wsj.com
I do hope we have our version of a Numenburg trials one day, but I also wouldn't be surprised if all these people squirm under the cracks once their near octogenarian rallying point declines.
> Bondi can still be charged. Hegseth can still be held liable.
[0] https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/05/27/trumps-budget-contemp...
You are right a lot of his actions can be (and have been) stopped via legal means. That's not so much democrats as individuals and groups with standing to bring suit. The dems can't really do much except fund the lawsuits which, again, don't threaten Trump in any way.
Case study -- Kazakhstan leader, Nazarbayev introduced all kinds of immunities before leaving. Didn't help later, all the titles and privileges got stripped. The only chance is to lose power and money and become harmless (and whole family as well), or get unreachable (keep the money).
PS: Autocrats like "small" wars, something that keeps people occupied and centralized. Not a large risky wars though, with unpredictable outcomes. "Small" is relative, e.g. for China a war with Taiwan very well might become "large", if India expresses an opinion on that. So they're reluctant to start it. For Russia, war with Ukraine anticipated to be "small", although grew up larger than expected.
So as I see it for Trump, a small war would be desirable, he envies Ukraine president, as they cannot conduct an election during war (and some territories occupied), that'd be nice for Trump.
My only solace right now is that Trump probably isn't in the health to survive to 2028, maybe not even 2027 to get potentially convicted if congress shifts. He's in worse wear in 2025 when Biden in 2024.
It's Republicans that think it's alright. Not "Congress". The Republicans just happen to control what happens in Congress - the Democrats are not complicit at all.
Trump can live as long as medically possible, which could be 10 or 20 more years, nobody really knows. Then Trump Jr. is going to take his place as the figurehead, and he'll probably win the next election if there is one. If Trump doesn't make it to the end of his term, we'll have President Vance and VP Miller, or maybe VP Trump Jr. It's not looking good no matter what happens.
Signed: A person with a disability, unable to support DEI as it stands.
Are the DEI bunch radicalized? I’m not sure I get that vibe. The people who riot and are radicalized probably aren’t out there understanding nuance, being level headed and campaigning for an even playing field.
If you can also expound on why you can’t support DEI as it stands I’m open to your thoughts. I have my own reservations about DEI because as a model minority it does me no favors. But it hasn’t harmed me either, or if it has I don’t know any better.
To your other question: I perceive DEI, and most other "inclusion" efforts I've seen so far, mostly as a strawman. We basically failed with digital accessibility and more inclusion in the workplace for people with disabilities. If I am not mistaken, the US and EU still stand somewhere around 80% unemployment for people with disabilities. To me, DEI is an attempt to hide that failure by including a lot more marginalized groups, which at the end of the day do not need so much adaptation as people with disabilities do. So IMO, DEI is trying to hide the fact that inclusion of people with disabilities has already failed. And its mixing up too many groups with different needs. I have absolutely nothing in common with a LGBTQ-person when it comes to my needs as a blind guy. There is no overlap, and I dont feel represented when they have their pride month. But they are so loud that the needs of my community have been silenced by now. Which confirms my intuition with DEI. Meanwhile, teachers are telling me they are working with their classes to find a new word for "disability". If that is the outcome of DEI, people endlessly engaging in wordgames, instead of working on the actual hard problems, I don't need anything from it. Its useless waste of time and dumbing down of the actual problems at hand.
Congratulations, you are being played. In the end, the Conservatives will destroy DEI and repress LGBTQ - and you won't have any more help as a blind person, because they never really cared and just manipulated you into hating "the gays" instead of hating them. Trump HATES you deeply, you know? He despises you, as a loser, a cripple, someone less-than-human. It is just that gay people are more politically active and visible, so they are more useful as a foe for his "two minutes of hate" - for now.
If you don't believe me:
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/trump-dei-target-a...
https://www.theguardian.com/global/2025/mar/27/us-disability...
https://time.com/7002003/donald-trump-disabled-americans-all...
“Those people . . . ” Donald said, trailing off. “The shape they’re in, all the expenses, maybe those kinds of people should just die.”
Meanwhile while you froth at the mouth against the "DEI bunch", disabled people are ending unemployed en masse right this very moment, thanks to the crazy cuts to Federal Workforce - the only big employer who tried to do things right.
https://www.axios.com/2025/01/24/dei-orders-disabled-workers...
Damn those extremists - don't they know how women got the vote, how racial segregation was ended and how persecution of gays by the police was addressed? They really need some civics lesson!
In comparison, it seems like we're almost at a point where all WW2 vets (the last time "white men" had to confront fascist behavior) have passed away. When's the last time America as a general unit has had to properly protest authority? The Boomers didn't seem to take the right lessons about Vietnam into account when they started taking the reigns.
That said, what people call DEI today is just a reformation of Maoism based in Marxism, and its goals follow hopes, and patterns that seek to engender social collectivist indoctrination in those subjected to it; following principles of thought reform/torture unironically also coming out of mainland China during Mao (1950s).
Its particularly effective against the habitually complacent.
The big trick of communism is to induce hope in people to narrow their focus to a circular but undefined viewpoint which can be falsely claimed as truth later, but which in reality lacks a property of what's called metaphysical objectivity in philosophy; an identity you need to prove anything through logic/critical thinking. This is how double-speak and double-think work.
It also takes advantage of a lot of psychological blindspots we all have (by purposeful design), just like any other cult programming.
Its important to note: Equity isn't equality, and its not properly defined.
If you want to learn more about blindspots, I'd suggest starting with Robert Cialdini (Influence). Robert Lifton covers case studies of actual torture mechanics which can be derived (elements, structuring, clustering), which use these blindspots (albeit this material came before Cialdini published back in the 1950s).
New Discourses covers the progression of DEI in damning detail albeit he sometimes becomes too wordy.
With any regime change playbook you inherently have two roles being played simultaneously by a single cohort. You have a subgroup of antagonists, who perform and carry out acts to inflame which then are used by the other role to create a unifying narrative/platform for influence and insurgency.
The fact that violence and rioting are occurring fairly often is sufficient evidence that DEI and its other forms have had some success as a memetic contagion.
The harm always comes at you sideways without any visibility or attribution being possible. Are you better off today than you were a decade ago? Could you imagine a decade ago police firing teargas and rubber bullets indiscriminately into a peaceful assembly, or people firebombing cars with molotov cocktails? Which came first?, none of the news is saying and all the public narratives lean towards omitted lies in one form or another.
No objective signals can be discernible or come out of channels jammed to the Shannon Limit.
People go absolutely insane when they cannot maintain an internal consistent narrative/mental state and this happens without them realizing it (subliminally), and its been known for quite a long time going all the way back to the 1800s with Gustave Le Bon's The Crowd.
Which side are you talking about now? Because according to [0], DEI violence is so rare that it doesn't even merit a mention in the statistics.
[0] https://www.justice.gov/hatecrimes/hate-crime-statistics
They need riots to make their big play. I wish people got that, but unfortunately if you poke the right places you can get people to react.
Communism has always been about telling misleading deceitful lies pretending its truth, generating confusion through circular thoughts, promoting magical thinking, and narrowing focus improperly in isolation to perspectives of oppressor vs the oppressed, a perspective where there can never be equality, or the ability to change and become better/grow (i.e. The Woke, who are delusional).
The channel New Discourses on youtube has long-running coverage of this referencing these people's own publicized words, and what's been happening, and how it was rebranded by Paulo Freire and others a few decades ago.
When you have American companies and government resources going to paying for indoctrinating communism in your worker, educator, or child; and nothing has been being done to stop it... that's a serious problem which would be worthy of declaring martial law over. Failure to act is an action itself.
Communism indoctrinating and brainwashing your people towards lies, and turning them to insurgency is a serious national security issue.
You objectively aren't an American, if you don't follow the western philosophy's founding ideals laid out by our founding fathers, which was based first in objective truth, property, and a rule of law which itself has requirements codified in the constitution that no court can overrule or curtail and remain a rule of law.
The rule of law has been gone for awhile, which is how the communists have not been held to account. It was replaced by a surrogate "rule by law" which favors some small groups over others.
People are only just now realizing it.
Once the infection has spread too far, you've got to cut if you want a hope for survival. Whether that's good or it turns out to be another 1933 Germany, we will simply have to wait and see.
The cause though is irrefutably the result of communism breaking down the protections and destabilizing the system and front-of-line blocking any action from resolving the destabilizing influence.
What we are seeing are just the natural dynamics of fascism rising out of the dynamics caused by an attempted communist takeover.
Why it matters? Long-term, under non-market socialism, everyone dies from population constraint dependencies (food) where no production can occur. The population goes into a death spiral that cannot be averted because the dynamics of incentives prevent any change of direction which might pull away from that existential maelstrom.
It has long been known that Centralized power hierarchies fail predictably from failures inherent in its structure, which include corruption and front-of-line blocking to prevent action/adaptive response, and not just immediately, but over time as well through purposeful frameworks of false thinking.
Communists know this, and have used this for decades to weaken and destabilize over generations (a generation is 20 years).
