In 1955… Most people personally knew someone aflicted with polio. They knew how bad it was
In Appalachia, it was unlikely to not know someone on a vent or dead from Covid, yet…
Fox News tells you not to believe your eyes, and conservatives trust Fox News more than their own eyes.
Their final, most essential command.
Why wouldn’t they trust Fox News over their own eyes? Fox News is the most trusted name in news. At least that’s what the viewers get told when they come back from commercial breaks. It’s not like Fox would lie to them. They are the most trusted name in news after all…
Circular logic at its finest.
I didn’t see anybody die of covid. 2 relatives died after getting the shot tho, of apparently unrelated cause.
Tell me what to believe.
Believe the mass graves and filled ERs.
I didn’t actually see mass graves or filled ERs.
You’re not alone. I also didn’t see either of those things, or know anyone that died from it.
I’m also not denying those things exist, I’m simply affirming your reality.
I guess you can’t see if your eyes are closed.
Hrm, the full ERs were easy to find though, news were coming up multiple times a day which hospital is rejecting patients and of doctors and nurses collapsing from 40-80 hours continuous work.
Mass graves… trickier. We tend to not want to be faced with mass deaths in general, which is why we tend to not glorify this as much as we do personal death. They were in the news though, and of course travel to any poorer country and they were/are easy to find.
We were discussing “seeing with your own eyes” vs “being told what to think by various propaganda organs”. The latter being less good.
deleted by creator
Ugh, that’s rough.
That being said, like you said, people die. I can’t imagine how shitty it feels but given how the COVID vaccine is the most-empirically-tested-and-documented vaccine and as a result of it’s absolutely insane number uses uses (beaten only by the likes of Aspirin and Ibuprofene and so on), it’s hopefully understandable that we not only know but know with beyond-certainty that it’s side effects are insanely rare and extremely mild.
The reason people can extremely rarely die from a vaccination (and then it happens ~directly after getting it!) is a reaction to the actual injection, not what you get injected with. This has happened in the past, it’s just extremely improbably. There’s also the chance of an allergic reaction but for most healthy adults we would know about this as COVID would be far from our first vaccine we’re getting, and with multiple billions of uses, we know that the COVID vaccine as a whole has no allergic interactions beyond standard ones.
That’s not to downplay your loss, sorry if it sounds that way - english is not my primary language. Not at all. Just trying to illustrate how impossible it’d be for COVID to have a lethal effect without millions~tens-of-millions showing this, simply because we have such an amount of data points.
That is to say, someobody could get a vaccine shot, then go home, and fry themselves an egg in a new pan they bought on the way home. There is a multiple orders of magnitude higher chance of poisoning from the pan because of an undocumented chemical in the coating than from the shot. We don’t have that much data on any particular pan, not even IKEA ones. Orders of magnitude less data.
The statistics and the science, not the anecdotes and inadequate sample size.
I knew three people who died from COVID and another after they recovered from COVID, unfortunately unless it’s their direct family they would just assume ‘theyre just making it all out to be covid’
I assume most people would blame social media for this, but here’s my c/unpopularopinions take, it’s inevitable with a profit oriented news platform, where they try to scaremonger in both ‘we are all going to die’ and ‘government is putting chips in our bloodstream’ directions
In other nations, unless a blunder by government policy, they werent as affected by the anti vaccine shenanigans, even though they were as affected by social media and such
Dude my grandmother died of Covid in August pf 2020, and yet my father and his sister who is a nurse and gave her the dease arge to this day weather covid is bullshit or not. AT HER funeral they argued about mask mandates. Maga brains will watch millions die from covid, and polio and still call it fake news.
And then there’s my ex who after COVID took nearly 9 months (!) to get normal use of their lung again. Fuck people who go all “COVID is bullshit”.
Trust me. I’ve been along live enough to recognize that if people don’t want to believe something, then they won’t.
i mean unless you were like 10, chances are everyone was aware of fdr
“We’re not gonna make it, are we? Humans I mean” -John Connor- Terminator 2
“It’s in your nature to destroy yourselves”
-the terminator
I could feel my dread go as I heard that lines over the years, as a young teen? Of course we will we always have, we endure. As a middle aged adult? I’m not so sure we aren’t going to shove ourselves back to the cave man era and not enough people will listen to anyone with survival knowledge for the species to survive.
