I think it works in reverse, like evolution. The people are the chaos machine that generate ideas. The ones that stick FoxNews latches onto. If politicians don't get in line, they don't get reelected.
It's like coronavirus for political information. It mutates in the masses, and the ideas that are the fittest survive - becoming political points for the Party as a whole.
This is not really true. Maybe more educated in some areas but not in all of them. People used to be much better educated to build a garden, better educated to understand the nature. I don't think people think differently than they did hundreds of times ago, I don't feel like we are individually smarter
And there will always be millions of saps and pollyannas who believe their politicians just want to help them.
- Everyone should go to the opera/cinema to fight Covid (7th March 2020)
- Lockdown for everybody (20th March) (I guess people caught it in the theaters…)
- Masks are useless, absolutely useless for the general public (June 2020),
- Masks are mandatory (September),
- Blocking borders is useless, Covid will be here,
- Borders blocked during Lockdown II and III, if I remember the dates, because it’s useful (so maybe we should have stopped the direct flights between WUHAN and Lyon earlier than September 2020?),
- The idea of Passe Sanitaire (a generalized QR code suspending entrance in public buildings) is a conspiration theory (10th May 2021)
- Passe Sanitaire mandatory on August 1st, live and enforced in all public places except offices, including outdoor restaurants and public transport.
- Trust us this time, the vaccine is the right thing,
- But both research companies and ministers are exempt from legal responsibility on these vaccines,
- Given they injected 10,000 patients with AIDS in 1989, and took 6 years to admit it, and press wasn’t under État d’Urgence Sanitaire at the time,
(and also, they didn’t know that Benalla had kept and used 6 diplomatic passports after being fired, just to show how they work).
If anything, they have taught us to doubt everything they say: They clearly didn’t know what they were doing, and did governance-by-lying.
> But both research companies and ministers are exempt from legal responsibility on these vaccines,
What does that even mean? You're in France, you'll be treated no matter whether someone is responsible or not. I don't think you can be liable of something going wrong if you did everything properly (which is the case).
Everyone, governement and research companies, followed all the laws. Legal responsability exist only if you didn't respect the laws. If they didn't follow the laws, they won't be exempt from lawsuits.
So. What does "But both research companies and ministers are exempt from legal responsibility on these vaccines," mean?
If the state is practically mandating you to be vaccinated for covid they (or the companies that make the vaccine) should be held responsible for anything that happens to you.
You can't have it both ways; either there are no distinctions between vaccinated and unvaccinated people (no measures that only affect unvaccinated people) or someone can be held responsible for any resulting disability or death.
How is this different than the state drafting people into the military, knowing that some of them will die?
In both cases, the state is obviously responsible for the outcomes. But that doesn't mean that there is a liability on the behalf of the state, or that you can hold an individual functionary working for the state responsible.
Ok, but noone ever took responsibility on anything, except what's in the law. I mean, I've never witnessed anything like that.
Did Bush took responsibility when going to Afghanistan? Did Obama took responsibility when enacting ObamaCare? Did Trump took responsibility when embargoing Huawei? Did Raoult took responsibility when recommending Hydroxychloroquine?
I can go on. But really, if you want someone to take responsibility for something beyond laws and contracts (which implies compensation, a contract can't be one-sided. What you suggest would be one-sided), I think you're not in the right universe altogether.
- The population is panicking for only a few cases, people are even avoiding Chinese restaurants even when the owners have never been in China. The government wants people to stop panicking, the risks are still extremely low.
- Cases rise exponentially, faster than expected (possibly due to a new variant), hospitals are filling up, now we need to take it seriously
- That one is actually subtle, they told that surgical masks are for the sick and FFP2 (N95) masks are for health professionals, there was a shortage of masks and we didn't have enough for the general public. But they try to say it in a way that would limit fighting over masks, people still fought and stole masks, leaving people who really needed them without protection, I guess saying that masks are vital would have made things worse.
- Masks are back in stock
- Blocking borders is indeed mostly useless when covid is here in large numbers, it is only useful when you have a strict eradication policy and your country is not well connected, not the case of France.
- The point of a lockdown is to limit movement in general, blocking borders is part of it
- In May the situation was improving, vaccination was extremely successful, we were on our way to being mostly covid-free in the summer. There was no reason for such restrictions.
- Delta variant
- Vaccine is the right thing, it has always been the right thing, just look at the data if you don't trust the government. Even a less effective vaccine protects you.
