Just wait, more efficient and deadly mutations are coming…
(There’s another completely different plague coming in the next 4 to 8 years, too.)
Honestly, none of any real consequence. Yes, it’s more prevelant in red states, but as someone who lives in a blue city in an otherwise red state (hi oregon!) there’s plenty of hesitancy even amongst the blue part of the state to ruin herd immunity chances.
Even if all the republicans, and I mean ALL of them said yes, we still wouldn’t hit 85-90% vaccinated in oregon because of the 15-20% democrats who are saying no.
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A maniac passenger on a winding coastal (cliff) road, who tries to jerk the wheel the wrong way at Every Single Turn.
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hey now. that’s my extended family you’re talking about.
it pains me to admit that they’ve chosen their conspiracy theories over even talking with me. my one remaining consolation is that their beliefs are the result of the playbook of the white, rich, and powerful.
those at the top - trump, most of the republican governors, and nearly all of right wing media - they created this problem. and it is so so hard to break through to people - even loved ones - when their belief system has been deliberately subverted like this
id like them to make it through this. herd immunity was the main hope i had left
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The scale they chose goes from just under 1 out of ten to a bit over three out of ten. Or the other way you can say this is that about 70-90 something percent of Americans are sensible, but there’s some in every county that are not being sensible. I’m happy there’s at least six sane people out of ten based on this parameter in most areas. But if you bash the “flyovers” or the Southerners or the rural small town types, or the farmers… And maybe instead of listening to me and my five sane friends, they starts to hang out more with the crowd that assumes all the experts are wrong, and nobody really knows, so we’ll just wait on getting that shot…
“flyover states” is a dismissive way to refer to communities of millions. Especially since, for the most part, six or seven out of ten of them are more sensible than about one out of ten living in urban coastal cities, if your parameter is vaccine hesitancy. It’s a problem that is in EVERY COUNTY in the country, and making assumptions about the people in those areas is unhelpful.
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but the vaccines are. so for the moment talking about adults is talking about those who are eligible to get vaccinated.
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We conflate a lot by running with “hesitancy”.
Resistance to public health efforts in the Black community exists for a reason. But thing is for things like this vaccine, it doesn’t persist. There’s already headway being made on that front with public information campaigns and community organizing. And it’s expected hesitancy there, and in other minority communities with similar things going on, will fade as more people get access.
But the sort of people who brought measles back, then had parties to deliberately infect their kids. Aren’t gonna change their minds
Meanwhile there’s another sizable chunk of people who’ve already taken pretending COVID doesn’t exist as a core identity marker. And they’ve spent a year flaunting basic public health measures while people die around them. Many of them even as they themselves get sick or die.
The “flyover country” bit is a hoary old canard for sure. But no amount or style of discourse is going to shift those latter groups much.
Those deeper blue bits of the map are deeper blue for a reason, and will remain a problem. Herd immunity and eradication are hard cut offs, it’s not good enough to be close. It doesn’t really matter what your national or state number is either.
Clusters of unvaccinated people (even as small as a neighborhood) mean clustered roving outbreaks. Like we see with measles.
The risk from that isn’t just new strains. It’s those who can’t be vaccinated, or have yet to be vaccinated. The people the herd is meant to insulate. It’s also about what happens when immunity from the vaccine fades. We’re already expecting boosters in 6 months, and probably another round after that. If Covid lives in the US indefinitely, bouncing from cluster to cluster. We can expect to keep all this going for a very, very long time.
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True it’s more complicated than a monolith making bad decisions for the same reasons, and it’s good it’s being attacked on different fronts. It’s more likely someone they know will pass from covid than measles, so it may become more real to some of the measles party crowd. It’s too bad hundreds of thousands dying around the globe, or in the past didn’t get noticed, but when it’s someone they know, it’ll become a bit more real. I have heard at least some of those who disputed the reality but later died of the condition, occasionally realized they’d made a mistake. Sometimes a small amount of individuals (Trump being an example) hold back progress in a region. These people may lose power, or life, from covid or other natural causes. The Governor of Montanta apparently recently flew on a flight with an ill Ted Nugent (surprise, Ted didn’t disclose this). Not something to depend on to ensure vaccine coverage, but change happens. Georgia voted blue for the first time in two decades.
