A 60 yo friend of mine who smokes regularly is hesitant. He hated Trump, enthusiastically voted for Biden. Worried about long term effects, years out. Says he will get it if his doctor gives it to him. Maybe getting more distribution through primary care docs would help?
Getting personal physicians onboard does seem overdue. This is also a perfect example of people's inability to effectively evaluate risk as mentioned by Aidan below. A 60 yo *smoker* is worried about the potential long-term risk of an extremely effective vaccine.
It's really not. Americans are wildly conformist, and Trump supporters are only anti-vaccine because of Trump and Republican officials telling them COVID is good.
"A toxic society of extreme individualism" - versus what? The community building of Germany? Or other more collectivist societies that are doing just as bad?
Religious fanaticism? I'm not sure about you - but if you want to get rid of religion in the United States - there's a far more powerful one out there than Christianity.
I was more referring to the change in tone about large public gatherings as soon as BLM got a news cycle. "Racism is a public health crisis" was an actual press release by public health officials. That is clear and obvious religious behavior.
Not at all. I argue with tankies on here all the time. I'm just commited to secularism and community thinking. And I see the flaws in American society very clearly.
Yes, of course I have seen those recent statistics (and I cheer them).
Problem is, evangelicals and conservative Catholics still have an outsized influence due to America's flawed electoral system. It's why we're having so many discussion about the Senate, Electoral College, and minority rule, isn't it? And there's been articles about how evangelicals in particular are the ones putting herd immunity at risk.
There's also the fact that wokeism and other social movements themselves can be analyzed as religious phenemona (the tone-deaf rhetoric about how George Floyd "sacrificed his life for justice" is American religious/messianic thinking at its worst).
Also, some of those recent statistics are about church attendance. But there's lots of people who don't attend church but are still religious in some sense. It's a complicated topic. Fact remains that American religiosity explains a lot about American society and politics--including Trump, Q-Anon, the insurrection, and this vaccine hesitancy.
Some people using freedom to make terribad decisions seems like an awful reason to curtail freedoms. Lots of Americans overeat sweets and consume too much sugar, I have it occasionally as a treat. I'd be kind of pissed if you punished me by banning sugar to force discipline on someone else
I’m a young, healthy person. I follow the Covid rules because you pretty much have to now. But why would I get vaccinated when nothing will change? Still need to mask and distance? No thanks. I’m not a Covid denier either but I’m not concerned about it for myself. And I already do the things that supposedly limit transmission. If I could get the shot, wait the two weeks or whatever, and then not have any restrictions: now we’re talking. That sounds like a pretty good deal. But the arbitrary-ness of it all isn’t very persuasive...
Ryan, did you grow up worried about smallpox, tuberculosis, polio? Did you friend die from measles? No, because the generations before you, who endured those horrible diseases did everything they could to make sure their children — and you — didn’t have to suffer from them. Maybe you could pay it forward, now.
I think you're missing the nuance here. Whether the risk is low for you is beside the point. You can get infected, even asymptomatically, and keep the variant lottery going. Think beyond yourself son.
I think it's less about a lack of concern for others but just not really thinking things through. You are telling us you won't get vaccinated because you won't 'get something' like less masking. Yawn....
1. Yes you do 'get something' as vaccinated people can meet indoors w/o masks and while risk is not zero, it is probably very low.
2. You get 90%+ odds of not getting Covid or if you do almost zero chance you'll get very sick.
3. You get an unclear but greater than 0% chance of getting the infection and passing it onto others....who you probably like since those are other people you choose to interact with.
4. Society goes back to normal faster....which means not only do you get to do less masking and social distancing, but everyone else does too.
Also, most precautions are in practice self-enforced. Once you're 95% immune to covid, you can just start ignoring precautions most of the time, and putting on a cloth mask if someone complains. ("I'm vaccinated, but if it makes you feel better....")
I agree, however I would continue with masks until the region I'm in is virus free for two reasons:
1. Masks should be the norm until the virus is gone, unvaccinated people will feel more comfortable being maskless and slipping through.
2. Varients that maybe able to break through vaccines is something we DON'T need to start spreading around.
There is also a third reason. There's a 1 in 10 or so chance the vaccine hasn't worked on me and we don't really know how long the immunity offered by the vaccine lasts.
I kind of agree with this - at least in terms of masking (which seems to be the thing that bothers people the most). Masks provide approx 15% reduction in transmission rate. Vaccination provides almost 90% (probably), to be conservative say 60%. Then making this promise - get your shots and 2 weeks later you can not wear a mask - would make us all better off if more than 25% of people take it. I'm almost certain that they would.
100% this chef. Seems like a good trade to me. For others in my cohort (ages 25-35) who are vaccine hesitant, like 80-90% would do this as well or cite the continued restrictions as a reason not to get the vaccine.
I don't buy this. IMO most people are not upset about masking but anti-masking kooks (and that's what they are) are obsessive on social media. Politicians who make anti-masking noise get a lot of likes which convinces them there's an army of people really upset about masks out there. There isn't.
"Masks provide approx 15% reduction in transmission rate" This is not really a coherent measure. If you wear a cloth mask on a hosptial Covid ward where the air is filled with virus, I could see the reduction being 15%. If everyone wears a cloth mask on that ward, though, it's probably a higher reduction. If you wear a cloth mask when buying groceries it is probably a very high reduction since you're not getting continuous concentrated virus exposure but probably only spot exposure where an infected person might have left an invisible 'cloud' of virus.
To measure this sort of thing you have to think about:
1. How many people in an environment have the virus. If no one has it, there's nothing to reduce. If almost everyone has it, there's a large amount of virus to block.
2. How many people wear masks, if a lot then a lot of virus will be blocked by the infected people's masks.
3. What other provisions are being done, did the indoor establishment open windows and doors to increase ventilation? Are they using HEPA and/or UV light filters? Even things like people talking matters. In Japan it is impolite to even talk in a normal voice on a subway, that makes a big different in terms of how much virus ends up in the air.
That's not going to give you '15%' but a range of figures depending upon these factors.
The 15% was an estimate that I saw for society as a whole given the level of masking, etc.
The question is - 50% of people are vaccinated, or will be shortly. 20% are maybes, 30% want to own the libs. The maybes are worried about personal risk/annoyance. Now some of those people would sacrifice that for the greater good. But - as long as we say that masks will still be required, the question is - what greater good?
This is an interesting paradox, because if those 20% do get vaccinated, we probably don't need masks anyway! But if we keep our current rhetoric, we won't get the 20% and we'll need masks.
Who cares about you wearing masks? As the virus retreats, the importance of masks will too and they will be gone, at least as a requirement. Problem solved.
I mean look they said vaccinated people can meet indoors w/o masks. So obviously if you insist you need some goodies for getting vaccinated it is already happening yet do the anti-vax orientated yield?
Yes! Exactly. While there is some messaging as you described, there's a lot that is gratuitously "conservative". Get the vaccine, 2 weeks later you can stop wearing masks. Help society get back to normal.
You already got it. In fact you got it back on March 8th when the CDC said fully vaccinated people can meet indoors w/o masks. So why are you almost two months later telling us that people aren't getting vaccinated because 'nothing changes'?
Things like this hint that maybe some online people who make a fetish out of complaining about masks aren't really arguing in good faith and don't deserve to be taken seriously.
Who cares about you wearing masks? As the virus retreats, the importance of masks will too and they will be gone, at least as a requirement. Problem solved.
I mean look they said vaccinated people can meet indoors w/o masks. So obviously if you insist you need some goodies for getting vaccinated it is already happening yet do the anti-vax orientated yield?
These measures will be rolled back as more people get vaccinated and there's less circulating virus. Also, around 10-30% of people, including young people, go on to develop longer-term symptoms after even very mild infections -- breathing problems, severe fatigue, memory difficulties, and much else.
If young people are concerned about getting sick, they should totally get vaccinated. I understand the risk but it’s pretty tiny and isn’t really worth it to me if I still have to do everything that minimizes risk anyway.
Interestingly, I actually think that vaccine passports could be kinda effective here. Biden, of individual states, should say “if you get vaccinated, carry this card with you and you can do what you want. Then at midnight on New Year’s Eve, we’ll all rip them up and start 2022 with a bang!” You give vaccinated people the freedom they deserve, incentivize people to get vaccinated, and assuage concerns about permanent vaccine passports by connecting a clear end date/event with them.
You say it's "not worth it to you", but what are the costs precisely? A quick trip to CVS? Getting vaccinated is just not that challenging, so it's very odd to me that you wouldn't do it.
You mean figuring out which pharmacy has doses, getting work off, coordinating another shot, likely dealing with side effects for a day? So that what? People have an even smaller chance of getting Covid than they already do? Well the good news is that I already mask and distance so I’m already doing something to minimize their risk. How small does it need to be? It’s still baffling to me that I would need to mask and distance after being vaccinated.
Why is this baffling to you? Like do you wash your hands after you poo? Do you use toilet paper after you poo? Why? Isn't that baffling? Why if you're washing your hands you might as well just skip the toilet paper and use your hands! Who are these agents from big toilet paper that have convinced us to use toilet paper! My God!
Anyway, yes use a mask after you get vaccinated. When the virus goes away, you can cut back and eliminate the mask use. You'll be in a state of bafflement for a month or two maybe, but you'll survive and then you can enjoy the rest of your life not wearing a mask trying to understand why the moment you yourself got vaccinated the entire world didn't instantly return to 'normal'.
Coordinating a shot is no longer a super difficult task. The number of pharmacies with open spots has skyrocketed, and sites like https://www.vaccinespotter.org/ have made finding the nearest open pharmacy an easy and painless process in almost every state.
When I got my shot, they immediately scheduled the 2nd. Others I know had the same experience. While the beginning was no picnic from what I hear, the learning curve has been navigated here and there are open slots in every state in the US right now.
I got the vaccine the instant it was available to me but I understand this perspective. People who show no care about the impact of social distancing and restrictions, and no urgency about having them lifted, sound pretty absurd going around lecturing others for not caring about people's wellbeing.
" I understand the risk but it’s pretty tiny" You misspelled "I THINK I understand the risk based on very limited data of a virus that has only been in the human population for a bit more than a year".
Changes in heart shape have been observed in young people who got infected w/o any symptoms (BTW the heart is a very slow organ to heal). As a younger person your risk is actually bigger than you think since impacts that take decades to appear are ones you are more likely to stick around to experience rather than, say, 75 yr olds who are lucky to get another 5 years of life and stuff that takes 10-20 years to strike is not something they should worry about much.
Possibly, yeah, my risk is greater. Maybe I should pass on the very new vaccines we don’t know anything about long term. I’m not anti-vax by any means but you’re basically just applying the anti-vax argument to Covid. Not to mention, if we don’t have enough data to adequately risk-assess for Covid, then we certainly don’t for vaccines either.
No the risk is greater. You don't know the long term impact of Covid or the vaccine, therefore you have two black boxes. The boxes may have something really bad in them. They may have nothing in them. Maybe (but unlikely) there might be something slightly good in those boxes (no one thinks Covid will give anyone super powers, and I doubt that will be a 'long term' thing). So you got two boxes of risk.
So your rational choices are avoid the vaccine risk box, which means you should *double down* on your efforts to avoid Covid. That means even more masking and social distancing for you until the virus is clearly gone from your local area. Or avoid the Covid box by getting the vaccine.
