The Plague of the Poor

What stands out is the authors’ favor of natural immunity being better than vaccination.

It may well be, but it has this small caveat that you need to have had the virus to become naturally immune. E.g. you need to take that 1-2% of not surviving entirely, and if too many people take that chance at the same time, even higher.

- a significant portion of the US-Population (my remark: similar to other western countries) is not willing to take the shot

- a huge proportion of which are underprivileged, from "working classes"

- the pharmaceutical companies have a gigantic financial leverage, in total $1.3 trillion. (My remark: an example from Germany: Biontech Investors: Thomas & Andreas Strüngmann (Hexal) €48 billion; Biontech Founders: Özlem Türeci & Uğur Şahin: €13.5 billion.)

- basic violations of informed and voluntary consent

- criminal past ("Pfizer paid out the biggest health care fraud settlement in U.S. history as part of a $2.3 billion fine for illegal marketing, along with numerous other penalties.")

- revolving door (Scott Gottlieb, the former head of the FDA who accelerated the agency’s drug approval process, now sits on Pfizer’s board.)

- lobbying spending etc.

So, if one is willing to step outside the danger of being killed or seriously harmed by the virus, it is actually scary from a mere power standpoint, a trojan horse for totalitarian elements which once installed are very difficult to get rid of.

Basically there are broadly two camps: One side is afraid of the virus the other side is afraid of losing their freedoms. And they are each accusing one another to be "over-sensitive" to the point that there is barley any exchange anymore but an adherence to be on the "right side" of history, science whatever. This split can be observed way before, the recent one with Trump. And from my perspective the long underlying mechanism (beginning with the 70's) is indeed the ever greater gap between the rich and the poor.

So my point: take the fears of the persons around you seriously, however irrational they seem to you. Social media is a very bad representation since it is designed for the single purpose to capture your attention. Try to take the conscious effort from time to time to get out of your bubble in which you were socialized. And then, try not to lecture immediately but instead listen and perceive the real persons before you, their motiviations, their stories etc.

The perspectives were interesting. I won't get into all the details here. I'll just say that the well-reasoned opinions spanned a range.

The teachers had legitimate concerns about their safety while teaching in-person classes. One of them told me that the students pull down their masks all the time and that it is impossible to enforce it (she even said it was somewhat cruel for some). Yet she was genuinely concerned about her safety and that of her family.

A tech executive, older than the rest of the group, said he waited as long as possible before getting vaccinated because he wanted to see more data. Or, to be more accurate, he said something like: I wanted to give it enough time to see if fully vaccinated people were going to end-up in the hospital because of the vaccine. He was concerned about potential long term issues (a decade or more). In the end he reasoned he is old enough that he was far more likely to die from something else anyway, so, in his case, the potential for long term effects could be discounted.

Everyone in this gathering was vaccinated, yet, vaccine hesitancy came up in a number of conversations. There were also threads about the idea of the government forcing people to do something with their bodies under threat of losing their jobs, not being able to travel, not being able to go to any public places, etc. In many ways it is an argument that rhymes with the abortion debate: In that case we (well, some of us) believe it is the woman's right to choose. In other words, the government should not have anything to do with a woman's body. And yet, with vaccines, we accept being forced to inject a substance under threat of harm? It's an interesting and very complex comparison.

If I had to summarize the various conversations I would say everybody there wants everyone to be vaccinated. The difference is in how different people think we ought to get there. Some were OK with forcing the issue, others though it was a potentially dangerous precedent.

As is always the case, when you have in-person conversations with people you can actually explore issues in a far more civilized and informative way, everyone is respectful and there is no down-voting or flagging. Just people talking and sharing ideas. Refreshing when compared to the shit show online discussions often turn into.

Anti-vaxxers need help. The path is education, not a hammer over the head. They are not elementary school dropouts without teeth. They come in all shapes, sizes, races and levels of education.

For example in the UK vaccination rates amongst Conservative and Labour voters are the same.

So why is there such disparity in the US between Biden voters and Trump voters when it comes to Covid-denialism, pseudo-cures, and antivaxxing?

The poor don't care about authoritarianism. They care about having jobs, people coming into their stores, and their children going to daycare.

The poor suffer when the state does not function and does not do its job. Countries like China, both Taiwan and the mainland, Singapore, Vietnam even New Zealand and a few others avoided much harm to the poor by means of crushing the disease. They avoided both economic and disease burden by taking strong measures that anyone in Western Europe would have flinched about. (and then I had to live through anyway during three different lockdowns in Europe after live in China returned to normal in summer 2020.)

Vaccine passports suck but not because they're too authoritarian but because they're not authoritarian enough. They're half measures done by governments that were too indecisive to go all the way, at the expense of the most vulnerable in society.

Reading an anti-vax article afraid of authoritarianism after a crisis caused by weak and dysfunctional governance is like some sort of comedy. As if someone wrote an article in 2010 arguing the financial crisis harmed the poor because we regulated the financial sector too heavily or something

Should I keep reading? I think not

In New York City it is now 40% of Black adults fully vaccinated, 49% at least 1 dose. Numbers for whites are 57% and 61%. (Latinos are 63% and 76%, Asians 89% and 91%).

For the people most at risk, those 65 and older, it is currently 57% fully vaccinated 60% at least one dose for Blacks. The numbers are 60% and 63% for whites, 64% and 67% for Latinos, and 82% and 87% for Asians.

Data: https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data-vaccines.p...

If the article has a message it cerianly isn't found in the writing.

What I find truly repellent are highly educated and erudite people who spend huge effort on developing tortured arguments supporting their own agendas - such as to subvert the institutions of the United States in order to usher in an eternal Trumpian dictatorship.

The measles vaccine is not 100% effective.

The smallpox vaccine is not 100% effective.

"By one estimate" and statistics drawn from single rogue studies are not a decent or proper basis for an argument like this, this is not a court of law when precedent and legal text are fundamentals - this is science where the aggregate of evidence and analysis is used to support provisional hypothesis.

This kind of thing is disingenuous and malicious and corrosive to society. The author should be drummed out of wherever but since that's Twitter I'm not sure that that would be good thing or a bad thing.

In other news : just get the vaccine.

Is this true in the US? It seems unreasonable.

What I've seen in the EU is that antibodies and frequent PCR testing are deemed just as acceptable as vaccination, and I think it makes sense.