Then I think about how many species that must have and will happen to in this vast universe, so we’ll probably be an average result heh in the grand scheme of things that is.
we always have, we endure. As a middle aged adult? I’m not so sure we aren’t going to shove ourselves back to the cave man era
If we do, we’re stuck there. We don’t have enough fossil fuel left to re-industrialize
Okay, so we’re roughly in the middle…Are we on the left or the right of Fermi’s bell curve?
RFK jr is going to kill and cripple a lot more kids if he gets the chance to. He’ll make pretend polio / measles is eradicated and then somebody will get on a plane where there are cases, and it will spread amongst the unvaxxed and kids will die. When this happens he should be charged with negligent homicide but I doubt that will happen.
But he don’t care, because:
- It mostly kills poor people
- He is vaccinated
- His kids are vaccinated
- He couldn’t give any less fucks about people if you paid him for it. And he is being paid to not give a fuck about people’s lives.
5G hadn’t been invented yet. They had nothing to worry about back then.
/s
And then we ingested a bunch of lead through our lungs
If anything, this should tell us the trolls won.
Or at least have been more successful then they ever should have been.
Oh how humanity hath fallen
Never experienced hardship… Boomers.
And too foolish to learn from the experience of others. Personal experience isn’t required if you develop wisdom. Americans, wise? Naaah.
Not all of humanity. Mostly America and some Europe with the epidemic of willful ignorance
I think social media algorithms have fried people’s brains. Imagine we’d ban them, go back to content being kinda diverse and random, without adversaries able to game the system and push massive swaths of propaganda to people. The fact alone that most youths get their news from freaking TicTok of all places…
You know your local news network has a TikTok right? There’s nothing wrong with news from social media. The problem is that media is unregulated and people are allowed to lie and pass off that information factual.
You know your local news network has a TikTok right?
That’s not what people watch though. People get their news from “influencers”, often time those with far right alignments, or straight from fascist parties who are the ones with the most reach on TicTok.
The problem is that media is unregulated and people are allowed to lie and pass off that information factual.
That’s literally what the free press is, and a fundamental pillar of a free and democratic society. Regulated media is censored media, and exactly what fascists want. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_the_press
Being “press” does not give you blanket protection from lies. Alex Jones just lost his company because he lied about Sandy Hook victims.
He didn’t lost his company because he lied as a press entity, he was lying for years without issues, he lost his company because he directly defamed the victims and their loved ones, which caused a massive lawsuit by them that went in their favor. Even in the US there’s still a few restrictions to free speech, and defamation is one of them.
press
Alex Jones
Which one is it now?!
Why would anybody bad them, >50% in the US just voted to expand them massively and apply them ~everything. Oh and that money for the masses sucks versus money for grifters only, so I for one welcome Freedom Coin 2025 which rugpulls about 2 weeks after introduction.
If it’s propaganda to make people believe the truth, is it bad?
Depends who’s the arbiter of truth. Still propaganda
Interesting hypothetical, but not what’s happening.
It’s a question. You know what a question is, right?
You people are so used to these weird games that every question must be an insinuation.
Well, you said that, not me. But thanks for the outing.
Am I wrong?
I guess we’ll never know.
Stark contrast to the reaction most people had to the invention of seatbelts in cars.
Honestly, they are compared a lot, and while seat belts should be encouraged, I don’t think they should be mandated for adults.
Unlike masks, you’re only going to hurt yourself.
Then again I strongly believe in the right of any adult to end their own life, even if they’re physically healthy, or it’s not their life.
Unlike masks, you’re only going to hurt yourself.
Absolutely wrong. Seatbelts prevent people from turning into projectiles as well, which most definitely can harm other people.