- It is an emergency situation, no time to waste in lawyering, and I am glad they did, delta breakouts in unvaccinated areas are deadly (see DOM/TOM). It doesn't mean safety wasn't taken seriously, all vaccines available in France passed the trials.
- off topic
I am not a fan of Macron, or any political party for that matter, but without the benefit of hindsight everything looks reasonable considering the information available at that time and the specificities of the country. If you think it is bad what would you have done differently? Remember: you have no crystal ball, an unruly population, and a budget.
And there's no better way to help the virus than lying to people about the masks. Even the Chinese government didn't lie about masks, while all the western governments did. If masks became a strategic product, then there are enough laws to regulate them (and France did so).
- All mask shaped objects were quickly taken off the shelves. Including snorkeling masks that could be adapted!
- Health professionals received a limited number of masks. For example nurses had 2 FFP2 masks a day, in practice, except for those who worked with covid patients, most had only surgical masks. Pharmacists sometimes didn't have any mask at all (they should have had surgical masks)
- A lot of the masks were in poor condition and of dubious quality, they really tried everything they had. Some came from the stockpile intended for the 2009 flu pandemic.
- Masks regularly "disappeared". As an anecdote from a nurse, she worked in a psychiatric hospital and they didn't have masks (again, a mysteriously lost package). A guy came in, the leader of a big company and was appalled by the situation. He came back with 3 boxes, full of masks and told the personnel "this is for you, these will not got to the director's office, I will come back in a few days and if I don't see the masks, someone is going to have problems!".
- A friend of mine, a pharmacist, was constantly harassed for masks by random people. She had (not enough) masks available for doctors, but she was lucky when he could have one herself. And people had the nerve to ask for her own mask. And on a side note, at one point, they didn't even have enough ethanol for hand sanitizers!
Internationally, China kept most of the masks for themselves, and the ones foe export were sold to the highest bidder on the airport ground. Some countries had local factories, but were lacking in material, especially meltblown fabric, but sometimes even the metal nose strip.
It was bad, really bad. Things started to improve when volunteers started to make fabric masks. Initially, we were dubious about the efficiency of fabric masks, there was a fear that they would make droplets finer and more airborne, we still are, but it seems that they are better than nothing.
I want to think that the deception was a bad thing and that people deserved the whole truth, but I am glad I wasn't part of the government during that time.
None of what you mention can excuse or justify the blatant lies of the French government. A democratically elected government should not lie to its population, under no circumstances. You don't send a spokesperson on national TV to tell the population that masks are useless, and that the general population wouldn't even know how to use one(!!!).
I suspect the French population will be far more forgiving of a government fuckup followed by an apology and visible and effective efforts to fix the situation, than an outright lie that was only necessary in the first place because of arrogance, complacency and incompetence.
"independent hesitancy risk factors included younger age, non-Asian race, having a PhD or ≤high school education, living in a rural county, living in a county with higher 2020 Trump support, lack of worry about COVID-19, working outside the home, never intentionally avoiding contact with others, and no past-year flu vaccine. " https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.20.21260795v...
This is interesting.
No lol, you're flagged and omitted. Do you think everybody is as dumb as you?
People wonder why statistics can be so messed up. Some of it is lying with math. But statisticians can't also help when people are being malicious.
Having a PhD is pretty conflated with both race and political affiliations. Who knows what the effect would be after attempting to control for those things.
I was very surprised to learn that they were unwilling to get vaccinated. They are actually very worried about infection, and have been very careful with wearing masks, disinfecting things, and avoiding in-person contacts whenever possible. They explained that they were mostly worried about the unknown long-term side-effects of the vaccines. Maybe having a PhD degree is correlated with having this kind of caution.
Yep that's my understanding. Or if enough time has passed since vaccination to convince them that the vaccines are safe.
There is a grim history of poor medical ethics surrounding the treatment of African Americans that has resulted in feelings of distrust from some.
https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/history/40-years-human-exp...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2018/...
Additionally, medical debt is such a massive burden to many lower income households that there’s this additional layer of distrust, a feeling that you should steer clear of any medical establishment otherwise they’ll try to pin something on you and charge you mountains of money (even though the vaccine is free).
One of the most notable examples is that of the Tuskegee study on untreated syphilis, where we denied effective treatment w/o informed consent.
PoC have higher infant mortality rates, and the myth that PoC have more tolerance to pain (and therefore require less anesthesia) is still quite prevalent.
