not to get vaccinated?
I don't know if they switched because they're concerned their voters are going to die or if they're worried about getting sued but there's been a sudden switch in their narrative, for whatever reason.
Correct.
Biden, Harris, and Pelosi all said they won't trust any Trump vaccine. (<https://www.newsweek.com/anti-vaccine-covid-trust-skepticism...>)
Personally, I don't believe I would die from any of the variants. However, I got the vaccine because I don't want to become one of the infected with longer-term problems, including permanently reduced lung capacity.
Respiratory function in patients post-infection by COVID-19: a systematic review and meta-analysis
DOI: 10.1016/j.pulmoe.2020.10.013
You have the freedom to do what you want with your body but when it impacts me then that freedom stops being absolute and becomes more nuanced. If you don't want to be vaccinated then that's fine, but you're not allowed to put me at risk with your choice.
I almost compare it to drunk driving laws. You can get as drunk as you want at home. But when you get into a car, your choices start to impact everyone else, and your right to get as drunk as you want and die in a single-car accident is trumped by my right to not be subject to undue risk when I'm in public. Even if the risk is low, maybe you've driven drunk 1000 times and never killed anyone, my right to be safe trumps your right to drive drunk.
The cigarette industry argued this for years past the discovery of passive smoking.
In fact I'd say a large amount of 20th century industrial history has been discovering the long list of things that shave bits and pieces off the lives of people in aggregate and banning them - in the face of opposition saying they have a right to emit this and denying the harm.
Serious movie spoiler alert: this is literally what Soderbergh's latest film is about
It's particularly difficult to reason about probability of harm versus the value of exercising their freedom - if they choose to bear arms, for example, and harm people through poor execution, accidental discharge, or kids hurting themselves with found firearms around the home. It's like swinging your fist into the other man's nose and answering "oops, I meant to stop a millimeter short". Maybe you shouldn't be pointlessly swinging your fist in the first place, go find a punching bag somewhere safe instead. It's even more difficult when you want to compel someone to take positive action instead of preventing them from doing something prohibited.
Personally, I don't believe I would die, either. I understand that the possibility of long-term problems is also low, though as an athlete I really value my lung capacity. However, I work with, am friends with, and am related to a lot of people who have far more risk. I believe I would be morally culpable if I failed to wear a mask, socially distance, or get the vaccine, and transmitted the pandemic to someone who did suffer from the illness.
It is worth noting that the HPV vaccine is effective: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/hpv/hcp/safety-effectivenes...
As far as I am aware, mandates have been implemented in only a few places, at the state and local level.
Do you have a source for some kind of proposed federal mandate (excluding DOA bills by a backbenchers, because those mean nothing)? As far as I know, vaccine mandates have always been a state/local thing, usually only tied school entry requirements.
The chances of getting in a car accident in any given trip is way less than 99%, that doesn't mean I'm not going to wear seatbelts.
Tattoos are also injected into the muscles, and if you only had a 99% survival rate on those they'd be illegal and only the craziest of daredevils would risk them.
Anyway, my point is something with a 1% death rate is incredibly dangerous.
But good on the 1%!
Well rats, there goes that analogy.
But I've got another one: maybe a decade ago I had to give a loved one IM injections regularly (there was a class at the hospital and everything), and if there had been a 1% chance of fatal results the drug wouldn't have made it out of the lab.
Imagine insulin with a 1% fatality rate.
Technically that's what clinical testing is. Further we're long past beta testing with a large percentage of people being vaccinated.
Anti-vaxxers have done more damage to the country by scaring people from getting the vaccine without providing any serious proof.
How is a large percentage of people getting the beta an indication that we're past beta testing? None of the vaccines have FDA approval.
https://www.fda.gov/emergency-preparedness-and-response/coro...
And if you care to read it, the decision memo is here.
https://www.fda.gov/media/144416/download
Granted that's the Pfizer vaccine. Google is your friend here for other vaccines approved by the FDA.
Because testing is giving it to people and seeing what happens. The more people you give it to, the more rare and unusual reactions you can find. IIRC, drug testing involves giving the drug to progressively larger groups of people, to mitigate the damage if there are serious adverse side effects.
