How would it do that? Government didn't asked people about either of those. And if anything the people responsible for Iraq war will benefit from antivaxers votes.
If the government announced tomorrow that they would be putting all unvaccinated people in internment camps for everyone's safety, how many people do you think would be in favor? I've certainly seen plenty of comments on the internet that would suggest it's not zero.
Facts and reality will not change this formula.
You are absolutely right. Just read the comments, not even "on the internet" but right here on HN. Some even seem in favour of a... "more extreme" solution yet than internment, and have not a shred of self-reflection when they talk a mad game about others being bad people.
If messaged properly (eg: getting “the experts” to hint at it, getting NYT to push for it, etc) I bet a shockingly high amount of people in blue regions would cheer it on.
I’m convinced that all that kept this from escalating to violence is the fact that the media and “the experts” haven’t given permission. If they said to “take matters in into your own hands when around somebody who isn’t masked” I bet there would be lot of violence…
It's one thing to try to be objective and look at both sides. It's another to purposefully present a political issue as independent from political views. Anti-vax and anti-mask attitudes, conspiracy theories and tendency to violence are positively correlated with right-wing political views. That's just how it is.
> I’m convinced that all that kept this from escalating to violence is the fact that the media and “the experts” haven’t given permission.
Well, duh, if mainstream goes crazy then everything goes crazy. We know that since at least WW2.
The problem with alt-right is exactly that - their media and their experts give permission for violence, because anything that doesn't go their way is "treason" and "conspiracy". Compare what happened after Trump won with what happened after Biden did. One side did an investigation and protested. The other occupied the Congress.
[1] https://www.9news.com.au/national/sydney-cafe-targeted-by-an...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/italian-police-arrest-f...
[3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-02/poland-on...
[4] https://www.bridgemi.com/michigan-health-watch/violence-erup...
[5] https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/08/13/northern-california-t...
Sounds like a decent reason to maybe keep these people separate from the rest of the population, just for a little while until everything is back to normal. How would you feel about that? Would you cheer? Would you miss a paycheck to protest in the streets?
Sounds like you're trying very hard to make an abstract point to contradict what happens in practice.
> Would you miss a paycheck to protest in the streets?
I did, several times. I happen to live in Poland and our government is awful for the last 8 years.
It occurred to me that people who are unvaccinated fit that classifier, and that I've seen plenty of dehumanization of these people in comments on the internet. I saw your comment as not quite to that level, but along the same lines (lumping unvaccinated people in with alt right violence).
So I thought you might be a good test case. If they rounded up the unvaccinated, would you stand up for them? Or would you do what most people do in most situations, and keep your head to the grindstone, focus on feeding your family and paying your mortgage?
These same people are hyper-credulous of extremist wingnuts who manipulate them, just not centrist/progressive politicians and news media. They're only "skeptical" of the mainstream.
When it's climate-change on the table instead of COVID, they will behave the same, actively sabotaging necessary measures to protect the habitability of the Earth.
When your grandkids ask you why your generation doomed them, what will you tell them?
The downside is that it may cause other negative outcomes that are equally bad. There is a balance, as distrust can go too far.
But there's only so much they can do. Sowing distrust has proven to provide short-term self-benefit to many powerful interests (e.g. political factions, partisan media). Even if the health authorities have a perfect strategy, those interests will find an opening to subvert it (e.g. portraying initial confusion as lying).
Does it through? I suppose what I had in mind wasn't so much narrowly-focused electioneering, but broader and somewhat sloppy gesticulations towards an ideological tendency. For instance, if there were two left-wing parties, a Rush Limbaugh could get both of them by encouraging his listeners to distrust the "left."
But what about the center?
> if he points out that both Left-1 and Left-2 have a horrible foreign policy, there's likely Left-3 that opposes Left-1 and Left-2 on that policy
That seems to assume there's a party for every combination of views, but is that realistic? How frequently is there a party that's say, hard right on social policy but very left on economic policy? I get the impression that it usually plays out that you get a few parties that are different "degrees" of left or right (say hard left, left, and center left).
[1] https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2016/03/15/...
Worry about government's inability to learn and improve based on past mistakes, also complacency. It's not hard to imagine 100 years from now, popular presidential guy spearheading the next great pandemic, calming the subjects down with the great medical advancements they had since today and how well prepared they are. Until nature, as it always does, disregards everything and does its own thing unchallenged.
This will be geographically--and, over time, economically--isolated.
Nearly 80% of American adults and over ¾ of eligible Americans have taken at least one dose of a Covid vaccine [1]. In the 65+ population, the figure is 95%. This simply isn't a big group of people, noisy as they may be. (Caveat: the group of people who are philosophically against vaccine mandates, but will get vaccinated anyway, is larger.)
[1] https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations_vacc-...
We have experience containing outbreaks in small, isolated groups of high-risk populations. Even in densely populated places, e.g. measles in Williamsburg. The advantage is you know ex ante where the risk is, versus having the possibility of it popping up at random anywhere in the country.
On the one hand, you might assume the rate of pandemics is proportional to the size of the human population; more people, more hosts for mutating viruses, greater odds of one mutating to a pandemic-causing disease. There have been roughly 400 billion person-years lived since the last pandemic, but given the larger populations, we'd expect to accumulate another 400 billion person-years by around 2070.
On the other hand, you might assume the rate of pandemics is proportional to the size of the animal populations humans interact with. More animals to breed the viruses, more interactions to pass along the next candidate pandemic. In this case, we might expect more than a century for the next pandemic, since the next century isn't expected to be nearly as kind to animal populations.
(Obviously the situation is more complicated than an either-or, and has many contributing factors, and is stochastic in any case.)
It's almost certain that bad actors will make use of the available tech. We'll likely see many synthetic plagues before regulation and international controls catch up.
It is also worth remembering that for decades we have been carefully monitoring the spread of infectious diseases to prevent major pandemics from forming. There was no political controversy surrounding those efforts prior to COVID19, not in the US or anywhere else.
Downside for whom?
Yes, lying governments don't deserve to be trusted. It is still unfortunate that the damage done may be so severe that for some people it will be irreparable. This isn't an absolution of the establishment, or a condemnation of those who lost trust.
Increased barriers to developing better establishments in the future are still regrettable.
Speaking from Melbourne, Australia here, it certainly preserved life and (in the long run) the economy until vaccines came along (the rollout of which has been terribly bungled, but that's a different story.)