“And even Fox News.”
Go get em, Joe.
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The thing is, this isn’t just “white angry hillbilly because America”. This is the breakthrough infection on the 80 year old octogenarian with cancer. This is the person with lots of health issues who has been advised not to get a shot and is facing trying to go back to the office under work requirements because disabilities are in accommodated. While yes, healthy people willfully rejecting the vaccine are going to constitute the bulk of these cases, we also have to bear in mind the burden that this is putting on various minority groups, via disability status or what have you. And maybe ultimately the public health choice will be that the burden falls on those groups because it has to. But we have to be aware of the impact we’re having on them and not pretend like it’s not happening and we’re not unduly burdening some groups that already carry more than their fair share.
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But testing does not prevent infections.
And testing does not prevent people from spreading infections.
It might keep them out of work if they test positive, on a 2-week (paid?) quarantine, but can you keep them out of grocery stores? (Or even get them to put masks on?)
Vaccinations prevent infections. Testing is not helping that 80 year old octogenarian with cancer. It does nothing to further herd immunity .Vaccinating does.
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While I certainly don’t have the greatest faith in a lot of people (hellooooo working in healthcare), I think you’re selling a lot of folks short. For example, my uncle. Anti-vaxxer, usually no mask, kind of a dick. Recently left his wife of 35 years for a mistress 20 years his junior. great stuff like that. Real standup guy. But you know what? He notified everybody he knew he had come in contact with after his positive Covid test and self quarantined and my dad did the same because he had been exposed.
Anecdote aside, I’ve never seen something to suggest that testing is considered useless. Do you have a source for that?
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Anecdote aside, I’ve never seen something to suggest that testing is considered useless. Do you have a source for that?
Testing is not useless, and it was the best tool we had when there was no vaccine. But we KNOW the virus can spread before a person tests positive, the viral load to trigger a test is a lot higher than the viral load to get other people sick. If these people are only testing once a week, a lot can spread before they have a positive test in hand. Testing needs to go with a strong quarantine and contact tracing strategy- and with mask usage.
If tests alone kept people from getting the virus, Trump would have never gotten sick. Everyone around him tested DAILY, not weekly. The NFL and MLB test constantly, look how many players got sick. Someone who has a positive test, and assumes that means they are not sick, could get a lot of other people sick.
Not to mention, it appears vaccinated people are not having to be tested, which doesn’t really help things if there is still strong enough community spread that breakthrough cases are frequent.
Your uncle is way better than my neighbors. I’ve seen “heading to get my covid test”, then a picture of them unmasked at an indoor event, then the next day “ugh, positive” on Facebook.
I routinely see “ugh, kids exposed again, gotta get a test before heading to work today”. ALL the paperwork when you test says to quarantine until you get your results if not exposed and for 2-weeks if you were exposed regardless of results. Based on the fact that schools are not telling anyone if a student tests positive, including those in their classroom, those quarantines are no longer happening. My work is only notifying us if someone within 15 feet of our office tests positive. So there is plenty of exposure not being quarantined for.
Through acquaintances, I know people who tested positive for covid and then just went about their daily life like normal because they “felt fine”. People out here truly believe it is no big deal. “You wouldn’t not go the grocery store just because you have a cold.” (Um, well actually… you shouldn’t!)
I really wish the government would issue a mask mandate. If you go by the grocery store, we have a 95% vaccination rate here. Even 85% of kids under 12 seem to be vaccinated.
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Yes, but we also learned the hard way from the HIV epidemic that you can’t make perfect the enemy of good on public health measures. Is vaccination the ideal here? Yes of course. And I think the goal of this is to make sure more of them happen. If this is an effective way for that to happen, then excellent. It still is a vaccine mandate, just not a 100% covering all bases one. That’s still progress. This is still millions of additional people being required in some venue to be vaccinated whereas previously they were not in any way shape or form.
There are still a lot of fence sitters that this will likely inconvenience enough to push them into action, I’m sure is the idea.
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I agree with @Oro and @Bracken_Joy and I also think this idea that everyone who is anti-vaxx is some caricature of an evil trump supporter who wants to “own libs” is untrue. That’s some of them, sure, but when we look at hesitancy groups it is not just one group or type of person, much like there wasn’t one single demographic with Trump voters (which the NYTimes expressed total shock over this last election), or Obama voters, or the many people who voted for both candidates back-to-back.
