There's a frightening crisis of trust in authority, and frankly those in authority are the only ones to blame. It's been brewing for decades. More recent causes of this decay:
-mixed messaging on basics from NIH on COVID in the early days, including outright lies (remember when wearing masks was bad for you?) -> Elites are clueless
-Mixed messaging from pretty much every global leader about the best approach to handling the pandemic, clearly showing there are many uncertainties and unknowns. HOWEVER instead of genuinely acknowledging and encouraging public discourse on these uncertainties beyond lip service, act in a very paternal manner then do whatever polls tell them to do. -> Elites are clueless and only care about retaining power
-Pfizer's CFO actually saying in a call in 2021 that when the pandemic is over, they will be able to drastically bump up the price on the vaccine, pricing out the global South ensuring a constant, annual "supply" of new variants to threaten the global North that can afford the annual booster. -> Elites are corrupt, in particular Pharma.
-The Sackler family faces zero consequences and kept their fortune. -> Elites are corrupt, in particular Pharma.
These are just three examples surrounding health and pharma, but like I said it's been brewing for decades (WMD, Banksters, Austerity, etc) and frankly I don't blame people for losing trust in authority like this. Especially given the education system is structured in a way to engender Trust in authority. Unless those in position of leadership face real consequences, inclusively serious prison time and loss of fortunes for their mistakes (accidental or otherwise) this corrosion will go on.
P.s. to the downvoters: please provide a comment including how any one of the above items does not erode trust in authority
This is spot on. An average person will, consciously or not, perform a risk/benefit assessment for important decisions such as vaccination. But they may not have necessary resources to engage in deep research, and therefore must employ the traditional shortcut - trust. Trust is the most valuable asset an authority can have, but it was squandered with lightning speed by governments and corporations through mixed messaging, censorship of competent voices, and corruption.
And everyone who uses this argument fails to account for the fact that grifters are a symptom of the problem and only enabled by the loss of trust in the first place
This is really sad as it will probably cause unnecessary children deaths down the road.
I think public health authorities have serious soul-searching to do, this outcome was clearly warned upon by a lot of doctors and paediatricians who seen first hand parents not understanding why those authorities were pushing so hard novel mrna covid-19 vaccines on healthy children that were basically not at risk from this disease.
It's difficult for the soulless to soul-search, and all too many who lead us here are soulless sociopaths. Beyond the loss of confidence from the public, many of my friends who work at the CDC, and have been there their entire careers, have lost faith in both the organization and its leaders. I expect the CDC will experience a lot of brain drain and loss of institutional knowledge now that the rank-and-file have had to confront what has been going on since even before the pandemic. Even worse it that they'll likely be replaced by those who are uncurious true believers that won't question anything, giving the sociopaths in charge even more power.
Excellent observations. As a general rule this is how most organizations devolve. With private organizations they tend to self annihilate by not making profits. But with the government it devolves into totalitarianism.
There are some crazy anti vaxxers who are responsible for some of this, but those people were doing their crazy before the pandemic. While they may account for some of this vaccination rate reduction, it's unlikely to account for all of it. Governments worldwide, Joe Biden, his administration, Fauci in particular and the CDC, and all the vaccine makers lied. Some of the lies were big and some were small but so many of them seemed unnecessary. Combined with censorship of legitimate medical and scientific opinion by social media platforms under threat state punishment, therefore, it seems the most likely explanation for this reduction is loss of trust in our medical establishment and authorities. Parents think the lockdowns were stupid. And they were. They think the vaccinations were unnecessary. And they were. They were lied to. And some of them now believe everything these same incompetent liars are saying about other vaccines, including polio and flu, is also a lie.
Trust is difficult to gain and easy to lose. The medical community should have understood this. It should have spoken up. It should not have allowed secret censorship. It have done the right thing. It did the wrong thing and now the rest of have to pay.
The CDC lied to the public, knowingly, on multiple occasions. Of course that would lead to a complete loss of trust. This isn't surprising, and it was called out as a huge problem from Day 1.
And yet here we have Rochelle Wolensky the Director of the CDC straight up lying to the public (one of several instances of the CDC being dishonest) saying "Our data from the CDC today suggests that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don't get sick, and that it's not just in the clinical trials, but it's also in real-world data."
> A vaccine we know doesn't prevent infection, transmission, sickness or death.
The data doesn't support this. Of course you could say that the data has been tampered with, but so could be whatever data you use to "know" that the vaccine doesn't work.
The vaccine could work better for sure (and maybe future ones will), but beggars can't be choosers and even if it was only 10% effective it would be better than nothing.
> People who hate my children
This reeks of paranoid/conspiracist craziness. Nobody "hates" your children, and if they did, they'd have much easier, cheaper and more effective ways to poison and kill them than vaccines.
If a government wanted to kill people en-masse, why would they put the poison in something that arises concerns/suspicions such as vaccines or medicine instead of just putting it in the food supply chain or water supply which everyone consumes without a second thought?
I’m not convinced because my point still stands - a vaccine sounds like the worst possible way to achieve ethnic cleansing, especially considering the same vaccine is distributed to everyone regardless of race. Why not put the poison in the water supply, or food, cigarettes or alcohol supply chains which nobody thinks twice about consuming?
> It's the fault of those who push vaccines super hard for political reasons.
> A vaccine we know doesn't prevent infection, transmission, sickness or death.
This does not match reality. The more political right someone is, the more anti-vaxx someone is likely to me, the less likely they would get vaccinated; e.g., areas that lean more towards voting for Trump have higher COVID death rates:
"COVID-19 Deaths Among Older Adults During the Delta Surge Were Higher in States with Lower Vaccination Rates"
Yeah, the push to vaccinate children was not for the children, but to protect the old. And what will likely happen now, is a stronger push for forced vaccinations, met by even more entrenching of the anti-vaxx crowd.
Why in 2023 people still believe that C19 mRNA prevents infecting others? This myth has long been classified as wrong (unlike advertised in the beginning of its rollout)
It's just that the nuance is often ignored in the initial saying. Why do people try to debunk something out of a game of telephone instead on restoring the original information.
Point has always been that people who are less ill, less severely ill, for a shorter duration, with fewer or no symptoms, have lower chances of infecting others.
The urge to simplify is great but it causes these weird discussions like "does the vaccine prevent (all) infection" or like what we have here.
I understand why Biden, his administration, fauci and the CDC lied. The telephone game effect is real. And sometimes lies are well I intentioned, if stupid. But that doesn't change the fact that they all lied to us.
> Point has always been that people who are less ill, less severely ill, for a shorter duration, with fewer or no symptoms, have lower chances of infecting others.
The most recent research on the types of antibodies the vaccines create vs natural infection are showing the opposite: it causes our bodies to treat the virus more like an allergy, reducing the symptoms while clearing the infection much slower. This gives more chance to infect others, not less.
Do you have a good source on the “less I’ll less duration less spread” angle. A friend was just arguing with me recently about how ineffectual the vaccine was. So a good nuanced source would be helpful.
Some of us knew they were lying from the start and had a very frustrating few years: Pfizer made no claims about infection/transmission, just symptoms, because they never tested for infection/transmission. That claim popped up out of nowhere a few months after the vaccines were available.
If you don't know you are infected, you increase the risk of infecting others. As we know, the primary effect of the various vaccines was to reduce the incidences of symptomatic covid.
"Becoming sick with Covid" and "becoming infected with Covid" are very different things.
"Although vaccination still lowers the risk of infection, similar viral loads in vaccinated and unvaccinated persons who are infected with the delta variant call into question the degree to which vaccination prevents transmission."
Not to dispute your claim, but to put it into context. But apart from that, I am out of this debate.
I mean, you can't back up the converse with long terms studies either.
Just infer the very reasonable "based on the information available". And it's not like the vaccines are a complete unknown. Making them work at all takes a huge level of understanding.
I know, that is my point. Parenting is a juggling of risks.
"based on the information available"
And the information avaiable is confusing and partly contradictory.
I know that many researchers advised against child vaccination, because of the unknowns and the low risk for the children from the disease in the first place.
"Making them work at all takes a huge level of understanding."
It does, but it would be news to me, that the immune system is completely understood. Even less the immune system and long term effects of a immune system that is developing.
It was cutting edge research and to my understanding it was more of: this might work.
And it did and unlike the anti vaxx crowd told us, apparently we did not die from it, nor were there mass severe long term damages to be found. But there was damage, some likely did in fact die from the vaccines and so it is not a 100% clear obvious decision. It might have been for you, that is allright and it was allright for me, but for my infant children I did not feel like making that experiment.
Also we who were called "anti-vax", were not actually anti vaccine. We were just skeptical that these vaccines were all they were cracked up to be, and wanted choice an freedom to make our own decisions without coercion.
To call us anti-vax was a deliberate smear and a straw-man, of our (now vindicated) concerns.
Well yes, that got conflated way too often, was and is wrong and unfair but believe me, there are plenty of anti-vax people. More than I thought was possible. Ranging from virus do not exist, to it is all a conspiracy to wipe out/enslave humankind, to the more reasonable: "I don't want to mess with my immune system and I do not trust pharma companies".
edit: I was vaccinated, but I can understand people who refused the new vaccines
I don't think anyone of any significance said the virus doesn't exist - just that it doesn't pose anything like the level of danger that the hysteria would suggest, which is correct.