Ludwig von Mises rigorously defines, and covers all the structural failures of Communism in his writing from the 1930s through to the 1960s.
These works have been aggregated into a single book since then by the Liberty Fund; titled "Socialism", and for all but two of the 23 chapters, its a damning failure analysis of the structure.
No rational person pins their and their families continued survival to system's known to fail.
Ted Kennedy was elected by a plurality of his constituents many, many times. There was a campaign for each one of his terms and he won. Not so much "hired" as "elected." If the Republicans of that era could have unseated him, I presume they would have. In fact, the question that you may do better to ask is, "why couldn't a conservative in Massachusetts unseat someone with that much baggage?"
RFK and Pete Hegseth, whom I presume the earlier poster was alluding to because of his confirmed alcoholism, were appointed by the current President and confirmed by the Senate. There was no campaign and they were approved largely along party lines, which is more akin to "hiring" and that is an obviously less exhaustive process.
I can only assume that your connection to this was, "haha booze... Ted Kennedy!" Maybe you could graduate to parroting a different joke from Rush Limbaugh? Why don't you sample something from the "I do not think that 12-year old Chelsea Clinton is attractive" section?"
Not surprising!
> Ted Kennedy was elected by a plurality of his constituents many, many times.
Massachusetts voters condoned Chappaquiddick. He was still a drunk and worse. Ted Kennedy was never able to overcome Chappaquiddick when running on a national level. There's no doubt that the Chappaquiddick incident was one of the primary reasons he lost the 1980 primary, when he had his best chance of succeeding.
> If the Republicans of that era could have unseated him, I presume they would have.
Why? Massachusetts voters are overwhelmingly Democrats, and all sorts of disgusting characters like Ted Kennedy are elected to high office. The Democrat voters of Massachusetts were willing to overlook Chappaquiddick and that's all there is to it.
> RFK and Pete Hegseth, whom I presume the earlier poster was alluding to because of his confirmed alcoholism, were appointed by the current President and confirmed by the Senate. There was no campaign and they were approved largely along party lines, which is more akin to "hiring" and that is an obviously less exhaustive process.
Again, this only hurts the original argument. Hegseth and RFK Jr. are mere appointments. Neither of them to my knowledge has done anything as heinous as what Ted Kennedy did at Chappaquiddick but let's assume they did. Every few years Massachusetts voters spoke loudly and clearly, affirming their support for someone who drove so drunk that a woman was killed as a result. So the DUI snark above is kind of a joke, and deserves a response.
Heck you could argue that the national scrutiny that Hegseth and RFK Jr. faced was much more of a vetting than Ted Kennedy received in his machine state, but whatever.
> I can only assume that your connection to this was, "haha booze... Ted Kennedy!"
The truth hurts. If Democrats didn't want to defend Ted Kennedy they shouldn't have elected him. I happen to be fond of drinkers who don't kill people. Honestly I care much more about the fact that he abandoned Mary Jo Kopechne to die, and that he received special treatment in court.
> Maybe you could graduate to parroting a different joke from Rush Limbaugh? Why don't you sample something from the "I do not think that 12-year old Chelsea Clinton is attractive" section?"
The most famous example of a joke at Chelsea Clinton's expense was told by John McCain, who stated that the reason for her ugliness was the fact that her father was Janet Reno. John McCain was elected by a plurality of his constituents many, many times.
thats not wrong, look what the US was willing to overlook in 2016 and 2024 when electing our president lol! I do think the US should take the DUI thing more seriously but the trouble is that in many areas a car is central to ones very economic existence.
>The most famous example of a joke at Chelsea Clinton's expense was told by John McCain, who stated that the reason for her ugliness was the fact that her father was Janet Reno. John McCain was elected by a plurality of his constituents many, many times.
poor Chelsea lol I still did not totally dislike McCain like I do trump and his boyfriend musk.
So, another lawsuit against illegal executive branch dismissal of federal workers, then?
The committee is under the control of HHS Secretary... JFK. He literally has the authority to do what he did.
Changing a plan you inherited but now own is not illegal.
At the bare minumum, most government workers get due notice of their termination. The federal government is for the most part not at-will.
Apparently ACIP is very much not new. I am curious to the specifics of the prevous mass appointment, however.
Essentially, an anticipatory filling of a committee that had a lot of unfilled spots in hoping of stopping something like what's just happened.
That trust was undermined by habitual liars in an effort to score political points at the expense of public health. None of the batshit-insane things they claimed were just around the corner have actually materialized.
Unfortunately, this isn't even the top five most egregious thing these people are doing this week.
See https://web.archive.org/web/20250124095540/https://www.cdc.g...
But the basic work of ACIP had been done for 25+ years before the committee was created. The American Academy of Pediatrics made recommendations, etc.
> There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti‑intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’
- “A Cult of Ignorance” by Isaac Asimov, published on January 21, 1980 in Newsweek
But in a one-man-one-vote elective system what Asimov terms a "false notion" is true! Asimov rhetorically chose to label one side of an issue as "ignorant" and the other side as having "knowledge". But an honest statement of the notion would have been
"My vote is as good as yours."
This doesn't mean that ideas of right and wrong do not apply but it does mean that voting may not be the best way to choose.
> Asimov rhetorically chose to label one side of an issue as "ignorant" and the other side as having "knowledge"
This is not "rhetorical" -- they are not mere "labels" -- and in calling them that you're perpetuating the exact problem he's describing. RFK Jr.'s position is ignorant, false, stupid, inconsistent, dangerous, idiotic, etc. etc. These are not just labels.
I’m okay with federal officeholders selling ideas in newspapers like Obama did with Obamacare. He didn’t receive special treatment - just another voice in the marketplace of ideas. It’s just the announcement exclusives that feel wrong.
I thought that something like a pandemic would have brought us all together around a base truth. However, politics + social media was stronger than R₀, this time.
Three of my direct coworkers died from covid. One guy didn't get his sense of taste back for a year.
People just gasping to death in their bedrooms waiting for things to improve and only going to the overloaded ER when it's too late.
I'm an asthmatic, I've been close to that feeling where sub 90% oxygen saturation made me feel like death. Anything like 80% your lungs start to fail. You're dead in a hurry.
That particular plague is in Il Promisi Sposi ( The Betrothed), the Italian national epic. Really, it's a bit picardesque. But the first hand descriptions of that plague are just so damn similar to what the COVID was like. I remember reading it years before the pandemic and thinking that I was glad we weren't so mideaval anymore. Now it read it again ( it's only a few chapters in the book) and I feel more like one veteran talking to another about their war.
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/45334
Chapter 31 is where the plague part starts, you needn't really read the rest, but it's a good summer book all the same
;)
However Standard Ebooks didn't have it. They did have a page about how they want sponsors or volunteers to help create it which I found interesting in itself:
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/alessandro-manzoni/the-bet...
You are wrong.
Here in Sweden, I never got covid that I know of, people lined up real fast to get the vaccine without any threats.
1. They lied about masks, first it was irrelevant whether you wore one or not, then they changed their mind and suddenly masks were super important and you just have to wear one or else. The truth is that it probably helps a little because duh, you have some cloth in front of your breathing, it probably catches some particles but definitely not all all the time. Saying that scientific truth evolved is utter nonsense, experts definitely always knew particle size and mask efficiency. They just didn't care and didn't do their job figuring it out and telling people the real efficiency.
2. They lied constantly that vaccines are super safe and super effective, outright attempting to gaslight you that "nobody" dies to vaccines. Which is just a flat out lie. People absolutely died from vaccines and always have. Just stop lying about it.
3. The U.S president himself lied that you will not spread it anymore if you get vaccinated. All lies. And it was definitely already known at the time he said this, frankly it's common sense.
3. They lied about herd immunity which is basically impossible to achieve.
4. Deals with vaccine companies were kept secret, that doesn't exactly inspire much confidence to follow guidances when everyone knows how much money can corrupt.
5. They mounted a massive coercion campaign and constantly shamed everyone in the most pathetic ways possible with patronizing TV coverage. Colbert's little vaccine dance is historic at this point.
6. They strongly suppressed alternative points of view from other scientists and doctors. These were not flatearther tier people, they made good points and many were and are well respected people. And yet they were suppressed anyway.
And after all this you come here with a very generic comment about how disappointed you are that people didn't come together on a base truth. I'm disappointed that you seem to have no complaints and offer such a generic, apologist view of the past.
Commercial airplane travel is super safe. Some people die from commercial airplane crashes. Both statements are true. Ignorance is bliss.
Covid vaccines have different risk based on sex and age. The blood clot risk of the AZ vaccine was similar to the ICU risk from Covid for under 40s. The Moderna vaccine caused heart problems for young males.
Both of these issues were downplayed by politicians and officials, but the public health system eventually worked and AZ was discarded while young males were switched to Biontech.
With ideological purges done by the fake, ideological left, which is still in power in the western EU, it’s not clear that we won’t have nonsense policies in the future, such as dictating that BLM protests are fine during Covid while everyone else must stay indoors.
