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Comment by wannacboatmovie | Hacker News Reader

> It was only in late 2021 where certain people realized vaccine skepticism was lucrative and the Republicans needed something to rile up their base for the upcoming elections did vaccine skepticism become a thing.

This is revisionist history. I remember many Democrats being staunchly anti-"Trump's rushed vaccine" and it was only when their party came into power did they turn into human pincushions nearly overnight, "believing in science" and not being able to get enough jabs into them.

The vaccines, of course, were one and the same.

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They were against the obvious (and transparent) attempts to push the vaccine out before the election as some sort of political ploy - not the vaccine itself. Nearly everyone said they'd trust it if the FDA was left to their regular approval process. Which is a shame too, there was good reason to accelerate the approval but the admin messaging was focused purely on the political rather than health benefits of doing so.

The regular approval process takes years. We'd still be waiting for it. Yet everyone is in here splitting hairs over what amounted to a few weeks. I know healthcare workers that got the shot in December, the election having been in November.

So if the people that literally couldn't wait to get their shot, got it 4 weeks earlier, that would have been deemed rushed and too early to be safe? But four weeks later it's perfectly safe?

No, this is about political tribalism and not actual vaccine safety.

> The regular approval process takes years. We'd still be waiting for it. Yet everyone is in here splitting hairs over what amounted to a few weeks.

This isn't remotely true - it was on the expedited path and was always forecast to be ready in Q4 2020 or Q1 2021. The "few weeks" was whether they would be approved before the election or after it - which had clear and obvious political implications. Rather than resting on the laurels of having created Warp Speed and helped usher the the vaccine through development and approvals in under a year, they were leaning on the science teams to approve it to improve his election prospects. There were tons of articles in real time about the entire debacle;

https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/23/politics/trump-fda-coronaviru...

https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-donald-trump-mark-m...

yes, i remember this:

https://time.com/5887777/rushed-vaccine-democrats-republican...

Thank you for finding this!

> Unsurprisingly, the degree to which Americans are concerned about the President’s influence rushing the vaccine process falls along political lines. About 85% of Democrats and 61% of independents said they were concerned, compared to 35% of Republicans, according to the Kaiser poll.

This doesn't really match up with your original message. The issues raised on dem side were usually about the process/promises of rushing it, not any the vaccine itself. The specific worry is mentioned at the end of the article and it did come true - the myth of untested vaccine is still alive.

There's a big difference between anti-"Trump's rushed vaccine" and anti-"Trump rushing vaccine".

And yet that seems to have changed since the article referenced above was published.

> After May 1, 2021, when vaccines were available to all adults, the excess death rate gap between Republican and Democratic voters widened from -0.9 percentage point (95% PI, -2.5 to 0.3 percentage points) to 7.7 percentage points (95% PI, 6.0-9.3 percentage points) in the adjusted analysis; the excess death rate among Republican voters was 43% higher than the excess death rate among Democratic voters. The gap in excess death rates between Republican and Democratic voters was larger in counties with lower vaccination rates and was primarily noted in voters residing in Ohio.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37486680/

Well yeah, but that’s mostly because the vaccine wasn’t approved until after their party came into power after the 2020 election, despite Trump’s attempts to rush out a vaccine before the election.

Could you imagine how different things would have turned out if the vaccine was ready while Trump was still in office?

The right wing media outlets would be praising it and claiming that it was everyone's patriotic duty to get vaccinated.

The left wing media outlets would be pushing out articles and documentaries about how vaccine compliance is rooted in implicit white supremacy.

> The left wing media outlets would be pushing out articles and documentaries about how vaccine compliance is rooted in implicit white supremacy.

In 2013, 38% of Democrats and 22% of Republicans supported Obama's missile strikes on Syria. In 2017, 37% of Democrats and 86% of Republicans supported Trump's missile strikes on Syria.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/04/gop-voters-love-same...

The political parties aren't simplistic mirror images of each other. The Republicans are the ones that really flip mindlessly based on whoever is in power (and then once their guy is no longer in power -- like Bush -- they turn on him years later and forget they ever supported those policies at the time).

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