I agree with most your sentiment, but this disease was always going to evolve to be resistant to the vaccine, regardless of uptake in the US or places that have the vaccine.
Worldwide ONE dose vaccine percentages are at 26.6% worldwide. The world is on pace to be vaccinated to a safe level around 2023-2024. Developing / poor nations are at about 1.1%
This virus was ALWAYS going to mutate and possibly to something resistant to the vaccine. Our paltry 90 million people who haven’t done the right thing are a blip compared to the 5,920,000,000 who haven’t even had the opportunity yet.
That said, these refusers had a choice. Which was bought and paid for by their fearless leader. They should have taken it.
Hair Furor himself recently called misinformation a “beautiful word”. Jesus, Mary, and a carpenter from Brooklyn, what has befallen our nation that so many would support such a maniac. America is dead.
Apparently, getting it and either dying or living through it.
If anything, I’m a little torqued off at my state- my mother would easily be classed as ‘high risk’ with her various health issues, and yet she wasn’t able to get her shots until the first part of june, by which time she had already contracted it. Fortunately, she’s made of stern stuff and lived, but it irks me to no end that I was able to get my shots before her. (I’m fortunate that the company I work for is owned by a government entity, and had priority for the rollout. I got my shots in feburary.)
The valedictorian of my high school class dropped out of college after one semester because she grew up very sheltered with her head in a book, went away to a good school but wasn’t ready for the independence, and apparently got such a taste for partying that her life fell apart within a few months. K-12 made her great at taking tests but didn’t prepare her to handle personal responsibility. Obviously an extreme case, but one I always think of when the topic of “stupid smart people” comes up.
One commenter on that Facebook post was very interesting. She asked why people should trust the pharmaceutical industry after the opioid epidemic. I don’t think this paranoia is talked about enough. Sure, pain meds and vaccines are apples and oranges, but if you’re part of a poorly educated community that has been decimated for the past couple decades by drugs that start off as something doctors prescribe I can see how it wouldn’t take much for someone to convince you that all fruit is bad for you. That’s easy pickings for exploitative forces like Fox News, the Republican Party, Trump, MTG, etc.
Every half-awake sales person knows that the customers who consider themselves “rational” are some of the the easiest to emotionally manipulate. They have a wilful blind spot.
They shouldn’t trust the pharmaceutical industry. Big Pharma is nasty. Big Pharma lies. They should trust the scientific research community that was telling them that long term use of opioids was a really bad idea in the early 90s, loudly and frequently. They should also notice that when Democrats were in office the FDA did its best to restrict opioid prescriptions, whereas when Republicans were in office the FDA did essentially nothing on that front, so maybe they should trust the government when a Democrat is the president.
Obviously, I can’t know if this is true for your mom, but the gnostic lure of “hidden knowledge available only to a select few” is a siren song that has led many a ship to ruin. Tough to pull them back out of that sort of cult.
Sure, but these are low-education people. Their ability to think critically is limited to “The doctor gave Jim Bob oxy and it ruined him. Things the doctor gives you is bad.” A huge chunk of Americans function about a notch just above animal instinct and always have. It’s been part of the fabric of this country since the first colonists. Getting these people to change requires overcoming the fundamental nature of America.
BTW: Just so I’m clear, I’m focusing on the less educated in this case. There are plenty of other anti-vaxxers out there with different justifications that require entirely different tactics to deal with. This is a beast with many heads.
Sure house fires are bad, and some people burn to death but has anyone really studied the effects of all that steam that comes off when we spray water into fire?
What about that so called fire retardant foam? Surely that isn’t natural.
It’s sickening. A friend of mine refuses to get vaccinated because he read that some places are giving fake vaccines to POC to do Tuskegee style experiments on them. I don’t know what to tell him. I’m not sure he has a doctor he even trusts.
I can’t agree with you on that. It’s tempting, but lazy. Trump et al. have created a socially transmitted delusion that plays on human psychology. Even educated people are falling for it because at their core, humans are not rational. Rational thinking is a late add on to our evolution that is easily bypassed. And we pretty much all have at least some irrational biases. It’s just way, way more obvious with the Trumpian anti-science crowd because of all the dead people in their wake.
And that creates a blind spot for people on the left, because our irrationality doesn’t leave such a wake. But I know people who lost their rationality after 9/11. They spent so much time “researching” to prove it was an inside job ultimately to help Bush. And that conspiracy mode, unfortunately, makes them susceptible to all sorts of things. Including but not limited to the lies about all vaccines as well as COVID.
