Are there sort of nuanced or structural reasons why the right seems more antivax especially recently? Or is it more just that’s the way the politics has sort of played out.
My personal take, unrelated to politics, is that getting a vaccine for a virus from last year while the current strain has mutated isn’t a particularly stellar strategy, especially when I get the effects of the flu from the vaccine anyway.
I just roll the dice most years and I haven’t had the flu in over 10 years so it’s not worth it to me.
In what country? Certainly not the US.
The only federal vaccine mandate that actually survived contact with the judiciary was for healthcare workers in medicare-funded hospitals.
There were obvious a variety of employers requiring their employees to be vaccinated, but that's not the government in any shape or form.
The federal government’s response to Covid is one of the primary reasons we have seen such a huge backlash to the administrative state, culminating in Donald Trump’s purported current quest to dismantle it, ironically by using its own power to destabilize and destroy it. I say purported because whether Trump’s goal is to dismantle the administrative state or to reform it as a tool for himself, his friends, and his donors remains to be seen. It’s probably the latter.
It was: Every employer with 100+ employees would be required to have all employees get a COVID vaccination.
From memory, the series of events was:
* The initial mandate was issued
* It got challenged in courts and blocked
* Biden went on record speaking to the public, telling employers to do it anyway while they appealed
* The appeal failed and it was blocked again
* Only then did that administration drop it
During that interim where it was being appealed my at-the-time-fully-remote company was hinting they might be following it.
Do you have some concrete examples of this? I recall a lot of hyperventilating about the possibility of "vaccine passports" (complete with "mark of the beast" references), and a handful of instances where people got angry about COVID vaccination being folded into (decades-old) policies covering mandatory vaccinations for school/work, but not much beyond that. I carried a mask in case places had mask policies, but it never even occurred to me that I might need to prove that I was vaccinated.
Washington ended up being one of the 10 states with the least COVID deaths per capita.
ADDED: Add to this the fact that at least at one point, vaccines were seen as much more of a magical talisman to prevent population spread than they turned out to really be in spite of having at least a degree of effectiveness in mitigating individual severity.
Neither of them are the government.
Private individuals made private decisions about who they may associate with. If anything people should be protesting the existence of the first amendment.
There were also travel restrictions at the state level. As I recall, at one point I could only travel from MA to NH for medical-related reasons (probably some other exceptions too and it's not like your papers were being checked at the border.) ADDED: As someone else noted, there were lots of restrictions traveling to Hawaii.
Lots of people were feeling their way in the dark. I attended an event at the beginning of March before everything went crazy in the US. (An event right after was canceled. Seemed like an overreaction; it wasn't.) We were all washing our hands and elbow-bumping but nothing else.
And what would conflating State & Private action with Federal actions be?
This is literally what this thread is about. People are having backlash against the federal government for actions the federal government did not do. Even Republican lead states like Florida had travel restrictions [1] (keep in mind, Trump was president in 2020 when these restrictions were enacted).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Florida
Most people don't seem to know about it because it never officially went into effect, but to get there it had to be struck down in courts twice and Biden was telling employers to voluntarily do it because of the appeal. Plenty were in preparation for it going into effect.
And yeah, the irony is that throwing money at vaccine rollouts was one of the few good things the last Trump administration did, but trying to talk about it was about the only thing that could get him booed by his own fanbase
There is a very bright line between people who think such measures are fine and those that do not.
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2020/03/25/minnesotas-covid19-...
At one point, Hawaii State had one set of rules, and the Big Island another, which was ridiculous. But worse, when preparing for the former according to all the official instructions and forms there was no mention of the latter.
A multi-island visit of myself and two loved ones turned into quite a disaster as a result of the confusing redundant duplicative restrictions. Despite great pre-trip efforts to have all documentation (vaccines taken, State acknowledgment forms completed and returned as accepted, etc.)
We were not informed of the Big Islands special requirements until we arrived on the Big Island. If we left the airport for any reason we would immediately have gone into a two week quarantine - despite having all our vaccines.
It required a lot of pushing and pressing to let us get our luggage and buy and take last minute flights to Oahu (also gettting last minute accommodations) without being forced to leave the airport and go straight into quarantine. Because our luggage, as is usual when you arrive at what you believe to be your destination, was now outside departure security.
I was angry beyond all reason by the time we got out of there alive. Complete incompetent mess.
Why do you value your fun time over people’s safety?
We carefully followed all State rules and regulations.
We got vaccinated.
We got vaccinated specifically by providers they limited us to. Which was not geographically easy for all of us.
We waited for provider approvals.
We filled in all State forms, provided all evidence and information.
We waited and eventually got State notifications that we were each validated to go.