Now IMO I think the vaccine box is a lot smaller. For one thing, if you get Covid you get not only the RNA for the spike protein but the entire virus.
Now if 'getting stuff' like less masking and social distancing is important to you, then your incoherent not getting vaccinated.
Conditioning human freedoms and liberties on complying with executive action is not in any conception of the role of government I've seen in my entire life.
Why would you get vaccinated when nothing will change? Because it lowers your personal risk, for one thing. And, of course, as others have said, it does help society more generally, and that's good for all of us, even if doing our individual part might seem rather insignificant.
In a more emollient vein, I do think that most countries have been wrong in refusing to grant the vaccinated special privileges, and/or making life inconvenient for the unvaccinated. While being exempt from wearing a mask doesn't really work as a practical matter, some combination of carrot and stick could bring results. In the end, it is hard to balance the real risks of Covid with effective measures, clear communication, economic costs, civil liberties, lost education, the deteriorating physical and mental health of those home-bound, concern for the most vulnerable, and issues of equality.
The 'nothing will change' argument is childish in its impatience. Israel has about 68% vaccinated and masks are coming off, people are eating indoors and outdoors again. The UK is getting there. NZ and Aus. have achieved zeroCovid so while travel to there requires a 14 day quarantine (they don't care if you've been vaccinated or tested negative, you're waiting 14 days), they don't need masks, they have indoor rock concerts and are normal.
So the question is then do the 'nothing will change' people really need to be indulged for the space of a few months between vaccination and virus decline? No they don't. As we have seen here, these people don't really exist except as trolls on discussion groups.
Let's create heretofore unforseen levels of social control because covid is the troll, it's a concern troll to push through a patriot-act equivalent. Remember how that never went away?
Ah yes, because it's not like everyone in this thread (including you) were shouting for vaccine passports and denying people employment for failure to vaccinate *six minutes ago*.
There's actually one group that does this: The US military.
Do you wanna put some boots on? Because I know exactly where you want to work.
"Some balance of carrot and stick" - this is exactly the sort of top-down, bureaucratic control-oriented structure that is causing vaccine hestitancy. The conspiracy theories are already wild about "vaccine passports".
"In the United States" - yes. Since we are only actually concerned with Republican, Trump Supporting vaccine hesitants, I think dealing with the psychology of that group is pretty important. The psychology/attitude among right-wing vaccine hesitants are primarily concerned with the full-court press from prestige institutions they already don't trust (for a combination of good and bad reasons).
The idea that when we take a vaccine we are "trusting the Science" is fiction. Our scientific institutions are not Science written down on stone tablets and passed to us from the plane of pure math by Isaac Newton himself, they are institutions of humans - and given that those institutions have been caught red-handed in lies and manipulations basically constantly since 2016 that group has *every reason* not to trust any of them.
Few in the "pro-Science" group are actually doing any research or rational calculations *at all* - they are merely listening to the appointed People who Do The Science.
I actually *do* think Trump-says-vaccines-are-a-good-idea is a reasonable strategy here. Because "do you really think Trump is a part of these institutions you don't trust?" is a perfectly valid criticism that comes from *inside* the framework of someone who doesn't trust those institutions rather than outside of it.
Whereas , as another commenter posited "give the vaccinated the freedom they deserve" sets off some *incredible* alarm bells from the anti-vaxxer frame, which always puts government mandates of substance consumption front and center. The latter *encourages* the psychology that drives vaccine hesitancy, that group *already doesn't trust you*, shaming tactics and mandates will encourage people to resist you by-fraud. Which is even worse, because you're going to get statistics that say "80% vaccinated, yay we don't have to lock down any more" and then......... OOPS.
Your description of the psychology of Trump-supporting vaccine hesitants sounds plausible. But is your strategy to have Trump himself come out in favour of vaccines, or merely to push this message independently?
Trump sponsored Warp Speed, and a Blue Tribe doctor from California murdered on the order of hundreds of thousands of people delaying the Pfizer vaccine to own Trump.
Trump himself has been quoted as saying that vaccines are fine.
Why would it be so hard to push this message?
Probably because it would require Blues to admit:
A) That Trump actually did use executive power in an effective way to get vaccines, which would contradict their "haha silly fucking reds who don't like masks!" conception of the universe. You can yell at him all you want about "failure to lockdown" or mask mandates - but the fact is that we have this vaccine months earlier than we would have partially because of Trump's direct involvement and executive action. Surprisingly - with no international incidents like the UK/EU are experiencing!
What will change? I go to Krispy Kreme every day and get a _free donut_ because I'm vaccinated. That's a big change. I'm going to go to a baseball game next week. Vaccines are already changing my life (more importantly, changing it for the better).
Luckily, I got vaccinated and so did all of my close friends and family. I can attest that being with those people without wearing a mask and without worrying about contracting Covid feels liberating. I don’t mind masking and distancing when I’m out in public.
I’m a retired Internist and feel that you don’t need to use ‘supposedly’ to modify the verb ‘limit’ any more. I feel there’s no doubt about it. For one thing, there has been a dramatic drop in influenza this year and the only change is that people aren’t giving it to one another and that’s because of masking and distancing.
If the CDC guidelines seem arbitrary to you, it may be due to a misunderstanding of how science works. CDC has an outstanding record of using data to base its recommendations on (Damn! I could see that preposition dangling there well before I wrote it, but seemingly was powerless to prevent it). Anyway, they depend on data and, since this was a “novel” coronavirus, there were no data on the important questions at first. It takes time to collect data and analyze it in the most scientifically correct way, so on many questions, the CDC has just had to wait. As a result, issuing no recommendation or a scientifically half-baked one has been necessary at times. And, that has been confusing for us all. I really respect your thoughtful approach to this, but wish you’d get vaccinated.
If you read between the lines, the reason why they aren't willing to let vaccinated people go maskless is because they don't want MAGAnauts to be able to lie and say "I'm vaccinated, I don't need a mask!"
The masking and distancing will go away once the case count drops this summer, which will happen quicker the more people get vaccinated.
I think that at every age, the likely impact of getting covid is much worse than that of getting the vaccine. So if you imagine that covid is going to continue spreading (as will happen if not enough people get vaccinated), then you're probably eventually either going to get the vaccine or covid.
If you are young and healthy, then probably getting covid will mean several days of feeling sick--perhaps like a truck hit you, perhaps something milder. With low probability, it will mean ending up in the hospital, or having lingering symptoms where your sense of smell doesn't come back for six months, or even dying. This happens even to young and healthy people, though it's rare.
Getting the shot will probably mean several days of having your arm sore, and maybe a day or so of being really tired after each shot. It's possible you'll feel miserable for a couple days. It's also possible you'll have an allergic reaction to the shot, but that's extremely rare. Something like a billion people have gotten the shots so far, so we have a *really* good idea what the likely dangers are.
Also, if you get covid, you can pass it to other people. That's not a big deal if you mainly interact with young, healthy people or people who've been vaccinated, but it will suck if you pass your infection (which just ruins your week) to some 60-year-old with a heart condition who ends up dying. The shots can't give you covid, and you almost certainly won't be able to transmit covid afterwards, so the 60 year old dude working out at the gym next to you probably won't catch his death from you.
If you figure you're going to get one or the other, it's hard for me to imagine preferring covid to the shot. At this point, I think in most of the US you can just schedule a time and go get a shot--there are vaccine clinics around here that are open to anyone. So it's basically just the hassle of the shot and maybe a day or so of feeling tired afterward.
"But why would I get vaccinated when nothing will change?" Yet everything changes. When you get a large portion of the population vaccinated the virus retreats and life goes back to normal. This to me smells like the mental problem that has caused this thing to now go on over a year. No patience today means rather than taking the time needed to fix the problem now, we do half-assed measures ensuring all the stuff people say they hate goes on and on and on.
Pull the band aid off dude. Was 2020 so much fun we have to do it all over again in 2021?
Yes, exactly, masking and distancing and events being limited or shut down are terrible. I would like those restrictions lifted for vaccinated people right away since they aren’t risk-vectors anymore. Pull the band aid off dude. Was 2020 so much fun we have to do it all over again in 2021?
Unvaccinated people could meet maskless indoors previously, this *only* matters in the perspective of "my social group are all blind followers of the CDC" and has no actual impact on people's day to day life.
Yet you seem to be making some convoluted argument that you're a slave to CDC guidance...yet now you say you do what you judge is best for yourself. So why all the angst over how CDC words guidance on outdoor.vs.indoor vaccinated.vs.non?
If you want the stuff that people hate (and BTW, I don't buy there are real mask haters versus people who are just getting their social media charge off it) to go down, get the virus to go down. The rest of us are doing a pretty decent job at the moment. No help from you.
The angst is because *localities* have shown no interest in repealing mask orders. Specifically - even if you're correct on the CDC allowing people to be unmasked at private gatherings was correct ( it isn't), that's *totally irrelevant* because it doesn't affect:
Jobs
Businesses
Events
For the record, I wear a mask - I just don't like the conflation of "arbitrary power by unelected officials reinforced by social media signaling" with "actually doing the right thing" when the former is obviously being guided by political considerations *more than* reality considerations. See: Racism is a public health crisis.
The CDC said back in March it was safe for vaccinated people to congregate indoors unmasked with each other. See if you cared you'd know that, you don't. Why? Because you're a kook with an anti-mask fetish which is probably the stupidest, most irrelevant cause in recent human history to get behind and has no one in the real world behind it.
Has your locality repealed your mask mandate? If so, this "oh but you can gather privately in your own homes without a mask if you're vaccinated" piece strikes me as kind of weird - because guess what! I could always do that!
Unless of course, you were suggesting to SWAT raid people's private property on reports of "unmasked people" hanging out together.
So you have no credibility here. Your demands that the CDC 'give' you more things in exchange for being vaccinated was just a con game here because you assume our time, unlike yours, is of no value.
Look if you want to argue against masks, just do so. AT least you'll be making an honest argument.
“ The plague year infantilized us, made us impotent in the face of forces beyond our control.” In the big picture, there are a lot of forces beyond our control. However, we could not ignore the pandemic as we do most everything else. But we could meet the pandemic with self discipline, patience, and the ability to follow a plan. Unfortunately many people simply broke and acted irrationally; as is often the case when meeting big challenges.
To be honest the people who broke and behaved stupidly (anti-mask Karens for example) are a minority IMO. A lot of people rose to the occassion and learned how to become stronger going through it. This isn't reported on much since people 'breaking' are easier to spot and turn into a quick article or video, but in the long run I'm hopeful it's more important to our society at large.
Mask enforcement is the Karen position. "Karen" is a meme about suburban white people (who voted overwhelmingly for Biden) exerting petty authoritarianism on others. That does not fit with "shameless anti-masker"
No, "petty authoritarianism" is when you call the cops on someone smoking a doobie, demand someone be thrown out for not wearing a mask, get in fights with people for not wearing masks, sure in your moral righteousness.
It's using an ostensible public good or norm as a platform for a power trip, and people who do that in every other situation are *rightly* derided, laughed at, and memed about. This is *exactly* what the Karen meme/joke is about. - and claiming that the person doing the relatively innocent-in-the-single-case transgression is "Karen" runs contrary to the features of the joke or satire because you happen to think their transgression is serious enough, or find them unsympathetic for other reasons.