We have zero expectation that information on Tuberculosis in 1920 is accurate today. Some of it is, a lot of it isn't.
COVID was a new disease. That means, no matter what, we were going to change our mind a lot. It's honestly quite impressive we didn't change our minds more.
And the raw milk (might or might not contain a bit of cow poop)
Maybe he did have a real parasite in his brain, but according to him the parasite left no permanent damage after it got cleaned up after the divorce ended in his favour.
I don't see why raw milk necessarily contains cow poop unless the udders aren't cleaned before milking (though I suppose you can't trust the diary industry to take care of that reliably) but I doubt he's consuming any of it beyond the public appearances set up for the raw milk grifters.
Why attribute to insanity that which could just as easily be attributed to corruption and lies.
Indeed
Because his “insanity” is more than just a claimed brain worm:
The trauma from the men in his life being assassinated when he was an impressionable little boy. He now blames the CIA for both.
The heroin addiction.
The whale on the car incident.
The bear cub corpse in NYC.
The swimming in raw sewage.
There is no spy or health conspiracy too large for this guy. Everyone is corrupt/corruptable in his mind except him.
These are not the actions of a stable person. His solution to autism is to dictate that there is no significant genetic component, then give scientists 6 months to “find the cause” (after hijacking all of the medical data the US government can coerce).
Sure, there is corruption in that he is making referral money from some of his companies. I’m not sure he’s lying though — that requires Mens Rea. He might just have crazy ideas about reality. I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t believe in _germ theory_ after his statements about HIV /AIDS.
https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/04/rfk-jr-s-anti-vaccine...
> It's important to note here that our understanding of Kennedy's disbelief in germ theory isn't based on speculation or deduction; it's based on Kennedy's own words. He wrote an entire section on it in his 2021 book vilifying Fauci, titled The Real Anthony Fauci. The section is titled "Miasma vs. Germ Theory," in the chapter "The White Man's Burden."
I posted my remark because "swimming in raw sewage" gives a pretty lurid picture, as of Oliver St. John Gogarty's escape through the Liffey--"not really swimming, just going through the movements."
He (the head of US HHS) seems to be trying to push a medical social Darwinism (eg. Expose people directly to the deadly pathogens instead of using vaccines/inoculations), without getting anywhere close to a national consensus.
He is surrounding himself with sycophants of his strange pseudo-scientific beliefs. He claims to believe in science and testing, but the choices he has made as a political leader at the head of the HHS have been top-down dictates and fabricated + sock puppets “research” he is too scared to have peer reviewed in public by de-anonymized reviewers.
It happened with Governor Perry and the Department of Energy, and with Dan Bongino and the Epstein suicide.
This is the only way I see we break the fever of MAGA in a relatively short period of time.
On my part, I didn’t need anyone to tell me how various masks do or do not work. They all have certifications one can read on their own.
But, that mask messaging was bad. I suppose the alternative was, yes masks work, but we don’t enough have for you. Apparently we are not adult enough to hear that type of thing. And, I mean we’re not.
The fact of the matter is that such dishonesty makes one untrustworthy. It was clear that everyone landed in political lines here. The right answer is to not lie. “You can’t handle the truth” is nice in a movie but we’re in real life and if you say that to me you shouldn’t be surprised if the next time you say something I think that you’re lying again.
East Harlem - poor district - no health officials only harsh police enforcement, >20 people arrested.
Lots of arrests in Manhattan for social distancing. Even taking video of the arrests got you arrested
https://abc30.com/nypd-violent-arrest-east-village-caught-on...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/08/social-dista...
Famous report of Texas woman arrested for not wearing mask to Bank AFTER Abbott rolled back the federal mask mandate.
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/03/13/us/galveston-arrest-bank-...
No mask - no vote https://marylandmatters.org/2020/10/28/gop-lawmaker-takes-le...
Famous case of Mom arrested and taken to the ground for not wearing mask correctly, lol. https://ny1.com/nyc/brooklyn/coronavirus-blog/2020/05/15/mot...
We can go on and on...but seriously do people have such terrible short term memory that all the arrests, business closures and police abuse are already forgotten ?
In multiple cases, the individual was given the opportunity to comply with the law (or request, in the case of a private business), refused, and then was arrested for trespassing when they were asked to leave. That's actually different from "Arrested for not wearing a mask".
In one article, the women who refused to wear the mask threatened to cough on people.
In another case, the lawsuit was thrown out by the judge; the individual who was arrested was actually given the opportunity to vote (in a no-mask area), but refused and then was asked to leave, then arrested for trespassing.
There certainly were rights violations, and unnecessary violence/arrests by law enforcement officials. I'm not excusing those, but I will observe that it's challenging to uphold the law in a rapidly changing medical emergency.
In another ac
> When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent ... Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, "I can nudge this up a bit," so I went to 80, 85. We need to have some humility here .... We really don’t know what the real number is. I think the real range is somewhere between 70 to 90 percent. But, I'm not going to say 90 percent.
The intention doesn't really matter; you can't admit to lying for policy purposes, then wonder why people stopped trusting the government.
But if the bar is that public officials must communicate flawlessly during an emergency situation and have it so all of their recommendations end up being the correct ones once we have complete information then there's no possible hope. People point at the changing guidance as evidence of a conspiracy when public health officials were learning new things every day.
Once it turned out not to be true public trust was seriously eroded.
(1) https://abc3340.com/news/local/those-fully-vaccinated-very-u...
Weird link you got there.
You: Fauci's statement is true.
Me: How does that square with the fact that approximately everyone got covid? Do you think all of the infections came from unvaccinated people?
You: The vaccine was never advertised to prevent infection 100%, especially after time.
Do you see the logical disconnect here? How what you wrote was not responsive to the question?
A: If vaccinated then p(transmission) = low.
B: p(transmission) != low, given that many vaccinated people had to have transmitted.
How can A and B both be true? Or are you saying that B is not true, and everyone got sick via immaculate infection?
I was told by family and friends that the shots were 100% safe and effective, and that if I didn't take the shot I wanted grandma to die, because that's what the TV told them; and when I tried to show them quotes from the actual scientists creating the shots that contradicted that, they said it was misinformation.
Sorry - calling absolute bullshit on this one.
Take a look at the vaccine studies - only J&J actually tested the effect on transmission, and J&J was hardly used.
The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines never tested transmission. So why would Fauci make such a claim?
Pfizer trial protocols: https://www.nejm.org/doi/suppl/10.1056/NEJMoa2034577/suppl_f...
Moderna trial protocols: https://www.nejm.org/doi/suppl/10.1056/NEJMoa2035389/suppl_f...
But what did Fauci say on national news?
“So even though there are breakthrough infections with vaccinated people, almost always the people are asymptomatic and the level of virus is so low it makes it extremely unlikely — not impossible but very, very low likelihood — that they’re going to transmit it,” Fauci said.
Appearing on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” - June 16, 2021
While the vaccines do not eliminate all transmission, they can help. Studies done after distribution of the COVID-19 vaccines began, including research by Pfizer, did find that the company’s shot reduced asymptomatic infections in addition to symptomatic cases with earlier variants of the virus. Researchers in the United Kingdom reported in a February observational study that Pfizer’s vaccine helped cut transmission of the alpha and delta variants.
https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-pfizer-transmission-eu...
I don't remember the Manhattan project making any public statements that had an impact on public health?
What kind of a comparison is that?
Yeah, that's my point.
How is your example at all relevant?
Unfortunately, because of how special Americans are, the outcome of being stuck with this current administration was inevitable. It was going to happen sooner or later.
Im glad at least its happening sooner when Im still fairly young and have the flexibility to peace out if I need to.
Asking people to inject themselves with something that was rushed out the door, most using novel technology, and whose results did not come remotely close to the early rhetoric (which included claims that you would not get infected or spread COVID if vaccinated) is not something that people would ever organically rush to adopt.
The only country that had a very good societal response was Japan, as a result they had one of the lowest death rates in the world, even with their aging population, while having the law in place that pretty much only restrict government power to closing certain places, without being able to enforce quarantine. The initial decision of the government was even against imposing emergency powers, but eventually all parties agreed that emergency powers were necessary.
>Asking people to inject themselves with something that was rushed out the door, most using novel technology, and whose results did not come remotely close to the early rhetoric (which included claims that you would not get infected or spread COVID if vaccinated) is not something that people would ever organically rush to adopt.
And yet, those same people eat food that contains who knows what, was processed with random chemicals that may or may not cause cancer, buy meat from animals injected with chemicals that they don't know the contents of, smoke, drink alchol, vape.
But suddenly, when it comes to taking a vaccine with technology that not only has been around for a while, but also adequately tested, the "government can't be trusted".
The negative response to vaccine was never about government distrust, it was pretty much a very easy ideological line to draw in the sand. This is why every single anti vaxxer person on their way to the grave breathing through a ventilator was changing their mind and telling people to take the vaccine, because when shit actually gets real, ideology matters less.
