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Can you clarify that? It saved 100K+ lives even by incredibly conservative estimates, and allowed life to returned to normal at least a year earlier than otherwise.
Did we enter a new era or where you not paying attention or affecting you before?
Reminds me of the old adage of:
Q: "Why is no one speaking about this?"
R: "Is no one talking about this, or are you just 20 and its the first time you are hearing about it?"
We've been in that era your whole life.
I cannot believe the people that supported such measures at the time now turn around and say "well, we didn't literally pin you to the ground and force you to take it. So therefore, it was completely voluntary and you're responsible for your own choices and we can't be held responsible whatsoever."
The vaccine wasn't "forced on everyone". Pointing to specific people for whom it was forced isn't "everyone". Nor does the existence of people supporting mandatory COVID vaccines imply "vaccines were forced on everyone".
If the alternative is living in the woods not being able to go outside, that is obviously not a realistic compromise.
Do you have an allergy to the truth or something? Or maybe a difficulty distinguishing your paranoid delusions from reality.
It's hilarious you try to deny our lived history, we have a thing called memory.
A bunch of grifters pushed fear, uncertainty, and doubt for personal gain, at the expense of the health of the nation. I try not to blame people who got tricked, but at some point we need to treat people like adults who are responsible for their own actions, and hold them accountable for the harm they perpetuate by believing BS and acting on it.
A democracy cannot function when its members are low-functioning, and when bad information dominates. Those who spread disinformation, relish the conspiracy and disinformation because it makes them feel special emotionally, and wallow in the mess of it, are hurting us all.
A discussion as old as time. Plato considered voting a skill, and if you were shit at it, then you shouldnt be voting
People were holding protests. I know two friends who refused to get the vaccine and downloaded forged documents to be admitted into bars and clubs.
Very anecdotal, but after we went out together they both contracted Covid and had a high fever, while I luckily remained healthy.
However, that discussion was largely side-tracked by the massive amount of disinformation (eg, "Plandemic") that circulated online. There are people who to this day swear that COVID-19 was just like the flu and simultaneously claim that the vaccine spike proteins have killed around 20M people. Not just crackpots, but people with reach, like Brett Weinstein on Joe Rogan's podcast.
But we have already protocols and frameworks on public health.
Also plenty of other medical choices are taken with way less input of experts (see abortion discussions for example)
Not sure, the midst of a global crisis, with almost universal scientific approval is the time to have a long discussion on bodily autonomy on countries like america where 50% of people cant read at a 6th grade level.
There is a legitimate discussion (dating back at least to Typhoid Mary (1) ) on excluding people from public spaces when they refuse to take basic public health measures. Taking a vaccine for a spreading deadly pandemic is one of those measures.
Doing something so violently anti-social is not simply a "bodily autonomy" issue, and framing it only as such is deeply misguided in a way that seems particular to some USA norms.
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Mallon
> In 1907, she was forcibly quarantined at the Riverside Hospital
The thing is most of those people made rational objections. The problem is their reasoning was based on false information. They didn't see it as being anti social as they thought the drug was a boondoggle, untested, and that covid wasn't serious. I disagree with all of it, but it is important to understand why they objected, and not just saying they are selfish or antisocial.
This is how Typhoid Mary understood her status:
> It did not take Mary long to react to this suggestion. She seized a carving fork and advanced in my direction. ... Mallon's refusal was based on her belief that she was not infected. ... To stop her struggles, he had to sit on her chest for the journey.
And yet, locking her up over her objections her was itself a rational decision. This is the debate.
I'm not saying that this kind of intervention is appropriate today, just that her "rational objections" were not be-all and end-all of the situation.
Why is it more "important to understand why she objected"? Isn't it far more important to understand that she infected? The thing is, a virus doesn't care what you believe, or your political stripe. To a pathogen, you're a mass of warm cells, nothing more. Human beliefs are irrelevant to a virus, so why centre them?
Stopping the spread of e.g. measles depends on vaccinating just about everybody, that's statistics and epidemiology. At the end, that is what determines if there will be an outbreak. Cutting people slack on that because they choose to believe nonsense is not helpful and will not work. Actions matter more than beliefs, voluntary or not.
I hope this is not what you think my position is.
If you want to change someone's mind, you need to understand it. If someone believes false information, and if they are driven my emotion due to everything they've heard, then giving them a bullet list of facts will not change their mind 95% of the time.
You've probably heard of the term "steel manning" when arguing with someone. If you cannot state the other person's argument in a way that they agree with, then you are just talking past each other. If you can state their position as well or better than they can, now you in a better position to change their mind.
If your goal isn't to change their mind, then go ahead, just keep calling them stupid and making no progress with them.
But you cannot hope to change everyone's minds, and so that should not be a goal. A system that depends on that won't work. Typhoid Mary is a counterexample.