I think you're thinking of the type of Karen BLM complains about...the one that demands to see a Black person's license to 'prove' they really belong in the neighborhood. The other Karens are, of course, the infamous I'm going to throw a hissy fit because Trader Joe's says wear a mask and I'm going to start screaming about 'my rights' and HIPA even though the store manager is trying to act as polite as possible.
This, though, is social media nonsense. Most of the time in the US people are not freaking out in Wal-Marts and the minority doing the "I'm poking my nose out of the mask because I'm the shit m an" are more often ignored than confronted. Good to know you have their back, though.
Deciding to start fights with and report people for not wearing as mask *is the same set of behaviors* as demanding to see a black person's license to 'prove' they really belong in the neighborhood.
It's a power trip disguised as norms enforcement. In most cases, it isn't even particularly racist. It's just some person who think it's their Sworn Duty to enforce social norms despite not being police, or proprietors, or whatever.
You distinguish between the two because you want to both support BLM and support people snitching on each other for minor violations of the mask code at the same time.
A recurring theme in COVID vaccine resistance is concern with long-term side effects. But *we know* there's a large minority of people who got COVID a year or so ago and still haven't really recovered. Many can't work. Some can't leave their homes. Some are children. And, while we don't yet know if breakthrough infections are any less likely to develop into long COVID -- I hope someone is looking into it -- we do know that vaccination can decrease infection. I really, really wish the CDC would place this front and center. Run commercials featuring the voices of long-haulers, etc.
Also, I don't think direct payments would work that well with the "health freedom" hardcore, but I do think they might help with some other constituencies, particularly young people.
How about getting American capitalism behind it, while giving a choice. What if you allow restaurants to open at full capacity if the customers are all vaccinated (except children for the moment) or they can allow any one in but operate at whatever capacity is currently deemed safe.
I wholeheartedly agree with giving people capitalist incentives, but let's find a way that doesn't force businesses to take on inappropriate roles. After struggling for months to stay open and currently hanging by a thread, no way would I be ok burdening my remaining low-wage-tip-dependent employees with having to serve as bouncers while risking offense to half my potential customers.
I understand your point, and I was perhaps using an inept example, but I hoped it would be easy to understand. And as I said, it should be your choice as a restaurant owner, and the calculus might be different in different parts of the country. The flip side is that you or any other business owners should not be penalized if the rules remain strict because a substantial number of people won't get vaccinated.
The goal of health rules and other safety rules like fire codes is (or should be) to manage risk, keeping it at acceptable levels. We have reduced occupancy to reduce the risk, but if everyone is vaccinated at an establishment the presumably full occupancy or something closer to it would be safe, and shouldn't it be the owners choice which regime would be best for them?
Enforcement is obviously an issue, but it is not as if we don't already do things like this. Alcohol and tobacco to minors is an obvious example. The main point is that somehow we need to reward people who do get vaccinated, and help life get back to normal. Government coercion and rules won't do the job, so how do we use free enterprise and public opinion to move the needle.
You don't want to have the hassle. Fine. But I can well imagine other restaurants struggling mightily that would be fine if they could increase occupancy. Shouldn't they be able to if it is possible due to vaccination?
At numbers well below full vaccination things are safe - we do not have full vaccination of annual flu vaccine. Even among high-risk populations that are targeted it's approximately 69.5%.
I am a bit puzzled by your comment. Nowhere are Noah or I talking about full vaccination, just getting to a point where COVID is not too severe. There is a tipping point when the effects of vaccinations, natural immunity, and measures such as social distancing and masks flip us from the virus growing to shrinking. The thrust of the article is if, as appears likely, not enough people get vaccinated to get to that point, and particularly to the point where we can relax restrictions a bit, how do we encourage and empower reluctant people to get vaccinated.
Capacity at restaurants IMO will come back when the virus goes away. Many ones I see are doing massive take out operations but struggle to even get whatever their current capacity of sit down customers to sit indoors. That plus restaurants will need a vaccine passport that makes it easy to verify vaccination.
One option, however, is that you could get rid of the virus even if you don't get herd immunity via vaccination. If the reproduction rate is sustained below 1, the virus goes extinct.
If the reproduction rate is below 1 in *all* subpopulations then you are fine (and have herd immunity on your side) But if one group, one subpopulation, does not get R0 below one, then the virus doesn't go extinct, it will mutate, and natural selection will enhance the more resistant populations. So the question is how to we get enough people in all groups to get vaccinated to protect all of us?
Depends on what subpopulations you are talking about. Less dense rural populations would have a naturally lower R0 anyway, a lower vaccination rate there could be just enough to hold it under 1 while a city would need a higher rate. Once the virus is gone, and ZeroCovid is a thing and it can be done, then it doesn't really matter that you have a rump of reluctant vaxxers who never got the shot. Consider New Zealand, Australia and, horror, China for that matter.
Um. Wasn't the premise of Noah's piece that it is possible -- likely? -- that the rump will be too large. And what could we do to motivate more people to get vaccinated? That was the question that I was addressing.
As long as one sizable population has R0 > 1, whether sparsely populated rural areas, or dense cities, we all have a problem. I was commenting on your statement that if R0 < 1 the virus goes extinct even if we don't have herd immunity. But we have to get R0 below zero in all populations and sustain that over time. Which is pretty much the definition of herd immunity.
Say we have a subpopulation with less immunity but it is surrounded by a population with more. R0 may be above 1 for a while in that subpopulation but it will hit up against the larger population sooner or later or it will exhaust itself.
Imagine you have a forest fire in a big forest. You surround the fire and put water on it. That puts the fire out but the rest of the forest is dry and could catch fire at any time.
Imagine instead you use millions of planes to drop water on 90% of the forest, That's 'herd immunity' Yes some dry trees may remain and they may burn should lightening strike but the forest itself cannot burn.
Between those two extremes, you can achieve zero burning in the forest which is where I suspect the US will be in a few months.
> if our best hope to beat COVID once and for all hits a wall because of partisan rage
Is it reasonable to state that this partisan gap is the biggest problem America faces? That's been my perspective for a while - that you have these two tribes that fear and loathe each other, and there's little crosstalk between them.
> we need to find some way to convince people
Is it possible that attempts to do this keep failing because journalists are so heavily on one side of this partisan divide?
For example, once i clicked the the interview where you claimed a republican was 'encouraging people not to get vaccines', i find this quote:
> "What is it to you? You have got a vaccine, and science is telling you it's very, very effective. So, why is this big push to make sure everybody gets a vaccine?"
He's not telling people not to get vaccines. He's saying, "don't push people to get vaccines." This is much, much more subtle than what you claim he's said. And of course, Your uncharitable interpretation is what i've come to expect from journalists covering republicans.
Is it any wonder that large groups of the country, aligned with voting republican, don't trust official messengers?
It would be uncharitable if Republicans were getting vaccinated but just being cautious, they aren't. We instead get the nihilistic responses about not needing the vaccine but at the same time Trump should get praise for the vaccine.
It isn't uncharitable. The whole point is that institutional trust is a big deal, and when you start mandating untested things in a full-court press of the media and local law , people actually *do* start to wonder.
Consider:
If you were an antivaxxer conspiracy theorist who predicted this was a part of Bill Gates Mind Control Conspiracy - would the prestige institutions that are theoretically a part of the cabal be behaving any differently?
The messaging should in fact be : "You're right, we actually don't know directly the long-term effects of the covid vaccine. But we have good science and reasoning that says it should be safe , meanwhile the COVID pandemic is very bad - please accept the risk". Instead, concerns about long term side effects are washed away with "this is fake misinformation" - when anyone who knows what a longitudinal study is can see clearly that it is *you* who are lying.
Once you get caught in a lie, there's no longer a reason to trust anyone who is pro-vaccine, and conspiracy theorists and misinformers can fill the gap between reality and the official position with *whatever they like*.
Joe Rogan is not held to the same standard as the CDC, because he's just a Dude on the Internet.
"The messaging should in fact be" Isn't it? I mean if you are really curious about long term effects and you dug into the popular science (by which I mean the science written not by experts talking to each other but experts and non-experts presenting what that discussion is like in terms that an educated but non-scientist should be able to understand) what you're going to hear is exactly what. You will also hear we don't know what the long term effects of having Covid are but there is a lot of evidence they are not zero and are nothing like any long term effect that has ever been found in a vaccine.
Also I can tolerate a difference of views about reality but incoherency is intolerable. If someone is super concerned about 'long term effects' of the vaccine then coherency means they should be super concerned about long term covid effects and be demanding serious masking (nothing less than N95!), lockdowns, and nothing less than zero Covid. I mean look say you were a cop but had a strange skin condition that made you allergic to wearing bullet proof vests. You'd be *more* worried about getting shot then, not less.
Show me coherency and I'll extend my hand in friendly disagreement. Otherwise I give the back of my hand!
You haven't actually shown me being inconsistent or incoherent - you just do weird things like point to an announcement by the CDC that doesn't reflect their public guidance and saying "haha".
I do not see these "expert discussions to inform the public" - I see the Governor of my used-to-state and Science Pope Fauci citing obvious lies, repeated by people I know uncritically. That's "the messaging", the people who are having Good Faith Discussions on youtube hit like, 1, maybe 10% of the population.
When it comes to any issue for which the American Right has a position, analysis that fails to grapple with the pernicious effects of the toxic right-wing outrage machine will never translate into changing hearts and minds. Again and again, people on the Left think that if only the facts were known, if only that one expert had spoken more on-point, if only we could speak to what right wingers *really* feel, then we could reach some sort of understanding. So now it's personal autonomy? And that just happens to line up with that section of the population that loves Trump, believes in conspiracies, supports insurrections, denies climate change and is generally nihilistic? America's real problems lie deeper.
I do feel confident that the US will continue to vaccinate, and eventually start to flirt with herd immunity through various creative efforts. But it's hardly as if the entire world is getting vaccinated. Ever. So, variants will continue to flourish. And there will be a few more rounds of vaccines. Personally, I'm interested in hearing about how the world will deal with this, given all we have learned thus far.
The disaster will be when virus variants develop in unvaccinated red state communities--variants that achieve vaccine escape and/or increase in virulence...
Just wait until all the vaccines the liberal folks took become useless due to the selfishness of red state America.
I want to be wrong, but...yeah. Really not sure what the endgame is for America right now. The country is in deep trouble.
First and foremost I think that people are still underestimating this thing. It's ability to evolve is much greater than first anticipated. You should be very scared of these variants. The more opportunity we give this virus to reproduce, the more it will evolve to be something we can't control. What's happening in India now? They have a variant that more readily reinfects infected people (https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/04/24/988744811/people-are-talking-about-a-double-mutant-variant-in-india-what-does-that-mean). The more you challenge vaccinated people with infection, by having them encounter unvaccinated people, the faster this virus will evolve to evade the vaccines we have.
I other words, those that refuse to get vaccinated are sending the rest of us down a path of never-ending pandemic. Fine, they're cool with that. I am not.
Therefore, how do you get em vaccinated? you make them. If you want to come to my class, go to the university I teach at, work at the place I work at, you'll get vaccinated. That's what every sane person should be demanding.