> None of the vaccines have FDA approval.
While technically they don't have "full approval," they do have "emergency use approval." At this point, full approval is just a bureaucratic exercise, because the widespread emergency use rollout has tested these vaccines far, far better than any typical pharmaceutical testing program.
Per Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phases_of_clinical_research#Ph...), a Phase III trial involves 300–3,000 test patients. About 50% of the US population has been vaccinated, so you can think of that as a test on 150 million people. That's 50,000 times more than in your typical drug trial.
At this point, refusing the vaccine because it hasn't been tested enough is like refusing a common drug like ibuprofen for the same reason.
He's got no faith in the government any more, and would rather risk getting sick than try to keep up with whatever narrative is being pushed on any given week.
The government is made of imperfect employees like you and me, imbued by a mission to transform tax money into social guidance. At first, there were no mask and no knowledge, they chose to avoid a mask rush that would have led nowhere while inventing excuses to explain it, or nobody would follow. But as everyone they slowly learn and as factories start building the masks, they get easier to enforce. It might yet be another mistake, if at an even deeper level masks are non beneficial, and they might yet change their mind.
You can absolutely just accept faith isnt our guide and follow the best effort estimate of the people we pay for producing it. Dont wear the mask when they think it wont work, wear it when they discover maybe actually it might, remove it when ... you get the point.
Nobody knows, the government is not trying to steal our money with vaccines: they already did with taxes.
You're actively spreading misinformation, and it's disappointing.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/vaccine-fda-approve
I've found the FDA's lackadaisical attitude towards vaccine approval pretty puzzling during the whole pandemic. Why couldn't they start analyzing the drug company's testing data even before trials completed? Why couldn't they find people to work full time on reviewing the drug approval applications once they were formally in? Moderna, Pfizer, etc were willing to spend extra money and modify procedures to speed up their data collection process so why wasn't the FDA willing to do the same to go over the data they collected more quickly?
Same with the "99% survival rate" misinformation meme. Even if the fact were true, the insinuation is that a "99%" survival rate means the virus is no big deal, which is false.
They paused it while they investigated a rare side effect, then resumed a few weeks later with a new warning about that.
It's very much on the market (or would be if Emergent wasn't such a fuckup).
Sure, the vaccine appears less effective to the delta variant. But that's not a reason to avoid it.
One of the long term effects of not getting the vaccine is death. The recent stories coming out of hospitals where people are dying even though there's a vaccine available is tragic. Let's hope it doesn't happen to you.
Without vaccines you're basically guaranteed to catch it eventually.
The risk that you die while fully vaccinated is tremendously low.
About 1 percent now. Was as high as 10 before our medicine improved.
Many are dividing dead people by infected people. This understates the risk due to infections in progress are not yet outcomes, which biases the risk assessment to the very best, idealized case. The assumption is nobody else infected will die, which is a false assumption.
With a vaccine on board, chance of death is a mere, small fraction of 1 percent.
For perspective, ask poker players how sure of a thing 1 in 100 is. That hits way more often than people think!
Also, there is much more than 1% chance of very serious life long complications.
Still want to gamble? I would never take that risk, unless forced.
And was. Caught covid when the chance of death was about 7 percent. Damn near ended up in a hospital. Scary shit. Chance of longer term symptoms is higher, 5 percent maybe?
Chance of death on a vaccination is much lower, 1 / maybe 100,000 very worst case?
Now, here is the hard part:
Chance of infection?
Well, if we vaccinated everyone, that will go to very good odds. Many may never be infected.
However, since we currently are not doing that, virus mutation means odds are great you will eventually get covid. And it could mutate into forms that are worse and or that nullify vaccinations and we start this crap over.
It is in the world now. We did not catch it in time.
More vaccinated people = less mutation = lower risk for all humans.
This is a when and what risk to take discussion. Very few will avoid this entirely. Odds are overwhelming that will not be you.
Good luck!
When you get covid, do you want to face it with or without the benefit of science?
