Originally published at: COVID-19 vaccines are $500 on the dark web | Boing Boing
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SMFH
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Are they really?
Related topic:
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I’m simultaneously looking forward to and dreading the point when everyone who wants a vaccine is able to get one.
Looking forward to for obvious reasons. Dreading because I fear we will soon lose momentum in stemming the spread of the disease when the anti-vaxxers refuse to help put the pandemic to rest.
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Indeed, they will say, “We TOLD YOU herd immunity would work” once the numbers subside after the vaccine is widely rolled out.
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I’m sure some guy on a random dark web page can mail you something that requires liquid nitrogen to store just fine.
That would require them to know what the term really means, and remember that that was their thing 3 minutes ago.
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I trust that [Vaccine from the Dark Web] maybe on par with tRump/GQP promises.
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A fool and his money (and life) are soon parted.
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Why pay $500 when you can get it for free?
People are weird.
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Well, as long as its “first copy”, you’ll be fine.
(cf: Karl Rock goes to Dubai to chat with low-level scammers | Boing Boing)
besides the fact that it’s highly likely not stored correctly and can’t be when sent out by mail, what’s the point? will you get a certificate? a stamp in your vaccination card? an entry in your health records? speaking as a sociologist, I’d argue that the social consequence of vaccination is more important to most people than the health consequence, i.e. being allowed to travel and take part in public life with a certificate of vaccination, which will probably come in one way or another. A black market vaccination will likely not gain you the health benefit, and definitely won’t get you the social benefits. Now, buying a certificate on the black market, however… that needs no nitrogen cooling…
They’ll help with herd immunity one way or the other. If they decide they would prefer to catch Covid, and risk the results, well, it’s on them, IMHO.
I disagree (or else I misunderstand, which is quite possible). I look forward to resuming social interaction, but I only want it if it’s safe. If I didn’t care about the health consequences, it would be trivial to make a fake vaccination certificate from an image scraped off the internet. And in most situations, I could just claim falsely to have been vaccinated. Are you really saying most people feel otherwise? (Or am I misunderstanding. It’s so often that second one, especially when the topic is “predicting the thoughts of others”.)
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there’s no vaccine in my country. we have to wait for all the rich americans to get it first it seems.
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Jumping the line on vaccine access. Look at the news. You got billionaires chartering private jets to get vaccines meant for Indian Reservations, hospitals getting their supply cut for vaccinating Trump’s kids and their friends early.
Plenty of people want the vaccine, even if they don’t want it publicly known, but aren’t willing to wait their turn. And they’ll spend a lot to make it happen.
I suppose I can see the appeal of this if you were afraid that covid-19 was going to kill you personally.
But fear that covid-19 will kill me isn’t really what makes me want to get the vaccine. What makes me want to get the vaccine is helping to build up that herd immunity to the point where health authorities will feel comfortable lifting restrictions so I can travel back to my hometown to see my friends and family. And getting a vaccine in secret doesn’t move me towards that goal at all, and in fact works against that goal because it will make the number of unvaccinated people appear higher than it actually is.
So thanks dicks, for dragging this out longer for everyone else.
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Dark web vendors are probably doing better business selling falsified vaccine cards and negative test results. “Lately, we’re seeing more vaccination certificates being offered” than vaccines
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I might be wrong, but if I am, it’s the typical cynical-critical sociologist kind of wrong… though I’ve found those cynical takes to be more uncomfortable to say than wrong. but anyway:
sociologists have never met a “usually openly presented argument” we didn’t question; we call this the hermeneutics of suspicion. Never believe that what people say they do is what they actually do. which is to say, while most people will say they’re of course interested in public health!, I suspect a lot of people secretly don’t care quite as much as it’s socially expected to show that they care. It’s that combination of a public sentiment that yells at them for even hinting at anything resembling questioning these days, combined with the fact that a lot of people haven’t actually seen anyone really affected by covid around them; it’s not that kind of pandemic. (a testament to this is that some people will feel an itch to yell at me for saying this, reading my words as “it’s not that dangerous!”… which is not what I said at all. But people invested in media shouting matches have an incentive to construe it that way.)
Which is to say, in the media, not just social, we get this image of hyperventilating danger narratives versus hyperventilating nomasker etc. narratives, Beyod these media circuses, we see a lot more people who go along with the measures, won’t yell either way, but are more than lowkey tired of it all. They’re the ones who will, one year in, still ask me: do you actually know anyone who had it? (for the record, I do: four people, one severely, one lightly, two symptom-free). But the “do you actually know anyone?” demographic is much more numerous than the media would have you assume. a lot of them would take the piece of paper and go out to eat.
I don’t know how numerous. The problem here, again, is that any survey would be an expensive random number generator: getting asked still means you’ll go into show mode and follow a more expected narrative, whatever that expected narrative is in your crowd…
Everyone who has asked me that has, after I say yes, proceeded to list off a number of people they know who actually had it. In a couple of cases including people who died as a result.
One of those people is my brother. Who had it, spent 2 months in the hospital and likely has some lingering neurological damage. Despite this he’ll still mouth off about how “nobody is even sick”, and make vague statements about something being wrong with the numbers and how vaccines are good but “experimental” vaccines are suspicious.
The “do you actually know anyone” crowd isn’t low key tired of it all. They’re people who have low key accepted the conspiracy theories.