If you don't wanna get vaccinated. Fine, you do you, just stay the hell away from me. You don't have a right to imprison me and my family in this hell forever. You don't have the right to endanger my life and my families life, and the rest of the rational world who just hope and pray that we can maybe get beyond this thing, using the only effective tool we have against it.
I agree with you. In fact, given it could easily evolve into something even more deadly and more virulent, I don't think mandatory vaccination for all but the most *actually* medically unable to take it should be on the table. I know this take scares a lot of people, but if this became something that kills 10% of who it infects - but also has a 1 week asymptomatic period, mandatory vaccination all at once is the only way you stop this.
Unless you are *honestly* suggesting that we pursue eradication and not a reasonable amount of protection (which might even be possible with mRNA vaccines!) - the world is going to have to come to terms with COVID becoming endemic, which would've happened regardless of any measures we took. The most likely outcome of this is that there are a number of primary strains with the CDC doing guesswork as to which strains will be the most prevalent and targeting vaccines for those annually. Vaccines for other strains of flu are effective at preventing death-from-flu even if the vaccine does not protect against the strain in question.
Conflating the reaction that *you* and your friends had to COVID with "this is going to go on forever because the virus mandates imprisonment" is problematic - this is not the case. The imprisonment was mandated by politicians, and didn't even seem to significantly impact the problem. We are still considering "lockdowns" two years into this pandemic.
I'm just sayin, the ability of this virus to evolve was underestimated. We did almost no surveying for variants in the U.S. for months. What's happening in India now seems to be more a function of a variant that can more readily infect people who've already been infected. If it can do that, it can certainly evolve to evade vaccines. The more vaccinated people are infected by unvaccinated people, the more quickly they'll be vaccine-resistant variants. That's just directed evolution 101. It's pretty critical to avoid that to the greatest extent possible, for the sake of everybody. Only when there is very little virus circulating, relative to what we've got now, will we have some reasonable amount of safety. What's reasonable? 30-40k/year dead. That's what the flu does and we' re good with that. That's a far cry from over 600,000. We mandate a number of vaccines to attend school etc. We mandate seat belts and that only saves you, it has little effect on anybody else. In this case, we have something that screws over everybody if you let it run wild.
Why do you predict that "new covid variants" will continue killing 600k/yr?
In the case of *other diseases* (notably - the flu) previous infections and vaccinations were *still* incredibly effective at preventing hospitalizations and deaths from flu. Why do you think this is different?
I don't predict this. I don't know. I'm worried only because of what we've seen thus far. This disease is just inherently more lethal than flu, and it seems to be inherently more infectious, though maybe that won't be the case when we have some immunity, but we don't know that. It is a very different virus from flu, and even from the other commonly circulating coronaviruses because of what it binds to on the cell, this ACE2 receptor. That's an enzyme that's involved in regulating blood pressure and a whole bunch of other cardiovascular processes. Flu binds to sialic acid, a little sugar molecule that's found on lots of cell surfaces. I thought at the beginning that COVID wouldn't mutate that much and we wouldn't get this crazy variant stew, because that seemed to be what the prediction was. It doesn't mutate nearly as much as flu, but there's just so much of it out there, and it's infected so many people it's had alot of chance to evolve and evolve it has. The COVID that's around now is not the same as the COVID we started with. It's alot more infective, and almost certainly significantly more lethal. I really hope the vaccines keep working long enough and enough people get them soon enough to slow down this evolution, but so far, all it's done is become more infective, and it's already way more infective than the average flu, and more lethal. Flu changes every year, and it can become somewhat more infective, but not like this thing, and flu's lethality doesn't change very much. All I'm sayin is, we should nip this thing in the bud as fast as possible. It's just too dangerous to be allowed to just keep infecting and evolving.
It won't keep killing 600k/year. We'll get much better at treating it, we'll keep updating vaccines, and immunity will probably help. But there is absolutely no reason to believe that it'll ever be just another flu, and the sooner we crush it as much as possible, the less problem it will be.
That's what I heard at first as well. However as more cases and data came in, apparently, at least the B.1.1.7 ("British") variant is significantly more lethal. It's one of the explanations for the Michigan flare up.
And you'd think that lethality would be actively bad for transmission, but most transmission happens early in infection, just before and after symptoms appear. People die, if they die, weeks and months later. Therefore, in this case, it won't necessarily be the case that lethality will be bad for transmission. I mean it's not a plus for sure, but what if long term lethality and increased transmission can sometimes be linked? I don't know that they are. I don't think anybody knows if they are, but again, because the receptor is ACE2, and tighter binding to ACE2 can affect its activity and what it's supposed to do physiologically, a link is not impossible.
Oh god, not the sniffles again! Or maybe I’m not scared of the disease itself, but the overreaction? Perhaps the cure is worse than the disease? Not that lockdowns or masks cured anything
The black folks who make up the bulk of hesitancy aren't hesitant (largely) due to a history of racist government experiments - they're hesitant because they don't like signing up for anything thats part of the official system. They're worried about showing up and finding out, "oh, it says here you owe $350 to the cable company. It says here your $90 parking ticket from 8 years ago will now cost you $270 after fines. It says here you've got a misdemeanor bench warrant for failure-to-appear. It looks like you have $400 in cash on you but we don't have a W-2 on file for you, where'd that money come from? And while you're here, would you like to give a fingerprint?"
This isn't specific to COVID, but seriously anyone who is too paranoid (or precarious) to have a bank account sure as heck aren't going to flattenthecurve.gov to find an appointment and sign up with their social security number. Lower class black folks are MUCH, MUCH, MUCH more like their lower class white neighbors than they are like middle and college-class black people (or their white middle and upper-middle class equivalents). Suspicious of the government, suspicious of the police, suspicious of doctors, etc.
>Perhaps we can air commercials showing vaccinated people living free and normal lives, with no masks, throwing dinner parties and going to concerts without fear.
They have been, other than the concerts part, since about 2 months in. The average person in a rural area has seen almost no direct effect from Corona on their lives, other than being lectured twice as much by elites. That’s where we’re at. No one cares anymore, people are moving and traveling to places that didn’t go full retard
I had a good friend who lived in a rural area, 20 acres, kept his own cows. He was 57 and healthy and now he's dead from COVID. You're right, he was unlucky. I guess I don't feel that lucky either. I still, for the life of me, can't understand why wearing a stupid mask on your face when you go shopping is such an affront to liberty.
When my car drives funny and I think it's the tires (I always think it's the tires, its' the cheapest solution), and I take it to the mechanic guy, and he tells me "no, its not the tires, it's the ball joints and if you don't replace em your wheel's gonna fall off" You know what I don't do? I don't say "I don't like being lectured to by elites" and drive off. I let the guy fix my car, because I obviously don't know much about cars. He may be wrong, but he knows more than me, that I know.
Not an antivaxxer btw. I had corona, will still get the vax (wouldn’t lose any sleep over corona, lol). Seeing as half of you probably still haven’t left your house since last April, I’ll give you the lowdown of the other half. They’re rolling their eyes at this point, especially about two masks or still not being “allowed” to do anything after being vaccinated. To them, the most recent liberal overreaction actually hit the bottom line, so they’re pissed.
You’re out of touch if you think I’m a troll, lol. As you said, I’m too dumb to troll anyways! I hope your “experts” let you out soon, you sound antsy!
Actually I said you were a dumb troll. Please tell the factory that the low end trolls should be sent to Facebook and Twitter. Substack readers demand more refinment in their trolls.
Depicting a virus with a less than 1% fatality rate for healthy adults as a "silent, ever-hungry terror" is the exact reason Trump voters are refusing the vaccine. They see the mask and vaccination campaigns as an effort by an established and entrenched class of "experts" that are incapable of doing basic cost-benefit calculations and instead using any possible excuse to exert more control over them.
It would be nice if you could convince Trump voters that no, this time it's about public health - but first you'd have to convince them to *trust you*. The 49 ish percent of people who voted for Trump have every reason in the world not to do so.
I defused someone close to me's claims of a "Stolen election" by saying "do you really think that a 6/3 conservative SCOTUS with 3 of the appointees appointed by Trump voted against Trump's election fraud case because they were part of the new left zeitgeist?"
Waving the end of mask mandates and things like concerts in front of them is very likely to get the opposite of the effect you want - the more conspiratorial right-wing antivaxx crowd is already running under the assumption that this is a tool of social control, and convincing them to buy their personal autonomy back by letting the nice men in masks shoot them in the arm is more likely to entrench the new strain of right-wing antivaxxing.
What you say: "Depicting a virus with a less than 1% fatality rate for healthy adults as a "silent, ever-hungry terror" is the exact reason Trump voters are refusing the vaccine."
If that were the case, liberals would be refusing the vaccine, as well. The real reason Trump voters are refusing the vaccine is because they are pro-COVID because Trump was pro-COVID ("don't be afraid of COVID"). If COVID had a 100% fatality rate, they would have exactly the same reaction.
"do you really think that a 6/3 conservative SCOTUS with 3 of the appointees appointed by Trump voted against Trump's election fraud case because they were part of the new left zeitgeist?"
Why wouldn't they be? Judges tend to be #NeverTrump. The real reason the election conspiracy theories are dumb is because the election data doesn't look like if they were true -strong swings among the college educated, pro-Trump swings in working class areas of most stripes, anti-Trump swings in almost every state.
There are two possible ways to convince the vaccine hesitant to get the vaccine: make Trump and Republican officials actually endorse it (including endorsing private business vaccine mandates) and point to a majority of private businesses mandating proof of vaccination as a warning to them.
A 60 yo friend of mine who smokes regularly is hesitant. He hated Trump, enthusiastically voted for Biden. Worried about long term effects, years out. Says he will get it if his doctor gives it to him. Maybe getting more distribution through primary care docs would help?
Getting personal physicians onboard does seem overdue. This is also a perfect example of people's inability to effectively evaluate risk as mentioned by Aidan below. A 60 yo *smoker* is worried about the potential long-term risk of an extremely effective vaccine.
My barber proudly told me he won’t get vaccinated. He’s worried about the long-term health effects. He smokes a cigarette after every haircut.
I used to be a libertarian, but, oh man, we don’t deserve freedom, do we?
America is a toxic society of extreme individualism and religious fantacism.
It's really not. Americans are wildly conformist, and Trump supporters are only anti-vaccine because of Trump and Republican officials telling them COVID is good.
"A toxic society of extreme individualism" - versus what? The community building of Germany? Or other more collectivist societies that are doing just as bad?
Religious fanaticism? I'm not sure about you - but if you want to get rid of religion in the United States - there's a far more powerful one out there than Christianity.
If it changes anything, I’m in New York and my barber is Jewish (and so am I).
I was more referring to the change in tone about large public gatherings as soon as BLM got a news cycle. "Racism is a public health crisis" was an actual press release by public health officials. That is clear and obvious religious behavior.
(And I’m fully vaccinated.)
Just look at India right now lol
homie are you a wumao or something?
Not at all. I argue with tankies on here all the time. I'm just commited to secularism and community thinking. And I see the flaws in American society very clearly.
Ah ok, saw a bunch of comments and made an assumption, my bad.
I'm just an angry salary man who rage posts sometimes. 😅😅😅
Yes, of course I have seen those recent statistics (and I cheer them).