It wasn't to enslave mankind as such, but there were certainly governmental factions looking to parley the situation to introduce climate change lock downs (see the Oxford 15 minute city project), universal id cards (vax pass mandates), and to address exploding government debt through inflation, impoverishing the citizenry.
Right wing people also correctly recognised that progressives despise them, and were more than happy to dominate them through spiteful imposition of malicious rules upon them and their children.
>I don't think anyone of any significance said the virus doesn't exist
How about someone with a dedicated audience of 15 million mostly older folks, and the recipient of the highest civilian honor in the US, on his highly popular radio show?
>Rush Limbaugh: Folks, this coronavirus thing, I want to try to put this in perspective for you. It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump. Now, I want to tell you the truth about the coronavirus. (interruption) You think I’m wrong about this? You think I’m missing it by saying that’s… (interruption) Yeah, I’m dead right on this. The coronavirus is the common cold, folks.
I don't listen to Rush Limbaugh or really know anything about him, but it's quite true to say that the establishment power was able to use the pandemic to great advantage against Trump. Mail-in voting has created completely new opportunities for Democrats to collect votes from its various client groups, permanently changing the face of voting in America.
As for the common cold... well its more akin to the common cold than than, say, the Spanish Flu
Trump is part of the establishment power. That's why he did absolutely nothing against it while in power. Just look all the elites he appointed to power. Just a few of them https://i.redd.it/niv0ma19hdx21.jpg
His labor secretary was literally the prosecutor who gave Epstein a sweetheart deal.
Under Australia's "No Jab, No Pay" laws, families cannot receive government taxation benefits for their unvaccinated children. In addition, some states require an up to date vaccination record to be enrolled in pre-school, kindergarten, and in some states, primary school.
Interestingly, it was News Limited (parent company of Fox News) that championed these laws.
I have very mixed feelings about this policy. I don't want my government taking my money in taxes, then deploying it as welfare conditional on unrelated policies. Particularly because once the have this leverage they'll make more widespread use of it.
Some (all, in fact) of the anti-vaxxers I know are extremely upstanding small businesspeople. I can imagine in the next pandemic that (1) the government will tax them heavily pre-pandemic (2) government shuts their business down by force and (3) refuses to support them unless they comply with a vaccination policy that they don't agree with.
That seems a logical but perverse destination for this sort of policy that is both unfair and at odds with basic concepts of property, freedom and charity.
You can't delete public health and expect unchanged levels of care individually. Health at the individual level very much depends on public health policies.
Don't believe me? Have fun watching your newborn die from whooping cough!
Whooping cough is a funny example, since most adults are in fact not vaccinated for it -- in the US anyway, the vaccination rate for pertussis is under 30%. The reason newborns aren't dying from whooping cough is not that we vaccinate everyone. Instead, we make the vaccine widely available for people who want it (I got my booster at one of my wife's ultrasounds), and we tell parents not to expose their newborns to anyone who isn't vaccinated, until the baby can get their own. So for whooping cough specifically, it really is up to the parents, and I would say more of an individual responsibility thing.
Yes, it would have effects on people's health but those effects would be both positive and negative. They'd both have to be summed together, but even then, health isn't everything. A healthy society run by totalitarians is still a deeply unpleasant society to live in.
Whooping cough vaccines and vaccines in general would still exist without public health. The difference is that it would be an individual decision to buy them, based on whether they believe it helps themselves and others, or not. It wouldn't be a government decision.
There are very few public health interventions that are deleterious to even a fraction of the population, because the prime directive is "first, do no harm" and that's a very much entrenched principle of public health.
Regarding vaccines, I chose the whooping cough example on purpose. This vaccine is only 60% efficient. The risk of newborns being killed or gravely ill would be highly increased if used only at the individual level, including for a particular person choosing to vaccinate.
Your view of risks and benefits involved is very much skewed by your overconfidence in individual medicine. It is widely known that poulation-level interventions aka public health are the most effective (e.g. the Cuban system).
> the prime directive is "first, do no harm" and that's a very much entrenched principle of public health.
Covid response made it clear that this directive went out the window. Practitioners in the medical industry may whole-heartedly believe and follow this goal, but public health is now much too political for it.
Plenty of examples in the US. To name a few:
Faucci's masking debacle
New York City's handling of elderly patients during the peak of their outbreak
approval of vaccines under the age of 5 after a study with only 30 participants
Biden's holiday speech from the Oval Office attacking anyone who didn't get vaccinated
Initial vaccine trials data bastardized by public health officials, claiming vaccines stop the spread when that was never tested.
The list goes on, but public health has been made a political game driven by few who they know what's best and are willing to saw what they think will get compliance rather than sharing what is and isn't known and doing no harm by fostering another core principle of informed consent.
It's been known for decades, and knowing that is part of my job. I'm in Europe, where this vaccine is part of the basic plan for all children.
> For those of us who generalize from public health in the COVID years to public health in general, why is that generalization wrong, in your view?
Most public health interventions do not make money for corporations or in fact, for anybody. They mostly spare taxpayer money by increasing efficiency across the healthcare system. COVID is a very particular case where a new technology became our best guess, and made money for powerful people. So COVID can't be generalized to other interventions at all.
"It's been known for decades, and knowing that is part of my job"
Mmm yeah not surprised, was already thinking your posts sounded just like the sort of things public health people say. But that didn't answer the question. How do you know?
"Most public health interventions do not make money [ - ] so COVID can't be generalized to other interventions at all"
That's a non-sequitur. Nobody mentioned money or corporations in this thread. You're answering an imaginary objection instead of the one we're actually raising, which says a lot. My prior that public health [-adjacent] people are all so left wing that they don't even realize how ideologically biased they are just got incremented again.
The problem here is not corporations or money or some people getting rich. The observation we are generalizing beyond COVID is that people who work in public health seem to lie a lot. Specifically, they lie any time they think a lie will make people act in ways that please them, and what pleases them is anything where everyone is forced to act in exactly the same way all at the same time.
By "public health" we mean here government officials, academics, researchers and the people who speak for them. Hey we don't trust Pfizer either but if it weren't for the public health sector forcing us to buy and consume their products, we could just ignore them, or make case-by-case decisions, so the root problem is not them.
Well, you already reached your own conclusions, but you see the reason why I focused on corporations is a) Pfizer making money is an extremely common critic regarding the COVID situation, at least around here, and b) the objection you were formulating was up to now unclear to me, so I unconsciously focused on the most common one. I never thought you were making a purely political statement, because in my mind, this problem has nothing political in it.
I'm not that left wing and most docs are not lefties at all. Honestly, I don't think the academic/medical arm of public health has a political agenda. We just don't care who is in charge, but it's frustrating to see people working against their best interest when you're spending 70+ hours a week attempting to improve a catastrophic situation. Regarding the lying, I fear you're attributing to malice what is in fact just ignorance. Academics were asked for recommendations, sent back their best guess about a very uncertain situation, and got backlash about everything they guessed wrong. I have to say that the american way of extremely polarized political opinions spreading to everything feels really alien to me.
I live in Europe and don't come from America, so don't kid yourself that this is some alien way of thinking. Europe is full of people with the exact same views. The destruction of trust is global.
I notice you never answered how you know the 60% figure is accurate, given others haven't been.
"I don't think the academic/medical arm of public health has a political agenda."
You're surrounded by it so you can't see it, but to the rest of us it's obvious and extreme. In the UK one prominent epidemiologist turned out to be dating someone in Extinction Rebellion and another is a member of the Communist Party. Both were advising the government, nobody within public health thought there was anything strange about that, let alone a problem. The WHO blindly trusted everything from China, and when the BLM protests/riots happened where was the uproar from public health? Nowhere - lockdowns had been essential but suddenly protests mattered more, unless you were protesting against public health policies in which case, those protests were somehow still too dangerous to allow.
Public health is nothing but politics and ideology. We all got taught that in the harshest way possible.
"got backlash about everything they guessed wrong"
They got backlash for lying, like having no clue what they were doing yet claiming their understanding was perfect and their predictions were guaranteed to happen, even that millions would die if their instructions weren't followed exactly. If they had admitted up front they didn't know how to predict epidemics and then shut up, they'd face far less hostility today. If they'd done these things in the private sector they'd be in prison. Just look at Elizabeth Holmes to see.
You are saying a lot for just being very anti social, anti human etc.
No a public health system is not totaliarism. A gov has the responsibility to take care of all people.
This also means that the individual might need to play a game they don't always like. That's how a good stable society works.
And just because you are (I guess) in the position to pay for medical, your neighbor might not. What society would that be that you buy the kids vaccines for yours and your neighbor kids die?
And frankly just because you made it so long on this planet is not just your archiement. It's the school system which exists because of everyone before you, the health system, the road and everything which allowed you to actually drive to your work, etc etc etc.
You are also alive due to vaccines, due to regulations which forces parents to do health checkups, etc.
The only reason you can use the internet is a stable functioning society.
This independent dream of yours is arrogant and ignorant.
>gov has the responsibility to take care of all people.
This is where the fundamental disagreement lies. Many people including myself do not agree with this statement and view that statement itself as totalitarian
It IS NOT the government role to take care of me. I do NOT need or want the government to provide that service
In a free society the government is the organization of the natural right of lawful defense. It is the substitution of a common force for individual forces. And this common force is to do only what the individual forces have a natural and lawful right to do: to protect persons, liberties, and properties;
Anything beyond that "night watchmen" framework and you go beyond free society into authoritarian and totalitarian governance
Absolutely not, infact believing government == social would be itself antisocial
There is nothing social about government, government is force, government is coercion
You can not claim to replace personal responsibility, community, family, etc with a system of governance that by its very nature achieves is objective exclusively by the threat of violence on a population as being the more "social" way to have a society
Social societies are bound by a sense of community and voluntary action, not by government mandates and regulations enforced by police and regulators.