In the event of a crash, a soft gooey human is probably the least likely object that flies out of that car to seriously injure someone else, and if that gooey human hits anything the car is made of first, the gooey human loses and is just further bruised against things harder than a human.
Can you point me to a single instance of someone being injured or died because the corpse of another human, and not hard metal, plastic, or glass was launched out of the vehicle and managed to hit them?
Because that seems like a cartoonish outcome of a crash that’s high speed enough to do so. Like one in a billion, about as likely as being next to a car crash and being killed by the shrapnel of the used gum that was under the seat.
They don’t need to leave the vehicle to hurt someone else. https://youtu.be/mKHY69AFstE
Fair enough, I concede the point when others are in the car.
I kinda suspect that shared joy might repeat if a cancer vaccine was revealed.
We didn’t collectively suffer long enough from COVID for its vaccine to be universally embraced…
This guy’s awesome. It reads as if he’s trying to dilute the great news by suggesting wars ending a decade before or moon landings 10 years are are really why everyone’s cheering.
I don’t think he’s necessarily trying to dismiss this as express curiosity about that kind of reaction to that news and adding in other examples where the whole nation would have celebrated something.
If anything, he seems to be saying that the invention of the polio vaccine is in the same class of news as the others, not that people were only celebrating the polio vaccine because they were happy about these other events that were well passed or still to come in the future.
Society can be so backwards.
They will just blame the gays when their kids start wiggling
It is a race between USA destroying the world or destroying itself.
I’ve been under the impression they’re trying to speed run both.
It is amazing to me how short our memories are as a species. There are people who are still in congress who had polio. There are an estimated 300,000 people still alive in the US who survived polio. Even with that, the nominated head of Health and Human Services wants to do away with the polio vaccine.
I don’t know what the problem is. Is it a lack of empathy? Is it willingness to swallow the bait surrounding conspiracy theories? Is it just a lack of education? How did we get to the point where it is even remotely okay for the future head of Heath and Human Services to be against the polio vaccine?
If being pro-polio isn’t disqualifying for being the head of HHS, and if he gets confirmed, the U.S. will have very clearly shown that it is in rapid decline. It will have shown that the government is corrupt to its core and is irredeemable.
If something is irredeemable, it’s not the government, it’s the voters.
All of this could be fixed if just enough people understood the truth.
The problem is that we have so little media that is both trusted and trustworthy. That so many people don’t actively seek out reliable information and think critically about it. Many just find a source that confirms their bias and feeds their emotional state, while others just passively absorb from those around them and on social media. And once you’ve bought the lies and misinformation, anyone that tries to tell you the truth becomes suspicious, because you know they are wrong.
And because the never ending stream of bullshit is both a lucrative industry and a source of immense political power, there is a vested interest in keeping it highly polarized and partisan. They have to tie it to your identity and tell you that this is what your country stands for, so that you know that everyone who disagrees is an enemy.
Anti-vaxxers are nothing new, but they were never so openly embraced by a political party (to say nothing of those who have claimed that vaccines are suddenly against their religion, discovering a prohibition that no religion has ever had prior to 2020). They don’t care how many people will suffer or die because of their actions, as long as they can benefit from it politically. Sadly, this is a fairly consistent theme on the right.
There are many influences. One is pure resentment of elites as know-it-alls which propagandists amplify. A bit of Dunning–Kruger effect at the same time as people without specialized training can’t even comprehend what they don’t know. Another is how difficult it is to think probabilistically so that people can’t easily appreciate risk. And as more and more people proclaim conspiracy theories as truth there is peer pressure to confirm.
History should be mandatory especially to vote. Some people don’t even remember the holocaust and they’re repeating it again.
It’s because polio is a developing world problem now. Until it comes back to the US the only relevancy it has is as foreign aid. And that’s forbidden by these guys unless it’s guns.
Is it a lack of empathy?
Yes, it’s a disregard for human life
I think that is true for some of the people involved, but I think it is much more complicated than that. There are many people who think vaccines do more harm than good because they believe conspiracy theories and junk science. Not everyone against vaccines is malicious. Some must be, though, for such bullshit to keep propagating the way that it does.