Good luck then I guess.
relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/2397/
625k deaths in the US over 35147k cases, a death rate of 1.78%
Current US population is about 328M. 1.78% death rate across 328M is close to 6M.
deaths have also been likely undercounted a bit although 625k is a lot closer to the current 700k estimate of excess deaths than it used to be.
It doesn't. The case-fatality ratio is 2.15%. And this is with preventative actions being taken which allow higher percentages of people to obtain healthcare. If treatment was even more scarce than it has been, the death rate would climb even more.
* 215% deadlier than anthrax.
* 2150% deadlier than polio.
* about the same as the average death rate between the two smallpox strains, and on-par with the spanish flu
Smallpox, variola major has a 30% CFR.
Both are much worse than either covid or the flu.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_disease_case_fat...
Yes, bad cases of smallpox and anthrax are worse than COVID. And, the flu is pretty bad, but COVID is significantly more deadly than the Influenza A.
So while it's true that covid was more deadly than influenza in 2020, that's not because covid is inherently more deadly, but simply because people weren't immune to it yet.
Now that we have a vaccine, and a significant number of people who've had the disease, covid death rates are much, much lower. Currently about 250 per day in the US, an annual rate of less than 100k per year, not much worse than the flu.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-covid-deaths-7-day?...
New data coming out seems to show that the rate of hospitalizations and deaths are increasing with the Delta variant.
A troubling sign of what to come is the outbreak in Arkansas. https://arkansascovid.com/2021/07/covid-19-hospitalizations-...
What you’re looking for is IFR, which by definition is a smaller proportion.
Anecdotally: my family all tested positive for COVID a few weeks ago via the Abbott at-home test. That test has a relatively large false negative rate (~15% IIRC) but a vanishingly small false positive rate. Of the four of us, I’m the only one who might have been reported to the CDC, because after about a week I called my doctor and asked for a prescription for inhaled steroids to ease my shortness of breath.
Problem is, people today haven't seen the tough stuff. If every third person had Ebola you wouldn't have the luxury of opining on government unease, because your lived reality would look far different. We've had it good. Maybe people complaining about these things is a concrete sign of how much progress we've made.
Oh boy, what do you dispute? That covid is real? Do you dispute that over 600,000 Americans have died from covid? Those are only the ones we know about. And that's with our incredible luck to have lived in a time where we can develop a vaccine with incredible speed and effectiveness. And that's with all the measures we've taken to hold back the virus, with people like you kicking and screaming the entire way. Maybe you're hearing the same "narrative" because it's reality.
We know what would happen if we did nothing - see New York, Iran, Italy last year. I don't know what people like you want. Apparently you want to sit back and pout with your conspiracy theories while the rest of us do our part.
I think people should get vaccinated, but admittedly there is a profound lack of trust in institutions these days. misconceptions like this microchip theory would be 100x less likely if the government wasn’t literally surveilling your every movement and communicated word with the help of big tech
The institutions behave in a profoundly untrustworthy way for generations, then people stop trusting them. Society breaks down. It’s that simple. In 30 years this will be amazingly worse unless things change
https://www.gatesfoundation.org/our-work/programs/global-hea...
They funded the development of a quantum dot to track vaccinations. The distinction between that and a microchip to track people is difficult for many to understand.
It's surprising how clueless or indifferent they are about people's privacy concerns.
You talk like a 99% survival rate is pretty good and means it's not something to worry about. One percent of the US population is 3.28 million people. Which is oddly enough about the population of the entire metro area I live in.
So Russia could nuke my city and kill everyone, and the US would still have a 99% survival rate.
Cut the number of deaths in half, for a 99.5% survival rate, and you're still taking out a city like Milwaukee.
> and the media manipulating us at every turn, trust in these institutions is less than rock bottom
The media may be manipulating you, but the people who sell the media manipulation narrative are usually do so to manipulate you even more. It's like deciding to eat dogshit because there was a fly in your food. Yeah, there's a problem with the food, but it's still better than dogshit.
E.g. the US government had a role in the opioid crisis.
Personally, I don't know why anyone would take that bet when they don't have to.
Yeah, no surprise there lol
Thanks for beta-testing covid-19 for us though.