That was on a challenging short schedule, because they wanted new vaccinations within a short window before the departure date. And twice we had to wait for delays by providers and the State we had no control over.
But we scrambled through their timeline and completely complied.
We brought printed copies ov everything. We had the site links to everything saved too, in case of any confusion.
We entered Hawaii going through a long line, cooperating with everyone and were then allowed to leave and enjoy Maui.
Then… well read what I wrote above again, if you need to.
And for reference, this was my second post-COVID trip to Hawaii, with the same itinerary, but I carefully checked all the same information and rules, made all the same preparations and we were all validated by the State in exactly the same way.
One island subsequently decided to handle things differently. A fact that was not reflected or mentioned in all the State’s information or forms that we encountered, and competed.
They introduced novel requirement that also needed to be made days in advance.
But they did not get any information about the islands break with the rest of the state, or the nature of those changes, posted anywhere State travelers got and submitted their information from the state. Nor did the States approvals mention any provisional aspects.
We were cleared by the State. As far as the State was concerned, we could go anywhere.
The result of one islands decision not to accept State approvals wasn’t just a disaster for us but many other travelers and the beleaguered staff at the arrivals of one airport, on the one rogue island, who had no idea what they were supposed to do while they held unhappy people in an airport, and only had ridiculously bad official options for them.
When we flew to Hawaii from the mainland, the airline verified ouur preparation for landing before giving us boarding passes to depart. Completely professionally handled by the State.
When just going from island to island, as I had recently done before, no mention of any second set of new one-island regulations were mentioned, until we and other unhappy people arrived after a 30 minute in-state island hop.
Where the heck did you read any lack of appreciation for “hospitality”?
Your personal take is wrong and you should get vaxxed for flu as doctors recommend.
Trying to keep Americans alive is somehow political. The party of "pro life" was so against trying to save lives that we ended up with the highest COVID death rate in the world, and overall had between 4 and 5 million deaths above the normal rates (see CDC excess deaths between 2020 and 2022).
Also, the vaccine IS NOT ABOUT YOU. Vaccinations are about protecting the people who cannot get vaccinated. When you have 97%+ of the populace vaccinated then you are also protecting the most vulnerable from the same. This is why Measles is showing up again, because the people decrying vaccines have caused the coverage to drop below the critical threshold.
Until Americans, and even more importantly the "Christian Right" can wake up and actually start acting like Christ tells us to (feed the hungry, heal the sick, give to the poor, love your enemy, give away your wealth), the cruelty America is inflicting on ourselves and the world will only get worse.
> COVID-19 vaccine efficacy or effectiveness against severe disease remained high, although it did decrease somewhat by 6 months after full vaccination. By contrast, vaccine efficacy or effectiveness against infection and symptomatic disease decreased approximately 20–30 percentage points by 6 months.
This is the only place I could find in your source that mentions the efficacy numbers (not the drop in efficacy, which is what this is focused on), and it is only against severe disease.
The first one that came up for my search was this:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2...
The findings section shows that by the time omicron was around, you were at around 43% against infection by 112 days.
That was then. What is it today? How many people do you need to jab to prevent one transmission? And how many people are doing that? Uptake is very low today.
There was a time when "the VAX is not about you!" was plausible. That time has passed.
Would have been even better if the effect on transmission had remained with the later variants, but unfortunately it didn't as the virus changed. Preventing transmission would be ideal, but that was just not possible with this particular virus and regular vaccines. But it still saved a lot of lives because of the very strong effect on mortality.
Look at trucks and SUVs. If you aren't driving a giant death machine that's on you.
Look at guns. It's your responsibility to protect yourself and your family from criminals with guns by owning a gun.
Etc etc.
The fact of the matter is that the virus being discussed here (the flu) isn't remotely deadly enough to warrant such an escalation my you.
And wherever the flu vaccine is actually worth it is way more disputed then you seem to think. Almost every doctor I've personally visited told me that its a waste of money for a healthy person, because it merely reduces the likelihood and potentially strength of the infection - at the cost of feeling bad for a few days after getting the shot. But I don't live in America, which is kinda the only place that ritually goes through flu vaccinations, yearly.
The only reference to Corona (before your escalation) was merely the acknowledgement that the ultimately questionable messaging during the pandemic likely caused the current push back against all vaccines. That's completely unrelated to wherever the first strain of Corona was deadly enough to warrant using untested vaccines at large.
The right is the most anti-freedom a political movement can get!
I would phrase it more as "the right doesn't like to be told what to do". The left generally values "freedom" more in my experience, but they like telling people what to do.