We all wouldn't be were we are without a stable social structure.
The structure is necessary to find the right people who are then able to change the world.
You know the poor kid who got fed and support from school etc despite it's upbringing which then studies and finds a cancer treatment.
But hey who cares right? I mean look at everything you actually own in your flat or house: non of it comes from your family and you clearly find it totally fine that other people are working for you and you probably despite that they also want to have a good live because this is also social and happens through gov and not through the free market.
Gov is the opposition to pure capitalism and gov is us the people.
And you believe that is Government? and not just any government a draconian top down government that function as a substituted for parents from cradle to grave sapping all free will and freedom from citizens?
>>You know the poor kid who got fed and support from school etc despite it's upbringing which then studies and finds a cancer treatment.
that is a good fairy tale... where is the reality
>>actually own in your flat
European... Now I am getting a clearer picture with your relationship with government, you place government over the people. Where by I place people over the government. I see government as a necessary evil and not something that should be admired
History has more examples of my worldview being closer to reality then your utopia view of government being a net good
>>non of it comes from your family and you
Some of it does, I come from a line of tradesman that do actually build things, including homes. I also work in manufacturing sector that actually does build things.. physical things...
That said, it does not really matter, these things exist due to VOLUNTARY EXCHANGE due to markets not because of coordination of government.
"None of the thousands of persons involved in producing the pencil performed his task because he wanted a pencil. Some among them never saw a pencil and would not know what it is for. Each saw his work as a way to get the goods and services he wanted—goods and services we produced in order to get the pencil we wanted. Every time we go to the store and buy a pencil, we are exchanging a little bit of our services for the infinitesimal amount of services that each of the thousands contributed toward producing the pencil. It is even more astounding that the pencil was ever produced. No one sitting in a central office gave orders to these thousands of people. No military police enforced the orders that were not given. These people live in many lands, speak different languages, practice different religions, may even hate one another— yet none of these differences prevented them from cooperating to produce a pencil. How did it happen? Adam Smith gave us the answer two hundred years ago." -- [1] Afterword of I, Pencil
Risk sharing is best done through insurance. The government has no need to be involved in healthcare, beyond subsidizing premiums to some extent for those who are too poor to pay the full cost.
There is nothing more anti-social or anti-human than public health. Look at what they did to us. They stopped people visiting their dying parents in hospitals in a failed attempt to stop the spread of an airborne virus. They told people not to get close to each other, they shut down as much of the economy as they could. They forced us all behind screens, to rely for everything on enormous tech firms that automate every interaction. Absolutely every single action they took was calculated to maximally destroy the humanity of society because they believed, wrongly, that each naturally human act they destroyed was increasing transmission by some trivial percent. And then when Sweden ended up with some of the best results in Europe they ignored it and pretended it didn't exist.
"The only reason you can use the internet is a stable functioning society."
The internet was created by the least totalitarian society on Earth due to fear of attack by the USSR, a maximally totalitarian society that never developed an equivalent to TCP/IP, never even successfully developed a software industry. And today one of the countries that restricts the internet the most, is the country that was welding people into their apartments long after the rest of the world got over COVID and moved on. We can use the internet today because luckily, some people recognized the dangers of totalitarian collectivism and resisted it. Now we must do the same for public health, otherwise next time it's gonna be us behind the welded doors.
> Risk sharing is best done through insurance. The government has no need to be involved in healthcare, beyond subsidizing premiums to some extent for those who are too poor to pay the full cost.
I disagree on the basis that insurance skew to not having to pay as much as possible. This conflicts with healthcare because if Insurance companies are able to determine that you are high risk for something, they would either outright deny you coverage or give you a price that outright means denial anyway.
The only entity capable of stopping this is one with the monopoly of power, I.e The Government.
This is such a frustrating comment to read. There is plenty of debate in public health about what is and isn’t appropriate. A lot of effort is put into communicating the often confusing and oblique conclusions of biology in such a way that people will understand and also be willing to take actions that will help themselves. Covid was, predictably, a massive defeat for public health.
Also, you may have noticed that there are not really any restrictions despite covid still being around. There are limits on that power, although I imagine you think that those limits should be in a different place.
> This is such a frustrating comment to read. There is plenty of debate in public health about what is and isn’t appropriate.
Ordinarily. My dad and most of his friends are in the field, and they’re all smart, thoughtful people who tackle incredibly complex things like how to get third world villagers to use maternal health services when all they’ve ever known is midwives with no formal medical training. But they all somehow turned their brains off when COVID happened and started acting like parrots. And now they’re paying the price for that in terms of public trust.
The public trust of lay people in experts of all stripes rests on following established processes and norms. When experts deviate from those, such as by concededly lying to the public about mask effectiveness, public trust evaporates. There is never any excuse that justifies that. When judges and prosecutors and police cut corners on process “because lives are at stake” large swaths of the public rightfully come to distrust the system. The same is true for public health or any other field.
There are still restrictions. I named a big one in the comment already. Biden admin just extended the ban on foreign arrivals based on vaccine status for more months so gotta assume the ban will last until the Dems next lose the White House. That's a ban on a big fraction of the population of most countries. Other countries don't do that because it's pointless but still have some restrictions like mandatory masks in some contexts in Germany.
During COVID I compared claims made by public health officials to the actual data their own agencies were publishing and so often they didn't match. Not just my perception. I have a friend, at the start of it all we often argued because I had already realized public health was corrupt, but he hadn't. I dropped the topic rather than try to convince him. Some months later we were drinking and he told me his views had changed, was now hard-core skeptical about it all. Changed because he did the same as me, watched a press conference by the government, got curious about something, went to the websites with that data and downloaded it. Found they didn't line up, that the government scientists and health minister were lying about what the numbers said. Then he admitted he'd been wrong to argue with me about it.
Lots of people had experiences like that. Public health communication trying to make us "willing to take actions that will help ourselves" was always whatever would sound convincing in the moment, not what was true. So it's all worthless.
Pretty sure this is just a racist comment. A quick look at the demographics data for Australia shows it to be overwhelmingly white european - even if we restrict ourselves to the White Australia Policy definitions.
We're shopping around for a pediatrician for our forthcoming baby and several offices we called said they will only accept new patients who will commit to a full schedule of vaccines. That's fine with us, but I got the feeling some providers are just tired of having the same stupid arguments with parents.
Our pediatrician (not in the US) has the same policy. She mentioned that the people that reject recommended vaccinations are often the same that show up with a highly contagious child at the front desk, asking for immediate treatment instead of calling ahead and being let in at a dedicated side entrance to avoid endangering other patients.
Same here. They flat out told us on day 1 if you aren’t going to get the full schedule of vaccines find another doctor. To clarify, they don’t care if you get the flu or Covid shots.
We hired a concierge doctor for our son for the first 2 years post birth.
We had mediocre insurance from an employer at the time. After doing the math, it wasn’t really that much more expensive. And the benefits are huge!
Answers the phone the first time 24x7, they come to your house, no need to sit in a waiting room, willing to personalize care instead of a cookie cutter model.
It was really great for our family. Also, our son was born 60 days before the COVID outbreak, so all of those benefits really shined.
I am not sure what the best way to communicate with these kinds of parents is. This is a parent with a very specific kind of mindset about who should be the ultimate authority on their child. More often than not, it becomes unhealthy for the child living in this environment both physically and emotionally.
Everyone understands the parents ultimately mean no harm, but their warped perception of science, among other things, means their actions are harmful. But trying to point this fact out makes them very, very defensive and they take it personally. Others only spend energy communicating because they want to help the child too.
That's the thing that always causes me difficulty when dealing with parents like this, it's like talking to a brick wall. My usual attempt is trying to get them to see me as someone speaking from a place of trustworthiness, but it's frustrating. Usually the kids are smart enough to pick up on certain things so I guide them a little. For context, I tutor. The same parents that dismiss me about things like this or getting a diagnosis/treatment for ADHD pay me to teach their kids about science and math. I want to continue caring and trying, but I understand why teachers become so jaded.
> This is a parent with a very specific kind of mindset about who should be the ultimate authority on their child.
I think this may be your problem: you don't perceive the parent as the ultimate authority on the child.
As a tutor, you fill a strictly advisory role, not a position of authority, and even your advisory role is limited in scope. If you try to exert authority or influence outside of that scope then yes, you will run into a wall. You have to accept that your ability to influence extends only as far as the parents' trust in you.
As you gain trust, the circle in which you can exert influence expands, but you have to know where the boundaries are because every time you step out of them you lose trust and your ability to influence becomes weaker, not stronger.
But the question is whether parents should be the ultimate authority on the child, and the law in many countries does not support that. The lines get drawn at different points in different countries, but many have laws against child endangerment etc.
For example, in Europe it’s mandatory to send your child to school - whether the parents want it or not. Some parts of the curriculum are mandatory, whether the parents agree or not.
It is the role of the tutor and teacher to ensure that children receive an education in line with this. Parents can complain, but they have no authority there.