I made the mistake of telling them the results. It was 2x 3-days of me bitching and moaning about a sore arm and just feeling aches while the innoculation worked its magic. Since TFG convinced a lot of Americans the virus is no worse than a light flu somehow my achy arm is way worse than any flu. So now the vaccine is not worth taking because those 6 total days of achiness are worse than being in ICU.
It's that fucking dumb.
In hindsight I should have kept my mouth shut and said everything was fine.
Indeed, contrarian to what, exactly?
In the USA, by March 2021, there were 114.6 million estimated total infections, 5.6 million estimated hospitalizations, and 17.5 million estimated asymptomatic infections.
That predicts approximately 1 in 3 Americans were infected with the virus. These numbers make sense to me, and I can show this with back of the napkin math. A few global studies estimated the average infection fatality rate to be between 0.4-0.7%. Using a 0.6% death rate and the reported 600k deaths in the USA, that gives 600,000 / 0.6% = ~100 million infected in the USA. So the CDC numbers look alright.
So yeah, a lot. Go google "2021 life expentancy us" and see.the shithole.we are in, even if a lot of other dearh causes went down (like driving)
If someone is TFG (had to look up that abbreviation), talking about the side effects was nowhere near table stakes for their degree of concern and FUD. Had you said nothing, I strongly believe they still wouldn't have anyways.
My wife requires care and those days were difficult when we both were sick. I had to take paracetamol on last night to clean and cook.
I assume someone dependent on day wage would think twice and possibly would not choose the best option for the comfortable one.
TFG?
Apparently it also stands for "Too Far Gone" (as it too nutty to convince of the truth), which sort of made sense in the sentence, but not as much as Trump.
Harris said she wouldn't trust the vaccine? [1]
Things seem to be moving very fast. Anyone else have trouble keeping up who's on what side of every issue? Not too long ago people were arguing about the politics of a bean producer. Weird time to be alive
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/30/opinion/coron...
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/05/politics/kamala-harris-not-tr...
Regarding the vaccine timeline, Trump deserves major credit for Operation Warp Speed. To a large extent, we got lucky - the mRNA vaccines are really good, while others (CureVac) did not fare so well.
[1]: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/covid-19-was-always-goi...
Yes, but he also downplayed the pandemic leading a large number of his followers to believe that COVID is no more threatening than a mild flu.
If you believe that COVID is no worse than a mild flu then there is no more reason to get COVID vaccine than there is to get a flu vaccination. Only about half of Americans get an annual flu vaccination.
I felt worse the day after my yearly flu shot in 2020.
But I'd totally do it again if it's necessary to keep my immunity.
But I don't think it's super mysterious. The US is one of the few countries that has a major news network constantly pushing the antivax message (Russia being the other that comes to mind, and that strengthens my point). We also have an erosion of trust in institutions, the media, and authority that goes deeper than in most other places.
We also see evidence here on HN: every Covid thread has a significant number of antivax comments. They are also aggressive on Twitter, and even in the chat of TWiV livestreams.
There is some reason for optimism though. Very recently, there has been something of a turnaround in right-leaning news sources, where they are now advocating the vaccine. I'm not sure if that will hold up, but in any case I expect it will boost vax numbers considerably, and in the process save many thousands of lives.
A deeper question remains: what can we do toward having an information ecosystem that is not so terribly dysfunctional that antivax messages thrive in it?
[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/07/unvaccina...
Russia's low rate of vaccination comes from three things:
1) Lack of incentive. Life was going as usual throughout Winter and Spring - everything was open, no one was enforcing masks. Moscow had the requirement to be vaccinated in order to enter restaurants for a few weeks in June-July, that forced people to go get vaccines.
2) Not many people were dying before Delta, so everyone thought it was fading away. And combined with the iron curtain situation between vaccines (Sputnik V not approved in EU and P/M/J&J/AZ not approved in Russia), people thought there was going to be some development, maybe new vaccines, and that it's worth waiting a bit.
3) Many people didn't trust some dying corrupt company to be able to make millions of doses out of nowhere and for it to be effective. It was just too suspicious to be true. But eventually Sputnik proved to work, so this went away.