And equivalently now, maybe (and hopefully), when US is embroiled in civil unrest with martial law in place, and people can't feed their families, they will realize that having a black woman president would have been probably a much better outcome than voting for a convicted felon who sold them lies of individual liberty.
First of all, a medical treatment which is enforced by the government is a major thing, no matter how small the intervention may appear.
In Germany a limited mandate for healthcare workers was introduced. This didn’t force people to accept a vaccine, but they could be temporarily forbidden from coming to work. This was declared valid by the constitutional court.
Forcing people to get the vaccine would clearly contradict the constitution on the other hand.
Problem is, in America, that group is large enough to make significant impact on government.
People still act like it's some common cold. My partner has nearly no taste left, years later. That's an entire sense, a fundamental perception, gone.
Even if it was a common cold, I don't want to be forced to have it.
Versus those of us that were forced to get the the vaccine lest suffer the social consequences and live with the physical repercussions?
Or the conservative viewpoint now that one is entitled to have a job, and people MUST be nice to you? Sounds very leftist if you ask me.
I lived in Orange County CA at the start of the pandemic and moved to Cincinnati in the great diaspora. Went shopping in both places. Was never asked about a vaccine. I did have to mask up.
I don’t recall being asked about a vaccine anywhere. If I worked certain jobs I can imagine it, and those would be jobs where it would make sense.
There are countries that had a stricter response, but this is a US centric discussion. Hearing Americans complain about lock downs makes me roll my eyes. The USA did not have “lock downs” outside a few very dense metros you were free to leave at any time.
Old school union Democrats were often fiercely anti immigration too. Trump turned Ohio from purple to red and carried a lot of that region by pulling in these people.
I’m not personally a fan of populism of either left or right variety. It almost always has a negative outcome. It turns out that experts, even if they are sometimes assholes, often do really know something, and purging them and putting crackpots and apparatchiks in charge has consequences. People who don’t know how to do things don’t do them as well.
RFK is going to be an epic disaster. I think he’s the worst person in the administration in terms of potential long term blast radius. He’s a crank who will kill people with new agey granola anti medicine bullshit.
I used to regard that stuff as part of the loony left. I guess it was. Trump is the Sauron of crackpottery, gathering all con artists and crackpots to himself as if by some magical magnetism.
Sure, you could just say "well just ruin your future and NEET it up forever", but is that really any different than having it literally mandated? Remember, at the time it was heavily pushed that mandates would not be going away in the future, so the implication was anything forgone in the present would be for naught when you're inevitably forced to recieive it eventually anyway.
Granted, at the time I thought nothing if it, and happily got my first two doses. It was actually the experience of suffering side-effects from the second vaccine and getting labelled "anti-vax" when asking those around me for help that really turned me off the whole movement, forever.
You'd probably find more people in any given thread pushing back against the tech stack the OP site is using, lol
There used to be a lot less of us critics around 2020/2021, I don't know if it's a case of less moderation around such topics nowadays (doubtful, I'd expect dang to be pretty good even in the COVID heyday) or if there's more of us that have since wisened up or developed health conditions ourselves.
When you come out of the gate with masks aren't effective, just was your hands, then go to masks are mandatory, Americans are going to be upset because you're making them do something that you just told them not to do. They're also going to distrust future recommendations. When a new mandate comes through, they're going to be less likely to comply and more likely to make a big fuss.
Combine that with less than effective outreach on reasonable expectations of the vaccine in terms of reduction of illness and immune response to the injection, and it's a recipie for mistrust.
And since many of the mandates were found unenforcable, it weakens the potential power of future mandates, should there be a need.
Yes, this is true
There should be public debate around most of any issue. Tell people something as simple that getting some sunlight is good for them and some will even argue against it claiming that no it's not, you'll just get skin cancer. And that's fine, even those sort of views deserve their place in the public discourse. But when that discourse is completely absent - presumably to try to give the appearance of complete consensus, it doesn't inspire confidence, but destroys it.
The problem isn't the lack of debate, it is the hysteria against minor inconvenience and raw selfishness.
Here [1] is a blog which is highly critical of RFK's view on germ theory yet, unlike most media sources, it also lays out what he said in a vaguely reasonable way. He obviously does not reject germ theory in the least, but believes that having an overall healthier lifestyle and avoiding environmental toxins is a more effective means of ensuring your body can fight off infection than by focusing solely on specific germs. The article offers a quote that seems reasonable: "When a starving African child succumbs to measles, the miasmist attributes the death to malnutrition; germ theory proponents (a.k.a. virologists) blame the virus. The miasmist approach to public health is to boost individual immune response."
Of course one can engage with modern medicine and live a healthy life, but I think his entire schtick is that the whole live a healthy life aspect of healthcare has been largely neglected over the past half century. Just reducing the obesity rate, for instance, would probably have a dramatically greater impact on health outcomes than any new medical discovery over the next 50 years - as we seem to have entered well into the domain of diminishing returns. But yet there will be many trillions of dollars pumped into those discoveries, with little to no meaningful effort made to curb obesity, unless it can be done with a drug - because that's where the $$$ is.
[1] - https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-a...
About the healthy life stuff, yes most of the rest of the world already practice this without wedging war on modern science and have plenty of regulations in place to protect the citizens. Additionally, a lot of countries have some form of centralized healthcare structure that has has preventive healthcare.
Maybe RFK wants to make USA like EU using BS to avoid being called socialist.
Also, I previously said that I like the spirit of it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44134479
The youngest to die were Hamilton who died in a duel, and John Hancock who died of gout of an undocumented cause - it can be caused by excessive alcohol consumption. All the others lived into their 60s and 70s. So their overall life expectancy was pretty much the same as we have today. And this was long before vaccines or even us knowing that surgeons washing their hands before surgery was a good thing to do. It's the same as you go back further into history. A study [1] of all men of renown in Ancient Greece was 71.3, and that was from thousands of years ago!
The most primitive medical technology, antibiotics in particular, could have likely expanded these lives well beyond current day. So the idea here is not to just add more regulations to medicine or have people go to the hospital even more for preventative care but to start living healthier lives in general. Less crap food, more time outdoors, more exercise, less obesity, and so on. And these are things that the government should have been pushing all along.
IMHO it's the culture that matters and distrust into science and institutions breeds bad culture.
In other words, for most of human history, once you hit a certain point you were about as likely to live as long as any other point. Obviously not considering outlier circumstances like periods of war or novel disease.
It's only been in recent decades where we're really starting to push beyond that, at least in the most developed of nations. This is due to growing ability to solve the issues that arise from living too long.
But I'm not sure I'm aware of any evidence for the latter part. Max life expectancy doesn't seem to be changing much at all, even over millennia (though obviously claims from long ago are impossible to objectively verify). This is far from an exhaustive search but the first thing that came to mind was to search for the longest lived people. [1] Of the 100 oldest women and 100 oldest men to have ever lived, only 4 of each are still alive today, and the most common nationality (and in fact the only nationality with more than 1 represented) is Brazil with 2 of the oldest men and 1 of the oldest women.
If we were pushing the bounds max life expectancy, then you'd generally expect to see a significant number of people breaking those records and - accordingly - still alive. In many ways it's kind of surprising that we're not even if we weren't making progress, since the total sample size of 'verified' peoples is increasing dramatically over time, so more people should be living longer (even if there is no change in max life expectancy) by chance/outlierdome alone. This to me is suggestive that we indeed be going in the opposite direction, though that's some extremely weak evidence of course.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_verified_oldest_pe...
[1] https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publicatio...
And the various observations the article does make have similarly straight forward explanations. For instance gains have not been seen to the same degree in Eastern Europe where alcoholism, especially in the windows of time considered, was chronic. It also mentions dramatic gains in Asia but yet again you had things like China's Great Leap Forward and the Indonesian Genocide in the time frame studied where you were seeing deaths by the tens of millions. It's akin to saying that global life expectancy increased dramatically after 1945, which is certainly true.
No one's against nutritional public health measures or elimination of environmental toxins to improve public health. The fact is lifestyle interventions are ALWAYS first-line recommendations by medical doctors for things like obesity, but Americans are stressed out, overworked, inactive, eating garbage food, and have clamored for easy solutions like taking a pill for a long time rather than making lifestyle changes. There's been no neglect of "living a healthy life", it's just that Americans don't want to do it because it requires lifting a finger. There are many positive public health impacts HHS and the Trump admin could have, but they are talking out of both sides of their mouth when they claim "MAHA" while cutting food access entitlements, rolling back environmental regulations for clean air and water, and of course "drill baby drill". RFK Jr. made a deal with the devil to be HHS secretary.
Look at "The Questionable Contribution of Medical Measures to the Decline of Mortality in the United States in the Twentieth Century", by Mckinlay and McKinley (1977). I know it's an old paper, but it has some fascinating and, to me, very persuasive time series. Those plots show mortality from various infectious diseases over the 20th century.
Example: death rates (per 1000) from scarlet fever dropped from 0.1 in 1900 to effectively 0 in 1940. There is NO VACCINE for scarlet fever.
