Why are they not just being sent to everyone?
There's a lot of potential good in sending them to people who will never request them.
There's a lot of potential good in sending them to people who will never request them.
People who are worried about omicron and can afford $15 per test already have a supply.
People who aren’t worried about omicron will throw them away.
A large % of the red state population doesn’t want a test.
My friend's parents (Stockton, CA) aren't getting tested for this reason. They didn't get tested the first time they came down with 'Valley Fever', back in 2020, either.
(They also quit their jobs because of vaccination requirements, and believe that Trump won in 2020, and that he will reclaim the presidency on <a number of dates that have long passed>. It doesn't make me a bigot to point this sort of thing out, or that these beliefs tend to cluster.)
People generally hold sweeping, often negative, opinions of "those people". Over the decades, "those people" has been defined by race, religion, ethnicity, etc. Today in the US it is which political party people perceive you to be affiliated with.
I call this a feedback cycle because in my experience the people using this sort of rhetoric aren't interested in being proven wrong. They have chosen consciously or otherwise to vilify a group, or buy into preexisting vilification. Undoing that is hard work so it just doesn't happen. Absent any pressure, people assume themselves correct and chalk up another datapoint confirming their own biases.
This is readily apparent in response to any mass killing/tragedy. My more politically extreme friends seem to race for any evidence they can find that they perpetrator is Democrat/Republican. Of course this boils down to pure speculation (gun ownership, smokes pot, etc), but the urgency and desire is there all the same.
In summary it is little surprise that the politicians in Washington are so hardlined on their stances and party affiliations. This is effectively the government the voters have demanded. When the citizens of a country start vilify half the country, their representatives reaching across the isle is political suicide. And thus we sit.
I’d love to be proven wrong on this point. Any data you can share that red/blue is not the most efficient segmentation for pro/anti-vaxx and/or pro/anti-test?
I tried making a trend line comparing Vax % by state to Biden vote %. Interesting result[1] that i think supports both of our arguments. A trend line exists to support your claim, though i would argue it's not a great fit and the data is quite scattered.
I should also say i didn't mean to harsh address your comment specifically. I don't dispute the trend you claimed i was more ranting about the larger categorization that my parent comment was asking about.
Linking my sources[2][3] as well.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidentia...
2: https://www.dropbox.com/s/3rieowmakzvfzuv/vax%20vs%20demo%20...
3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidentia...
4: https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-st...
Some people feel that the mass asymptomatic testing serves to give perpetual fodder for sensationalist media headlines, as well as justification for public officials to impose new rounds of lockdowns, etc. As such those people believe that participating in asymptomatic testing only worsens those problems by creating "cases" in the absence of any actual clinical problem (that is to say, declaring people who are asymptomatic as COVID-19 positive even though COVID is an acronym that includes the word "disease"). They may also be against the general idea of constantly testing for the presence of a specific respiratory virus, however unique SARS-CoV-2 may be.
Better to ship the tests to the people that actually want them.
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As an aside, you're right about "a large % of the red state population(s)", but I'd add that most "blue" people seem to think republicans are much more anti-vax / anti-test than they are. A majority of republicans are vaccinated, and a majority appear to support masking (at least indoors), or at the least are willing to begrudgingly comply. Here in California I feel like I meet a lot of people that seem to think that republicans are overwhelmingly "anti-vax" or, even more humorously, that Trump is anti-vax (humorous because his vocal praise of "boosters" and incessant bragging that he deserves credit for the vaccines and that the vaccines+lockdowns saved tens/hundreds of millions of lives, is one of his most unpopular stances with his base)