There are a lot of factors that you need to take in account when talking about vaccine hesitant people. Some big ones:
* Risk: people that don't think they are at risk of catching covid are less likely to get the vaccine. Many people in rural areas don't interact with people as much, and likely feel like they are less likely to catch it. You can also see risk evaluation playing out in other countries that didn't have large early cases of Covid (like Japan), where the fall 2020 wave wasn't too bad, so people weren't as worried.
* Trust: There are many that seem to feel squelching discussion that dissents from the CDC guidance is the best way to convince the skeptics. Sadly, those people that are skeptical will see this as more of a reason not to trust the ruling class. Preventing discussion isn't how to fight this fight.
Where did you get the idea that in this country, rural people aren’t ruling the country? Have you looked at the senate lately?
No, equal representation is good, but none of the Senate, the Electoral College, or the House of Representatives feature even roughly equal representation. (The largest house district by population is, IIRC, about 1.75× the size of the smallest, with the same representation, and the range of representation ratios in the other two bodies is much larger.)
Yes, the senate skews congress highly rural. That's the point. It was designed that way. Frankly it works just fine except when electing a president or when doing things at the federal level that should be done at the state level.
At the state level, where most of the day to day stuff that affects people's lives is legislated the urban areas in any given state run the show unless the state is very, very, rural.
Furthermore, class based distinctions are mostly separate and parallel from urban vs rural ones. Both the hick and the hoodrat know full well their elected representatives, whether they voted for or against them, are nothing like them.
[1] https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/w2zmwpzsq0/econTabReport.pdf
Did you hear about the suspension of the J&J vaccine?
Did you hear that the suspension of the J&J vaccine had been lifted?
If the FDA were to grant regular authorization for use of a Covid vaccine how likely would you be to take it?
> Less than half of Black and Hispanic people have received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose in nearly all states reporting data, including a number of states where less than a third have received a vaccine
I'm aware that polls have a skew, but I can't figure out how those numbers are so different, especially since the latter numbers are about people who have received at least one dose, not the full dose.
[1] https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/latest-...
How many lives would it save?
Would we be willing to do that?
A change in the ad campaign could work, appeal to republican values but without alienating democrats in the process
Get a free stars and Stripes flag with every injection.
Conversely, using that name would have caused many others to not want it. Biden, Harris, and Pelosi all said they won't trust any Trump vaccine. (<https://www.newsweek.com/anti-vaccine-covid-trust-skepticism...>)
For starters COVID 19 is relatively benign compared to the other stuff you vaccinate against. And unlike the other vaccines which were marketed as - I don't want to get polio/my kids to get polio, this was done as moral duty which is to protect others - which not as much people buy in.
Throw in the speedy approval process, the Astra Zenecca feud with Brussels, the media being media with side effects stories and the constant annoying moralizing preaching of the very online crowd, the fact that vaccine is still no reason to ditch the masks - and it is no wonder that hesitancy is so strong.
Got jabbed with Pfizer in February - I don't think it was worth it. I am still forced to wear masks even though there is just no good evidence that vaccinated people could be infectious at any rates comparable to unvaccinated.
I couldn't believe one of the first nurses they vaccinated at the beginning of the rollout was one prone to fainting - who then fainted.
SERIOUSLY? If they wanted to instill confidence that's NOT the way to do it. It's like they were trying to sow division from the start. And then they wonder why people are distrustful? Changing medical "facts" based on the politics of the moment hasn't done any of the "experts" any favors - from no mask, to masks, to double/triple the masks (freaking clown show, that one) now masks even if you have had it/get the jab (absolutely NO medial basis for that policy) - it's just nuts.
If you want to have a really good time, just look up dear Dr. Fauci and his handling of AIDS in the 80's and SARS in the 90's. How that man still holds the position he does is simply mind boggling. He's less reliable than the local weather forecaster and at least they have a good reason for their accuracy and won't kill people based on being moronically wrong. When you look at how he downplayed AIDS when it was well known he was flat out wrong; how many hundreds of thousands died (especially in the gay community) that didn't have to?