Problem is, evangelicals and conservative Catholics still have an outsized influence due to America's flawed electoral system. It's why we're having so many discussion about the Senate, Electoral College, and minority rule, isn't it? And there's been articles about how evangelicals in particular are the ones putting herd immunity at risk.
There's also the fact that wokeism and other social movements themselves can be analyzed as religious phenemona (the tone-deaf rhetoric about how George Floyd "sacrificed his life for justice" is American religious/messianic thinking at its worst).
Also, some of those recent statistics are about church attendance. But there's lots of people who don't attend church but are still religious in some sense. It's a complicated topic. Fact remains that American religiosity explains a lot about American society and politics--including Trump, Q-Anon, the insurrection, and this vaccine hesitancy.
Some people using freedom to make terribad decisions seems like an awful reason to curtail freedoms. Lots of Americans overeat sweets and consume too much sugar, I have it occasionally as a treat. I'd be kind of pissed if you punished me by banning sugar to force discipline on someone else
I’m a young, healthy person. I follow the Covid rules because you pretty much have to now. But why would I get vaccinated when nothing will change? Still need to mask and distance? No thanks. I’m not a Covid denier either but I’m not concerned about it for myself. And I already do the things that supposedly limit transmission. If I could get the shot, wait the two weeks or whatever, and then not have any restrictions: now we’re talking. That sounds like a pretty good deal. But the arbitrary-ness of it all isn’t very persuasive...
This lack of concern about others and society at large is what amazes me at this point. This comment perfectly encapsulates it.
Ditto my guy lol. Clearly I said, “hopefully everyone gets Covid and dies.” Thanks for engaging in a nuanced, useful way.
Ryan, did you grow up worried about smallpox, tuberculosis, polio? Did you friend die from measles? No, because the generations before you, who endured those horrible diseases did everything they could to make sure their children — and you — didn’t have to suffer from them. Maybe you could pay it forward, now.
I think you're missing the nuance here. Whether the risk is low for you is beside the point. You can get infected, even asymptomatically, and keep the variant lottery going. Think beyond yourself son.
I think it's less about a lack of concern for others but just not really thinking things through. You are telling us you won't get vaccinated because you won't 'get something' like less masking. Yawn....
1. Yes you do 'get something' as vaccinated people can meet indoors w/o masks and while risk is not zero, it is probably very low.
2. You get 90%+ odds of not getting Covid or if you do almost zero chance you'll get very sick.
3. You get an unclear but greater than 0% chance of getting the infection and passing it onto others....who you probably like since those are other people you choose to interact with.
4. Society goes back to normal faster....which means not only do you get to do less masking and social distancing, but everyone else does too.
Also, most precautions are in practice self-enforced. Once you're 95% immune to covid, you can just start ignoring precautions most of the time, and putting on a cloth mask if someone complains. ("I'm vaccinated, but if it makes you feel better....")
I agree, however I would continue with masks until the region I'm in is virus free for two reasons:
1. Masks should be the norm until the virus is gone, unvaccinated people will feel more comfortable being maskless and slipping through.
2. Varients that maybe able to break through vaccines is something we DON'T need to start spreading around.
There is also a third reason. There's a 1 in 10 or so chance the vaccine hasn't worked on me and we don't really know how long the immunity offered by the vaccine lasts.
I kind of agree with this - at least in terms of masking (which seems to be the thing that bothers people the most). Masks provide approx 15% reduction in transmission rate. Vaccination provides almost 90% (probably), to be conservative say 60%. Then making this promise - get your shots and 2 weeks later you can not wear a mask - would make us all better off if more than 25% of people take it. I'm almost certain that they would.
100% this chef. Seems like a good trade to me. For others in my cohort (ages 25-35) who are vaccine hesitant, like 80-90% would do this as well or cite the continued restrictions as a reason not to get the vaccine.
I don't buy this. IMO most people are not upset about masking but anti-masking kooks (and that's what they are) are obsessive on social media. Politicians who make anti-masking noise get a lot of likes which convinces them there's an army of people really upset about masks out there. There isn't.
"Masks provide approx 15% reduction in transmission rate" This is not really a coherent measure. If you wear a cloth mask on a hosptial Covid ward where the air is filled with virus, I could see the reduction being 15%. If everyone wears a cloth mask on that ward, though, it's probably a higher reduction. If you wear a cloth mask when buying groceries it is probably a very high reduction since you're not getting continuous concentrated virus exposure but probably only spot exposure where an infected person might have left an invisible 'cloud' of virus.
To measure this sort of thing you have to think about:
1. How many people in an environment have the virus. If no one has it, there's nothing to reduce. If almost everyone has it, there's a large amount of virus to block.
2. How many people wear masks, if a lot then a lot of virus will be blocked by the infected people's masks.
3. What other provisions are being done, did the indoor establishment open windows and doors to increase ventilation? Are they using HEPA and/or UV light filters? Even things like people talking matters. In Japan it is impolite to even talk in a normal voice on a subway, that makes a big different in terms of how much virus ends up in the air.
That's not going to give you '15%' but a range of figures depending upon these factors.
The 15% was an estimate that I saw for society as a whole given the level of masking, etc.
The question is - 50% of people are vaccinated, or will be shortly. 20% are maybes, 30% want to own the libs. The maybes are worried about personal risk/annoyance. Now some of those people would sacrifice that for the greater good. But - as long as we say that masks will still be required, the question is - what greater good?
This is an interesting paradox, because if those 20% do get vaccinated, we probably don't need masks anyway! But if we keep our current rhetoric, we won't get the 20% and we'll need masks.
Who cares about you wearing masks? As the virus retreats, the importance of masks will too and they will be gone, at least as a requirement. Problem solved.
I mean look they said vaccinated people can meet indoors w/o masks. So obviously if you insist you need some goodies for getting vaccinated it is already happening yet do the anti-vax orientated yield?
Yes! Exactly. While there is some messaging as you described, there's a lot that is gratuitously "conservative". Get the vaccine, 2 weeks later you can stop wearing masks. Help society get back to normal.
You already got it. In fact you got it back on March 8th when the CDC said fully vaccinated people can meet indoors w/o masks. So why are you almost two months later telling us that people aren't getting vaccinated because 'nothing changes'?
Things like this hint that maybe some online people who make a fetish out of complaining about masks aren't really arguing in good faith and don't deserve to be taken seriously.
Who cares about you wearing masks? As the virus retreats, the importance of masks will too and they will be gone, at least as a requirement. Problem solved.
I mean look they said vaccinated people can meet indoors w/o masks. So obviously if you insist you need some goodies for getting vaccinated it is already happening yet do the anti-vax orientated yield?
These measures will be rolled back as more people get vaccinated and there's less circulating virus. Also, around 10-30% of people, including young people, go on to develop longer-term symptoms after even very mild infections -- breathing problems, severe fatigue, memory difficulties, and much else.
If young people are concerned about getting sick, they should totally get vaccinated. I understand the risk but it’s pretty tiny and isn’t really worth it to me if I still have to do everything that minimizes risk anyway.
Interestingly, I actually think that vaccine passports could be kinda effective here. Biden, of individual states, should say “if you get vaccinated, carry this card with you and you can do what you want. Then at midnight on New Year’s Eve, we’ll all rip them up and start 2022 with a bang!” You give vaccinated people the freedom they deserve, incentivize people to get vaccinated, and assuage concerns about permanent vaccine passports by connecting a clear end date/event with them.
You say it's "not worth it to you", but what are the costs precisely? A quick trip to CVS? Getting vaccinated is just not that challenging, so it's very odd to me that you wouldn't do it.
You mean figuring out which pharmacy has doses, getting work off, coordinating another shot, likely dealing with side effects for a day? So that what? People have an even smaller chance of getting Covid than they already do? Well the good news is that I already mask and distance so I’m already doing something to minimize their risk. How small does it need to be? It’s still baffling to me that I would need to mask and distance after being vaccinated.
Why is this baffling to you? Like do you wash your hands after you poo? Do you use toilet paper after you poo? Why? Isn't that baffling? Why if you're washing your hands you might as well just skip the toilet paper and use your hands! Who are these agents from big toilet paper that have convinced us to use toilet paper! My God!
Anyway, yes use a mask after you get vaccinated. When the virus goes away, you can cut back and eliminate the mask use. You'll be in a state of bafflement for a month or two maybe, but you'll survive and then you can enjoy the rest of your life not wearing a mask trying to understand why the moment you yourself got vaccinated the entire world didn't instantly return to 'normal'.
Coordinating a shot is no longer a super difficult task. The number of pharmacies with open spots has skyrocketed, and sites like https://www.vaccinespotter.org/ have made finding the nearest open pharmacy an easy and painless process in almost every state.
When I got my shot, they immediately scheduled the 2nd. Others I know had the same experience. While the beginning was no picnic from what I hear, the learning curve has been navigated here and there are open slots in every state in the US right now.
Here's a story about a just-published study showing that even asymptomatic children develop apparently serious blood vessel damage after infection: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/12/201208121044.htm
They can't be vaccinated. They need you and me to get vaccinated.
I got the vaccine the instant it was available to me but I understand this perspective. People who show no care about the impact of social distancing and restrictions, and no urgency about having them lifted, sound pretty absurd going around lecturing others for not caring about people's wellbeing.
" I understand the risk but it’s pretty tiny" You misspelled "I THINK I understand the risk based on very limited data of a virus that has only been in the human population for a bit more than a year".
Changes in heart shape have been observed in young people who got infected w/o any symptoms (BTW the heart is a very slow organ to heal). As a younger person your risk is actually bigger than you think since impacts that take decades to appear are ones you are more likely to stick around to experience rather than, say, 75 yr olds who are lucky to get another 5 years of life and stuff that takes 10-20 years to strike is not something they should worry about much.
Possibly, yeah, my risk is greater. Maybe I should pass on the very new vaccines we don’t know anything about long term. I’m not anti-vax by any means but you’re basically just applying the anti-vax argument to Covid. Not to mention, if we don’t have enough data to adequately risk-assess for Covid, then we certainly don’t for vaccines either.
No the risk is greater. You don't know the long term impact of Covid or the vaccine, therefore you have two black boxes. The boxes may have something really bad in them. They may have nothing in them. Maybe (but unlikely) there might be something slightly good in those boxes (no one thinks Covid will give anyone super powers, and I doubt that will be a 'long term' thing). So you got two boxes of risk.
So your rational choices are avoid the vaccine risk box, which means you should *double down* on your efforts to avoid Covid. That means even more masking and social distancing for you until the virus is clearly gone from your local area. Or avoid the Covid box by getting the vaccine.
Now IMO I think the vaccine box is a lot smaller. For one thing, if you get Covid you get not only the RNA for the spike protein but the entire virus.
Now if 'getting stuff' like less masking and social distancing is important to you, then your incoherent not getting vaccinated.
Conditioning human freedoms and liberties on complying with executive action is not in any conception of the role of government I've seen in my entire life.
Why would you get vaccinated when nothing will change? Because it lowers your personal risk, for one thing. And, of course, as others have said, it does help society more generally, and that's good for all of us, even if doing our individual part might seem rather insignificant.
In a more emollient vein, I do think that most countries have been wrong in refusing to grant the vaccinated special privileges, and/or making life inconvenient for the unvaccinated. While being exempt from wearing a mask doesn't really work as a practical matter, some combination of carrot and stick could bring results. In the end, it is hard to balance the real risks of Covid with effective measures, clear communication, economic costs, civil liberties, lost education, the deteriorating physical and mental health of those home-bound, concern for the most vulnerable, and issues of equality.