On a mild positive, we are smarter at vaccine and drug manufacture than ever before, so hoping that can give us something of an edge. No guarantees on any of this, of course, but we’ll hopefully continually pouring necessary funds into researching our way out of the pandemic. It could theoretically take only one working drug to make this a much less lethal virus.
Eta: For perspective on the more rapid vaccine production, I’m curious what the time frame would have been if this virus had emerged ten, twenty, fifty years ago. Polio virus was isolated 1909, structure seen on x-ray crystallography in 1958 (Rosalind Franklin didn’t win a Nobel for doing this, maybe if she hadn’t died from cancer or been male…) Behind the picture: Rosalind Franklin and the polio model - News and features - Medical Research Council. Polio was only sequenced in the early 80’s. Covid-19 was isolated, sequenced in a month, x-ray crystallography data by March of last year. Not diminishing the horrific toll of the virus, or the potential existential threat of upcoming pandemics, but so many shortcuts to progress now (on the scientific front, if not the political/societal) than there would have been in the recent past. Fascinated by what the next few decades will bring.
“It’s theoretically possible but we as a society have rejected that,”
Yeah, there’s a time and a place for polite, political speech, but this ain’t it.
What I would say?
“We could eradicate this disease, but a quarter of the population are fucking morons.”
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Measles is actually fairly nasty, about a quarter of people who get it will require hospitalization. To the extent that the death rate is lower (currently), it’s cause it’s been around long enough that we have very good treatments.
Not too many in the Anti-vax community shifted their position after watching children suffer quite badly, and there have been deaths. And that’s just one of the deadly childhood illnesses they’ve brought back from the brink of eradication.
I have heard at least some of those who disputed the reality but later died of the condition, occasionally realized they’d made a mistake.
But how much impact has that had on overall denial? States are still “open”, anti-maskers still scream about their rights and we’re looking at a pretty damn high vaccine refusal rate. Trump lost power, but he still left us with a tapped out vaccine supply and no plan. Got vaccinated in secret for political reasons and Florida is still Floridaing.
Our timeline on this can not be the entire state government of Florida flipping parties. And some one who is already sick (or dead) realizing they’re wrong isn’t exactly moving the needle.
It does, and it could have done so earlier.
But the fact that we got at least two very effective vaccines, in record time, doesn’t matter if large numbers of people refuse to take it because it’s the mark of the beast.
Part of the reason the time line was so fast was that after SARS and MERS a program was started to basically pre-prep prototype vaccines for related and extent strains. To allow rapid development of a specific vaccine in case of pandemic. It’s a big part of what mRNA vaccines may offer.
But funding evaporated with the lack of market after those two diseases faded out. And government programs here, like Obamas entire pandemic program were tossed out by Trump and the GOP.
Supposedly if those efforts had been kept up we could have had a vaccine ready for distribution 6 months ago, if not earlier.
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I think there’s not enough being made of this exact point.
And, we already have some version of a vaccine passport or requirement. Try going to college without a meningitis vaccine, or getting your kids into school without a full suite of shots (yes, it’s possible, but it’s not easy). There are already a number of vaccine requirements for various countries around the world (generally yellow fever, an expensive and difficult vaccine to manage).
At some point countries are just going to have to say “no vaccine, no travel; no vaccine, no college; no vaccine, no <x>.”
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I’m curious about what would happen (in court especially) if employers started listing “Must be fully vaccinated” among job requirements. If I were looking to hire someone, that would be on my list (especially for public facing jobs). Of course, that’s assuming a time when anyone can get a vaccine for free anywhere (hopefully not too far away).