On balance vaccines are a slam dunk positive; I'm certainly NOT an anti-vaxxer (just got my shingles vaccine - shingles are nasty; don't fool around!). I'm just not in a hurry for the COVID vaccines when I don't have to be - especially when it's still under emergency approval. Heck there are still studies narrowing down the optimal dose size - the smaller you can make it while still being effective greatly diminishes the side effects and it could be as much as half of what they are currently doing according to more than one recent study I have seen. That's a huge difference! I have had allergic reactions in the past so yeah, I have zero problem waiting a bit until more of this stuff gets refined. That's hardly a nutter/denier position, yet there seems to be zero room for nuance in public discourse these days. It's either you are part of the heard/groupthink or you are worse than a nazi, non-human and subject to immediate purge from the planet :p
Lie: > Vaccine rejection is higher among whites than it is among black and Hispanic Americans
The data: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccination-demogr...
Also observe in Figure 4 of https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/latest-... that while the percentage of whites that have gotten vaccinated his higher than Black and Hispanic groups, the slope of the curve is higher in the latter cases - if trends continue, the lines will cross, just as Canada has exceeded the US vaccination rate, and possibly for similar reasons.
EDIT: I'm eating the downvotes on this one, but it's an actual excuse I've seen reported in the wild. Even if they don't lose their job, many people are living very close to the edge and the loss of a couple days salary is a big deal.
I personally was unable to really work for a day and a half, and couldn't have driven myself there (or back) anyway. I'm very lucky in that I work from home and have plenty of paid sick leave, but that's not a situation experienced by lots of people.
Where exactly do you see this access problem for black and Hispanic Americans?
Which, it's from March, so a lot of the issues they cited were from early on in the rollout where supply was low, demand was high, and a lot of governments were still getting the kinks worked out. That said, some of the effects cited in the article may still apply. For example,
> Another barrier to getting vaccinated is difficulty in registering for appointments online. Applicants often have to navigate labyrinthine portal systems and fill out multiple pages of documentation before appointments fill up, so it becomes a race for who can load and complete the forms the fastest.
> Getting to vaccination sites can also be a challenge. They are not always near public transit, and not everyone has access to a car.
As someone who spent many years living without a car in the USA, I can personally attest that, "available at every major drug store in America," does not mean the same thing as, "readily accessible." Suburban sprawl doesn't care who won the last election.
These are not unique to minority communities.
Seems likely.
And here we have articles talking about real researchers doing real research, as scientifically as they can, to try and pin down what those other factors might be. And you are rejecting it, not based on its own merits as research, but based on a mix of sweeping statements and political assertions. Here I just pointed out that your most recent argument doesn't follow because it's a blatant strawman, and your response is to suggest that me pointing out that the universal and existential quantifiers are actually two very different logical constructs is somehow an encrypted 4D chess statement about voter laws?
Allow me to suggest that life has a distressing tendency to be neither that simple nor that complicated.
It's tiresome to see certain statements about black and Hispanic communities seem to generalize the assumption that these are groups almost entirely without agency or capacity for even minimal personal initiative on simple, inexpensive (by even the most basic standards) things. It's almost condescending, but presented in the name of fighting marginalization. An excusing of all behavior without even considering the possibility that members of a community might just be making a few poor choices of their own.
It's a bit like trying to say that 4 square meters is less than 6 cubic feet, just based on the numbers alone. It's nonsensical, because units do matter. Perhaps both those figures could play a part in an interesting comparison, depending on what they're actually measuring, but, even if they could, you'd need to bring in some more numbers to get there.
How do you go from one to the other here?
The vaccine rejection rate here is the percentage of people who say they won't get the vaccine. That has little to do with how many people have been vaccinated up to this point, which is a function of access and distributed among people who _haven't_ stated categorically they won't get it.
It can both be true that white people are more likely to say they won't ever get the vaccine than black and hispanic people AND that a higher percentage of white people have received vaccine shots SO FAR.
Here, imagine you can divide a box into four quadrants:
A | B
--+--
C | D
This is what surprises me about the US (if it’s true - I’d like to see more numbers). Not that there is a chunk of sceptics but a chunk of lunatics. Even if you account for troll responses you wouldn’t expect that kind of number. If just one in ten that answered yes actually mean it - that’s still terrifying.
