There's definitely an organized push to disseminate anecdotal stories of "see, he didn't get the vaccine, and on his death bed, his last wish was for everyone to get vaccinated."
Maybe these stories are put out by the AP? I'm in Lincoln, NE. Omaha is an hour a way. And these exact stories will run in both local papers the exact same day.
If you go on the Herman Cain Awards, there's some of that, but there's also a whole lot of people or their family posting anti-vaccine content right before (and sometimes after) the patient dies. Pure insanity.
Look folks, you can get owned by the libs or you can get owned by the virus. One of them leaves you living to post another day. It's the Trump vaccine, Christ. Remember when the pharma companies delayed announcing the vaccine to not give him the win before the election?
I hate that sub with a passion, I really do. Morbid schadenfreude at the deceased under a thin disguise of “awareness of the dangers of being anti-vax.”
It's perfectly reasonable to have a distaste for this, but I am curious as to if you take issue with this because the person in question is deceased, or if you just take issue with mocking someone under all circumstances.
> the doxxing
I can't say I've seen any of that. Admittedly I only ever see posts from that subreddit when they show up on r/all, so maybe it gets cleaned up on popular posts, but everything I've seen on the subreddit is just directly screenshotted from social media.
> and the general atmosphere of “the vermin are extinguishing themselves and the world is better for it.”
This one is really just a matter of your opinion on trolley problems. For what it's worth I'm pretty sure just about everyone on that subreddit would prefer the individuals in question have a sudden inspiration of critical thought and save their own lives.
> I'm pretty sure just about everyone on that subreddit would prefer the individuals in question have a sudden inspiration of critical thought and save their own lives.
That's backed up by the praise for people who post there saying they've changed their opinion.
I'm not going to lie and claim the feeling of schadenfreude isn't a factor, but it's more than that. The other reason that subreddit is happy about anti-vaxxers dying is because it means one less person spreading anti-vax sentiments (actually more since their family may stop too).
However, the subreddit isn't calling for anti-vaxxers to be killed. The deaths of anti-vaxxers who die for reasons other than COVID are not celebrated.
We care about vaccination rates because we care about human lives - so what have we gained if we lose our humanity in the process of trying to save it.
The lives of the people who aren't trying to get their peers killed, hopefully.
If someone is so hell-bent on dying that they'll ignore every single qualified doctor telling them that they're wrong, we can't really do much about that. But at least it usually stops them from getting other people killed with the same stupidity.
I am not American, but watching the way the vaccine has been politicised, I can understand a certain level of schaudenfreude as a reaction to after the years of Trump governing to 'owning the libs'.
I am not sure what to think about that sub, all I know is that where I live COVID hasn't been too bad, so it gives me a window into what it's like in the rest of the country. It mostly makes me feel bad, like looking at casualty lists from WW1 except someone told them they didn't have to go over the top. It's just so senseless and pointless.
The targets of vitriol should be the media and political figures who made vaccine hesitancy mainstream amongst conservatives, not individual people.
People are blinded by the public figures and institutions that they trust - and yes, that includes us.
They were steered wrong because they trusted the wrong people. You can imagine how fast the sentiment around vaccines would change amongst the professional class if suddenly the NYT, WaPo, HuffPo, Democratic politicians, etc. uniformly expressed that vaccines couldn’t be trusted.
> The targets of vitriol should be the media and political figures who made vaccine hesitancy mainstream amongst conservatives, not individual people.
Agreed. I never said I submitted anything to the sub or founded it or something. I do find it useful to see what is happening to people. A secondary reason I was there is my parents are anti-vax and comorbid and I was hoping to find something that would break their hypnosis, but it's too deep.
That said, as someone that was previous conservative and my parents are conservative, I can say definitively though that conservatism is a suckers game and it should be obvious to anyone that it's a pack of lies by the cruelest and most selfish people in our society with grifters and the super-rich at the top. Liberalism isn't much better (in some ways worse because they have enough credibility with workers to do real damage sometimes without pushback).
> You can imagine how fast the sentiment around vaccines would change amongst the professional class if suddenly the NYT, WaPo, HuffPo, Democratic politicians, etc. uniformly expressed that vaccines couldn’t be trusted.
That reality almost happened. At the presidential debates Harris said that she wouldn't take the vaccine if Trump told her to (which was about whether it was the FDA or Trump pressuring the FDA). If they really leaned into that, we'd be in a different world right now. Like everything these days, it's psychic whiplash how fast things change.
I remember Harris saying that and remembering always makes me chuckle.
I'm glad you mentioned that because that was my first thought reading the parent comment.
Regarding the "sucker's game" comment I can see where you're coming from but wanted to offer my perspective. I'm only a conservative because I'm anti big government, anti identity politics, and pro individuality. However, we live in a two party system so I have to root for the whole team. Those core issues outweigh all other factors. Sometimes after rooting for the same team for many years you just pick up the banner and wave it.
Have you asked your parents what their core beliefs are and why they're on that team? You might find they're one or two issue voters. Not sure if that would help you find some peace with them.
> Have you asked your parents what their core beliefs are and why they're on that team? You might find they're one or two issue voters. Not sure if that would help you find some peace with them.
