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Comment by jdavis703 | Hacker News Reader

COVID-19 was a program of systemic action. The US had lockdowns, mask mandates and even soft vaccine mandates. None of this was enough to crush the virus. Why? Because systems are made of individuals who will decide whether or not they want to collaborate on solving a problem.

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> None of this was enough to crush the virus. Why? Because systems are made of individuals who will decide whether or not they want to collaborate on solving a problem.

Many of the individuals currently refusing vaccines in the US didn't just decide, there was an active effort made to convince them not to get one:

> Had the US continued to vaccinate in the summer at the same rate as in the spring, the US would be near herd immunity by now. It took a lot of work by powerful people and institutions to prevent that outcome. It didn't just *happen.* It was *done.*

* https://twitter.com/davidfrum/status/1416215130656882688

> COVID vaccine refusal was not some unprompted, spontaneous reaction among pro-Trump Americans. It was manufactured: first as part of a larger program of denial to cover for Trump's pandemic failures; then after Trump lost, in order to stoke feelings of victimhood and persecution.

* https://twitter.com/davidfrum/status/1416408864027824131

People think that either (a) COVID itself is a hoax or not that bad, or (b) that the vaccines are a hoax:

* https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57958358

* https://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/story/news/2021/07/23/a...

These beliefs are highly correlated with where you sit on the political spectrum in the US, and probably your primary news sources.

> Had the US continued to vaccinate in the summer at the same rate as in the spring, the US would be near herd immunity by now.

This obsession in the media with herd immunity is strange. It's not even clear herd immunity with Delta and our current vaccines is attainable. Just look at Iceland where 65+% of cases are fully vaccinated (https://www.covid.is/data). UK has had high vaccination rates and is still surging (https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/).

We can certainly make the pandemic manageable - I'm not worried about hospitals toppling over in the Bay Area with its 80+% 12+ fully vaccinated rate, but covid is still on the upswing.

> People think that either (a) COVID itself is a hoax or not that bad, or (b) that the vaccines are a hoax

Granted this is the Bay Area I'm in but the folks I know that refuse to take a vaccine don't see it as a hoax. They are some combination of unconvinced of a low risk of long-term vaccine side-effects (by virtue of us having no actual long-term observations) and concluding P(risk_of_getting_covid) * expected_cost(covid | infected) < expected_cost(side_effects)

For some other analysis that this is more than just politics:

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2021/07/31/whos-agai...

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2021/07/27/americas-...

You have to admit that those unconvinced people doing that equation are unbelievably selfish, as they are certainly not including the cost of spreading COVID to an immunocompromised person in that last term.

The question being asked is "would you take a vaccine to save a neighbor's life?" and these people are answering no.

There was an effort to convince people not to vaccinate, but I think the bigger cause of anti-vaccination sentiment was contrarianism against and distrust of the effort to convince people to vaccinate. Years of government and media lies ranging from the Iraq War to distorted and propagandistic reporting of things that Trump had said resulted in millions of people justifiably feeling that the mainstream media, the government establishment, and the supposed "experts" that the media and government often trot out are all to be distrusted. It is a boy who cried wolf scenario.

That's why individuals should not have the freedom of choice. China's actions against the virus proved rather effective because the government actually has authority there. Western democracy is clearly weak when it comes to dealing with crisis of any kind.

Individuals always have the freedom of choice. Authoritarian governments only work when people choose to tolerate them. If the Chinese people lose faith in their government, we'll see how effectively it can manage a crisis...

In the US, many people don't have faith in strong centralized authorities. Becoming more authoritarian will only make that worse, not better. It is not a problem of political systems, it is a deeper cultural phenomenon.

>Western democracy is clearly weak when it comes to dealing with crisis of any kind.

Sounds like a feature to me. They're also "rather effective" at setting up reeducation camps in xijiang to deal with the "crisis" of "extremism and terrorism by Uygurs"[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_internment_camps

American democracy is just as capable, see Japanese internment, Guantanamo Bay, the Tuskegee experiment, warrantless wiretapping, etc.

It was a democracy which condemned Socrates to death.

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