Example: death rates from measles (lately very much in the news) dropped from 0.12 in 1900 to 0 in 1960 (a vaccine for measles was introduced in 1960).
A similar trend exists for many other infectious diseases: huge drops in mortality PRECEDE the introduction of vaccines or antibiotics for the disease. Surely we can't credit vaccines with such a drop in death rates. I don't see how anybody could come to such a conclusion.
Yes, measles death rates had dropped precipitously (fortunately), however incidence (new cases) had only dropped a little. It wasn't until the vaccine was introduced that incidence dropped to nearly zero[1]. Yours is a common anti-vaxx talking point, and one that seems to neglect that death is not the only negative outcome from measles. It's understandable to take the talking point at face value when it appears to be scientifically-supported, though this is a good example of how a talking point uses a cherry-picked fact and reframes the issue for a presupposed conclusion (that vaccines are unsafe or ineffective), because the origin of that talking point had no interest in comprehensively informing people but converting them to believers.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/measles-cases-and-death-r...
For me the paper shows not just that good sanitation and nutrition help reduce deaths from many infections diseases, but that they are the primary agent in that reduction. I thought it was a very cool paper, although you don’t seem moved in the same way as me.
When I was a child, my parents weren’t upset when I got measles (I was, because it meant missing a trip to the seashore). It meant that you were going to be miserable for a week, but would be immune afterwards. So I became one more case, but not one more death.
And nobody really knows why this is, though there are plentiful hypotheses. And exercise is just one aspect of living healthy, though a very important one. You find similar strong associations between 'clean' eating and all other sorts of aspects of a living a healthy life.
Not only does it have effects but rather dramatic ones. I'd think most people would probably see this in their daily lives as healthfulness has dramatic effects on both physical and psychological wellbeing.
[1] - https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/o...
Other things would be to offer a 100% tax credit for things like gym memberships. If this actually incentivized people, then it'd probably pay for itself through better health outcomes for society. It could also be paid for by adding a health tax, such as already exists on cigarettes, to e.g. highly processed foods, candy, and cola.
Similarly, the FDA should have some sort of an accreditation that restaurants and other food services can apply for that confirms some standard of minimal healthfulness of their food. This accreditation would be extremely critical since, in general, just dumping salt and sugar into food makes it more addictive, which increases margins, so when you go for health - you do so at profit loss. Such an accreditation could help combat this by giving people something to look for.
I didn't contest the relationship between regular exercise and health. The questions I raised were: what evidence is there that [malnutrition] is a significant contributor to infectious disease in countries like the US? What evidence is there that an otherwise healthy immune system could be "boosted" with proper nutrition and elimination of environmental toxins to the point that it would have a meaningful impact on infectious disease?
I agree with all of these solutions for encouraging regular exercise, and I'm open to the solutions for encouraging healthier nutrition.
Solutions are not difficult to find for this specific manifestation of malnutrition. The primary issue is crap foods and cola which enable one to consume far more calories than you'd even be able to if eating a comparable amount of healthy food. For instance 2400 calories is 15 100g (cooked size) chicken breast servings. Or it's less than 2 McDonalds Big Breakfasts.
Another thing is to remove the ability to purchase junk foods and cola with government food assistance. There's an extreme inverse correlation between obesity and income (hah.. imagine people of a couple hundred years ago hearing that) and so steps like this could actually have a tremendously positive overall impact on overall social health and wellbeing. This is even more true when you consider that twinkies and cokes are being bought on strictly limited budgets which means that much less money (and now more) for healthy foods.
There's merit to the government food assistance (SNAP in the US) idea, though if you're trying to ban "junk food" from SNAP you're going to run into definition issues. Banning things like Twinkies and cola from SNAP is one thing, but "junk food" may also include ready-made ultra-processed food depending on your definition, and that may be the only type of food typical SNAP recipients can use (e.g. homeless who do not have access to cooking, people who live in food deserts). There is also a valid concern about micromanaging the food people eat, because SNAP recipients are normal humans and we tend to give normal humans leeway to indulge in a treat every now and then.
Food deserts are largely irrelevant. Things like rice, beans, canned goods, and other such products are widely available and provide sufficient nutrition. There is also online food ordering (from Amazon etc) that allows payment with things like SNAP. And the sort of products we're talking about are not "treats", and should not be seen that way. They are highly addictive and harmful trash that, in the future will almost certainly be completely banned, certainly in anything like their current formulations.
Rather than have the stores and restaurants pay for changes they can be required and tax funded. Do it gradually.
The economy will thank you later.
If he wants to focus on encouraging Americans to live more healthily, that doesn't need to come at the expense of vaccines. Further, he wouldn't be focused on areas of questionable or marginal value like food dyes, but on junk food as a whole. And if you want to focus on junk food, the place to start is economics: junk food is cheap in both time and money, and a financially-struggling population lacks both.
So with that in mind, we can now say he's a complete and utter buffoonish idiot whose opinion is not worth a fart.
my point is not that he is right, I have no idea if he's right but I know what the argument is.
my point is that this HN discussion and all others like it is full of useless whining.
In case anybody wondered.
He had said that he thinks no vaccines are safe and effective. These quotes are easy to find, I'm not sure how you could have missed them.
https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/04/rfk-jr-s-anti-vaccine...
You don't even know what you are talking about when it comes to your own guy.
"In all, the chapter provides a clear explanation of why Kennedy relentlessly attacks evidence-based medicines; vilifies the pharmaceutical industry; suggests HIV doesn't cause AIDS and antidepressants are behind mass shootings; believes that vaccines are harmful, not protective; claims 5G wireless networks cause cancer; suggests chemicals in water are changing children's gender identities; and is quick to promote supplements to prevent and treat diseases, such as recently recommending vitamin A for measles and falsely claiming children who die from the viral infection are malnourished."
Better to state what you argue or what you believe an opponent is arguing, so that a reasonable discussion can then ensue. IOW I agree with you that each of RFK's contentions could be discussed dispassionately here; however, in contrast mrtksn 55 minutes ago wrote:
+I like the suggestion, but this is not a debate really, this is action."
which, to me, sounds like some sort of (insurrectionist/Marxist/something I'm unfamiliar with) "call to action" rather than a consideration of further discussion. If so, then my imagined discussion would be likely impossible. Instead I see two possible alternatives depending on what your state laws are:
I. You live in a state where firearms are heavily regulated and there is no "stand-your-ground" law or "castle doctrine". Result: possible burnings, lootings and days of general lawlessness, or
II. You live in a state like Texas where one can possess firearms and use them to "stand your ground". Result: a few possible deaths, some wounded burners, looters and rioters after 15 minutes of clarification.
(1) "The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health"
https://www.amazon.com/Real-Anthony-Fauci-Pharma-Democracy/d...
if you want to make changes, you should make a convincing argument to do so
1. That Wifi causes cancer.
2. That there is no vaccine which is "safe and effective".
3. It's unknown if the Polio vaccine prevented more deaths than it caused.
This quote from him seems to summarize his view on vaccines: "I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, 'Better not get him vaccinated.'"
> This quote from him seems to summarize his view on vaccines: "I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, 'Better not get him vaccinated.'"
Unless of course the baby is his son, or grandson, then absolutely they should be vaccinated.
Nowhere in there does it matter that anyone is "right". Democracy doesn't care.
See, the problem with everyone in these comments is that you're focusing on the wrong problem. RFK, Trump, they're all just symptoms of that larger problem. Getting mad at this news is like watching a tornado tear your house off the foundations then yelling in anger at the storm.
I don't believe you're engaging in good faith either.
"We will get rid of those positions to make room for Trump loyalists. It's not as bad as it sounds because some of those Biden loyalists were only appointed recently."
i took 2 jabs at that start of covid vaxinations, fcked my life up to be honest.
only now doctors they are saying may be related after years of inconclusive reports..
we jumped the gun on covid19 vax, i am fine with anything being out many many years.
we wouldnt dare give it to our children.
BUT we are upto date and will continue to be upto date on immunizations as required by local health and schools (covid is not one of them).
so we arent anti-vax.
we anti-letting us and our kids be the test bed.
Sounds like perimenopause. Irregular menstrual cycles, and "doctors are clueless", are both symptoms of perimenopause; and trigeminal neuralgia is associated with menopause (see e.g. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3401754/#sec2-4 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4247552/#sec2-8).
I'd recommend getting your bloods done, and then (if you are experiencing perimenopause) try taking enough œstradiol to get your levels back up: that might reduce the pressure on your trigeminal nerve, if the two things are related. (This of course increases your cancer risk, but for most women it's worth it.)
They reviewing my case for a case study at ubc med
Anyone else feel free to armchair opinion and be skeptical.
Did the vax cause the issues directly? Probably not.
Did it trigger somehting dormant already in a cascading affect? Possibly...
Keep down voting i guess if doesnt match your personal experience or u think ita just menopause
This challenge is why we use randomized controlled trials to investigate the effects of treatment… they are the best tool we know of that can actually measure cause and effect.