Most of Trump’s cabinet ranges from morally indifferent to outright hostile to human beings. The only exception I think I see is RFK Jr. who is just batshit insane.
Agreed. It takes more than Trump, his cabinet, and MAGA to get here, though. It requires complicity and complacency from a ton of other people.
Yeah I think those other people are conspiracy theorists, like you said.
Yep. Biden and Harris come to mind, as does the rest of the Democratic establishment. If they didn’t prefer Trump to Bernie, this would be a much sweeter timeline.
Hey! Whoa! Speaking as a member of the batshit insane community, don’t you try to dump him off as one of us! He’s clearly in the “manipulated puppet” camp. Or at the very least the Kennedys camp. Those guys were always their own bunch to begin with. I mean JFK brought us inches away from WWIII and then said “Peace out bitches! I’m dying by suicide!”
Then he faked his own death, and moved to Boston, where nobody would recognize him.
Thank you for the chuckle
Don’t sell RFK Jr short. He might be crazy but he’s also an evil POS.
I’m just going to keep repeating this. RFK killed 20 Samoan children with an anti vaccine campaign.
What is quite scary is that it doesnt have to be vaccines, they could be convinced of anything given time and right approach.
I disagree. People are always assholes first and then look for rationalisations for their assholery. All that conspiracy bullshit always leads back to racism and antisemitism.
Please explain how the earth being flat, birds not being real, bigfoot, ufo’s, and the moonlanding being a hoax have ANYTHING to do with racism and antisemitism.
Even with that, the nominated head of Health and Human Services wants to do away with the polio vaccine.
…I’m sorry, what?
GOD DAMMIT! GET LUIGI MORE BULLETS! THE JOB’S NOT DONE!!!
RFK Jr tried this before in 2022. He’s been trying to get the FDA to revoke approval for the vaccine, probably to snowball it into “we need to revoke all vaccine approvals”.
Oh yeah we’re so fucked. As well as believing that vaccines cause autism, RFK believes that HIV doesn’t lead to AIDS. He literally believes that “something about the gay lifestyle” causes it.
My dad remembers from his childhood occasionally seeing houses placed under quarantine for diseases like measles and then at some point thanks to vaccines measles pretty much just stopped being a thing in most of the US. He got his polio and smallpox vaccines back in the day, and has lived to see smallpox eradicated and polio nearly so.
My grandfather was born a couple years after the 1918 flu pandemic, he had a brother born a couple years before him who died in infancy, he never talked about it much but the timing lines up that his brother was likely a victim of that pandemic. It was certainly something he heard talked about in his childhood just as we’ll probably keep talking about COVID for years to come, and I think it definitely left an impact on him, he always was wary about passing germs along to his grandchildren, he always warned our parents against kissing us and never did himself, the only time he did was on his literal deathbed (cancer, nothing communicable) when he kissed my sister (in a non-creepy familial way) as probably one of his last conscious acts.
He was never one to shy away from a fight, I would have loved to see the hell he would have raised against anti-maskers if he’d lived another decade or so. There are people his age or older still walking among us. These things aren’t even out of living memory, we’re barely a handful of generations removed from them.
The chickenpox vaccine was introduced when I was in elementary school. I remember a lot of children’s shows when I was growing up having a chickenpox episode where one or more of the main characters would get chickenpox, they’d take oatmeal baths and slather on calamine lotion to ease the itching, their parents would discuss having their friends over to get them infected early and give them immunity, etc. It kind of seemed like it was inevitable that many if not most kids would get chickenpox eventually, and at the time it kind of was. The vaccine was still optional at the time, and I remember a lot of discussion about it not being very effective, but a lot of kids in my age range got it, and the number of kids in my school who got chickenpox was probably in the dozens instead of probably hundreds just a few years earlier.
