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Comment by kcplate | Hacker News Reader

No, that’s not what I said at all. RFKjr’s public prominence rose much higher in 2021 and 2022 because the previous administration publicly lied about the vaccine’s efficacy. He was the most vocal and well known antivax person in the public space so of course when the public detects obvious bullshit from its leaders it will gravitate to the rebel with the loudest voice.

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.

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But we can write a similar narrative about the abjectly poor handling of Covid by Trump (using it as a divisive wedge issue as if he was still campaigning, rather than actually leading), causing the ham-fisted overreactions of traditional government structures trying to restore order. So how does that ping-ponging of blame stop? In reality, government will always be simplistically paternalistic and people have the responsibility to wade through the bullshit and actually analyze for themselves - not to just find one damnable overstepping and then assume an alternative must be perfect.

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.

I have plenty of criticism for Trump on Covid, but my comment was originally talking about actions that influenced publix antivax attitudes.

On this topic whataboutism might apply to Trump platforming RFKjr, but that is still a reaction to my underlying premise.

The point is they are related. In a normal well-run freedom-respecting society, the leaders would make speeches and statements telling everyone they should get vaccinated, and most everyone would go along with it. There would be small contingents that rejected it for whatever crazy or not crazy reasons, but for the most part humans are social animals and the social default would be to just go do it. But rather than leading during Covid, Trump used it as if it was another campaign issue. He sowed the division and stoked the crazy that validated people's hesitations, and made those not getting the vaccine a much larger contingent than they otherwise would have been. So the bureaucracy, the corporate government, and the incoming administration upped their authoritarianism to try to get people back on board, engaging in the overreactions you're calling out.

> publicly lied about the vaccine’s efficacy.

You keep saying this... what was the lie?

The most common response I've heard from people who believe the government lied about the COVID vaccine is that they take issue with the word 'vaccine'. They think it should not have been described as a vaccine since you can still get COVID after getting the vaccine, and the vaccine has a certain timeframe after which it loses efficacy because the virus mutates.

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

Do you think it is more the responsibility of miscommunication under Biden than it is of the people who are actually in power doing the bad things now, Trump and RFK Jr? How long into the future does this excuse hold, by the way?

Trump and RFKjr of course will own their own part of this if public antivax sentiment descends further. However as I have said elsewhere on this thread, I prefer to blame causes more than effects as having the ultimate responsibility.

RFK Jr was antivax long before Biden became president. Antivax sentiment has been widespread for a long time. I'm pretty sure the Bi den administration is not the ultimate cause.

I agree 100%.

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.

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