They can't, and often neither can the doctors. That is one of the major practical reasons why vaccinations should be voluntary - it is quite hard to assess the evidence of what exactly medicine does. Some things take a while for the evidence to really form a meaningful pattern.
It was like them declaring the vaccine safe and effective after a few months of trials - that isn't a crazy standard but if the vaccine literally caused people to drop dead after 12 months for some weird reason they just couldn't have detected it because not enough time had passed.
OK, so vaccines that improve the situation because of creating herd immunity should not be mandatory because a small number of the people taking the vaccine may think that medical problems they develop some time after vaccination was caused by the vaccination without any particular proof that the vaccination was the cause, thus allowing enough people to opt out of taking the vaccines destroying the benefits of herd immunity.
>but if the vaccine literally caused people to drop dead after 12 months for some weird reason they just couldn't have detected it because not enough time had passed.
is there a specific time period cut off for this scenario in your head? What if a vaccine caused people to drop dead after 50 years for some reason, we should wait 50 years then.
The COVID vaccines were strictly personal protection.
> is there a specific time period cut off for this scenario in your head?
No; although personally rather than specific timelines I'd prefer that the people compelling me to get vaccinated had evidence they thought was compelling - they appeared to think threats were necessary which does make me doubt the quality of the evidence. That is the thing about voluntary administration of medical procedures - everyone gets to decide their own standard of evidence. Maybe some people just won't get vaccinated.
Out of interest, what have the doctors ruled out? I know your personal opinion is "the vaccine did it", but that was hardly the only thing going on in your life at the time, and n=1 doesn't give a lot of opportunities for a comparison.
I'd be interested in reading the case study, too, once pre-prints are available.
Anyway, just wanted to say—you’re not crazy, you really experienced what you experienced, and I’m glad people are becoming more open minded about this stuff.
Literally WHAT PROOOOF do you have of this? Do you not understand how unbelievably fucking complicated health is? Hm?
I got cancer in my 20s, do you know what caused it? No fucking idea. There's literally thousands of things that could have caused it, take your pick. I don't know, my doctor doesn't know, nobody fucking knows.
So what the fuck do you mean the COVID vaccine ruined your life? Did you eat McDonald's between now and then? So then how do you know it isn't the McDonald's?
Or, I'll do you one better: how do you know it wasn't COVID itself?
Presumably to be replaced with political appointees / friends?
I can't wait to travel to Mexico or Canada to get a vaccine!
> I can't wait to travel to Mexico or Canada to get a vaccine!
In any event, Mexico and Canada are special in that they share a terrestrial border with most of the United States.
FWIW TB was the leading infectious disease killer in 2023 (surpassing COVID-19)
https://www.who.int/news/item/29-10-2024-tuberculosis-resurg...
and remained so in 2024.
I specifically remember you could either show proof of vaccination OR proof that you had tested negatively quite recently. If you are against _testing_ too, I don't think we have anything further to discuss.
Because America has been the paragon of health over the past few decades...because America spends the most per capita on Health Care. What a super effective system. Obviously everything was working out so great before this JFK guy came.
I work in healthcare - most problems we see in the hospital are related to chronic illness caused by poverty and the gutting of social services. Many other countries spend more on social services than healthcare, but in the US it's flipped.
Where I come from, whenever 2 old women meet, I noticed they always ask how many children they had. And the response is always a variation of: 6 children, 4 alive, 2 dead.
Child mortality is still present in their minds. This is inconceivable to me but my generation still listens to the stories. The future generations are not gonna listen to these stories, the US is probably already in such a future.
If you are a conservative who is reading this, give me any conservative viewpoint and Ill show you that it either doesn't make sense in reality, or is already supported by Democrats.
You can flag my comment if you want, but Im past the point of caring about optics when it comes to conservatives as they are functionally destroying my country.
Good luck getting more Dems in office!
I am also not about changing their minds, as their minds can't be changed by any conversation. If they were able to actually listen to reason, the wouldn't be conservatives.
Conservatives on the other hand feel like its ok to have a private militia in the form of ICE exacting their will.
The left believes the aggressors are the Trump administration. The right believes its the left and the Biden admin. The real aggressor is the division itself; upstream from both these administrations. Those sad quirks of human nature, tribalism and division, which the algorithms picked up on, which feeds back into content creators biasing toward serving those algorithmic niches, which feeds the cycle further. Russia probably disinfo'd a bit in there, but honestly, they don't even need to; human nature does it itself.
Social media and AI-accelerated tribal bubble reinforcement is going to destroy the world. If you work in social media: Your work is destroying the world. You need to stop. The only way to save modern society is to turn off social media.
I think terms in boards like this should be filled under a different periodicity from the presidential term, preferentially with a period coprime to it, just like cicadas do. This way it would be harder to pull the trick of letting both cycles sync.
I am not antivax but can we please stop pretending like our government and health authorities didn’t royally screw the pooch as it related to the COVID vaccine communications, mandates, etc…?
People became more anti-vax largely due to the prior administration more than RFKjr.
So there may not be a scientific defense but there damn sure is a backlash because of poor leadership.
What happened is that our country is extremely polarized and one side picked vaccines, masks, and lockdowns, so the other side took the opposite stance.
Then the vaccine, mask, and lockdown side reacted by leaning farther in (probably a bit too far near the end of things).
On the one side you had people yelling about masks causing them to asphyxiate and on the other you had people wearing masks alone in the car.
We don't even seem to be learning in retrospect. I've yet to see one article from health officials to the public about how they could have done better and what mistakes were made.
But if only sick people had to wear masks, it would single you out as sick, so nobody would wear a mask.
So the solution is for everyone to wear a mask, so a mask isn't a sign of illness.
Of course, this level of thinking requires an IQ of at least 100, which half the population is under.
So "Wear a mask, because masks stop the spread of illness" is used to allude to masks being a tool for protection primarily, rather than a tool of containment.
How’s that working out so far?
Now you are suggesting it was all some form of performative behavior modification theater? It’s no wonder our public trust in our health authorities has decreased.
- He said masks are not effective because they aren't. Surgical masks won't stop much and N95 needs special procedure to use properly. 95% of people clamoring for masks would be healthy unsick people who want protection from the virus, which masks aren't that great at (in general public hands).
- At the time people needed to stay home and medical workers who understand masks and using them properly needed them. There was a huge shortage.
- The number of sick people going out in public, the ones where a mask is very effective (picture a sweatshirt hanging over a garden hose, now spray someone with it) would be very small, requiring very few masks.
- If the public understood that only sick people needed to wear masks -no one would wear a mask- Health officials deeply understand this. You kill your whole program if the public associates masks with being sick.
Fauci had no lies, maybe misteps, but he could not reveal the true motivation of "Wear a mask" (stated in the line abaove) because it kills the whole initiative(as stated in the line above).
So now, lets see who can clear the hurdle:
How do you as a public health communicator get all sick people to wear masks in public?
Fauci was stuck in a game theory problem, and you need some hidden information (which I now revealed) and mild intelligence to understand it
Sorry, but I am not going to assume mastery and genius that manifests itself as incompetence. Feel free to call me low intelligence.
It's totally understandable that you were not aware that public masking primarily works by masking sick people, and the game theory folly that creates.
It's ok to reassess when you learn new information.
> On May 15, 2020, President Donald Trump officially announced the public-private partnership. The purpose of Operation Warp Speed was to coordinate Health and Human Services-wide efforts, including the NIH ACTIV partnership for vaccine and therapeutic development, the NIH RADx initiative for diagnostic development, and work by BARDA.
For what it’s worth…I am not a Trump supporter…but I am not going to make excuses for Biden and the democrats for the clusterfuck they created.
RFK made a career out of being anti-vax, while according to his congressional testimony, his own children were indeed vaccinated.
These people are political grifters, with no limits, even when it comes to other people's health.
(This comment exchange probably sucks, sorry)
That is the real issue. RFKjr is in the position he is as a reaction to bad leadership. Whatever further damage that he manages to do, is still owned by the mismanagement caused by the prior administration.
This seems like nonsense. Is your theory that the previous administration is perceived by some as having over-reached on COVID-19 vaccines; so the proper response is to install someone with no background in biomedical sciences to blow up vaccine research and implementation and then blame it all on the prior administration … do I have it right?
RFKjr’s popularity rose and he tried to capitalize on it by choosing to run for president as a democrat, then an independent, then throws his support behind Trump…who wins. Trump is a master troll who wants to hurt the opposition and who better to do that as Director of HHS than RFKjr?
Without Biden and Fauci creating the environment of people questioning vaccine efficacy, RFKjr doesn’t get the popularity bump. His position is is due to that bump. He is a reaction to bad leadership.
You keep saying this... what was the lie?
Pointing out that other vaccines have these exact same properties just leads to them claiming all of those are not really vaccines and we need to stop recommending them. In their mind if its not a shot you get once, after which there is no possibility of contracting the disease, it is a hoax.