My mother is a Q-anon type person that became deranged and believes in physically impossible conspiracies. She's jewish and hangs out in alternate youtubes that have videos of burning stars of david next to the Q stuff she's interested in. I think she became disoriented by her economic trajectory in life where she initially was working with a masters and then became a housewife that was unable to reenter the economy. She spent over a decade listening to right-wing talk radio and fell into the youtube zone. and At this point I do not know what will reach her.
My father is a lawyer that rubs shoulders with big real estate people. In his youth he supported Nixon. This lived experience of contact with the morally bankrupt rich capitalists has imo morally damaged him. When I asked him if a poor person should die on the street if they can't pay for healthcare, he assented. He doesn't want to be a bad guy, but outside of his specialty his thinking is not clear or imo firmly grounded. He watches Fox and listens to Tucker. He's a Regan type Republican.
> I'm only a conservative because I'm anti big government, anti identity politics, and pro individuality
I'm a communist because over time I realized that we are being divided against each other by the rich and need social solidarity and democracy to have a high-functioning society. I think freedom comes from having security in food, housing, education and from the creative output of individuals and groups and not from what you're able to buy. In other words, a decent society comes from addressing the needs of the people and cooperation, not from making them compete against each other.
It's not just vaccine hesitancy, they have been undermining public institutions in the US for ages. There is nothing remotely close to say, the NHS in the UK.
The worst post I've seen on that subreddit yet was one where the wife of the person who passed away made a post that claimed god had cured her husband... by killing him. Cured through death. My head nearly exploded at that one.
I've had the covid twice in 2 years, with nothing more than having to stay in bed, feeling a bit dizzy and play Skyrim for a day before I was able to work again (wfm). Second time was much milder. I'm pretty confident I can handle a third infection without dying nor getting vaccinated.
Please stop fearmongering people, if you're under 50 and have no comorbidity, you're not at risk.
On the opposite side, the waiter from the coffee shop where I use to sit and read my newspaper on sunday has got a
I'm glad you're doing okay, but long COVID is real. Also, for real, how many people do you know that have zero commodities??? Nearly everyone has one. America is fat, diabetic, and has no universal healthcare.
EDIT: We should absolutely be taking care of people that got sick, but America has no social solidarity whatsoever. It's disgusting.
Long-COVID sounds like pseudo-science to me. They poll a bunch of people who have had COVID, and then attribute the reported symptoms to COVID, when there are a host of confounding factors. For example, anxiety - the most commonly reported long-COVID symptom - can easily be explained by the extreme fear surrounding COVID, or the two weeks of total isolation that all people diagnosed with COVID are prescribed.
The negative impact of fear is being completely dismissed by a large cross-section of the population. Reposting what I posted above:
>>Great clip of Bill Maher citing a survey in which 41% of Democrats said that if you catch COVID, the chances of going to the hospital are >50%... (the correct answer is between 1% - 5%) Maher says the "liberal media needs to take responsibility for scaring the sh*t out of people"
Some of the symptoms could be seen as psychological, but I've read several studies that identified brain damage in imaging, lung damage, heart damage, and kidney damage. It's real. I'm writing an article on this, but the research has required so much reading and interpretation it's taking me a long time.
Some long COVID symptoms are loss of the ability to regulate heart rate reliably. This causes difficulty even standing up because you need to rebalance your blood pressure! It's not every single person that gets these problems, but the population burden is and is going to be enormous.
One cardiac study I read found that the closer they looked, the more heart damage they found, much of it subclinical. That subclinical damage is going to be important as you age even if you don't notice it right away.
Puntmann, V.O., Carerj, M.L., Wieters, I., Fahim, M., Arendt, C., Hoffmann, J., Shchendrygina, A., Escher, F., Vasa-Nicotera, M., Zeiher, A.M., Vehreschild, M., Nagel, E., 2020. Outcomes of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Patients Recently Recovered From Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19). JAMA Cardiol 5, 1265. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamacardio.2020.3557
"To our knowledge, this is the first prospective report on a cohort of unselected patients with a recent COVID-19 infec- tion identified from a local testing center who voluntarily un- derwent evaluation for cardiac involvement with CMR. The results of our study provide important insights into the preva- lence of cardiovascular involvement in the early convales- cent stage. Our findings demonstrate that participants with a relative paucity of preexisting cardiovascular condition and with mostly home-based recovery had frequent cardiac in- flammatory involvement, which was similar to the hospital- ized subgroup with regards to severity and extent. Our obser- vations are concordant with early case reports in hospitalized patients showing a frequent presence of LGE,3,25 diffuse in- flammatory involvement,10,26 and significant rise of tropo- nin T levels.4 Unlike these previous studies, our findings re- veal that significant cardiac involvement occurs independently of the severity of original presentation and persists beyond the period of acute presentation, with no significant trend to- ward reduction of imaging or serological findings during the recovery period. Our findings may provide an indication of po- tentially considerable burden of inflammatory disease in large and growing parts of the population and urgently require con- firmation in a larger cohort. "
We don't have enough evidence at this point to be claiming long-COVID exists as a significant problem, and such a situation would contradict the very mild effects that COVID manifests in most cases. The evidence in support of it is not rigorous. If this was the breadth and rigor of the evidence being used support the idea that ivermectin is an effective COVID prophylaxis, no one would give the idea a second look.