> For example, in Europe it’s mandatory to send your child to school
No. No it isn’t. I don’t know where you’re writing from but I can tell you that home schooling is a thing in some European countries. Maybe all of them? I can say for sure and I’m unwilling to subscribe to a sweeping statement about a mass of 44 countries. It amazes me that anyone would.
Regardless of jurisdiction, OP is not the state and the issues they're talking about (ADHD diagnosis and vaccines) are not related to their role as a tutor. Even in the most extreme state-as-ultimate-authority jurisdiction, OP's role on these topics would be that of a reporter, not that of an authority.
The alternative to the parents being the authority, is that the state is, but the state has lied constantly about everything related to COVID and children so that would be far worse.
in Europe it’s mandatory to send your child to school - whether the parents want it or not.
No it's not. It's mandatory to educate them. Home schooling exists in Europe and parents who think teachers at a school are teaching children things that are wrong can do various things about it.
No home schooling exists in germany - all children must go to a state-approved school and that school must follow the standard curriculum. There are a handful of possible exceptions - serious illness for example - but in the general case it’s not legal and may result in (partial) loss of custody.
In Poland home shchooling is a thing. There are tens of thousands kids learning at home. They only need to come to school from time to time to do some tests. They have to pass mandatory exams after year 8 - for primary education and after year 12 for high school (yes, it is allowed to do high school education). To my best knowledge you do not have to provide any specific reasons why your kid is learning at home, the parents however need to provide evidence of theirs capacity to conduct that type of education.
Either parents should be allowed to kill their children on a whim without consequence, or parents are not the ultimate authority over their children. They are mutually exclusive beliefs.
Children aren't property. They're human beings that deserve the protection of the state. Sometimes that means protection FROM their parents.
> Either parents should be allowed to kill their children on a whim without consequence, or parents are not the ultimate authority over their children. They are mutually exclusive beliefs.
That's either a weird strawman, or you missed the point of what "ultimate authority" means here. The question is who gets the final say in how the child is cared for - if the parent thinks that something is harmful to the child, and the state says it's mandatory, who gets final say?
You're right. Children aren't property. They're human beings that deserve protection. Sometimes that means protection from the state.
> The question is who gets the final say in how the child is cared for - if the parent thinks that something is harmful to the child, and the state says it's mandatory, who gets final say?
The state gets final say.
On most parenting matters the state has no opinion, or at least has the opinion "let the parent decide." But that delegation of authority does not mean the state has given it up. We the people have authority in the matter in how you parent your child. We will go to such lengths as taking the child away and raising it elsewhere if that is what's best for them.
People don't get to murder their children and get away with it.
> We will go to such lengths as taking the child away and raising it elsewhere if that is what's best for them
Correction. "if we think that is what's best for them." Maybe it is, maybe it's not. It's kinda like the death penalty - the state can totally get it wrong, and mistakes have lifelong reprecussions.
> People don't get to murder their children and get away with it.
Again, this seems like a weird strawman. And like I implied before, balance that possibilty with the liklihood it's the state doing the murdering. I'd rather have a distributed system of parents putting a majority of their time and attention into figuring out what's best for their own kid -- rather than a bureaucratic state that's playing politics and influenced by lobbyists, deciding what's probably best for the majority of the kids.
It's not a strawman. If the state disallows you from murdering your child, they have authority over you. There are court cases every year where parents who kill their kids get convicted and sent to jail. Who had authority? The people who went to jail, or the people who sent them there?
> I'd rather have a distributed system of parents putting a majority of their time and attention into figuring out what's best for their own kid -- rather than a bureaucratic state that's playing politics and influenced by lobbyists, deciding what's probably best for the majority of the kids.
I would rather have the state disallow murdering children rather than each parent deciding for themselves if they should be able to murder their kid. Maybe you had great parents, but not everyone is so lucky. Sometimes parents don't do what's best for their kid. In those cases, it's better for the state to use their Ultimate Authority to intervene in the interests of the child.
Stopping people from killing their children should be uncontroversial.
> I would rather have the state disallow murdering children rather than each parent deciding for themselves if they should be able to murder their kid.
You're the only one here who has said anything about parental authority overriding the murdering-is-bad laws that most countries seem to have. The state disallows murdering children in the same way it disallows murdering anyone else - via general laws that are nonspecific to parents and their authority over their children.
If you were talking about some other kind of crime where the state was claiming specific authority over the special case of parents' authority over their kids, then I'd understand why you brought it up. Like I said earlier. That's either a weird strawman, or you missed the point of what "ultimate authority" means here.
> Sometimes parents don't do what's best for their kid. In those cases, it's better for the state to use their Ultimate Authority to intervene in the interests of the child.
Except that what you're advocating for isn't intervention in just those cases. You're also advocating that the state intervene in cases where: the treatment is harmful to the child, and the well-educated parent knows it, but the state thinks it's for the best, and causes harm to the child. And you're justifying it by saying the parents shouldn't be allowed to murder their kid. Which is really weird logic.
I'm talking about whether or not parents have ultimate authority over their children. Why do you think murder is a special case that isn't included in "ultimate?" Many parents truly believe it is their right to kill their child if they so choose, and that the state should not be able to intervene or punish them in such situations. "I brought you into this world, and I can take you out of it." You seem really optimistic about the kinds of behaviors and beliefs parents have. Parents are often abusive and -definitely- believe their children are their property to do with as they please. For real. This is the exact kind of thing the original comment was talking about.
If you want to replace "murder" with "beat" or "starve" or "sexually molest" or whatever else, feel free. Murder is not a special case. Parents do not have ultimate authority over their children. It can be easily seen through example in the real world.
> Except that what you're advocating for isn't intervention in just those cases. You're also advocating that the state intervene in cases where: the treatment is harmful to the child, and the well-educated parent knows it, but the state thinks it's for the best, and causes harm to the child. And you're justifying it by saying the parents shouldn't be allowed to murder their kid. Which is really weird logic.
I am not trying to advocate for, nor justify anything. I'm simply saying that the state does not allow parents free reign to do whatever they want to their children, simply because they're parents. Murder is an obvious example, but the state also disallows lots of other things. If parents had ultimate authority over their children, the state could not allow or disallow anything, because they would have no say in the matter.
> Why do you think murder is a special case that isn't included in "ultimate?"
Because that's completely outside the context of what we're discussing here. Because we were talking about who gets final say on medical treatments, and because I clarified with OP [0].
Sure, there's evil people out there. Though usually "I brought you in...I can take you out" seems like hyperbole. But child abuse is wrong for the same reason the same abuse towards adults is wrong. I'm creating a distinction, because the principle involved matters: is the state exerting authority over the bad action done to the child, or over the child itself?
> I am not trying to advocate for, nor justify anything.
You are explicitly advocating for that, and explicitly justifying it. "The state gets final say." "It's better for the state to use their Ultimate Authority to intervene." "I would rather have the state disallow murdering children rather than each parent deciding for themselves if they should be able to murder their kid." "People don't get to murder their children and get away with it."
I suggest you look into laws surrounding medical neglect of children. The first part of my comment was general, and is specifically describing this very type of parent, but not taken to an extreme. As far as my state laws go
"A parent who denies their child vital and necessary medical treatment faces the following consequences:
• Loss of custody. The child is taken to state custody for protection if the parent is found of negligence.
• Criminal charges. The parent may be charged with child abuse and neglect or even assault if it is proven that he or she has failed in providing the necessary medical attention for the child."
The state take will authority of both situations. I am not sure what the laws are regarding this where you are. HN is a globally accessible website, but discussions are generally US-centric. It wasn't outside the context, I was just not focusing on the very extremes. After you've interacted with this type of parent once or twice, it becomes very easy to identy harmful behavior. I do mean interact with parents that ended up losing custody over neglect. I hope you empathize more with the children stuck in these situations after reading some of the cases. I am not 100% sure what you are attempting to argue.
In my state becoming aware of such behavior and failing to report itself is a crime. I think the crime part only officially applied during when I was associated as an employee of a univeristy and teaching high schoolers. I know I had to do mandated reporter training. The law states every single state resident is a mandated reporter, but I am not sure about the consequences for residents.
The reason vaccination is not covered under this law is because there is it's hard to prove the harm of denying vaccines, in a legal way. There are plenty of people, especially healthcare professionals, that wish vaccination was covered under this kind of law. It is true in some states but not all.
"Results. Our search yielded 9 cases from 5 states. Most courts (7 of 9) considered vaccine refusal to constitute neglect. In the 4 cases decided in jurisdictions that permitted religious exemptions, courts either found that vaccine refusal did not constitute neglect or considered it neglect only in the absence of a sincere religious objection to vaccination.
Conclusions. Some states have a legal precedent for considering parental vaccine refusal as medical neglect, but this is based on a small number of cases. Each state should clarify whether, under its laws, vaccine refusal constitutes medical neglect."
I'm familiar with those laws. The problem is that those laws can be invoked in ways that harm the child, just as easily as they can be invoked to prevent harm. You both are focusing on situations where the parent is abusive. I'm looking at situations where the parents are genuinely caring for the child, and the state invokes those laws to the detriment of the child.
I mean, it's too bad that the Ninth Circuit had to specify that "a social worker and a police officer are not entitled to qualified immunity for investigating a report of a child crying by making a nonconsensual entry into a home without a search warrant or special exigency and coercing a parent to aid them in strip-searching her child." [0]
As I pointed out earlier - what happens when the parent is well-educated, and knows better than to allow some treatment for the child, but the state decides otherwise and forces something that harms the child? This is the risk which we run when we allow the state to have final say.