Thanks for your use of the word ‘emollient’ in that way! I wasn’t familiar with the definition ‘making less intense or harsh : MOLLIFYING’.
The 'nothing will change' argument is childish in its impatience. Israel has about 68% vaccinated and masks are coming off, people are eating indoors and outdoors again. The UK is getting there. NZ and Aus. have achieved zeroCovid so while travel to there requires a 14 day quarantine (they don't care if you've been vaccinated or tested negative, you're waiting 14 days), they don't need masks, they have indoor rock concerts and are normal.
So the question is then do the 'nothing will change' people really need to be indulged for the space of a few months between vaccination and virus decline? No they don't. As we have seen here, these people don't really exist except as trolls on discussion groups.
Let's create heretofore unforseen levels of social control because covid is the troll, it's a concern troll to push through a patriot-act equivalent. Remember how that never went away?
There's not a single new social control from Covid. Not a one. But keep trying troll.
Ah yes, because it's not like everyone in this thread (including you) were shouting for vaccine passports and denying people employment for failure to vaccinate *six minutes ago*.
There's actually one group that does this: The US military.
Do you wanna put some boots on? Because I know exactly where you want to work.
Where on this thread has anyone advocated people be denied employment for not getting vaccinated?
Just keep making shit up troll.
"Some balance of carrot and stick" - this is exactly the sort of top-down, bureaucratic control-oriented structure that is causing vaccine hestitancy. The conspiracy theories are already wild about "vaccine passports".
Are you saying that vaccine hesitancy tracks with the degree of control exercised by states and countries?
"In the United States" - yes. Since we are only actually concerned with Republican, Trump Supporting vaccine hesitants, I think dealing with the psychology of that group is pretty important. The psychology/attitude among right-wing vaccine hesitants are primarily concerned with the full-court press from prestige institutions they already don't trust (for a combination of good and bad reasons).
The idea that when we take a vaccine we are "trusting the Science" is fiction. Our scientific institutions are not Science written down on stone tablets and passed to us from the plane of pure math by Isaac Newton himself, they are institutions of humans - and given that those institutions have been caught red-handed in lies and manipulations basically constantly since 2016 that group has *every reason* not to trust any of them.
Few in the "pro-Science" group are actually doing any research or rational calculations *at all* - they are merely listening to the appointed People who Do The Science.
I actually *do* think Trump-says-vaccines-are-a-good-idea is a reasonable strategy here. Because "do you really think Trump is a part of these institutions you don't trust?" is a perfectly valid criticism that comes from *inside* the framework of someone who doesn't trust those institutions rather than outside of it.
Whereas , as another commenter posited "give the vaccinated the freedom they deserve" sets off some *incredible* alarm bells from the anti-vaxxer frame, which always puts government mandates of substance consumption front and center. The latter *encourages* the psychology that drives vaccine hesitancy, that group *already doesn't trust you*, shaming tactics and mandates will encourage people to resist you by-fraud. Which is even worse, because you're going to get statistics that say "80% vaccinated, yay we don't have to lock down any more" and then......... OOPS.
Your description of the psychology of Trump-supporting vaccine hesitants sounds plausible. But is your strategy to have Trump himself come out in favour of vaccines, or merely to push this message independently?
Trump sponsored Warp Speed, and a Blue Tribe doctor from California murdered on the order of hundreds of thousands of people delaying the Pfizer vaccine to own Trump.
Trump himself has been quoted as saying that vaccines are fine.
Why would it be so hard to push this message?
Probably because it would require Blues to admit:
A) That Trump actually did use executive power in an effective way to get vaccines, which would contradict their "haha silly fucking reds who don't like masks!" conception of the universe. You can yell at him all you want about "failure to lockdown" or mask mandates - but the fact is that we have this vaccine months earlier than we would have partially because of Trump's direct involvement and executive action. Surprisingly - with no international incidents like the UK/EU are experiencing!
B) That this man directly committed murders in order to swing the election: https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/10/19/1010646/campaign-stop-covid-19-vaccine-trump-election-day/
These things cannot be spoken aloud by anyone in the Blue zeitgeist for fear of getting utterly destroyed by the people who cut their paychecks.
What will change? I go to Krispy Kreme every day and get a _free donut_ because I'm vaccinated. That's a big change. I'm going to go to a baseball game next week. Vaccines are already changing my life (more importantly, changing it for the better).
Luckily, I got vaccinated and so did all of my close friends and family. I can attest that being with those people without wearing a mask and without worrying about contracting Covid feels liberating. I don’t mind masking and distancing when I’m out in public.
I’m a retired Internist and feel that you don’t need to use ‘supposedly’ to modify the verb ‘limit’ any more. I feel there’s no doubt about it. For one thing, there has been a dramatic drop in influenza this year and the only change is that people aren’t giving it to one another and that’s because of masking and distancing.
If the CDC guidelines seem arbitrary to you, it may be due to a misunderstanding of how science works. CDC has an outstanding record of using data to base its recommendations on (Damn! I could see that preposition dangling there well before I wrote it, but seemingly was powerless to prevent it). Anyway, they depend on data and, since this was a “novel” coronavirus, there were no data on the important questions at first. It takes time to collect data and analyze it in the most scientifically correct way, so on many questions, the CDC has just had to wait. As a result, issuing no recommendation or a scientifically half-baked one has been necessary at times. And, that has been confusing for us all. I really respect your thoughtful approach to this, but wish you’d get vaccinated.
If you read between the lines, the reason why they aren't willing to let vaccinated people go maskless is because they don't want MAGAnauts to be able to lie and say "I'm vaccinated, I don't need a mask!"
The masking and distancing will go away once the case count drops this summer, which will happen quicker the more people get vaccinated.
Selfish.
I think that at every age, the likely impact of getting covid is much worse than that of getting the vaccine. So if you imagine that covid is going to continue spreading (as will happen if not enough people get vaccinated), then you're probably eventually either going to get the vaccine or covid.
If you are young and healthy, then probably getting covid will mean several days of feeling sick--perhaps like a truck hit you, perhaps something milder. With low probability, it will mean ending up in the hospital, or having lingering symptoms where your sense of smell doesn't come back for six months, or even dying. This happens even to young and healthy people, though it's rare.
Getting the shot will probably mean several days of having your arm sore, and maybe a day or so of being really tired after each shot. It's possible you'll feel miserable for a couple days. It's also possible you'll have an allergic reaction to the shot, but that's extremely rare. Something like a billion people have gotten the shots so far, so we have a *really* good idea what the likely dangers are.
Also, if you get covid, you can pass it to other people. That's not a big deal if you mainly interact with young, healthy people or people who've been vaccinated, but it will suck if you pass your infection (which just ruins your week) to some 60-year-old with a heart condition who ends up dying. The shots can't give you covid, and you almost certainly won't be able to transmit covid afterwards, so the 60 year old dude working out at the gym next to you probably won't catch his death from you.
If you figure you're going to get one or the other, it's hard for me to imagine preferring covid to the shot. At this point, I think in most of the US you can just schedule a time and go get a shot--there are vaccine clinics around here that are open to anyone. So it's basically just the hassle of the shot and maybe a day or so of feeling tired afterward.
"But why would I get vaccinated when nothing will change?" Yet everything changes. When you get a large portion of the population vaccinated the virus retreats and life goes back to normal. This to me smells like the mental problem that has caused this thing to now go on over a year. No patience today means rather than taking the time needed to fix the problem now, we do half-assed measures ensuring all the stuff people say they hate goes on and on and on.
Pull the band aid off dude. Was 2020 so much fun we have to do it all over again in 2021?
Yes, exactly, masking and distancing and events being limited or shut down are terrible. I would like those restrictions lifted for vaccinated people right away since they aren’t risk-vectors anymore. Pull the band aid off dude. Was 2020 so much fun we have to do it all over again in 2021?
You are a risk vector but the CDC has relaxed the rules for the vaccinated advising that vaccinated people can meet maskless indoors.
So are you getting the vaccine now?
Unvaccinated people could meet maskless indoors previously, this *only* matters in the perspective of "my social group are all blind followers of the CDC" and has no actual impact on people's day to day life.
Yet you seem to be making some convoluted argument that you're a slave to CDC guidance...yet now you say you do what you judge is best for yourself. So why all the angst over how CDC words guidance on outdoor.vs.indoor vaccinated.vs.non?
If you want the stuff that people hate (and BTW, I don't buy there are real mask haters versus people who are just getting their social media charge off it) to go down, get the virus to go down. The rest of us are doing a pretty decent job at the moment. No help from you.
The angst is because *localities* have shown no interest in repealing mask orders. Specifically - even if you're correct on the CDC allowing people to be unmasked at private gatherings was correct ( it isn't), that's *totally irrelevant* because it doesn't affect:
Jobs
Businesses
Events
For the record, I wear a mask - I just don't like the conflation of "arbitrary power by unelected officials reinforced by social media signaling" with "actually doing the right thing" when the former is obviously being guided by political considerations *more than* reality considerations. See: Racism is a public health crisis.
Except given the CDC update on mask mandates for the vaccine - there's no evidence of things changing.
The CDC said back in March it was safe for vaccinated people to congregate indoors unmasked with each other. See if you cared you'd know that, you don't. Why? Because you're a kook with an anti-mask fetish which is probably the stupidest, most irrelevant cause in recent human history to get behind and has no one in the real world behind it.
As I said the CDC said that back in March. You don't even pay attention to the things you claim to be important. What right do you have to expect us to give you any credibility? https://www.webmd.com/vaccines/covid-19-vaccine/news/20210308/cdc--vaccinated-people-can-gather-indoors-without-masks
Has your locality repealed your mask mandate? If so, this "oh but you can gather privately in your own homes without a mask if you're vaccinated" piece strikes me as kind of weird - because guess what! I could always do that!
Unless of course, you were suggesting to SWAT raid people's private property on reports of "unmasked people" hanging out together.
So you have no credibility here. Your demands that the CDC 'give' you more things in exchange for being vaccinated was just a con game here because you assume our time, unlike yours, is of no value.
Look if you want to argue against masks, just do so. AT least you'll be making an honest argument.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-sick/cloth-face-cover-guidance.html
Official CDC guidance - nothing about vaccinated people.
The CDC mask update I watched on Monday said "outdoors".
“ The plague year infantilized us, made us impotent in the face of forces beyond our control.” In the big picture, there are a lot of forces beyond our control. However, we could not ignore the pandemic as we do most everything else. But we could meet the pandemic with self discipline, patience, and the ability to follow a plan. Unfortunately many people simply broke and acted irrationally; as is often the case when meeting big challenges.
To be honest the people who broke and behaved stupidly (anti-mask Karens for example) are a minority IMO. A lot of people rose to the occassion and learned how to become stronger going through it. This isn't reported on much since people 'breaking' are easier to spot and turn into a quick article or video, but in the long run I'm hopeful it's more important to our society at large.
Mask enforcement is the Karen position. "Karen" is a meme about suburban white people (who voted overwhelmingly for Biden) exerting petty authoritarianism on others. That does not fit with "shameless anti-masker"
You mean by 'petty authoritarianism' things like you have to wear pants to walk into WalMart?