You can see exactly this train of thought in this thread from some people
It's like all of these "conservatives" (how they think of themselves, they obviously are no longer actually conservatives) finally had their "trust the system" broken, but then rather being generally skeptical and trying to think for themselves, their general desire to trust authority figures made them latch on to contrarian "authorities". And it turns out those professional contrarians don't actually like our country very much at all.
On this topic whataboutism might apply to Trump platforming RFKjr, but that is still a reaction to my underlying premise.
The absolute clusterfuck by Fauci when he lied about masks, lied about vaccine efficacy, and the Biden administration saying being in groups was dangerous unless it was a BLM protest, did far, far more to destroy confidence in the FDA and vaccines than RFK ever did.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbooksauthors/2025/06/09/t...
People became more anti-vax because of the large contingent pushing anti-vax conspiracies to a credulous audience.
The previous administration’s policies were a significant success. Any idea they were a failure or a mistake is wrong.
It's very simple: if you push more anti-vax talking points and conspiracies, then naturally those ideas will be more popular in the zeitgeist. And, well, the right in general has been doing just that. Two plus two, now there's a lot more anti-vax people.
Yoda: “And that is why you fail…”
Just 12 People Are Behind Most Vaccine Hoaxes On Social Media, Research Shows
- https://www.npr.org/2021/05/13/996570855/disinformation-doze...
Researchers have found just 12 people are responsible for the bulk of the misleading claims and outright lies about COVID-19 vaccines that proliferate on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
"The 'Disinformation Dozen' produce 65% of the shares of anti-vaccine misinformation on social media platforms," said Imran Ahmed, chief executive officer of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which identified the accounts.In what way? (Specifically re: screwing the pooch around vaccines, and not other parts of the covid response.)
Then, even after it was apparent that the vaccine did not have the advertised benefit, they continued to press its use including mandates for federal employees and the military, encouraged censorship of social media conversation about the vaccine and its efficacy, as well as pressed covid vaccination of healthy children (who were among the least likely in the population to either get or spread the disease).
We all can look back on this time and choose to remember what we want. I am going to remember the government mandating an ineffective vaccine and lying to me about it.
The country is pretty inarguably substantially safer with a covid-vaccinated population than without. The development of those vaccines is a hugely important event in human history.
Second, vaccination did reduce both severity of disease in case of infection, and also rate of infection, and thus transmission. Even imperfect reduction of transmissibility (the famous R_0) can mean the difference between a pandemic and fizzling out.
It wasn't.
First of all, they didn't need to guess, because immunology already knew that there is a difference between immunity in the mucus membranes (which is where respiratory infection has to be fought) versus in the blood. The latter is where the immune response is generated if you get an intramuscular injection. This turns out to be have been immunology 101, as testified by e.g. immunologist Liliane Schoofs to my government. You will also note subsequent efforts put into a nasal version of the vaccine that wouldn't have this design problem. There were, in fact, lies.
Second of all, the net effect of getting "vaccinated" was that people got a green pass to go out during winter time, sit across each other in bars and restaurants, and breathe each other's air, while explicitly believing they were immune, even though they were not. The argument that this was still a net positive seems preposterous and a form of magical thinking, where the people who got the ineffective shot were still somehow better off, even though they were engaging in far riskier behaviors.
The people who didn't get the shot meanwhile were forced to stay inside unless they were recently tested. So the hypothesis that the shots reduced illness by reducing transmission is likely also false. There is ample evidence now of spike protein being produced far longer than was ever promised in some patients, and also signs of immunodeficiency, which means the shots themselves were also not an unalloyed good.
What this thread mostly shows is that "anti-vax" remains a magical word, a dividing line between the Good People Who Believe Science and the Bad People Who Dismiss it. The actual details of the vaccine science are not known, and the story many people tell in retrospect does not hold up to basic scrutiny. They are willing to admit to individual instances of error, overstatement or deception in the management of COVID, but they are rarely willing to put them all together and see how this radically changes the entire picture.
Because what it looks like is an insane lobbying effort of governments and influencers, enormous amounts of public money being spent on shots we didn't need, a huge propaganda effort to silence any dissent as "anti-vax" and "anti-science", and all this because likely it did escape from a lab, and the people responsible for developing and funding it were terrified of being held accountable, and having their field shut down as the irresponsible LARP it was. Following some of these star virologists (e.g. Marion Koopmans) online is quite hilarious, because it is very obvious none of their excuses hold up.
> a network of prospective cohorts among frontline workers, showed that the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna mRNA COVID-19 vaccines were approximately 90% effective in preventing symptomatic and asymptomatic infection with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, in real-world conditions (1,2)
Are they lying? Is 90% the damning number of ineffectiveness? Also I'm confused, why wouldn't you vaccinate everyone including healthy children? It's like the first thing I would do as a parent. The yearly flu vaccine is more of a gamble than the COVID vaccine and I still get it every year. Why do you want less protection?
I dont. I am not antivax and will not defend that position. What I am arguing here is that our government mandated and oversold (lied about) the effectiveness of the vaccine. Because of that, public attitude started shifting toward an antivax mentality.
"Because of [COVID] mandates"?
Apparently you've never heard of what a good chunk of the population believes causes autism, including Kennedy.
Apparently you haven’t read all of the robust discussion on this thread. This wasn’t a “what came first the chicken or the egg” discussion. It was a “what made eating eggs so popular” discussion.
Horseshit, and you know it. Because even you acknowledged elsewhere they said "unlikely".
Then you run around this conversation saying "they said it won't happen", and using weasel words like "basically" to justify your mischaracterization of what they said as absolute claims.
However, believe what you want to believe and split hairs on language how you want. Doesn’t change the fact that vaccine trust is down and that trust started falling after the COVID vaccine was released.
Either RFKjr all of a sudden became really good all of a sudden at convincing people of his wacky ideas or something else happened.
I can remember Trump trying to take credit for funding the vaccine efforts, and getting nothing but negativity from his crowd.
Unfortunately, it predates both presidents. It's just kept creeping upward in popularity, along with a lot of other conspiracy theories.
That's the real issue, and it's weird that so few seem to realize it. Sure, they skew Republican because stay-at-home moms tend to skew that way too. As you said though, it all predates both presidents. It was the crunchy parents before COVID, and often times still is.
Before the pandemic, I heard some weird things from older Slovaks, such as EU has decided that kids must name their parents "parent1" and "parent2", and if they don't they will take your kids away. Absolutely bonkers.
Then during the pandemic, all the typical anti-vax rhetoric really took hold there, like crazy.
Then after the pandemic, all those anti-vaxers all of a sudden got pro-Russia. Which makes no sense when you think about that, because both have nothing to do with each other. At that point, I realised Russia was doing their campaigns way before covid already, but it got an extra boost thanks to it.
And now Slovaks elected prime minister Fico attended the Russian military parade.
The ironic part is that these anti-vaxers like to call the rest of us "sheep", but in the end they are the sheep that are lead straight to the slaughter house.
Is it "Enemies of the USA are deploying social media based psyops that destabilize the country by astroturfing propaganda?"
That's an interesting idea, probably true, but also sounds like a conspiracy theory. Even if it is true, how would we know to what extent it affects public opinion?
Or maybe you're referring to something else.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-35576-9
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/russia-us-election-interferenc...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK561254/table/T4/
Are you being anti-humanity and anti-science if you didn’t want to take one of those?
SMALLPOX SMALLPOX ERADICATED
Yeah, the smallpox vaccine was pulled from the market because it actually worked and eradicated smallpox.
We almost got the same for polio, but unfortunately some anti-vax nuts prevented that.
So I ask again - If someone refused to take those vaccines would they be "anti-science"?
Long story short: if you are anti-vax, you for sure are anti-science. We know a lot about vaccinations and the risks of taking them and not taking them.
You're ignoring the fact that the FDA approved them initially. They said "the risks are worth the benefits".
Then years later, after more data was collected, the FDA changed their determination and said "the risks ARE NOT worth the benefits".
So I ask you for a third time - "If I refused to take those vaccines for safety reasons when the FDA first approved them, would I be anti-science?"
It's seem's like I'd be "pro-science" since I came to the same conclusion the FDA did years later?
Both scenarios are anti-science.
No, I'm asking about vaccines that were eventually pulled from the market for safety reasons.
> Or are you magically able to predict what the FDA will say in a few years?
The FDA doesn't magically monitor safety, they work off reports by HCPs. Usually after a few years of reports, they are forced to investigate (FDA action is a lagging indicator). By the time it's pulled from the market, typically many physicians are aware of the problem and haven't been using the products for months or years.
So for the 4th time, I ask - "If I were to refuse to get one of the vaccines, based off initial safety reports, but at a point where the FDA had not yet acted, would I be anti-science?"
Your question now: "If I were to refuse to get one of the vaccines, based off initial safety reports, but at a point where the FDA had not yet acted, would I be anti-science?"
We both know those 2 questions differ. But no problem, I'll answer your last question. Do you have the right qualifications to interpret those initial results?