The same argument isn't used to excuse people who won't vaccinate.
Don't get me wrong-- I am completely in favor of vaccination, and completely in favor of government ids for all vital functions.
Edit: “almost all” changed to “most”
Antibody titers are higher from vaccines as well. "After the second dose of the vaccine, antibody titers were up to 10 times higher than those of patients who had recovered from natural COVID-19 infection, suggesting that even those with prior exposure could benefit from vaccination."
https://www.contagionlive.com/view/immune-response-from-mrna...
People with the vaccine accepting phenotype are dying at lower rates than the vaccine hesitant phenotype because they have adapted to their environment better. Whether this leads to adaptation in the broader population remains to be seen.
My guess is that it won't because most of the people who aren't getting vaccinated and dying are 1. too small in number and 2. Primarily past the age of reproduction anyway.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/biden-trump-coronavi...
What exactly is “carelessly promoting” mean in this context.
Edit: ah OP edited his post, s/carelessly/ceaselessly/
ADVERB Continuously and without end.
‘a former policeman who has campaigned ceaselessly on his daughter's behalf’
I despise all mainstream media, but if there's any one entity to chiefly blame for that, it's the federal government itself.
For a taste of the alternative, book airfare to Haiti, Somalia, or Venezuela.
If you were truly informed and educated as you claim you would know that our founding fathers had the foresight to anticipate the badness of government as a necessary evil (their words). We enjoy the high quality of life due to our constitution which enable the freedoms and sacrifice of Americans before us, despite the government's interference along the way.
If you want to take that (partisan?) tack, you might turn it around and observe that both halves of the media take their turns being in opposition.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/20/us/politics/trump-coronav...
They're not against the government, they speak out against the concept of government itself.
Nothing in that article describes Trump or the Republican Party speaking against the "concept of government itself." That would make them anarchists, which clearly they are not. The article points out numerous pro-government positions by Trump and implies that his position on the legitimate purpose and scope of government, rather than being founded on a rigid anti-government ideological core, is entirely transactional. The same guy who supported political protests against vaccination procedures and his opponent's election was shouting "LAW AND ORDER" from Twitter and sending troops into Portland... to crack down on political protesters.
And as far as the Republicans themselves go, the party is famously pro-military, pro-police, pro hardline stances on drug enforcement and immigration, and pro Constitution. The only form of government they consistently oppose are social programs (with the exceptions of agricultural subsidies and the GI bill), spending related to arts and sciences, public education and anything else they consider "leftist" (or more simply, anything their political opponents support.)
Both sides criticize and question the legitimacy of government when in opposition. The point stands.
Separate from the partisan nonsense, it is possible that government overreaches. There are legitimate criticisms of government largess. However, blanketly categorizing these criticisms as anti-government is also nonsense. Especially if it is in pursuit of a nakedly partisan point.
I'm not opposed to taking the vaccine - I personally have no reason to rush into it. If my situation changes and it makes more sense to get the poke then I will do it.
Acting like anyone choosing to think independently is akin to committing murder as some politicals have espoused is beyond irresponsible and does more to further sow seeds of distrust.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...
If you told me that one in ten people would troll someone conducting a survey I would be surprised the number is that low.
I would. I live out in the country and the people in my area believe some absolutely bonkers stuff.
I wish they'd done a follow-up question where they asked that 9% "do you think your vaccine contained microchips" to see if the answers were logically consistent.
The chart in the article labels that 9% as "Definitely / probably true", so not all of those 9% definitely believe it.
Looking at the detailed data[1] gives more info:
> 46E. Belief in Conspiracy Theories — The U.S. government is using the COVID-19 vaccine to microchip the population
> In your opinion, how likely is it that the following scenarios are true?
> Definitely true 5%
> Probably true 15%
> Probably false 19%
> Definitely false 46%
> Not sure 14%
So, of the 9% (who got it despite microchipping) how many are "definitely" and how many are "probably"?
Among all respondents, "probably true" is 3X as common as "definitely true". If those percentages are the same among vaccine refuser respondents, then 2.25% of vaccine refusers believe the microchip thing is definitely true and 6.75% only believe it's probably true.