As an observer reading this exchange, this is my take:
> You both are focusing on situations where the parent is abusive. I'm looking at situations where the parents are genuinely caring for the child
A(n ignorant) parent can absolutely genuinely care for the child, and yet abuse them with medical neglect if they've been brainwashed into thinking that (some) medical care is bad, even when it's not. That's what is being discussed here.
> As I pointed out earlier - what happens when the parent is well-educated, and knows better than to allow some treatment for the child, but the state decides otherwise and forces something that harms the child? This is the risk which we run when we allow the state to have final say.
I think the bigger question is which risk is larger, that the parent is right or a state employing experts. I'm sure both risks exist, I'm not sure both are even remotely as likely and thus as dangerous. [0]
I completely understand that the parents are the ultimate authority. I feel like I was in a position where I could have done more. I can't imagine how many times a teacher must feel the same throughout their years of teaching. I feel a lot of empathy for the child since I can relate. But that might make me more impatient about certain things than I would like to admit.
The specific situation I am thinking of is when the parents asked me about my opinons on ADHD treatment. I have volunteered my diagnosis when I learned one of the reasons for the student being sent to me was difficulty in school. I had my suspicions on the beginning, but I know kids grow at different paces. But then his a few school teacher recommended testing as well. He was professionally tested and showed that he would benefit from proper treatment.
The parents and I speak the same language, and they are immigrants, and so they trusted me with a lot of responsiblity regarding their child's schooling. I became sort of a translator too between the teachers and the parents, when appropriate.
It doesn't feel like I am putting myself in a position of authority when I am arguing for evidence backed actions. I don't mean medication, but in this case the parents didn't share the "diagnosis" with the school, which would have helped the student recieve accomodations through official channels. In that case it feels less about what's best for the child and more about how the parents want others to percieve their child.
But you make a good point, even that might be something the parents take as me overstepping my authority.
Walk through the potential accommodations and what the parents should look for as evidence that they are helpful. If there’s an opportunity to take a low risk step like having the parents meet with a specialist at the school up front, it would help them become more comfortable.
So in your capacity as a tutor, do you think you are qualified to make medical diagnoses of and medical decisions for other people's children? It's generally thought that this is the parents' decision because they have the most information about the child and the biggest "stake" in their child's success.
Has it occurred to you that you might be working with incomplete information? Has it occurred to you that your conclusions might be wrong?
I have a diagnosis. Their teachers suspected a diagnosis and the child was tested. The child would benefit from treatment. The parents were asking for my opinion. As a tutor, I would be one of the first people that would know if a student is struggling and needs testing for a learning disorder.
These situations I am talking about are specifically when the parent is clearly choosing to disregard information because they don't trust it or want it to be wrong for one reason or another. I don't understand why it's still such a divisive thing when the idea of parents being wrong is brought up. Parents, like all humans, have the capacity to do bad/wrong things with good intentions.
Pediatricians face the same situation every day when dealing with this type of parent.
EDIT: The child was tested by a healthcare profesional and was diagosed and medication was recommended. And I went through the same school system. They came to me for advice.
Fyi, speaking as a parent: as it relates to ADHD and giving young children powerful psychoactive drugs, the fact that you only seem aware of one side of an extremely complex and contentious issue makes me disinterested in your advice on this or any other parenting topic. The kinds of people I look to for advice understand the arguments on both sides and, while they may have a position one way or the other, are not zealots.
As someone that has a diagnosis and takes medication for it and and an educator, I understand better than most both sides of the situation. I apologize if it seems like I don't understand both sides. In asian culture there is still a very very strong stigma surrounding treatment for mental health issues. Sometimes hesitancy is cultural and other times it's religious and other times it's pride. My own struggles growing up in a similar situation as the child and learning that I suffered unecessarily after I started medication, affects the language I use to describe the situation. Maybe I have become more jaded than I realize, I appreciate your perspective.
I appreciate your response and being willing to reconsider.
It’s great that you found an approach that worked for you. But yes, I would still suggest humility in assuming that you can identify when the same approach will work for someone else, especially when that someone is a child and the parents, who know that child better than anyone else, don’t share your conviction. There are good reasons to be skeptical about diagnosing young children with ADHD except in very rare circumstances.
Most of the parents I feel frustrated with show hesitancy about even testing, despite also being very concerned about their child failing in school. They treat a positive diagnosis and even testing like a conspiracy, and continually argue that it's simply a question of laziness and motivation.
I am not sure what age you define as young children. I think ages 13 and above, with the assumption they started puberty at minimum a year prior and are at least entering high school, is a fair time to seriously consider/start pharmacological treatment. That was my suggestion to some other parents who have directly asked me. Sometimes starting medication younger is necessary, but in my opinion most kids aren't doing anything where focus is critical to their long term success before starting high school.
I similary have reservations about the current way in which ADHD hyperactive is diagnosed in children younger than 12. I am mainly talking about primarily inattentive diagnoses, because that's what I have experience with and feel confident speaking about. I only teach kids in high school and older. On the other hand, there's a weakness in identifying girls who would benefit from being tested, and an issue of underdiagnosed women, because of the way ADHD symtoms present differently by gender.
I respect your beliefs and can tell they come from good intentions and a desire to help.
That said, my personal inclination is that diagnosis and medication should be a last resort after first trying alternative approaches to education and learning, as well as looking at lifestyle issues like diet, sleep, exercise, screen time, etc.
My experience of education in the US is that it was mostly bad, and that most teachers were bad, particularly when it comes to helping intelligent, creative, and eccentric kids reach their potentials. If at all possible, I would always favor first trying to find a better environment for a child who is struggling rather than using drugs to force them to adapt to a low quality education system.
My perspective comes from a place where I went to a fantastic school but the ADHD made even that education system feel medicore/poor. Not every parent will have the luxury and freedom required to help kids reach maximum potential. If lifestyle changes are enough to fix the situation, the child doesn't meet the critera for ADHD in the first place.
Homeschooling requires a lot of sacrifice from parents in order to set up the child for success, both socially and career-wise. Covid showed me the value in kids socializing with their peers in their age range, during middle and high shool, and how much they will struggle socially if that piece is missing. The thing about ADHD is that once the child leaves the homeschool environment, they will begin to struggle.
It is a myth that ADHD is possible to outgrow, the current thinking is that kids that seemingly outgrew it were incorrectly diagnosed to begin with. The stigma around medication ends up negatively affecting people that are diagnosed. I know I delayed starting medication longer than I should have from the stigma and from time to time feel guilty for needing it after I come across certain messages or articles. It feels like imposter syndrome. The stigma around the diagnosis has been changing but not around the medication.
I respect your decision regarding medication and in many ways agree with you evaluation of the US school system. I do hope you reconsider your take on a diagnosis, it's not prescriptive in any way. It can only benefit the child, "worst" case scenario is you paid a healthcare professional to talk to your child for an unnecessary few hours. There are a tons of options that open up for kids once there's some sort of documentation like a 504, in the US. Simple things like no restriction on bathroom breaks and just being able to have small snacks like baby carrots in class helped me, but it's open ended. I have heard of accomodations like extra exam time or being able to audio record classes and even alternate testing environments or formats in college.
I don't expect to change your mind, I just wanted to share why I believe differently. I appreciate you hearing me out despite my bad initial impression, in my experience that is a usually a sign of a great parent.
The fact that you and a teacher have diagnosed a child with ADHD means less than nothing. Medical advice from teachers has about as much weight as stock tips from them.
They were likely taken aback by how forward and certain you seem to have been about it. If you had instead said, "your child is having some academic trouble, maybe you should get him tested for a learning disability" it would have gone over better. Focus on providing advice within your area of expertise.
Teachers, in general, seem to feel entitled to be surrogate parents to children, but that's really not their role. Their job is solely to help the child learn.
Did you think that the problem may be the other way around? Their perception of the reliability of "the science" is accurate and yours is warped.
The last years have split the population into those who blindly believe in academic and government scientific claims, regardless of how incredible those claims are or how frequently they turn out to have been wrong. And the rest, who don't treat science religiously, and who develop doubt when they see untrustworthy behavior. The first camp can't understand the second because they don't even try to. They feel the righteousness of the true believer.
So here's the suggestion. If you're really a tutor who has such great understanding of the science, try debating with the parents and investigate any claims they make to justify their beliefs honestly. Do Your Own Research. Do not attempt to brainwash the child bypassing the parents. That will simply reinforce their pre-existing beliefs that people who are pro-vaccine are engaged in scientism, can't defend their beliefs and prefer to use communist-style tactics to manipulate others (like turning children against their parents). It will cause them to double down.
That is some very charged language. Showing empathy and helping a child become better at critical thinking isn't anything close to brainwashing. Maybe you're trying to use language that you imagine the parents might think in, but that's not charitable to them either. By asking this question, I felt like I was making it clear that I am trying to understand the parents and reach some middle ground.
You aren't showing empathy, you claimed the parents were "brick walls" with "warped perceptions" who were harming their own children, and that you specifically told them that! No wonder they got defensive. That's the opposite of trying to understand them and it's certainly not charitable to them, is it?