There have been some missteps along the way, my dad had a small hepatitis scare when a blood test turned up antibodies (though no active infection) likely from exposure from reused vaccine needles when he was in the army. The US did a grave disserve to polio vaccination efforts by using them as a cover to track down bin Laden and increased distrust in the vaccine in the process. There have been cases where vaccines have used ingredients that have proven unsafe, where people have had adverse reactions, etc. but still overall, the fact that I have never met anyone who has had smallpox, polio, or measles and probably never will speaks volumes about how much more good than harm vaccines do when 100 years ago I would almost certainly have known people who had died or left disabled or disfigured by those diseases.
Paraphrasing from a recent episode of Behind the Bastards on the Vioxx scandal: There’s a lot of recency bias in humans where it’s difficult to look past the fuckups of the pharma industry. If their “current” MO is to make a shit ton of money at the cost of human lives, then why would someone with lesser critical thinking skills trust them? One needs quite a bit more faculties to separate the capitalism from the good they are doing and tell apart what’s trustworthy and what not.
So pharma fucked their bed spectacularly and aren’t doing fuck all to restore trust. And that’s very sad considering how important they could be if they wanted to.
So pharma fucked their bed spectacularly and aren’t doing fuck all to restore trust.
It goes farther than that, because of how aggressively the US has resisted drug imports and fear mongered against foreign science and development.
The post-COVID “vaccine diplomacy” of European and Chinese state pharmaceutical providers (hell, Cuba even developed a variant) was matched with a flood of early US reporting that amounted to “don’t trust any vaccine that isn’t American!!!” Then there was a dirty war between domestic providers over whose vaccine was the best.
All that propaganda took its toll.
Cuba has some of the best doctors in the world. They have a potential lung cancer vaccine in trials. Imagine what they could do if the sanctions were lifted.
I need to get back to listening to podcasts. I’ve taken a break since the election because many of my favorites were political and I’m currently burying my head in the sand and screaming “I CAN’T HEAR YOU!”.
Maybe I’ll dive back in with BTB. That seems mostly safe…
Behind the Bastards is an amazing podcast.
I don’t know what the problem is. Is it a lack of empathy? Is it willingness to swallow the bait surrounding conspiracy theories? I
I think it’s education, so many of us are now "educated ", this makes us confident idiots, a superb pinnacle of that example might be Linus Pauling and vitamin C for example.
If my hypothesis is correct, more education wont help.
Empathy is always lacking, just have to look at the refugee debate, its not new. Jews were turned away when Hitler sent them overseas, telling other countries to take then or he’d start killing them,
Japense interment camps in the US in WW2, slavery, endless wars prosecuted on other countries and participants lionised, it’s part of our makeup that’s difficult for most people to overcome,. I’d posit they don’t want to overcome it. . Then there’s the whole treatment of native peoples all over the world. US, Australia, Sweden, New Zealand, Russia and on and on.
The one thing that unites Demorcats and Republicans ? disdain for the homeless, again a lack of empathy.
If that’s true, you’d expect to see more conspiracy theories among more educated populations. People with PhDs and MDs would be the most likely to be antivaxxers. Do you have statistics to confirm that?
I believe what they are referring to is a high school education. There are still a fuckton of people in the US that still believe that “no one really needs to go to school past 6th or 8th grade.”
There are people who are still in congress who had polio.
Mitch has done nothing but enable the incoming administration, and helped to get it in power, so he has no leg to stand on now in all of his hand waving about the polio vaccine.
Mitch as the Repub leader could have prevented all of this, by voting and allowing other R senators to vote to convict in either the first impeachment or the second impeachment, which would have prevented Trump from being able to run again (and the trials against him would likely have been carried out by now). McConnell bears a huge amount of responsibility for where we are right now.
The above link will give you the overview of the historical background on antivax movement since vaccine invention.
It basically boils down to two arguments, which feed each other.
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Risk => Vaccine are/can be/will be/may be/ought to be dangerous to someone somewhere, somehow. I don’t understand and I’m scared.
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FrEeDoM => I do not contract and I am free to decide what treatment I get, I am not a sheep and I participate in no herd and the only immunity I accept is from overbearing big government.
In spite of my sarcasm, I do think the second argument has merit, a government should of course be extremely careful with mandatory medical treatment of any kind and bear the burden of proving regularly that the benefits continues to far outweigh any and all alternative.