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No, but the (current) vaccine is. Unfortunately.
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There are already governors positioning themselves to not allow this statewide, plus the same governors are leaning hard on OSHA and internal employment law to not prosecute employers for unsafe environments provided by possible exposure (to each other, to/from customers, etc.). This would be a lovely thing in theory, but super hard to make happen or enforce.
It will likely have to be a federal law to have any teeth. We have until midterm elections to get that in place, or the majority may be endangered.
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Agree that months were wasted, and opportunities to save lives have continually been missed, especially in Trump era.
The SARS and MERS era legacy were important, but there pre-existence are not the key difference it’s easier to do things faster, molecular biology has more tools to do cooler things faster. Like a lot in science, wasn’t one gov’t mandate, was a scientist or two or five with smart ideas who was stubborn, hard working, smart and lucky. The story of mRNA: From a loose idea to a tool that may help curb Covid
People can change their minds over deeply held beliefs. It’s not perfect or easy, but we’ve seen a shift in gay rights that would have been assumed impossible not that many decades ago. Buttigieg won the Iowa Caucus and came in second In NH. Not saying we’re done on that front, by any stretch of the imagination, but some things are better.
You mentioned hesitancy of POC to getting vaccinated, but some shifts have been seen in a brief time:
a recent Pew survey challenges the idea that Black Americans are hesitant to get vaccinated: A majority of Black adults (61 percent) told Pew that they either planned to get a COVID-19 vaccine or have already gotten one, a sharp uptick from the 42 percent who said in November that they planned to get vaccinated.
Delivery of vaccines is still complicated and problematic, and blacks are still and underserved medical population. The Reason Black Americans Are Getting Vaccinated At A Much Slower Rate Is Not Because They’re Reluctant | FiveThirtyEight
Bush went from 90% to 25% or so in approval rating.
. People are fickle. They may well be with antivaxx nonsense as well, the assumption “they will never change” is just an assumption. Trump, and the ideas he championed, may follow a similar fall.
Sooo, the TLDR is “we won’t reach 85% immunity because we have 25% stupidity”
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What I’m saying is this is not an issue that will resolve itself. Or where a silver lining that “most” people, or people in particular area being “sensible” will work out.
You keep referencing changes that take decades. Shifts on gay rights took twenty or thirty years. And there’s still a decent chunk of people so opposed to the mere existance of LGBTQ people that they’ll kill over it.
Decades of push back on anti-vax have just seen it become a core concept in right wing circles.
Epidemiology is not politics. Pandemics don’t play out in a way where long societal shifts are a solution. And majorities of people being on the right side of things don’t just win out.
If you don’t hit the mark. It’s rolling quarantines, regular outbreaks, mask requirements, travel restrictions, public vaccine and booster roll outs. And people dead. Till you do hit the mark.
I mentioned reluctance in the Black community because it can not be equated to anti-vax and right wing refusal. For one it’s not generally out right refusal, and it doesn’t really extend to vaccines in general. What that is, is caution about the medical system in general after a very long time of being straight up fucked by the medical system. It’s not ideological, it’s not rooted in a hard no or specific opposition. So it can be impacted by information and typical out reach.
That is markedly different than the anti-vax movement and far right movements. Where people have rejected accurate information, often as part of a conspiracy. Rejected and oppose vaccines in general. And have largely insulated themselves from accurate information and out reach. We already know that typical public health efforts for this sort of thing do not work here, and can actually drive people to become more vehement.
Those people need to be pushed. Cause weirdly, even very ideological people tend to cave in the face of mild inconvenience. Hoping they come around eventually just doesn’t work. And proceeding as if we can do nothing about it, is just the disaster we’ve been dealing with for over a year.
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… We need to bring those PSAs back. If we can’t science rational thought into them, we should try Fear instead.
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Ah, it always comes down to teledildonics. snickers
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