Originally published at: An angry anti-vaccine passport mob storms Westfield mall in London, shutting it down | Boing Boing
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Well, I personally like to make things better by making things worse also. It’s my go-to solution for everything!
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Is it reassuring to know the USA hasn’t cornered the market on Covidiots, or is that just adding to the sinking feeling?
I’m having a hard time making my mind up. Intellectually I know it is bad because it fuels the spread and increases the chance that some (more?) worse variants are mutated into the world. Emotionally it is sort of reassuring to know that we aren’t the worst country in this arena (or if we are the worst, we at least have some company near our outlying dot on the “how nuts are you” graph).
Yeah, I’m going to go with emotionally, because it is that kind of Tuesday.
Thanks UK, thanks for making me feel less ashamed of our own homegrown idiots.
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Not to worry UK, Boris the Clown will come to the rescue.
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No
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Heh, wish the vaccine came in an aerosol delivery mechanism rather than an injection. Then instead of tear-gas to disperse the crowd they could just say they are firing vaccines into the crowd to ensure the safety of everyone.
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Reality or Dawn of the Dead remake?
You decide.
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The UK is often seen as “America, but more sensible”. But as I have followed Brexit and how they have handled Covid 19, it seem they are just more polite sounding while doing stupid things.
Part of me wants to get all of these anti-vax people in a room and infect them all. At least after they recover or die, they will have some immunity and then herd immunity should be achieved and the virus will burn out. Of course we can’t actually do that. Then again - a bunch of people rushing into a mall might mean they are doing it to themselves. 
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If the pandemic was more horrific and virulent, like ebola or smallpox or some rabies-like infection from “28 Days Later” would these people be so self-righteous and self-centered?
One of the lessons of COVID is that “your freedom ends where my freedom begins” applies to disease too.
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As with many crap things, Little Britain provides a preview of the suckitude that lies in store for the U.S. in the near future. Imagine this scene, but with armed Know-Nothings.
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The would be self-centered still, but their actions would change to paranoia and overreactions to protecting themselves.
Humans in general are terrible and long range risk assessment, or gauging risk that is “invisible”. Everyone knows to run away from a big fire, but will light a small contained fire for warmth that kills them in the night with carbon monoxide.
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“What’s the fuss? It’s only a small pox.”
/s
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It’s been observed that in retrospect one of the things that all zombie movies got wrong is that none of them depict a vocal subset of the public demanding their right to be eaten by zombies.
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“Thank god it wasn’t one of those ‘large pox’, right? Then we’d really be screwed!”
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R0 for Smallpox is 1-2x that of covid-19, ebola maybe 1/2 as virulent. (Basic reproduction number - Wikipedia)
(Ebola spreads less quick, but kills more of the people who get it. So many more.)
Ebola is totally novel so R would be R0. We’ve not vaccinated for smallpox since my parents generation… But I have no idea if a vaccine delivered ~40 years ago will give them immunity.
Measles is the damn scary one - R0 of 12-18. Thankfully almost everyone gets their MMR jab so Rt is much less than 1 when it reappears. (Give or take a nursery where the antivax mind-virus has spread and nobody has been vaccinated there. It’ll run right through that nursery)
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You’re not but the UK is actually a bad example for that because it has some of the highest vaccine acceptance rates in the world. Those idiots are the exception. There are plenty of other countries though that have problems with covidiots (or Querdenker as they call themselves in Germany). Weirdly (well not really surprisingly) they’re usually aligned with the far right.
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Yeah, my reflexive thought when I see covidiots doing things like this is, “Well, I hope they all get covid, then!” But I really don’t, because, if nothing else, some poor medical workers will now have to deal with them getting sick and overloading the medical system. It’d only work if we could isolate them all on some empty island somewhere, and we let out any survivors some months later. (Health care provided in isolation by any covidiot medical workers.) But, if US covidiots are anything to go by, I’d really want them isolated all the time anyways, covid or no, so releasing them seems like a bad idea.
I suspect not, as a big part of the problem is that people are getting seriously sick and dying hidden behind hospital doors in isolation where literally no one in their lives can see them, except a few close family members and even then only on a video screen. No one sees the interventions required to keep serious covid patients alive, nor is the damage wrought by the virus particularly visible. (You can’t see damaged internal organs.) If the disease left more obvious traces in those who were sick, people would be less relaxed about it. Though I suspect they’d be irrational about it in different ways.
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