That reminds me, I have a 10am appointment for my flu shot. Almost forgot.
Yeah, I see the antivax movement as largely a failure of politics and a symptom of the corrosive effects of social media.
People have lost faith in politicians after lies and corruption on mnah topics, and that is undermining all elements of democracy and trust in state intervention…
At the same time, Social Media allows idiots to connect with one another and organise there stupidity into movements. Social Media is largely driven by a desire to keep people on their apps to make money so the whole thing is designed to only show people the content they want and makes them happy, not anything that challenges their world view. They are largely not forums for free speech, instead they are commercial tools to manipulate people in to wasting time by feeding them what they want (including playing to their biases) to maximise advertising revenues.
Social media is the horrific consequence of unfetted capitalism - where all that matters is maximum profits, and the harm done to people and society as a whole is irrelevant.
Yes, except the antivax movement predate the internet by a hundred year.
But social media does work as an accelerator. Unfortunately it seems to be very good at accelerating stupidity.
This is a comment worth saving.
I agree that governments should be careful about what medical treatments they make mandatory. I think the US government has been pretty judicious with their decisions, though. The vaccines that are mandated for school attendance are wildly effective and have been shown to be safe, both via scientific studies and decades of dispensing many of them.
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Sometimes it feels like it’s all done to grab headlines.
It works, they eat cats and dogs.
Stupidity.
I see it as a sign of health that people working with vaccines only use them when they are beneficial, and don’t use them when there are reasons not to.
I don’t know the reasons he has in this case. Would be interesting to know more.
Ooooh no. No, fuck off. This disingenuous “just asking questions” shtick can fuck right off. This is about polio you fucking lunatic, get a fucking grip.
edit: That single, impotent downvote fills me with joy.
If you want to know more, go read the lawsuit he is associated with to remove FDA approval of the polo vaccine. Essentially, he believes fraudulent research that indicates that vaccines cause autism.
Then, before you take what he says at face value, go read a history of polio.
If you give the materials an honest read, you’ll find that polio is horrific, that the vaccine was one of the greatest medical achievements of the 20th century, and that the evidence indicating that the vaccine causes autism is all junk.
Even if the vaccine caused autism (which it does not), that would still be better than polio.
I 100% agree.
In mild cases of autism, perhaps. It can be severe and debilitating, to the point of requiring life-long 24/7 care.
That said, conspiracy nuts buying that vaccines cause autism and failing to see the actual, real-life conspiracy which lead to the idea of vaccines causing autism would be absolutely fucking hilarious if it hadn’t been the direct cause of countless dead children. Read up on Andrew Wakefield if you don’t know what I’m talking about.
Autism is a superpower.
Fuck all the way off, asshole! What possible reasons are there to avoid the fucking polio vaccine??
I see it as a sign of health that people working with vaccines only use them when they are beneficial, and don’t use them when there are reasons not to.
Citation needed…
Seems rational, and I assume they almost always use them since they are overwhelmingly beneficial.
Yeah, in case of polio and pox, there’s no question of if it will be beneficial
I think I can understand your reasoning but I disagree with it.
A few years back, a vaccine was removed from our national vaccination plan. It was deemed as unnecessary, as the disease was considered erradicated. The decision was mostly political, with our National Healthcare Council keeping a very terse silence on the matter.
Precisely two years after the alteration, a sudden, unpredictable, with no known vector of origin, series of cases surged. Luckily, no child died, as the our NHS is robust enough to handle this kind of situation but there was a swift public backlash from the National Healthcare Council, on why the withdrawal of the vaccine had opened doors to a ressurgence of the disease. The vaccine was quickly reintroduced.
Smallpox was erradicated because of vaccination efforts. Many more could have been, if wasn’t for stupidity and religious fanaticis. Having an openly admitted vaccine denier take office is a sad joke, made at the expense of who knows how many lifes.
Could you give an example of what would be “a reason not to”?
There are actual reasons not to: allergies to a component, compromised immune system.
Somehow I don’t think that’s what he means though.
