230 Comments
Apr 28, 2021Liked by Noah Smith

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?

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Apr 28, 2021Liked by Noah Smith

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?

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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...

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“ 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.

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Apr 28, 2021Liked by Noah Smith

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.

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Apr 28, 2021Liked by Noah Smith

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.

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Apr 28, 2021Liked by Noah Smith

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.

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Apr 28, 2021Liked by Noah Smith

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

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Apr 28, 2021Liked by Noah Smith

> 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

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Apr 28, 2021Liked by Noah Smith

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.

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Apr 28, 2021Liked by Noah Smith

Run a lottery with an inverse time weighted chance of winning 💰

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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.

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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.

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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.

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>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

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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.

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