No, "petty authoritarianism" is when you call the cops on someone smoking a doobie, demand someone be thrown out for not wearing a mask, get in fights with people for not wearing masks, sure in your moral righteousness.
It's using an ostensible public good or norm as a platform for a power trip, and people who do that in every other situation are *rightly* derided, laughed at, and memed about. This is *exactly* what the Karen meme/joke is about. - and claiming that the person doing the relatively innocent-in-the-single-case transgression is "Karen" runs contrary to the features of the joke or satire because you happen to think their transgression is serious enough, or find them unsympathetic for other reasons.
A more correct term would be "scofflaw".
I think you're thinking of the type of Karen BLM complains about...the one that demands to see a Black person's license to 'prove' they really belong in the neighborhood. The other Karens are, of course, the infamous I'm going to throw a hissy fit because Trader Joe's says wear a mask and I'm going to start screaming about 'my rights' and HIPA even though the store manager is trying to act as polite as possible.
This, though, is social media nonsense. Most of the time in the US people are not freaking out in Wal-Marts and the minority doing the "I'm poking my nose out of the mask because I'm the shit m an" are more often ignored than confronted. Good to know you have their back, though.
Deciding to start fights with and report people for not wearing as mask *is the same set of behaviors* as demanding to see a black person's license to 'prove' they really belong in the neighborhood.
It's a power trip disguised as norms enforcement. In most cases, it isn't even particularly racist. It's just some person who think it's their Sworn Duty to enforce social norms despite not being police, or proprietors, or whatever.
You distinguish between the two because you want to both support BLM and support people snitching on each other for minor violations of the mask code at the same time.
A recurring theme in COVID vaccine resistance is concern with long-term side effects. But *we know* there's a large minority of people who got COVID a year or so ago and still haven't really recovered. Many can't work. Some can't leave their homes. Some are children. And, while we don't yet know if breakthrough infections are any less likely to develop into long COVID -- I hope someone is looking into it -- we do know that vaccination can decrease infection. I really, really wish the CDC would place this front and center. Run commercials featuring the voices of long-haulers, etc.
Also, I don't think direct payments would work that well with the "health freedom" hardcore, but I do think they might help with some other constituencies, particularly young people.
How about getting American capitalism behind it, while giving a choice. What if you allow restaurants to open at full capacity if the customers are all vaccinated (except children for the moment) or they can allow any one in but operate at whatever capacity is currently deemed safe.
I wholeheartedly agree with giving people capitalist incentives, but let's find a way that doesn't force businesses to take on inappropriate roles. After struggling for months to stay open and currently hanging by a thread, no way would I be ok burdening my remaining low-wage-tip-dependent employees with having to serve as bouncers while risking offense to half my potential customers.
I understand your point, and I was perhaps using an inept example, but I hoped it would be easy to understand. And as I said, it should be your choice as a restaurant owner, and the calculus might be different in different parts of the country. The flip side is that you or any other business owners should not be penalized if the rules remain strict because a substantial number of people won't get vaccinated.
The goal of health rules and other safety rules like fire codes is (or should be) to manage risk, keeping it at acceptable levels. We have reduced occupancy to reduce the risk, but if everyone is vaccinated at an establishment the presumably full occupancy or something closer to it would be safe, and shouldn't it be the owners choice which regime would be best for them?
Enforcement is obviously an issue, but it is not as if we don't already do things like this. Alcohol and tobacco to minors is an obvious example. The main point is that somehow we need to reward people who do get vaccinated, and help life get back to normal. Government coercion and rules won't do the job, so how do we use free enterprise and public opinion to move the needle.
You don't want to have the hassle. Fine. But I can well imagine other restaurants struggling mightily that would be fine if they could increase occupancy. Shouldn't they be able to if it is possible due to vaccination?
At numbers well below full vaccination things are safe - we do not have full vaccination of annual flu vaccine. Even among high-risk populations that are targeted it's approximately 69.5%.
I am a bit puzzled by your comment. Nowhere are Noah or I talking about full vaccination, just getting to a point where COVID is not too severe. There is a tipping point when the effects of vaccinations, natural immunity, and measures such as social distancing and masks flip us from the virus growing to shrinking. The thrust of the article is if, as appears likely, not enough people get vaccinated to get to that point, and particularly to the point where we can relax restrictions a bit, how do we encourage and empower reluctant people to get vaccinated.
Capacity at restaurants IMO will come back when the virus goes away. Many ones I see are doing massive take out operations but struggle to even get whatever their current capacity of sit down customers to sit indoors. That plus restaurants will need a vaccine passport that makes it easy to verify vaccination.
One option, however, is that you could get rid of the virus even if you don't get herd immunity via vaccination. If the reproduction rate is sustained below 1, the virus goes extinct.
If the reproduction rate is below 1 in *all* subpopulations then you are fine (and have herd immunity on your side) But if one group, one subpopulation, does not get R0 below one, then the virus doesn't go extinct, it will mutate, and natural selection will enhance the more resistant populations. So the question is how to we get enough people in all groups to get vaccinated to protect all of us?
Depends on what subpopulations you are talking about. Less dense rural populations would have a naturally lower R0 anyway, a lower vaccination rate there could be just enough to hold it under 1 while a city would need a higher rate. Once the virus is gone, and ZeroCovid is a thing and it can be done, then it doesn't really matter that you have a rump of reluctant vaxxers who never got the shot. Consider New Zealand, Australia and, horror, China for that matter.
Um. Wasn't the premise of Noah's piece that it is possible -- likely? -- that the rump will be too large. And what could we do to motivate more people to get vaccinated? That was the question that I was addressing.
As long as one sizable population has R0 > 1, whether sparsely populated rural areas, or dense cities, we all have a problem. I was commenting on your statement that if R0 < 1 the virus goes extinct even if we don't have herd immunity. But we have to get R0 below zero in all populations and sustain that over time. Which is pretty much the definition of herd immunity.
Say we have a subpopulation with less immunity but it is surrounded by a population with more. R0 may be above 1 for a while in that subpopulation but it will hit up against the larger population sooner or later or it will exhaust itself.
Imagine you have a forest fire in a big forest. You surround the fire and put water on it. That puts the fire out but the rest of the forest is dry and could catch fire at any time.
Imagine instead you use millions of planes to drop water on 90% of the forest, That's 'herd immunity' Yes some dry trees may remain and they may burn should lightening strike but the forest itself cannot burn.
Between those two extremes, you can achieve zero burning in the forest which is where I suspect the US will be in a few months.
Fortunately burning trees don't drive to visit grandma.
Hi Noah,
Trump has been publicly in favour of the jab for over a month. Do you think the supporters don't know or don't care?
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56424614.amp
> if our best hope to beat COVID once and for all hits a wall because of partisan rage
Is it reasonable to state that this partisan gap is the biggest problem America faces? That's been my perspective for a while - that you have these two tribes that fear and loathe each other, and there's little crosstalk between them.
> we need to find some way to convince people
Is it possible that attempts to do this keep failing because journalists are so heavily on one side of this partisan divide?
https://ballotpedia.org/Fact_check/Do_97_percent_of_journalist_donations_go_to_Democrats
For example, once i clicked the the interview where you claimed a republican was 'encouraging people not to get vaccines', i find this quote:
> "What is it to you? You have got a vaccine, and science is telling you it's very, very effective. So, why is this big push to make sure everybody gets a vaccine?"
He's not telling people not to get vaccines. He's saying, "don't push people to get vaccines." This is much, much more subtle than what you claim he's said. And of course, Your uncharitable interpretation is what i've come to expect from journalists covering republicans.
Is it any wonder that large groups of the country, aligned with voting republican, don't trust official messengers?
It would be uncharitable if Republicans were getting vaccinated but just being cautious, they aren't. We instead get the nihilistic responses about not needing the vaccine but at the same time Trump should get praise for the vaccine.
It isn't uncharitable. The whole point is that institutional trust is a big deal, and when you start mandating untested things in a full-court press of the media and local law , people actually *do* start to wonder.
Consider:
If you were an antivaxxer conspiracy theorist who predicted this was a part of Bill Gates Mind Control Conspiracy - would the prestige institutions that are theoretically a part of the cabal be behaving any differently?
The messaging should in fact be : "You're right, we actually don't know directly the long-term effects of the covid vaccine. But we have good science and reasoning that says it should be safe , meanwhile the COVID pandemic is very bad - please accept the risk". Instead, concerns about long term side effects are washed away with "this is fake misinformation" - when anyone who knows what a longitudinal study is can see clearly that it is *you* who are lying.
Once you get caught in a lie, there's no longer a reason to trust anyone who is pro-vaccine, and conspiracy theorists and misinformers can fill the gap between reality and the official position with *whatever they like*.
Joe Rogan is not held to the same standard as the CDC, because he's just a Dude on the Internet.
"The messaging should in fact be" Isn't it? I mean if you are really curious about long term effects and you dug into the popular science (by which I mean the science written not by experts talking to each other but experts and non-experts presenting what that discussion is like in terms that an educated but non-scientist should be able to understand) what you're going to hear is exactly what. You will also hear we don't know what the long term effects of having Covid are but there is a lot of evidence they are not zero and are nothing like any long term effect that has ever been found in a vaccine.
Also I can tolerate a difference of views about reality but incoherency is intolerable. If someone is super concerned about 'long term effects' of the vaccine then coherency means they should be super concerned about long term covid effects and be demanding serious masking (nothing less than N95!), lockdowns, and nothing less than zero Covid. I mean look say you were a cop but had a strange skin condition that made you allergic to wearing bullet proof vests. You'd be *more* worried about getting shot then, not less.
Show me coherency and I'll extend my hand in friendly disagreement. Otherwise I give the back of my hand!
You haven't actually shown me being inconsistent or incoherent - you just do weird things like point to an announcement by the CDC that doesn't reflect their public guidance and saying "haha".
I do not see these "expert discussions to inform the public" - I see the Governor of my used-to-state and Science Pope Fauci citing obvious lies, repeated by people I know uncritically. That's "the messaging", the people who are having Good Faith Discussions on youtube hit like, 1, maybe 10% of the population.
Yet the only one caught here in lies has been you. Odd isn't it?
When it comes to any issue for which the American Right has a position, analysis that fails to grapple with the pernicious effects of the toxic right-wing outrage machine will never translate into changing hearts and minds. Again and again, people on the Left think that if only the facts were known, if only that one expert had spoken more on-point, if only we could speak to what right wingers *really* feel, then we could reach some sort of understanding. So now it's personal autonomy? And that just happens to line up with that section of the population that loves Trump, believes in conspiracies, supports insurrections, denies climate change and is generally nihilistic? America's real problems lie deeper.
I do feel confident that the US will continue to vaccinate, and eventually start to flirt with herd immunity through various creative efforts. But it's hardly as if the entire world is getting vaccinated. Ever. So, variants will continue to flourish. And there will be a few more rounds of vaccines. Personally, I'm interested in hearing about how the world will deal with this, given all we have learned thus far.
What are your opinions on these comments:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/19/politics/maxine-waters-derek-chauvin-trial/index.html
Run a lottery with an inverse time weighted chance of winning 💰
The disaster will be when virus variants develop in unvaccinated red state communities--variants that achieve vaccine escape and/or increase in virulence...
