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Comment by its_ethan | Hacker News Reader

I am very prepared to get downvoted for bringing this up - but I'm not convinced that the "anti-vax movement" most people think of is truly to blame (that is, crazy people who think it gives you autism or whatever).

At least in my area, there are pockets of (relatively) new immigrants that have MMR vaccination rates at around 30% (that's very low, much lower than the anti-vaxxer population could account for imo), and the reasons for that have nothing to do with MAGA/MAHA as far as I can tell.

It's an entirely different problem (that needs solving), and pretending that this is simply the by-product of uneducated crazies on the internet feels like it's over indexing on a loud and flashy but ultimately small part of the problem.

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Before MAGA I'd heard of granola moms, the same people who think that amber helps their kid with teething, were very against vaccinating their kids as well. So it's a wide swath of people who are just oblivious to the benefits of vaccination. It's a reason that they have vaccine schedules to begin with.

the data is quite slow to be released so i haven't updated my charts for a bit but britain saw a decent spike in HIV / AIDS because of the migratory flows under boris johnson. In large part because we don't test on the basis that it's considered racist (I went looking for discourse on testing on entry or not - first article that came up was from the graun, first words "Nigel Farage").

Would you say that the government telling those people that they should be afraid of vaccines will help or hurt in this case?

I don't think people base their beliefs purely based on what the administration says

the whole rollout and lockdowns, Fauci, etc. were a perfect storm to cause skepticism towards vaccines

I don't think it was the roll-out or anything along those lines, so much as the lying. Saying people won't get sick or won't catch COVID if they get the vaccines [1] was just false and very myopic. Obviously the intent was to try to get people to take the shots, but they completely destroyed trust in the process. Broader skepticism predictably follows from there.

[1] - https://xcancel.com/ITGuy1959/status/1581034815700488192

I gotta be honest, I don't really think these immigrant groups see or care what Trump/RFK are saying. If anything they see them as an "enemy" who they should not trust.. This is an incredibly left-leaning city where the majority of public health information (or any other messaging) being disseminated is counter to what the current federal admin is saying (as a rule, it seems).

So to answer your question, I don't personally think it helps or hurts in any significant amount relative to other cultural drivers.

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