Dehumanizing the opposition is an integral step to radicalization on both sides, and the media is a huge fan of doing it because it plays well with both camps of readers and makes them feel superior to the other. I also think privilege plays a real role here in terms of education, evaluation of media, understanding of the industry of politics and media, raw IQ, and past experiences with government and medical authorities. If it were purely political affiliation I don’t believe we’d see so much reticence in minority groups that tend to vote democrat.
I don’t think punching down is the answer to getting more people vaccinated; I think that’s actually a surefire way to push people further away and re-affirm the “out of touch liberal elitists” narrative. I’m not against this new legislation though, assuming there are actual accommodations made for those who can’t get vaccinated, which I am dubious about.
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I keep hearing that women my age, into everything I’m into are a big piece of the vaccine hesitant. And my personal aquaintances show it. People who are/we’re vaccine hesitant and science positive (i.e. I want more data, I want to wait) are turning towards the conspiracy theories because it’s the only welcoming group left.
Personally I’m upset over some of my country and ocvupation’s decisions to brute force vaccine uptake and information sharing.
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I agree, it is not the only reason, especially when you look at vaccine hesitancy among minority groups.
But it is a MAJOR group where I live. There is not a day that goes by, if I leave my house, that I don’t hear something about sticking it to the libs, literally, leaving someone’s mouth.
The republicans in my state have gone out of the way to make sure people cannot receive federal benefits during the pandemic. They have done everything they can to prevent people from being able to protect themselves during this pandemic. It’s hard to feel sorry for any republican here.
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I went from thinking this was a trumped up view from the media, to being surrounded (virtually - I’m not going anywhere) by the anti vax crowd when we moved south. From the FB pages I’m on in New Area, the pandemic is totally over. Hardly masks, no distancing, and F*ck Joe Biden who wants to see small business fail, inject untested chemicals in everyone, and give money to the deadbeats sitting at home without jobs. It’s…eye opening. I’m not a person who is in favor of mandating anything across the board, but also I want this pandemic to end ever please.
Anyway, not really arguing with anyone here, just stating my surprise to find myself surrounded by a lot of vocal anti-vaxxers. My sister has chosen not to get the vaccine for medical reasons, and I respect the thoughtfulness that has gone into her decision, even though I would choose differently if I were her.
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I think that people’s experience of the pandemic is just so vastly different depending on where they live.
It is over here. Pandemic, what pandemic?
It will not end if people don’t even recognize it is a problem.
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I’d like us to have tests everywhere be free all the time paid for by the taxpayers. Maybe at least some part of our health care will be socialists
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Well, I’d support that if we actually were on the road toward making healthcare accessible rather than just subsidizing people who won’t get vaccinated.
My husband said his work is working on a test that does covid+influenzaA+influenzaB at the same time. That would be handy.
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Nope I want to subsidize everyone I don’t care what medical procedures or drugs they have had before. I don’t want any more for people to say they don’t want to pay for my STI tests because I am unmarried than I want to say that I don’t want to pay for covid tests for the unvaccinated.
Most cafes and museums and restaurants and train stations in Germany now require vax proof or a test to get in. You can get a test anywhere, takes 15 mins, free. Handy if you even just forget your vax card.
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This is great. I saw that Moderna is working on a covid/flu combo shot. I wonder if it would be ready for Australia’s flu season.
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Also this affects so few workers and nearly no one in food service.
Based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau, there were 6.1 million employer firms in the United States in 2018 and 98.1 percent of them have less than 100 employees.
This is why FMLA (our one mandated unpaid sick/parental leave) doesn’t help most people, because most people don’t work at Firms >50 employees.
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I hear you, my bff is a hospice nurse and lives in the ultra conservative rural area where we both grew up. She hears a lot of this stuff, plus conspiracy theories, people telling her she’s in on it, etc. She has been at a lot of death beds for unvaccinated people and it’s pretty horrific and heartbreaking, many of them plead with their family members to get vaccinated with their last breath. Some are so mentally ill that they think this is all part of the cover up, seriously, they think they are being assassinated for speaking the truth and refusing vaccination. It’s pretty sad.
I guess when I hear anger at that level on either side it just strikes me as intense pain and suffering and insecurity. I don’t think this resistance to come together all sprang out of nothing the day Trump was elected. I don’t think we went from “we have different views but we can still be respectful of each other’s rights” to what is happening now, with no long interlude of divergence. I also don’t think reacting with the same type of black and white thinking is going to help, I literally think that’s what got us where we are.
