We need more reporting like this. The news should be in different hospitals every night showing the results of vaccine hesitancy. Because too many of these people are getting bad advice from their leaders. They’ve been fed a lie about “I the individual” instead of “We the people” and it’s killing them. The news has a responsibility to cover this the right way, and it’s failing us today.
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Libertarians are just Republicans who want to smoke dope and get laid.
Thom Hartmann
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Bears repeating:
https://whatever.scalzi.com/2021/08/09/how-bad-should-we-feel-when-the-willfully-unvaccinated-die
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They likely think they’re doing research as they’re listening to Tucker AND Hannity AND that doctor on Facebook AND the smart sounding guy on youtube AND Trump (he’s been all over the map, so they can pick out the soundbite that best resonates with their feelings). You and I know they’re often listening to idiots and smart people without souls who don’t care about people dying, but there’s no shortage of smart-seeming “authorities” telling them what they want to hear.
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I’ve watched a few people like this grow old and what strikes me the most is how they inevitably end up missing out on the growth their peers get to go through. So busy protecting that brittle ego from more and more necessary changes as the stakes get higher and fewer people have the resources to care. I wish I was surprised to see people die for something so stupid, but I’m … not. Pride goeth before a fall I guess.
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Pressuring these people is counterproductive. If Johnny won’t eat his broccoli, just send the doses overseas. Pretty soon they’ll be saying that there’s a conspiracy to deny them their vaccines.
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I have always known that a significant portion of people are just hopeless fucking morons, and often I have been told it’s not that bad, that I have too much of a negative view on them.
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Oh it’s a new fact I didn’t know…
“NOBODY KNEW THIS. NOBODY KNOWS ABOUT THIS. PEOPLE ARE SAYING, PEOPLE ARE TELLING ME…”
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“Oh you’re being too hard on them. It’s not like they’d refuse a free vaccine for a deadly disease out of spite! Don’t be silly, they’re not monsters.”
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It’s not that they don’t consider it. It’s that they just don’t care. They really do not give a shit how many other people they kill because of their selfishness.
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I was surprised to hear that only 50% of the hospital staff were vaccinated. WTF? It’s possible that most of the unvaccinated staff work in a non-clinical areas like housekeeping or the cafeteria and don’t see people dying every day.
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They have no problem telling other people not to publicly urinate. After all, that’s gross, and those other people are disgusting. But don’t you dare tell them not to publicly urinate. They can urinate any damn place they please, including on you, and how dare you try to infringe on their personal freedoms!
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It’s from all over the hospital, but this is also something that’s kind of complicated.
There’s a nurse shortage at BRMC. A big one. Some of the friends I know from growing up are working 100 hour weeks there. A very common shift right now is 78 on, 12 off. Many of them have already had covid, even from before the vaccine. Many are currently prevented from getting the vaccine because there’s not enough staff to cover for them if they’re affected by the side effects. So if they’ve already had covid, and they don’t think they can find enough coverage , they are either prevented from getting the vaccine or not given the time off for it if they get sick/side effects. Another group of people ABSOLUTELY are refusing, though.
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Thanks, that article sums up my own views as well. Sympathy for those who have been misled, but not for their leaders. My anger is directed towards Fox News, Newsmax, Mike Lindell, Marjorie Greene, and those like them.
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I have always thought this was a consequence of authoritarian “Because I said so!” parenting. If a kid grows up learning that there is never any explanation for any of the things grownups want him to do, and that the only correct response they expect is blind obedience without understanding, that kid will grow up to either be a blindly obeying cult member or a “I don’t wanna be told what to do” libertarian. They never learn to, or are encouraged to, think about whether the order they’re asked to obey is reasonable or not, or to think about the rationale for those orders.
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Yeah, this is definitely part of it.
I recently started to get frustrated with a relative who was insisting that the vaccines aren’t that effective and are just a way for pharma companies who are in bed with regulators to make lots of money. And I knew the medically and economically correct arguments wouldn’t get me anywhere ("Well then why did they develop so few vaccines in other years when there are so many infectious diseases around? And why are covid deaths so closely coupled to vaccination status? And how can you still call something untested when it’s been used hundreds of millions of times this year and consists of compounds that have a known mechanism of action and behavior in the body and a lifetime measured in hours once injected?).
But then I remembered the FDA literally just approved an Alzheimer’s drug that’s very expensive, against the advice of its advisory committee and every expert I’ve seen mention anything about it who insists it doesn’t (and based on the mechanism, essentially can’t) have clinical benefit. And that once they approve it, that essentially guarantees Medicare will cover it, and Medicare isn’t allowed to negotiate on price for drugs. And what other insurers cover is tied to what Medicare covers. And with the number of Alzheimer’s patients out there this could end up being a massive, sustained payday (in the high tens of billions of dollars a year, potentially) for the company that developed the drug.
The argument has the same form in both cases, good epistemology is hard, and it made be a little more sympathetic. He’s still wrong, but I can at least see why he thinks he isn’t.
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Without government investment there would be no line for vaccines. So those governments that were rich enough to invest, were able to offer this to their citizens first.
The world is not fair. This is not the first or last time that rich countries have made things worse for poor countries. It’s not nice but it’s the world we live in, and while I try to make small personal choices to fight against it, it’s like bailing out the Titanic with a teaspoon.
The real moral tragedy would be to start giving third shots before all the second shots are given. I would find that very difficult to accept, if my government offered it to me.
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Congratulations. If you’re in the US, your government is already offering it to you starting in August. And yeah, my comment isn’t necessarily about how “fair or unfair” it is, it’s decidedly unfair. It’s more that the argument that “these anti-vax people in the US are the sole reason why new variants are going to happen” is false. It’s a BS argument. New variants are going to happen even if we were perfect because we’re very, very early in the “vaccinate the world” game here.
What these people WILL do however, and the concern we definitely SHOULD be harping on, is cause us to have decreased medical options and availability, and bog down an already troubled system. If you add up the people in the US who could get COVID, factor for even vaccinated people getting COVID due to community transmission, multiply it by the liklihood of bad cases requiring hospitalization and ICU rooms… you’ll run into a fact. There aren’t enough ICU hospital beds in the US for even the vaccinated people plus the normal usage of ICU beds. Much less the unvaccinated people plus the vaccinated people plus the normal usage of ICU beds.
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I had a stomach bug these last weeks. Nauseous, diarreia, the whole 9 yards. Husband takes me to the emergency room. They ask me if I have Covid or Flu-like symptoms. I say nope, but I’m still sick. Clerk says that the only thing available quickly is a PCR screening but if I really want I will have to wait hours before they can see me.
I cut my losses and went back home, reasoning that most viruses-caused stomach problems will resolve themselves in about a week.
Still, it’s very worrisome that they are leaving people to just suffer in reception until they give up and go suffer at home.
At least my Healthcare is free.
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