The "probably true" refusers are not that hard for me to understand. Maybe you feel like it could have a microchip but you don't really know and some other force (fear of the virus, job requirement, pressure from family/friends) pushes you to get it anyway.
The "definitely true" refusers are much harder to explain, but like others I think it could be that some people are not giving honest answers. I suppose some of them might have gotten the vaccination before they came to believe in the microchip theory.
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[1] See p. 132 at https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/w2zmwpzsq0/econTabReport.pdf
If you won’t get vaccinated, you’re a write-off.
- I already had long covid (lasted 14 months), and don't want the vaccine to cause a relapse. It did exactly that to a family member who also had long covid, and she's still not better. It's just anecdotal but I've seen on longcovid forums multiple people claiming the vaccine CAUSED their longcovid.
- I don't believe CDC recommendation that increasing antibody titers through vaccination offers better protection against the virus than convalescent immunity through prior infection. Antibody titers are just one aspect of immunity and BCells make antibodies when exposed to a virus again. Actually I'd be worried about training my immune system with only one part of the virus, it's possible that would hurt my robust immunity against variants, not help it.
- CDC is dishonest with numbers by not tracking mild/non-hospitalized breakthrough cases. There is no reason not to track them. From the UK Gov on Page 12... 37 of 73 deaths from Delta variant are vaccinated: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... According to the CDC and media such numbers of deaths among vaccinated would be statistically impossible.
- FDA not approving an inactive virus vaccine is BS. It's a monumental failure of the US government if they want a high % of people vaccinated to only offer DNA/RNA vaccines that are nothing like traditional vaccines people receive as children. China's Sinopharm works at preventing death and is just inactive virus. If required to take a vaccine I'd travel to another country to take that. Actually I'd even pay $10k to have an inactive virus vaccine imported if it prevented me from being discriminated against. I don't know if the US will ever make a law like France just did, but the corporate media's propaganda is definitely pushing people to support it.
- If there was such a thing as "misinformation" then it should be openly mocked, ridiculed and contested with facts. What's happening now with censorship is unprecedented - we even need a dedicated news site to keep track of it: https://reclaimthenet.org/ . Organizations like the EFF should be presenting legal challenges for many of these things but it seems like everyone has gotten on the "misinformation" bandwagon. Doing that will lead to authoritarianism. Health policy should not be political, but opposing forced medical procedures is a fundamental human right, no exceptions.
People in this thread are the problem. You're talking about this or that piece of specific "mis-information" as the reason someone didn't get vaccinated. Wake up. You really think if only you could control the messaging better, then the monkeys would do as they're told. You're just another authoritarian elitist, like the rest. Oh masks don't work (except they do, we just couldn't tell you the truth). Oh you're racist it didn't leak from China (except it probably did, and they knew then). Oh these vaccines are safe (except 50K people have died from them).
You call us anti-vaxxers. No, we're against this vaccine, mostly. And yes, we get some of it wrong sometimes, but we've gotten a lot right too. What you've ignored, or called "misinformation". Everyone read the American Frontline Doctor's filing 3 days ago that spells out what we've been talking about for a long time. https://archive.org/details/15-main/page/n1/mode/2up
When is the CDC going to acknowledge Ivermectin? In a recent Dr. John Cambell video, who I mostly like even when I disagree, because he's honest, he said the real-politic of the situation means we can't expect our health authorities even mention it. Sorry, but that's not going to fly.
I consider myself still a patriot. But I've watched the government and media lie about WMD in Iraq, NSA spying, Trump nonstop, the peaceful riots, about the questionable election, about funding gain of function, and been called racist, sexist, and every other name by so-called leaders. I've watched the principles of our nation get thrown away. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1413165168956088321.html
So this is where I'm at. I won't live in your cities. I won't take your advice. I won't trust your reporting. I won't ever give up my arms. You, our institutions, leaders, and other so-called Americans, have soiled our great nation. And what comes next nobody knows, but there is no path back now, only forward.
There's lots more examples like that, but that's a big one and is illustrative.