Do it by state or territory now.
American Samoa - Gone.
Northern Mariana Islands - Gone.
U.S. Virgin Islands - Gone.
Guam - Gone.
Wyoming - Gone.
Vermont - Gone.
District of Columbia - Almost.
Alaska - We’ll probably get there.
Not all of them combined, just individually. Still, if you’re picturing Boston as a ghost town, try picturing Wyoming or Vermont empty. We passed that U.S. Virgin Islands vacation being to a deserted island long long ago.
How long before the unvaccinated admit they were wrong?
Never.
That’s a very hard cognitive problem.
To solve this, we need to give them a reason to get vaccinated that lets them still be “right” from before. Hence all the work and event mandates with the inconvenient opt out steps. This way they’ll get vaccinated to avoid the inconvenient step. They’re not getting vaccinated because it’s the right thing, or because they were wrong. They’re getting vaccinated because XYZ requires it and the alternative is onerous plus they really want to do XYZ.
No cognitive problem then. They were both right before and they can be vaccinated. Win-Win (sort of, but I’ll take it)
This fella Peter McKnight writes that believers of conspiracy theories are
Unfortunately he doesn’t suggest a parable that would get through to them.
ETA
BC’s vaccine passport had an immediate effect on vaccine uptake, particularly with young people. We are at ~80% vaxxed. Many of the unvaxxed are rural and northern, and that has become a big problem as the weather cools and people gather inside.
If facts and mockery don’t work, we’ll need to switch to Plan C:
SALAD DRESSING!
But won’t the vinegar in the dressing affect the nanochips??
Not a bad idea, but put it in ketchup.
Lotsa food references today. I’m getting hungry.
I’m in southern Oregon, so this has been on my mind, also. We’ve had some crazy wildfires here and nearby for years now, and we also made national news last month for needing refrigerated trucks to hold extra bodies because all of our morgues were full. Meanwhile, it was only a few weeks ago that 1,600 people came to a local hospital to protest mandatory vaccines for healthcare workers.
Combustible undergrowth, indeed.
The solution seems obvious!
There was someone on the CBC complaining that their horse actually needed Ivermectin and they couldn’t find any since idiots keep buying it from the local feed store. Poor horse.
I chose specifically to call out Boston because I live about 20ish miles away. I’ve been watching the death toll creep up that list of cities to help get a handle on the scope of the pandemic. It’s a little easier to visualize “Hartford, CT is dead” than “121,054 people are dead”.
Someone I know who knows says they’re flipping death certificates.
That’s awesome! Down here in Argentina, we’re at the deep lull between 2nd and third waves, with some things like nightclubs and movie theaters now fixing to reopen Oct 1st (50% occupancy) for first time since pandemic hit. The government said that both doses are going to be required to go to a club, stadium for sports game, etc. Great to hear it works.
I too am very fed up with Trumpkin antivaxxers, but I wonder what percentage aren’t vaccinated for other reasons.
Twenty years ago 3000 people died in a terrorist attack. Americans changed their whole way of life, and demanded the rest of the world fall in line and do the same. Today many times that number of people are dying in a week, and people won’t stay home, wear a mask, or get a free jab.
They didn’t say it then and they don’t say it now, but a lot of those people probably cared more about the buildings destroyed than the lives lost.
And because at the top of the pyramid of idiots lies a handful of very rich and powerful people who are happy to see those people die in droves if it serves their short term interests.
Also because for every story you hear of white idiots taking horse paste, there’s several more you don’t hear about people of color being the ones dying because of the crap health care system, working in necessary services, etc. And we’re back to things that make the people with power extending this and the useful idiots happy…
I think it’s a lot. In jurisdiction after jurisdiction all over the world you see governments announcing something like, “You need vaccines to go to restaurants, clubs and gyms” and next thing you know some large fraction of the unvaccinated are making appointments.
In most places the unvaccinated skew pretty young, and I think young adults just don’t think very much about their health and about staying alive. They pretty much count on staying alive and healthy without doing anything special. I think the response to restrictions shows that all that was in the way of getting vaccinated was just not thinking about it or not prioritizing it.
Then you have people who can’t afford to take a day off work (or to miss a day due to side effects), people who can’t get to a vaccine site, and on and on.
So, like you, I’m sick of hearing about people who have made not getting a vaccine part of their identity. Those people can’t be reached by any kind of public health measure or public communications, only by people they know and trust. But if we:
We can make a big difference. And that’s something we (as in all of us through democratic governments) can do (and we are doing, varying by jurisdiction). Unlike convincing anti-vaxxers which is something you can only really do if you know some personally.
Thank you for spelling out much of what I was thinking, but was too lazy to type out.
Venting our rage at the latest outburst of Trumpish disobedience may be cathartic, but it can distract us too much from bigger problems, that being in this case, the much larger numbers who aren’t vaxxed yet for other reasons.
In the 9/11 terrorist attack, there was a concrete, identifiable source of evil. It wasn’t contagious. You could shoot it with a gun. And it was overseas. You didn’t really have to change your habits that much.
Today, the evil is a contagion that potentially makes you the terrorist. Well, that won’t do! The evil isn’t overseas, it’s everywhere, which is another way of saying it’s nowhere. (If every person is to blame, then no one is to blame.) The only way to do anything about it is to literally do anything about it. That also won’t do!