To engage in empathy you must be able to fairly articulate their views and the reasoning they use to arrive at them, in the same way they would or even better. In both posts you haven't done that. That's why they aren't listening to you. Your response to their views is laughable, it's to say "trust me" and then try to manipulate ("guide") their child when they aren't around, which is the opposite of being trustworthy. They trusted you to tutor their child in specific subjects and instead you betrayed that trust, then act surprised when they are "brick walls"?
To convince the parents, you first need to convince them to talk to you and take you seriously. That in turn requires that you, firstly, stop bringing their child into it. Just ignore the child. The child is not being harmed, you aren't a hero who's saving them. The child's views are not your business, they are the parent's business. And secondly, that you do the legwork to fairly investigate their beliefs and the evidence they found convincing, so you can debate with them directly instead of telling them about "a place of trustworthiness" that they clearly don't believe in.
They believe as a parents, they have all of the specific knowledge required to give their child the best possible life. While ignoring pediatricians and teachers. I wasn't referring to myself in any way.
This is one of the many results of the continued breakdown of trust in public institutions. It will get worse, until there is radical change for better and worse.
Maybe this is what happens when you try to force people do something, even if for their own good?
Like some sort of resistant force born in response to the force applied?
Added: I am totally pro-vaccine as an extraordinary medical tool, just trying to understand this phenomenon hoping we won't make the same strategic mistakes again.
It's this combined with the horror of not having vaccines, people have forgotten or don't know what that looks like, so we probably have to see children destroyed from diseases (we already have vaccines for) before people will understand why things like vaccine mandates exist.
I do agree with others though, I don't feel the same way about Covid19 vaccines, even though I took them, it really does, in retrospect, look like a lot of it was trying to get people onto a yearly vaccine plan, "get your yearly covid19 booster", I don't like that personally.
> it really does, in retrospect, look like a lot of it was trying to get people onto a yearly vaccine plan
I think, yes, the companies are for sure rubbing their hands and thinking about the extra money from another mandated yearly vaccine. But the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines, though they have a short window of effectiveness (as do flu vaccines) have protected some people from severity of the symptoms and death, which is not a bad thing.
There may be some value in a yearly vaccine for at least susceptible people that covers a window of time where infection rates are typically highest.
1) We know it isn't because the same routine vaccination requirements have been around for decades.
2) They aren't forced. They are required to go to public school (with limited exemptions) but parents have other options, albeit more time-consuming and/or costly.
The primary reason given is "pandemic-related interruptions in children’s medical visits as well as in-person schooling", and catching up with documentation.
While it's "also possible that anti-vaccine sentiment, inflamed during the Covid-19 pandemic, is widening", "Health officials said they haven’t seen an increase in vaccine exemptions nationally".
Not all of the required "vaccines" have been around for decades. One of them is very new and that one seems to have a lot of controversy when it comes to kids and mounting questions on if it is safe or effective for said age group. Even mainstream news networks like the BBC are starting to air concerns from their own medical experts
The linked-to page says those are: "measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) shot; the diphtheria, tetanus, and acellular pertussis (DTaP) shot; and the shots against poliovirus and varicella (chickenpox)."
Messaging and PR equated the new controversial vaccine with the older routine ones (in the sense of safety and effectiveness, leveraging their track record) and -- surprise -- it goes both ways - it has cast some of the controversy back onto the routine ones.
A lot of people who had never in their life questioned vaccine safety or necessity, are now looking into them and not always coming with the conclusion that they are needed.
I understand that is what the story has said but as another poster has indicated a lot of doctors are only doing vaccinations if parents "agree to all required vaccines" which in most areas of the US they have added COVID to that list
So if they make it "take them all including COVID or none"
Then naturally parents that refuse to give their children the new COVID treatment will also have to choose refuse the "routine" ones as they are not being given the opportunity to only receive the routine vaccines with out COVID
Actually from reading this thread I can’t see anyone who suggested paediatricians are requiring the COVID vaccine. In fact one clarified that in requiring all routine vaccines they explicitly did NOT mean flu or COVID
I wonder what my life would be like if no one had ever tried to force me to do anything. I'd probably describe myself as deeply unambitious and as such I probably wouldn't have accomplished much without some prods, and I think I agree with you that I resent all of it. All the expectations about wearing the socially acceptable clothing, all the weirdness about expectations from your neighbors about proper behavior and lawn/house upkeep, and all the societal expectations and laws are incredibly stifling and seem like a waste of time and effort. But you probably wouldn't like what people would get up to without them.
I'm pro vaccines, but chicken pox isn't a great choice for making a rhetorical point. It's the least dangerous illness of the standard childhood vaccines, and was added recently enough that even millennials just lived with it (the vaccine became available in the US in 1995).
Measles and polio are the ones I'd emphasize, not chicken pox.
Government agencies have a responsibility not to lie to the public to achieve what they think is a "greater good". The have a responsibility not to just change the definition of words like vaccine to fit their political goals
The failure here is not parents it is every single person in power and every single spineless person that unquestionably was regurgitating the dracionian narratives of those in power the last 2+ years
No, the failure is still the parents. They’re the ones choosing to expose their children to deadly diseases.
That was true five years ago and it’s equally true now — we’re talking about the same routine vaccines. Nothing that happened during the Covid-19 pandemic changed that.
You are responding based in the research paper who were looking at the non COVID vaccines however as another poster has indicated a lot of doctors are only doing vaccinations if parents "agree to all required vaccines" which in most areas of the US they have added COVID to that list
So if doctors are only giving the other vaccines if parents alos.agree to the COVID one then naturally parents that are refusing just COVID one will also have to refuse the others
Seems like a bad idea to hold the other vaccines hostage unless people agree to take the COVID treatment
Not the person you're responding to, but this is one of the more egregious examples that comes to mind, from the Director of the CDC herself:
"Our data from the CDC today suggests that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don't get sick, and that it's not just in the clinical trials, but it's also in real-world data." ~Dr. Rochelle Wolensky[1]
This was a lie, and it was not only repeated but amplified by those in positions of authority up to and including the President of the United States.
It sounds like a good response only if you ignore the real point being raised: when coerced, a being who thinks of itself as having free will fights back at least a small amount.
That summary is so high-level and abstract as to be useless.
At that level, we face coercion all the time: a traffic light is a form of coercion backed by the threat of state violence.
Does fighting back against that coercion explain why people run red lights?
Moreover, if it's the expected human response, what explains the 2% difference between now and the 2019-2020 school year? Do more people now think of themselves as having free will than a few years ago?
Do you agree with every single traffic light in every single circunstance (place, and your timing)? Moreover, do you agree with every future traffic light that will ever be placed?
My disagreements with a traffic light placement so far have not been based on a don't-tread-on-me sense of The Man treading on my free will.
For example, I strongly prefer a modern roundabout for many of the places where the US uses a stop sign or traffic light. But my argument is made on increased safety and improved traffic flow.
I once accidentally ran a red light because I got confused about which traffic light was for my lane.
My father once deliberately ran a red light. After waiting for 5 minutes in the middle of the night. Because the detector didn't sense his motorcycle. A cop ticketed him. My father went to court and the judge ruled that what my father did was reasonable.
So while I'm certain that someone, somewhere ran a red light because of moral outrage over repressive government, that's not main reason people run a red light.
Just like this linked-to article seems to describe that the drop in routine vaccinations does not seem primarily due to increased vaccine hesitance due to the covid pandemic, even though certainly that is a reason for a few people.
> So while I'm certain that someone, somewhere ran a red light because of moral outrage over repressive government, that's not main reason people run a red light.
So you agree coercion causes pushback. A bit tricky to get that out of you. Thank you for the exchange.
Like I said, your point is "so high-level and abstract as to be useless."
I expect far more people have run a red light because they were texting than as pushback against coercion.
It appears far more kids have failed to receive their MMR shots due to pandemic-related interruptions in children’s medical visits than parental pushback against coercion.
"Could" is doing a lot of work there. It could also be productive. (Another example of "so high-level and abstract as to be useless".)
Here's a counter-example. Assume 99% of the people who run a red light / haven't vaccinated their kid, do so for some reason totally disconnected from reacting to coercion, and 1% of the people are fighting The Man.
Now we change the coercive circumstances [1] so that 98% of those people now stop at a red light / have vaccinated their kids, the 1% still haven't changed, and an additional 1% have joined them.
That means the overall number of red light runners / non-vaccinated children go down significantly.
Which means those changes are productive.
[1] For traffic lights this might include: higher fines, more active police enforcement, propaganda campaigns about the dangers of running a red light, changing the lights to be more visible. For vaccination these might include: remind parents of vaccination requirements, provide in-school and home-visit vaccination services, and increase propaganda campaigns.
Are you seriously trying to argue your way away from agreeing that coercion can be refused by itself so much that you can't resist providing your hypothetical?
Are you still talking about the linked-to piece on the drop in routine vaccinations?
Or abstract generalizations that could be applied to just about any topic?
What evidence do you have that the reason for the drop is NOT primarily due to disruption caused by the pandemic, but is instead due to people "who thinks of [themselves] as having free ... fight[ing] back at least a small amount"?
Because the paper is clear that the decrease is due to disruption, saying:
] Twenty-three states reported COVID-19–related impacts on data collection including lower response rates from schools, data collection extensions and delays, and incomplete data from schools that did respond; 30 states reported lingering COVID-19–related impacts on vaccination coverage, mostly related to reduced access to vaccination appointments and local or school level extensions of grace period or provisional enrollment policies (CDC, School Vaccination Coverage Report, unpublished data, 2022). - https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/wr/mm7202a2.htm?s_cid=mm...