Also, people who have had ICU care may get life-changing injuries from the care itself.
It's worth noting that with delta and unvaccinated younger cogorts, we can see hiw the relative risk of ending up in ICU increases for younger cohorts.
Sweden has good register web page for this. Choose fates after July 2021 to see how the distribution of cases moves to the left, younger cohorts.
In the time period before you were symptomatic but we’re still contagious did you potentially get anyone else sick? What’s your level of confidence if you catch covid again, you won’t spread it prior to being symptomatic? Are you comfortable with the fact that you could be the nexus that leads to many others getting sick? What if one of them dies? Or has a miscarriage? Or hospital bills?
Yeah, sure, I’ll be fine if I get covid. Will my toddler? Will the person at the store who doesn’t have the luxury of working from home? It’s such a big, selfish risk for something that’s so easy to deal with.
I'm implying that we all had a better life, better relationships with each other, and a healthier view of dealing with disease as a society before we started measuring this one.
I've had the covid twice in 2 years, with nothing more than having to stay in bed, feeling a bit dizzy and play Skyrim for a day before I was able to work again (wfm). Second time was much milder. I'm pretty confident I can handle a third infection without dying nor getting vaccinated.
Please stop fearmongering people, if you're under 50 and have no comorbidity, you're not at risk.
On the opposite side, the waiter from the coffee shop where I use to sit and read my newspaper on sunday has got a sight impairment since he got vaccinated: he now sees double. His doctor refuses to believe him. Unfortunately, the pro-vax people won't help him get a new job, nor compensate for his financial loss. Deal with it, plebs.
There are and they're out there counter to the random stories of "X got the vaccine and died the day after!"
But FWIW, I find that kind of thing to be too propaganda-ish and to push people away. I'd rather have a more boring discussion about the numbers and why we've seen thousands of people dying per day from Covid and the risks just aren't there from the vaccine. To hear some talk, we should just start randomly dying from it, but that obviously hasn't materialized.
I don't deny that either group exists, but I instead tell people that we have to take a step back because there aren't equivalent numbers of each event. There are orders of magnitude more Covid deaths (and injuries) than vaccine injuries. Yes, there are some of each, but as always, the actual numbers matter here.
I don't really find long Covid to be that useful in arguments. I suppose it has its place vs. the "untested" nature of the vaccine, but it's not really "untested" any more than the average flu shot is, and nobody is randomly dying in droves from those. Also it's in many millions of arms, so if there's something horrible that's going to happen due to it, well... where are all the deaths? We'd need to see millions of them to get anywhere close to the impact of Covid.
I mean it is a legitimate reaction people are having, it's not surprising the standard outlets pick up on these type of stories because they do push for the outcome of getting people to vaccinate.
I think these mass distributed stories work against the movement.
I’m looking at these stories, wondering why they’re running a story about a guy in NC when local Nebraskans are dying. Why aren’t they covering the local story?
Why is it cross posted across local news outlets.
Just lazy journalism or a concerted message. Feels gross either way. And not pursuasive. At all.
Oh definitely. And the stories about how hospitals are now like war zones. I totally understand the enormous toll and pain this pandemic has caused, but headlines like these make me feel like it infantilizes the problem in a way I can't quite lay a finger on. "Get your shots or else the boogeyman will take you away" works on kids, does not seem to work too well on adults.
And "the vaccine is the Boogeyman - look that's why we're not allowed to say so on YouTube" isn't infantilizing? You might be giving too much credit to adults who can't do basic math.
> You might be giving too much credit to adults who can't do basic math.
I agree and perhaps this is where most of the difference lies. I do tend to place an outsize trust on adults whether they can do basic math or not, probably from my upbringing in a rather rural setting where the average person may not be able to handle math beyond 4th grade and yet be very "street smart". I don't see them as any inferior as far as decision making is concerned.
I don't knock street smarts, and I do believe in living by your gut. I think people without formal education or much numeracy will - left to their own devices - come to very sane conclusions about viruses and vaccines if they're just given the raw data to work through. What they don't have is the armor to repel false arguments. The premise of telling someone who's never read a medical text to "do your own research" - by reading conspiracy sites online - is just so ridiculous that you know whoever is telling them that is laughing up their sleeve. I live in a deep red area so I see this all the time... when people say they did their own research on the vaccine, I think, wow. Research is a big word.
This is different from having a gut feeling that something is wrong and you don't trust the government. It's almost like the in-group of pro-vax, pro-science liberals has deliberately organized and promoted a mass display of ignorance by the skeptical country folks just for the purpose of pointing and laughing and delighting in their ignorance. And yet, the antivax fever that's swept over the red states is still ignorant, and even more so if it plays directly into a concerted plan to make them look like fools who are prolonging the pandemic.
Maybe these stories are put out by the AP? I'm in Lincoln, NE. Omaha is an hour a way. And these exact stories will run in both local papers the exact same day.
Feels... slimy.