Political attacks could crush the mRNA vaccine revolution | Hacker News Reader

Political attacks could crush the mRNA vaccine revolution

nature.com

13 pointsrbanffy6 comments

This is how you concede a lead to China.

Their approach is misguided and ultimately more harmful to public health than any benefit mrna ever provided.

Back in 2020 COVID responses split along ideological lines. mrna should've stayed politically neutral. They aligned with 1 side of politics, pushed the false claim that vaccines stopped transmission, and then enforced mandates, banning people from public life, job suspensions and firings, and even criminal fines for the unvaccinated... Greece and Quebec for examples.

They enabled censorship of dissent and framed skeptics as dangerous. While coercion won over 90% in places like Canada... how about that trust in public health. Now we’re seeing measles outbreaks and growing vaccine hesitancy.

Now HIV and cancer, they play the victim: “How dare you criticize us after all we did to you and not for you”

Antivaxxers arent the heroes here, but liberty and staying politically neutral would have not resulted in such terrible consequences to public health.

So the anti-VAX people are the heroes here? Incredible narrative.

> They aligned with 1 side of politics

I don't think that was the issue. Even in Southeast Asia there was a lot of resistance to the vaccine. Some of it is definitely due to American interference [0], but there already a lot of existing fear. The disinformation campaign only strengthened the argument against all vaccines. If it wasn't forced, I think even less people would've taken it.

I personally place blame on how capitalist healthcare has become such that science is distrusted and believed to only push corporate narratives. It's not entirely unjustified - A lot of family has had experiences where pharmacies would push unnecessary medicine to charge more.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covi...

The opioid pandemic is what worsened these faults. Kids growing up watch their parents transform from an addiction subscribed by their doctor. Then when they get older realize there wasn't a medical reason to subscribe something so hard, and instead it was lobbying the government then the hospitals for a few families to get wealthier.

Both parties used to utterly laugh at antivax culture, but it changed fast with combinations of workers getting messed up by opiods, terrible medical conditions in the US in general, and social media politard-ed-ness.

Left wing politics, regardless of how superficial and stupendous such a category really is in the end, is increasingly driven by fear. An atypical development classically, but common in recent years.

That is true for the right as well, but their neuroticism is more predictable. In any case it will always be a bad advisor. Conservatives convince with their complete inability to deal with anything really. The so called business friendly people protecting the economy from heinous influences seem to have difficulty capitalizing on anything substantial.

Examples for left wing failure are simple. Freedom of speech, generally the ability to discuss political issues with people that disagree, questioning dogmatism... these weren't problems for the classical left, but seem insurmountable problems for the modern audience. Today they are consumers of the "Righteous And Good®" at best.

For Covid/MRNA these fear reactions take their toll. For enternainment the "anti-vaxxer", a side-phenomenon since beginning of time was propped up to be a monster everyone can shortly be indignant about. I am not sure who the larger idiot is here, everyone that touched this pile doesn't look really clean.

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