I don't know why you are so pointedly insistent on a population which is so small it doesn't seem to show up in the statistics.
Supposing people thought your point was useful. How would that insight help improve routine vaccine coverage?
A broken clock is right twice a day, some of these "predictions" are a coin toss to get right. This doesn't ever make the rest of those talking points more valid.
You have literally named no names, no predictions, no topic even, there's no substance at all. Yet somehow you have acquired the impression that my comment applies to the group you disagree with, wow.
You are reading too much into things just to confirm your viewpoints you have barely grazed.
I always wonder what people mean when they talk about "the news" or "the media". I don't watch any of the 24/7 cable stuff (I last had cable in 1999), but I get the impression its what actually drives the perception of whatever this unitary entity is believed to be thinking/scheming at any moment. So I'm somewhat blind/deaf to a lot of this zeitgeist, though I understand that like any media, they long ago cracked the code that negative engagement is more profitable, and so yes, scaremongering is part of the job, and so I tend to avoid it.
That said, I knew people who died from Covid, the latest just a few weeks ago. When my parents, who aren't young anymore got it, I was pretty fearful for them.
I'm not sure I agree completely. Certainly over the pandemic I saw conspiracies appear right from the start, and then the goalposts shifted on most of them to fit around the current situation and messaging. I think a handful of people took huge advantage of a difficult situation to further their own agenda.
That said, I absolutely agree 'normal' people were pushed to the limit in a way that made them look for anything that made sense of what was happening around them.
Conspiracy theories spread when you let a medium that profits off "engagement" take over humanity's social fabric.
Back in the day that kind of crazy was relegated to the dark corners of the Internet and you had to explicitly seek it out.
Nowadays social media apps that claim to make it easier to connect with your family/friends will happily push these in front of you, knowing that getting you deep into that rabbit hole is likely to net them more "engagement".
The net result is that naive but well-meaning people who originally just wanted to keep in touch with friends/family got sucked deep into this bullshit.
When did you switch from hating masks to loving masks? What caused your switch? Why caused you to hate them before you loved them? Was it a conspiracy?
Let's make the exceptionally charitable assumption that you are asking this question in good faith...
Nobody that listened to public health experts ever "hated" masks. But initially, they didn't rush out to buy masks because the advice was to prioritise isolating the infected, social distancing for everyone else and clean hands to avoid [overestimated risk of] contact transmission, and not to rely on masks to protect you from infected people because there was no evidence they would offer that protection (the only masks they had reasonable confidence might work were far too limited in supply to stop it on a population level)
The recommendation changed (pretty quickly, based on stronger evidence of aerosol transmission and asymptomatic transmission and COVID being sufficiently widespread to make altogether avoiding contagious people unrealistic) to suggesting that although social distancing was recommended because cloth masks alone were insufficiently effective at preventing infection, masks were better than nothing and so on a population scale wearing them in public places would slow infection rates. At this point - even though I'd already had the infection - I started wearing a mask to the supermarket because apart from it being logical, it was also required to enter. It wasn't much of an imposition, and subsequent evidence largely supports the reduced transmission risk.
I think the question works better in reverse. When was it you switched from being angry at the CDC for telling you not to bother with the masks because they couldn't altogether prevent infection so you were better off avoiding people with COVID altogether to being angry at the CDC for recommending masks in public places to somewhat reduce risk of infection? What was the scientific evidence that lead you to change your mind?
You're re-writing history. The existence of airborne diseases has been known for hundreds of years, and masks have been used for more than a hundred.
In Asia they were using masks from the start, just like they did with the original SARS.
But with this second SARS doctors/WHO were saying that surgical masks had no effect and that Asians don't know what they're doing.
Then, masks not only had no effect, they were bad for you.
Then, all of a sudden masks were good. Cloth masks were good too. And you had doctors showing you how to make masks out of t-shirts.
Then masks were so good you had to wear them by force.
Then cloth masks had no effect. Then surgical masks had no effect. Only N95 and above were good.
It was absolute roller coaster, and with every turn (excused with “the science has changed”) doctors were hammering a nail into the coffin of public acceptance of science.
I love the irony of being lectured about "rewriting history" from someone arguing that the WHO adopted the position that "Asians don't know what they're doing" and "masks not only had no effect, they were bad for you"...
> The recommendation changed (pretty quickly, based on stronger evidence of aerosol transmission and
This is not only backwards, it is hilariously so: Aerosol transmission was only partially accepted a year or more after the mask push. People still resist it even now. The whole reason masks were supposed to work was the assumption that it was entirely droplet transmission.
The people who believed it was aerosol spread that first year were the ones against masking, because the virus is too small to be stopped by cloth masks.
Funny that, because I can find references to likely aerosol transmission and the assumption that cloth masks would reduce aerosol transmission to a small degree in the early 2020 minutes of the body that later recommended mask mandates (on the basis reducing stuff to a small degree is important when reducing pandemic spread...) in my country
Not all aerosol particles are the same size, and particles don't have to be smaller than holes they pass through for a grid of fibre to obstruct a significant proportion of them. The change in guidance wasn't a conclusion masks were a panacea, they were a reflection that even a small degree of protection was better than no protection in a situation where existing measures weren't slowing its spread fast enough.
The people who were against masking on principle by and large didn't care what degree it reduced it by, because they just didn't want to be told to wear masks.
Who said anything about masks? And why does everything have to be black or white? I personally never hated masks. Never loved them either. But I understand how they help and when they don't.
No, it's the weeds that sprawl when education is constantly underfunded, demonized and people's access to good education is constantly hindered. All while idiocies are given the same amount of platform as rigorous methods out of "need for a debate" when there was going to be none to begin with.
It's not "dogma" to "sterilize" some fringe idiocies, just implying that is often pretty much helping that sewer just fester under our noses.
tl;dr "I know the truth. All objections are fringe idiocies. There is no need for debate. Just give me the mic, shut up and listen."
I remember reading about how Lenin dealt with opposition. He never argued with them on public, as it could damage his image and undermine his dogma. Instead, he ferociously attacked the opponent himself: demonized him, called him names, and later got rid of him.
Now you're just projecting, I don't see where else you could've gotten that TL;DR from.
I've heard similar comparisons to dictators from flat-earthers, that tells me a lot. I get the impression you wish you'd be oppressed, demonized, instead of ridiculed. But the latter is all it deserves, a laugh in the face and the door shut.
No, that's what happens if people lack self-reflection. If they had asked themselves if there is any chance that they could possibly know better than someone who's working on a topic all the time, the answer would have been a resounding no, no matter the topic in question.
In my personal experience... you are wrong. I mean, the part about knowing better than someone that works with something.
People working in some fields often suffer the "It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It"
Example: I have Hashimoto's Disease. All endocrinologists I went to, wouldn't help me, some of them burned a lot of my money trying to prove I had diabetes or other disease that could lead to expensive treatment (one insisted I had cancer, despite every test for cancer she asked for, returning negative). In the end to get treatment I got help from an Ophthalmologist, that even explained to me some things I didn't knew about the disease.
Example 2: when I was having some mental issues, all psychiatrists kept giving me random meds that were recently patented and expensive, and refused to let me get Ritalin, that was cheap because generic version of it exists. In the end the solution was ritalin. To get the ritalin I went to a psychiatrist that inherited lots of wealth and focused treating poor people, I suspect that psychiatrist in particular is the only one not getting dinners, parties and other "marketing events" from manufacturers. (I also in one point of my career worked in a software company that one project was make an app for the pharma client sales team track all the "gifts" given to doctors...)
Thank you for sharing your personal experience. Unfortunately sharing personal stories like this in the internet is the source of much grief for three reasons:
1) There is no way to quantify how likely this is from personal stories. If your experience is 1 in 100 event, you are doing more harm sharing it than not sharing it if 1 in 10 becomes too suspicious to follow diagnosis.
2) We really don't know. Either things happened as people say, or they doctor shopped until received a misdiagnosis and mismedication they wanted.
3) Readers can't use your example in their personal life because they are different. They may read what you said and go doctor shopping and googling until they are misdiagnosed and mismedicated.
You should not blindly trust doctors, and get second opinion of things seem wrong, but sharing medical stories in the internet is misses the information needed for it to be usable.
So “lived experience” matters until it is against the dogma.
Sharing personal story likes this is the reason the internet being a wonderful place. It should always be recommended as long as it is truthful, and doesn’t involve explicit agenda of spamming out other experience or information.
Your argument makes no sense unless you are claiming the GP is lying.
The sharer should always be truthful. But also the reader should assume things might not be as it seems, trying to verify it on their own. But that is different than recommending everyone to not share anything.
There are two separate recommendations to be made: one for the writer, and one for the reader.
Actually yes, sometimes an outsider opinion can be the correct one... that is the very essence of scientific enquiry - to ask questions.
Who am I? Some rando on the Internet, but I correctly assessed that the vaccines wouldn't prevent transmission, carried a non-zero risk of side effects - sometimes extremely serious, that natural immunity would provide far greater protection, that vaccination was unnecessary for children and younger adults, that there would no benefit to lock downs, and that masks were pointless.
We have been proven correct about every single one of these things, and every health official who promoted these ideas has been proven completely incorrect
> We have been proven correct about every single one of these things
No, you haven't.