I've always said that if Covid had been a little more deadly, or affected young people more, than the role would have been reversed and the Right would've been screaming to have the military force people to be indoors.
Covid response was partisanized very quickly. Some people will say this was because of overly aggressive regulation from blue states, though I don't think it would have been different even if the response was significantly more tepid.
By the time the vaccine was available, we'd had a year of people screaming that Fauci was a satanist and that we just needed to accept deaths in order to keep the economy moving. The pump was primed for the vaccine to be made into an extreme partisan issue. Trump's rhetoric didn't help things.
This very naturally spread outwards, latching on to pre-existing antivaxx sentiment derived from Wakefield's criminal paper. Once you are deciding that one vaccine is actually a mind control serum, it isn't a terribly large jump to decide that they are all lowering sperm counts or whatever.
I've also noticed that conservatives tend to have a pronounced reaction to the prospect of ills that have visited marginalized groups also becoming their problem. The US has a limited but sharp history of medical exploitation, particularly of minorities. Many conservatives think, "We're next, unless we resist forcefully."
The hardest part of modern day political discourse is saying something that is insightful while being concrete and, for insults/criticisms, not equally applicable to the "other" side. You haven't done that here. You can replace "conservative" with "liberal" in your post and have it be just as applicable because you haven't actually said anything.
Trust the science- the pharmaceutical industry pushed the idea that Oxy is a less addictive than morphine. State medical boards across the country put their thumbs in their pockets.
But wait there's more! The whole concept of selling SSRIs to people based on another lie that they have a "chemical imbalance" when exercise has proven to be more beneficial.
What else? Oh, mass prescribing stimulants to children.
Public health was MIA for most of the epidemic regarding true and actionable information. And you're asking if this is just how the politics has played out? It's not at all nuanced.
What or who that is, seems kind of arbitrary to me. It just has to be something people can get riled up against comparatively easily. Conspiracy theories (e.g. around vaccinations) are a good staring point for something like that.
Put another way, if you want power, you can just listen to what issues (regardless of whether they are real or even plausible) people complain about, and tell them you agree with them and are gonna fix that. And by the way, it's also why they can't have nice things, are in danger, or whatever else you can find that riles them up more. The point is, they'll follow you.
If you "well, actually" angry or otherwise irrational people instead, you're kinda painting a target on your back. Someone following the other strategy can now use _you_ as the scapegoat.
The structural reason is mass manipulation through omnipresent disinformation campaigns enabled by social media addiction and user trauma.
That said, THIS IS NOT A STATEMENT FOR OR AGAINST mRNA VACCINES! TRUST YOUR DOCTOR! What I want to point out, is that such anecdotal experiences exist and I expect a lot of people have had the same experience, which would lead them to thinking they were tricked or forced by the Democratic administration to get vaccinated not for their benefit, but for the monetary profit of "Big Pharma". Absent a science-based education, a lot of people do not have the tools to judge the validity of their observations.
The entire messaging from the Biden administration during COVID was an abject PR disaster. Censoring people who had misgivings for the vaccine, or wanted to discuss implications of statistics, was also not helpful[1]. It erased trust in vaccines in general, erased trust in the Democratic party, erased trust in media, etc. I expect that for decades to come this event will be studied in management classes with workshops for "How would you have handled it better?" To be fair, I have no idea how it could have been handled better given the information at the time, but the gamble they took was severely miscalculated. I don't see how it could have been handled any worse.
[1] As an aside, I see a similar censorship-led effect amongst youth who say "The Holocaust didn't happen!" simply because questioning it leads to their post getting deleted and banned. It doesn't matter whether the arguments they want to discuss are in any way valid or absolutely fucking stupid - the fact they're getting censored is a signal that gets interpreted as "they are trying to hide the truth!".
Ultimately I think we need to tolerate a certain amount of misinformation, hate speech, and so on online, so that new people can see that yes - this thing was asked, it is a valid question, but it is absolutely wrong, because so and so. Too many of the once fully integrated communities online have become quite isolationist. People end up in echo chambers and cults, leading to the above described effects.
Through this lens, much of political nonsense in the US can be understood.
There are a myriad of complex reasons, but one important note is that many high profile donors of the current right wing believe in early 20th century Eugenics - blind to the advantages they have received from modern medicine and civilization, they see themselves as having "superior genes" and implements like vaccines as some kind of crutch that only prop up the weak and pollute the species with lineage that doesn't deserve to be there.
It's a belief system fully rooted in undeserved ego and pure scientific ignorance.
Quite a claim. Where is your evidence of this?
Many of the replies so far seem to be focused on how dumb/evil/selfish/etc the entire right is. I wonder if thats the nuance you were looking for?
Decidedly not