Funny story: I saw someone on Facebook referring to some paper that some covid vaccine doesn't work. One of the authors name looked familiar, so I looked her up on Twitter. The discussion there went like this: "Hey ..., did you know anti-vaxers are using your paper to show the X vaccine doesn't work?", reply of the author "What? It's exactly the opposite, our paper shows they were actually working better than expected!".
Goes to show the idiots that got their degree from 4 YouTube videos, had no clue how to interpret a scientific paper. That's why I ask: do you have the proper qualifications to interpret such results? And by that I mean, do experts think a person like you has the right qualifications to interpret such material?
Let’s go with a real life example from my link.
Your doctor says to you “This vaccine prevents the flu, but several cases of Bell’s palsy have been reported where you may end up with facial paralysis that may never resolve. The FDA is looking at the cases and will make a determination whether or not to pull it from the market.”
I’d say every patient is equipped to make their own decision about that.
And if they decide the answer is “no”, it’s actually a pro-science and pro-humanity decision.
People like you who act like no one should ever decline a vaccine are the anti-science ones! Youre the ones who downplay the risks of any medicine and act like the FDA never makes a mistake in approving a vaccine OR new data doesn’t come out to show it shouldn’t be on the market in the first place.
Now that wasn't that hard huh?
Your initial statement was that you didn't take the vaccine based on nothing, and only later it turned out you were right. That is not scientific, like me and the other people already said many times.
And by the way, the doctors said it was best to take the covid mRNA vaccine because it was safe. If you didn't, that's anti-science and anti-life. And today, science says it was still the best choice.
I'm going to end the conversation here.
A stopped clock is right twice a day.
This is the sort of logic people use against, say, wearing a seatbelt. "My cousin's roommate's friend's hairdresser would've died in a freak accident if they'd buckled theirs!" Is that true? Perhaps! Is it a good way of making decisions? No.
You can make what, in hindsight, is the correct call for the wrong reasons. (And in these cases, it's usually "we thought the risk/reward balance was 1.05 and not 0.95" sort of things.)
I also find it odd that in their reporting the media lumps all vaccines together, as either "safe" or "unsafe". I would trust a vaccine that's been around for decades giving us time to evaluate any long term effects, such as MMR for example, over a newly created one, about which we can only speculate as to the long-term effects.
Packing the committee with a diverse group of cranks and cronies will surely restore confidence in the health care system.
So is your suggestion that medical policy based on balancing humours is actually effective altruism?
Our current policies favor fearmongering and cherry-picking to influence people to seek medical treatment that they don't need and come with side effects.
The fact that Doctors get paid a kickback for high child VAX percentages alone is enough to make me toss out the whole idea.
Everyone: “we can tell you’re an entitled dbag.”
VC: “well now I’m going to act like an entitled dbag and it’s your fault.”
- Me paraphrasing his actual interview. You know who I’m talking about.
No, we don't, because not all of us watch the same media or follow the same threads.
In this case though I guess it's just hard for me to recognise how much the focus of this site has shifted and that people can come here that seemingly have no interest in startups/tech/vc.
It's pretty easy to come across this site if you're just generally interested in tech stuff (I think everybody I talk to knows exactly what I refer to if I say "the orange site"), and if you're someone who's interested in tech but not particularly plugged into things like the mechanics of startups or business, well, there's a lot on here that's not related to that.
Also, I didn't really see the connection to the US election and vaccines.
All of them?
Sorry, don't know, plz tell us!
It’s incredible when I read this sort of comment, and then I realise that the comment is so badly ill informed that I need to respond. But it does make me wonder what sources of information the other person is reading…
Perhaps you were thinking about compensation from the government, but the original poster was talking about actually holding Pfizer and Moderna liable.
People still have an avenue to sue for harm -- they can sue the government.
The government took on that liability in exchange for preventing the spread of a highly pathogenic, novel pandemic with moderate mortality, thereby allowing return to normal life, with fewer deaths, faster.
Which part of that was a bad idea?
VI claims are still paid (faster, with lower standard of evidence, and cheaper to everyone involved). Lawsuits that go through court involve law firms and the investigations become extremely expensive for everyone.
Manufacturers (and rhetorical supply+delivery chain) are monitored by medical orgs and the federal government to ensure the doses remain safe, after passing the initial trials. These review systems catch incidents like the Samoa measles vaccine incident (in which a few nurses were at fault for injecting from the wrong bottles, which RFKJr was on the wrong side of) and other incidents where some vials were contaminated. Unless a VI plaintiff can prove gross negligence, the outcome is better under the current system. If they can prove gross negligence, they can still take a manufacturer (or any other defendant involved in the supply chain) to court.
The government decided that vaccines are a public health net positive and designed to current system to spread the risk across manufacturers and the government to ensure the cost of litigation didn’t eliminate this very useful tool.
Edit: evidently it's more complex than that. The COVID vaccines are covered under the 2005 Prep Act instead.
Hence the schadenfreude.
It's one thing to be wrong with everyone. It's another to be wrong after a ton of people said "This is a dumb idea."
The Citizens United decision allowed capital to have a much larger influence on the programming of our political media.
Obama, many faults and all, has a great quote on this topic: ~"If I watched Fox News, I wouldn't vote for me either!"
That is why Trump was right about him shooting someone on 5th Avenue and getting away with it. He was smart enough to tap into this undercurrent that I was unaware of, perhaps due to my youth.
Yes, we grow into that as we turn into toddlers, then hopefully we grow out of it. One of our simple core algo's is categorization, but it's just a base algo which came out of base survival techniques from the days of yore.
> They were okay with the idea of equality of opportunity, but once their relative social ranking started to drop, they reverted to their base instinct of pulling others down to make up for their own failings.
This is true to some extent, and very sad. However, it does not apply to everyone in my experience. It only applies to those who see the world as a zero-sum game. If I understand the last few hundred years correctly, thanks to technology, we do not live in a zero-sum world, so it's an obsolete concept. Once you learn that, it overrides those old base algo's, if you are in a social circle that allows this. However, those base categorizations do appeal to our base instincts, so it's an effective political campaigning technique for those politicians who have no shame.
I ain't young no more, and the biggest change in US politics that I have seen is that being shameless has become normalized, again.
There are many examples of when super racist/sexist/political people get to talk with those who they once hated, they drop all those previous trainings, and just see them as fellow humans, and even friends. This is why those who use the obsolete categorization ideology as their entire identity don't want you to go to university, or travel, where you might learn all that.
this feels like missing the forest for the trees.
racism, sexism, classism etc are structural issues. individual prejudices are fear-based levers that are manipulated by bad actors in order to serve economic goals.
it doesn't appear to be difficult to manipulate people using these levers when you're also responsible for the dogshit economic and social conditions they find themselves in.
And ample access to 1000x more lies than truth. For the people who are media illiterate, facts don’t matter and truth is replaced by confirmation of priors.
If not, the end state looks not great. How have you dealt with this reality for your own personal/family planning? Asking for me.
But hey, what do I know, maybe you're 80yo and working on a short time horizon.
And this is coming from someone who abhors that business model and everyone in it.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/08/is...
Oh and to be clear my attitude towards antivaxxers is burn by /slow/ fire, but still.
https://www.factcheck.org/2023/11/scicheck-rfk-jr-incorrectl...
For all we know, RFK and his kids got sick but just didn't tell anybody.
Meanwhile my son and I (both inoculated in our first months of life) had a very light cold, essentially unnoticeable on my part, and were ok in a couple days. Because we inoculate children against HIB no doctors sees serious cases like this in otherwise healthy adults and it took many rounds of seeing multiple doctors before they tried looking for HIB. The bacteria is very very common but only the immunocompromised are checked with any regularity.
Incidents like this will become more common if these antivax anti science schemes are in effect for long enough. HIB is not a big flashy name because we have solved this problem. You get a “cold”, are told to rest, and you never remember it happening as time passes. My wife is not going to forget the part of her vocal range that does not work. She has had to stop her singing classes, something she loves.
“You died of dysentery” is a meme in the US because the only people we collectively know who have had dysentery are the characters we played in the Oregon Trail as kids in school. As someone who has had Dysentery care of an outbreak in the Caribbean, I feel like we’re seeing the result of the tremendous success of our health programs allowing completely stupid thinking to gain power.
What really pains me through all this is that the absence of disease does not mean that vaccines do not work! One would think the latest pointless measles outbreak would have been proof to convince people that the antivax rhetoric is all bunk, yet here we are. I don’t understand how we have gotten here beyond people simply not seeing up close what has been prevented by decades of programs.
My parents are old enough to have grown up with people who were irreparably harmed by Polio. The only ones I know of are aging senators or when the odd documentary on iron lungs. The vaccine development for Polio is the example that people like RFK use against all other vaccines, as if they’re all made the same way and as if we had not learned from the experience. Regulations are often written in blood and it’s simply disgraceful that they are throwing away what has been codified so they can smugly sell onesies with “I didn’t get a vaccine” on it.
Meanwhile RFK’s kids are vaccinated.
Charlatan.
If someone thinks they’ve actually been harmed by a vaccine, there’s a part of the government that would like to talk to you. Better do that fast before that gets torn down too.