Just wait until all the vaccines the liberal folks took become useless due to the selfishness of red state America.
I want to be wrong, but...yeah. Really not sure what the endgame is for America right now. The country is in deep trouble.
First and foremost I think that people are still underestimating this thing. It's ability to evolve is much greater than first anticipated. You should be very scared of these variants. The more opportunity we give this virus to reproduce, the more it will evolve to be something we can't control. What's happening in India now? They have a variant that more readily reinfects infected people (https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/04/24/988744811/people-are-talking-about-a-double-mutant-variant-in-india-what-does-that-mean). The more you challenge vaccinated people with infection, by having them encounter unvaccinated people, the faster this virus will evolve to evade the vaccines we have.
I other words, those that refuse to get vaccinated are sending the rest of us down a path of never-ending pandemic. Fine, they're cool with that. I am not.
Therefore, how do you get em vaccinated? you make them. If you want to come to my class, go to the university I teach at, work at the place I work at, you'll get vaccinated. That's what every sane person should be demanding.
If you don't wanna get vaccinated. Fine, you do you, just stay the hell away from me. You don't have a right to imprison me and my family in this hell forever. You don't have the right to endanger my life and my families life, and the rest of the rational world who just hope and pray that we can maybe get beyond this thing, using the only effective tool we have against it.
I agree with you. In fact, given it could easily evolve into something even more deadly and more virulent, I don't think mandatory vaccination for all but the most *actually* medically unable to take it should be on the table. I know this take scares a lot of people, but if this became something that kills 10% of who it infects - but also has a 1 week asymptomatic period, mandatory vaccination all at once is the only way you stop this.
I hope to god it doesn't get to that point.
Unless you are *honestly* suggesting that we pursue eradication and not a reasonable amount of protection (which might even be possible with mRNA vaccines!) - the world is going to have to come to terms with COVID becoming endemic, which would've happened regardless of any measures we took. The most likely outcome of this is that there are a number of primary strains with the CDC doing guesswork as to which strains will be the most prevalent and targeting vaccines for those annually. Vaccines for other strains of flu are effective at preventing death-from-flu even if the vaccine does not protect against the strain in question.
Conflating the reaction that *you* and your friends had to COVID with "this is going to go on forever because the virus mandates imprisonment" is problematic - this is not the case. The imprisonment was mandated by politicians, and didn't even seem to significantly impact the problem. We are still considering "lockdowns" two years into this pandemic.
I'm just sayin, the ability of this virus to evolve was underestimated. We did almost no surveying for variants in the U.S. for months. What's happening in India now seems to be more a function of a variant that can more readily infect people who've already been infected. If it can do that, it can certainly evolve to evade vaccines. The more vaccinated people are infected by unvaccinated people, the more quickly they'll be vaccine-resistant variants. That's just directed evolution 101. It's pretty critical to avoid that to the greatest extent possible, for the sake of everybody. Only when there is very little virus circulating, relative to what we've got now, will we have some reasonable amount of safety. What's reasonable? 30-40k/year dead. That's what the flu does and we' re good with that. That's a far cry from over 600,000. We mandate a number of vaccines to attend school etc. We mandate seat belts and that only saves you, it has little effect on anybody else. In this case, we have something that screws over everybody if you let it run wild.
Why do you predict that "new covid variants" will continue killing 600k/yr?
In the case of *other diseases* (notably - the flu) previous infections and vaccinations were *still* incredibly effective at preventing hospitalizations and deaths from flu. Why do you think this is different?
I don't predict this. I don't know. I'm worried only because of what we've seen thus far. This disease is just inherently more lethal than flu, and it seems to be inherently more infectious, though maybe that won't be the case when we have some immunity, but we don't know that. It is a very different virus from flu, and even from the other commonly circulating coronaviruses because of what it binds to on the cell, this ACE2 receptor. That's an enzyme that's involved in regulating blood pressure and a whole bunch of other cardiovascular processes. Flu binds to sialic acid, a little sugar molecule that's found on lots of cell surfaces. I thought at the beginning that COVID wouldn't mutate that much and we wouldn't get this crazy variant stew, because that seemed to be what the prediction was. It doesn't mutate nearly as much as flu, but there's just so much of it out there, and it's infected so many people it's had alot of chance to evolve and evolve it has. The COVID that's around now is not the same as the COVID we started with. It's alot more infective, and almost certainly significantly more lethal. I really hope the vaccines keep working long enough and enough people get them soon enough to slow down this evolution, but so far, all it's done is become more infective, and it's already way more infective than the average flu, and more lethal. Flu changes every year, and it can become somewhat more infective, but not like this thing, and flu's lethality doesn't change very much. All I'm sayin is, we should nip this thing in the bud as fast as possible. It's just too dangerous to be allowed to just keep infecting and evolving.
It won't keep killing 600k/year. We'll get much better at treating it, we'll keep updating vaccines, and immunity will probably help. But there is absolutely no reason to believe that it'll ever be just another flu, and the sooner we crush it as much as possible, the less problem it will be.
Johns Hopkins seems to disagree with you on lethality: https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/coronavirus/a-new-strain-of-coronavirus-what-you-should-know
Additionally - lethality is *actively bad* for transmission.
That's what I heard at first as well. However as more cases and data came in, apparently, at least the B.1.1.7 ("British") variant is significantly more lethal. It's one of the explanations for the Michigan flare up.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/covid-19-is-the-b-1-1-7-variant-more-lethal
And you'd think that lethality would be actively bad for transmission, but most transmission happens early in infection, just before and after symptoms appear. People die, if they die, weeks and months later. Therefore, in this case, it won't necessarily be the case that lethality will be bad for transmission. I mean it's not a plus for sure, but what if long term lethality and increased transmission can sometimes be linked? I don't know that they are. I don't think anybody knows if they are, but again, because the receptor is ACE2, and tighter binding to ACE2 can affect its activity and what it's supposed to do physiologically, a link is not impossible.
> You should be very scared of these variants.
Oh god, not the sniffles again! Or maybe I’m not scared of the disease itself, but the overreaction? Perhaps the cure is worse than the disease? Not that lockdowns or masks cured anything
The black folks who make up the bulk of hesitancy aren't hesitant (largely) due to a history of racist government experiments - they're hesitant because they don't like signing up for anything thats part of the official system. They're worried about showing up and finding out, "oh, it says here you owe $350 to the cable company. It says here your $90 parking ticket from 8 years ago will now cost you $270 after fines. It says here you've got a misdemeanor bench warrant for failure-to-appear. It looks like you have $400 in cash on you but we don't have a W-2 on file for you, where'd that money come from? And while you're here, would you like to give a fingerprint?"
This isn't specific to COVID, but seriously anyone who is too paranoid (or precarious) to have a bank account sure as heck aren't going to flattenthecurve.gov to find an appointment and sign up with their social security number. Lower class black folks are MUCH, MUCH, MUCH more like their lower class white neighbors than they are like middle and college-class black people (or their white middle and upper-middle class equivalents). Suspicious of the government, suspicious of the police, suspicious of doctors, etc.
>Perhaps we can air commercials showing vaccinated people living free and normal lives, with no masks, throwing dinner parties and going to concerts without fear.
They have been, other than the concerts part, since about 2 months in. The average person in a rural area has seen almost no direct effect from Corona on their lives, other than being lectured twice as much by elites. That’s where we’re at. No one cares anymore, people are moving and traveling to places that didn’t go full retard
I had a good friend who lived in a rural area, 20 acres, kept his own cows. He was 57 and healthy and now he's dead from COVID. You're right, he was unlucky. I guess I don't feel that lucky either. I still, for the life of me, can't understand why wearing a stupid mask on your face when you go shopping is such an affront to liberty.
When my car drives funny and I think it's the tires (I always think it's the tires, its' the cheapest solution), and I take it to the mechanic guy, and he tells me "no, its not the tires, it's the ball joints and if you don't replace em your wheel's gonna fall off" You know what I don't do? I don't say "I don't like being lectured to by elites" and drive off. I let the guy fix my car, because I obviously don't know much about cars. He may be wrong, but he knows more than me, that I know.
Not an antivaxxer btw. I had corona, will still get the vax (wouldn’t lose any sleep over corona, lol). Seeing as half of you probably still haven’t left your house since last April, I’ll give you the lowdown of the other half. They’re rolling their eyes at this point, especially about two masks or still not being “allowed” to do anything after being vaccinated. To them, the most recent liberal overreaction actually hit the bottom line, so they’re pissed.
You sound more like a troll to me, and a stupid one at that. I suggest substack deserves premium trolls. Tell your boss.
You’re out of touch if you think I’m a troll, lol. As you said, I’m too dumb to troll anyways! I hope your “experts” let you out soon, you sound antsy!
Actually I said you were a dumb troll. Please tell the factory that the low end trolls should be sent to Facebook and Twitter. Substack readers demand more refinment in their trolls.
Depicting a virus with a less than 1% fatality rate for healthy adults as a "silent, ever-hungry terror" is the exact reason Trump voters are refusing the vaccine. They see the mask and vaccination campaigns as an effort by an established and entrenched class of "experts" that are incapable of doing basic cost-benefit calculations and instead using any possible excuse to exert more control over them.
It would be nice if you could convince Trump voters that no, this time it's about public health - but first you'd have to convince them to *trust you*. The 49 ish percent of people who voted for Trump have every reason in the world not to do so.
I defused someone close to me's claims of a "Stolen election" by saying "do you really think that a 6/3 conservative SCOTUS with 3 of the appointees appointed by Trump voted against Trump's election fraud case because they were part of the new left zeitgeist?"
Waving the end of mask mandates and things like concerts in front of them is very likely to get the opposite of the effect you want - the more conspiratorial right-wing antivaxx crowd is already running under the assumption that this is a tool of social control, and convincing them to buy their personal autonomy back by letting the nice men in masks shoot them in the arm is more likely to entrench the new strain of right-wing antivaxxing.
First, establish trust.
What you say: "Depicting a virus with a less than 1% fatality rate for healthy adults as a "silent, ever-hungry terror" is the exact reason Trump voters are refusing the vaccine."
If that were the case, liberals would be refusing the vaccine, as well. The real reason Trump voters are refusing the vaccine is because they are pro-COVID because Trump was pro-COVID ("don't be afraid of COVID"). If COVID had a 100% fatality rate, they would have exactly the same reaction.
"do you really think that a 6/3 conservative SCOTUS with 3 of the appointees appointed by Trump voted against Trump's election fraud case because they were part of the new left zeitgeist?"
Why wouldn't they be? Judges tend to be #NeverTrump. The real reason the election conspiracy theories are dumb is because the election data doesn't look like if they were true -strong swings among the college educated, pro-Trump swings in working class areas of most stripes, anti-Trump swings in almost every state.
There are two possible ways to convince the vaccine hesitant to get the vaccine: make Trump and Republican officials actually endorse it (including endorsing private business vaccine mandates) and point to a majority of private businesses mandating proof of vaccination as a warning to them.
You really didn't read my post, did you?
>that are incapable of doing basic cost-benefit calculations
Exactly. Not only did they fuck the economy, they didn’t even stop the virus, which could have possibly made all this worth it.
> tool of social control
Well they wound down the TSA and NSA, so I’m sure we don’t have much to fear from that