I also think the intense distrust of the media is worth exploring and is not being upheld as a major factor in radicalization, when IMO it absolutely is and it could possibly be the single biggest factor. Not just news media either, but entertainment media in general. I also think the tone on college campuses plays a role because there is absolutely no balance of views on most campuses. This all ties together if you ask me and it makes it easier for extremists to claim victimization.
Why was it so easy for millions of people to believe Trump’s “fake news” angle? There’s a reason! Because part of it is true. Those seeds were firmly sewed already, through years of reporting without balanced perspectives, very vocal disdain of anyone in a rural area (which is quite common/considered acceptable on this forum as well!), anyone with certain religion, anyone of a certain race and socioeconomic group, etc. That disdain was heard and felt intensely for years, and then an insane politician came along and said, “yeah that’s not in your head, it’s real” and people jumped aboard.
Corrections are always on page 20, right? If they’re there at all! Even in the latest NY Times newsletter posted here it was pointed out that the Times themselves were guilty of doing what they were deriding, but of course they don’t point that out because they are always innocent and correct. The history of these publications has been swept under the rug too and they are seen as bastions of objectivity (like how the Times participated in listing the names of “known homosexuals” for years), but today if you criticise media you are placed in the “stupid white hillbilly trump lover idiot” category.
I think more and more topics feel off limits to discuss IRL and online than at any other point in my life (granted I’m only 34, but still). I know I’m not the only person who feels this way because I even get DMs here about it, where people are afraid to write their thoughts publicly for fear of backlash, but want to talk privately. I hear it from IRL friends too, with the sheer amount of caveats people feel they have to state before having an opinion. More and more points of view are instantly correlated with a caricature type of person, on both sides. I don’t think that’s good!
Anger and hatred and even sarcasm and mockery are easy and that’s why those things spread so insanely fast, not just here, but look at extremism in the Middle East. I mean things were not like that even 50 years ago! Hatred is so appealing to the ego and now it’s the officially sanctioned way to react even among super highly educated people. Anyone who holds certain beliefs or states their beliefs in a certain way is un-personed.
It makes me really nervous. I keep thinking about Shirley Chisholm and how she said something like (paraphrased) ‘if they continue to exclude us I will draw a bigger circle to include them’. Her idea of the bigger circle was absolutely extended to people who didn’t even believe she should have the right to speak, but she still thought that was a more effective way at changing minds. I find that really compelling.
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Love that whole post, AllHat.
Honestly I think a huge part of what’s going on is that people are waaaaaaay maxed out on the amount of complexity we can handle. And when that happens, we grasp on to simple solutions – having some kind of answer, even a wrong one, is better than being maxed out and confused.
Our lives are crammed full of details and capitalism has set things up to where dropping the ball on even one of them can have massive consequences. Media plays a huge role in this – the more stuff there is to read, click on, and be afraid of, the more money they make. And since money is basically our society’s number one way of assigning value, they just keep ratcheting it up.
So I keep trying to think, how can we make things a little simpler? How can we add a little breathing room to our lives and the lives of the people around us, so that we have the time and mental space and regulated nervous systems we need if we want to think clearly?
I don’t know how to do this on a big enough scale to make a big difference, but it’s something I try to do
at work (resisting manufactured urgency, encouraging everyone to rest and take vacation) and in my community (offering mutual aid) and even within myself (being aware of my own state of activation and taking a moment to chill before I respond to stimuli). It’s hard! But I look around and see so many people rushing around from activity to activity and I’m just like WHY? Why are we rushing to destroy the planet and our ability to leave peacefully as fast as we possibly can?
It feels like some lizard brain switch has been flipped in a huge number of people. I don’t know how to calm that down but it feels important.
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The lizard brain and the idea that we’re just maxed out on complexity is really fascinating! I could see that because we evolved to handle social complexity, but only the social complexity around us, right? Like when we were all living in tribes or small villages we had hierarchies and wars and all that, but you didn’t have to understand the inner workings and motivations of every village, just yours. Tragedies and disasters too, you knew if your village was being abused, or lost food due to drought, but you had no awareness of it happening every single time it happened to others.
If anyone can suggest reading on this topic I’d be super interested!
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