It was bad enough that we had to actually produce a report on what is considered the "bare minimum", but even that has not been totally effective. (https://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/regulations-and-policy/belmont-repo...)
People are not that different
Now outside of the US, anti-vaxxers are in every country including Germany, Australia, the UK. It's a global problem. It's actually the "third world" that seems to have less vaccine hesitance. Probably because they've seen the recent benefits of vaccines and they have less access to misinformation.
By contrast in the USA, and ONLY in the USA, COVID became a partisan issue so state policies didn't change much.
The factcheck word twisting is getting out of control.
But if anything, this distinction is worse, because instead of saying don't trust a controversial product, it's saying don't trust this controversial product because you shouldn't trust the/this government promoting it.
And that's largely what made this, or magnified it, as a political issue: the broader acceptance of saying it's ok to distrust the government depending on what politician is speaking.
They were responding to being asked if they would take a vaccine developed/released under the Trump administration.
Not: "What's wrong with how this administrator is handling the vaccine?"
Or, "Do you have a problem with how it's going to distributed?" Which didn't significantly change from one administration to the next, and is an impressive logistical feat in it's own right.
Even if, the same logic stands. Sowing distrust in distribution -or any other aspect- is either implicit distrust in the product or distrust in the government pushing it.
What good is expressing distrust in any part of it, except to discourage people from trusting the quality/safety/efficacy of the product itself?
Not "Do you trust that Trump will deliver in time?"
Or anything about reliability being affected by "rushing" things, because when it did arrive in the timeframe Trump promised, no one was concerned about the speediness compromising any quality or reliability.
The election was over by that point.
Could you point me in the direction of a source on this? I have done my own research and pulled up absolutely nothing. Actually that's inaccurate. I pulled up a BUNCH of 2020 articles where Biden talks about inadequate vaccination orders, etc. But I'd be interested in seeing the basis of your claims.
Harris:
"If the public health professionals, if Dr. Fauci, if the doctors tell us that we should take it, I’ll be the first in line to take it. Absolutely. But if Donald Trump tells us that we should take it, I’m not taking it."
Kamala says she would not take a vaccine recommended by Trump, even if recommended by scientists. There is no way in the US for a vaccine to be publicly available without FDA approval so the only interpretation that makes sense is one where even if the FDA approved it, if Trump also approved it she would not take it.
Biden:
"Look at what’s happened. Enormous pressure put on the CDC not to put out the detailed guidelines. The enormous pressure being put on the FDA to say they’re going, that the following protocol will in fact reduce, it will have a giant impact on COVID. All these things turn out not to be true, and when a president continues to mislead and lie, when we finally do, God willing, get a vaccine, who’s going to take the shot? Who’s going to take the shot? You going to be the first one to say, ‘Put me — sign me up, they now say it’s OK’? I’m not being facetious."
Biden says he does not trust the CDC and FDA (at the time) because of political influence.
This is not what she said. She specifically said that if public health professionals and Dr. Fauci recommended it, she would take it. The "if Donald Trump tells us" has an implied 'solely' and that is not hard to figure out given context, where in the same statement she says she'd take it if the public health professionals recommended it.
> Biden says he does not trust the CDC and FDA (at the time) because of political influence.
Not what he said. He was asking for more transparency, and suggesting that that needs to happen for public opinion to sway in the direction of getting the vaccines; in particular, during the Trump administration when the public was repeatedly fed lies about all sorts of things.
Both are more nuanced than you are suggesting, imho.
With the history that Trump had for firing people who did follow unreasonable orders (e.g. Rod Rosenstein), it becomes entirely plausible that he would fire any FDA head who did not support a vaccine, regardless of the science behind them. As things turned out, the studies did support the vaccine, but it was not unreasonable to draw a distinction between unbiased experts and experts under threat of firing.
https://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/news/news-stories/2021/july/cov...
> Participants were asked if they had received the COVID-19 vaccine, and if not, “If a vaccine to prevent COVID-19 (coronavirus) were offered to you today, would you choose to get vaccinated.” Participants were categorized as vaccine hesitant if they answered that they probably or definitely would not choose to get vaccinated (versus probably or definitely would choose to get vaccinated or were vaccinated). Those who had already received the vaccine were coded as not hesitant in order to reduce bias from differential access to a COVID-19 vaccine among subgroups over the time studied.
PS The author states that Facebook funded the survey, which is an interesting datapoint.