> natural immunity would provide far greater protection
false
> vaccines wouldn't prevent transmission, carried a non-zero risk of side effects
"Prevent" and "non-zero" are weasel words, that sentence as written is true of literally every treatment and prophylactic in existence forever.
But it does reduce the risk of transmission even in the case of prisoners sharing a cell.
And the risks of side effects are much, much lower than the risks of those effects from the actual illness.
> that there would no benefit to lock downs, and that masks were pointless.
False on both counts.
Lockdowns were there to reduce the secondary consequences from running out of capacity. Several places ran out of capacity to handle the dead, let alone the living. I still don't understand how we were able to get short of medical oxygen, but that happened in some places too.
Masks likewise, reduce the transmission rate. Not eliminate, reduce. That's not pointless.
> that vaccination was unnecessary for children and younger adults,
Weasel phrasing, "unnecessary" can mean anything. But, I will try to interpret generously as possible: Sure, lots of kids and young adults won't die, they'll only get sick for a few weeks, with unknown long term damage.
While I agree with the points you are making and think they are important, they could have been made just as effectively without resorting to an Ad hominem format. Though the quality of civil discourse on HN has degraded over the years, HN is still the one of the places I expect to live upto a higher standard.
(I'm sorry to any readers that this comment is not adding anything materially useful to the wider discussion)
Noted. I'm not sure how to make the same points without saying that some of the statements were weasel words, but if you could suggest a different way to make the same points, I'd appreciate it.
(Apart from anything else, I know that raising the other party's heart rate is a terrible way to change their minds).
I think you were half way there taking charitable view on one of the arguments, I think taking a charitable view on the commenter's perspective/intent would have gotten you all the way.
With that adjustment, I think you can go from "weasel words" to "Your perspective might be flawed..."
-- and indeed they do not prevent transmission, or infection for that matter. Many many people, from Joe Biden to my own mother have been injected and boosted 5-times over, and still got a COVID infection. The vaccines simply don't work very well.
> And the risks of side effects are much, much lower than the risks of those effects from the actual illness.
You can't make a blanket statement about risk, especially when so little was know about the risk of side effects across the population.
For people like us, and the large number of people who have had COVID, we know what the risk of a COVID infection is, and in our case - as with most other people who are in good health, and not extremely elderly, it's a very mild condition.
On the other hand, health officials continue to deliberately downplay the significance of side effects, which we now know includes non-negligable risk of life threatening heart dissease and Bell's Palsey.
> Lockdowns were there to reduce the secondary consequences from running out of capacity.
That was the claim, certainly. But as we predicted, this never actually happened anywhere in the world - not even in places where people live in poverty, and healthcare is virtually non-existant.
> Several places ran out of capacity to handle the dead, let alone the living. I still don't understand how we were able to get short of medical oxygen, but that happened in some places too.
A lot of that stuff turneded out to be fabricated, but it spooked a lot of folks.
Sweden never locked down, and their outcomes were better than most of the rest of Europe:
> Masks likewise, reduce the transmission rate. Not eliminate, reduce. That's not pointless.
They don't though. Scarecly anyone wore the kind of mask that could possibly make any difference. It was security theatre to calm the masses. All a cloth mask does is redirect your breathe out the sides. It doesn't filter anything.
> Sure, lots of kids and young adults won't die, they'll only get sick for a few weeks, with unknown long term damage.
My kids have never had any COVID symptoms at all since we were first infected March 2020. So in our case (and millions like us), it's actually not unknown. I wouldn't even know if they had had the disease a dozen times over already - I hope they have, because it help further fortify their natural immunity.
Over and over the claims of the expert class have been proven wrong. They claimed to know things that they couldn't possibly have known, and continue to lie and deflect to this day.
Lockdowns did help flatten the curve, many countries health systems were overwhelmed regardless, but without lockdowns the fatalities and outcomes for severe cases would have been an order of magnitude worse.
-> personal experience: I survived only because I was able to get an ICU bed at the right time as did millions more in my country. Millions more didn't because the health systems were overwhelmed.
It's hard to take your argument in good faith when you offhandedly say stuff like this -> "A lot of that stuff turneded out to be fabricated, but it spooked a lot of folks."
Look at the hell china is going through right now and the hell we went through(India). The wounds are still deep and fresh, loved ones dying because they can't get a bed, or oxygen. Bodies rotting because crematoriums couldn't handle load and cities ran out of firewood.
I think there is room for discussion about the merits and demerits of various public/social policies around the pandemic without reducing it to a binary point of view and making it evidence based instead of offhandedly invalidating the pain and suffering of millions over the last few years as "fabricated".
> Lockdowns did help flatten the curve, many countries health systems were overwhelmed regardless, but without lockdowns the fatalities and outcomes for severe cases would have been an order of magnitude worse.
There's no evidence to support this assertion, and plenty of evidence to the contrary e.g. Sweden.
> It's hard to take your argument in good faith when you offhandedly say stuff like this -> "A lot of that stuff turneded out to be fabricated, but it spooked a lot of folks."
Like all your other assertions this one feels self serving for your point of view when a rudimentary google search provides references to the alternative.
Consensus on efficacy of lockdowns flattening the curve with relevant bibliography.
N of 1 as in what worked in Sweden (ranked 3rd in the global healthcare index and has a population lower than some cities in india) does not in any way shape or form meaningfully imply what would be good for the rest of the world (though it might certainly inform it)
I wasn't referring to the presence of fake/false/sensational/agenda driven narratives or your allusion to them, I was referring to your following offhanded assertions.
" Lockdowns were there to reduce the secondary consequences from running out of capacity.
That was the claim, certainly. But as we predicted, this never actually happened anywhere in the world - not even in places where people live in poverty, and healthcare is virtually non-existant."
It's arguments like this one in Nature that destroy confidence in public health. You claimed the article reflected a consensus, but it starts by saying that lots of papers show no lockdown effect and there's no agreement!
Also read the citations. They make a lot of uncited assertions (worthless), and then their primary evidence is Flaxman et al, it's a joke paper. Read it, they made a model that predicted 3 million deaths and when it didn't happen said lockdowns were the reason. Their methodology is wack. They had to hide Sweden from some of their graphs because it broke their model, they had to claim that shutting major sport/music events was magically effective in Sweden but nowhere else because their model just assigned all the reduction to whatever the last government decision happened to be. Google for it to find more criticism of their methods. Nature do admit the paper was criticized but don't tell you the type of problems.
> The vaccines were never tested to prevent transmission
Because it's an inevitable thing when people are less ill. It's dishonest to demand testing something like "people coughing less spread less" and then use that to pad the rest of your weak arguments with that - like the last sentence about efficacy (straight after the anecdotal).
> Sweden never locked down, and their outcomes were better than most of the rest of Europe
Emphasis on the "were".
> Scarecly anyone wore the kind of mask that could possibly make any difference. It was security theatre to calm the masses. All a cloth mask does is redirect your breathe out the sides. It doesn't filter anything.
Whose fault is that when the good practices could have been followed but were not? Should have beaten them with a baton? Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
> I hope they have, because it help further fortify their natural immunity.
Yikes. The old adage about "what doesn't kill you" should end with "leaves scars" as it's definitely not so cut and dry to only "make you stronger".
> Over and over the claims of the expert class have been proven wrong. They claimed to know things that they couldn't possibly have known, and continue to lie and deflect to this day.
They have been far less wrong than the rest. That is how the process is supposed to work - new evidence comes to light, opinion changes. It's not an ancient belief system based on a book. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of science to expect random sentences (where most nuance has been filtered out from) to be irrevocably true.
There are going to be improvements, better ways to apply the same principles, changes in the underlying assessments, things change. Framing it as the reason why some opposing stance is correct is extremely dishonest and grossly wrong.
> Because it's an inevitable thing when people are less ill. It's dishonest to demand testing something like "people coughing less spread less" and then use that to pad the rest of your weak arguments with that - like the last sentence about efficacy (straight after the anecdotal).
The context of this is that there were voices calling for coercing vaccination. My mother-in-law lost her job because she refused to have it. The sole justification offered was that the experts claimed to know that it would protect other people. Except they never knew that - it was guesswork, and we now know that the vaccines don't prevent transmission.
For example this linke @grjdiofgeriov shared:
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2116597
"Although vaccination still lowers the risk of infection, similar viral loads in vaccinated and unvaccinated persons who are infected with the delta variant call into question the degree to which vaccination prevents transmission."
>> Sweden never locked down, and their outcomes were better than most of the rest of Europe
> Emphasis on the "were".
Not just were - they continue to be now. Their all-cause mortality has been far lower from start to finish, and they never had any kind of COVID-related crisis.
Equally, if you look across the world, there is simply no correlation between COVID policy and outcomes. None of the intereventions made any significant differentce.
> Whose fault is that when the good practices could have been followed but were not? Should have beaten them with a baton? Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Even with perfect practices, it wouldn't have made much difference. The virus was airbourne, endemic, and highly transmissible. In the same way, I can still smell a bonfire half a mile away mask or no mask.
It was purely security theatre. "Something must be done. This is something"
>> I hope they have, because it help further fortify their natural immunity.
> Yikes. The old adage about "what doesn't kill you" should end with "leaves scars" as it's definitely not so cut and dry to only "make you stronger".
No - not yikes. Their symptoms from COVID were zero. No scars. Nada. Nothing at all.
> It's a fundamental misunderstanding of science to expect random sentences (where most nuance has been filtered out from) to be irrevocably true.
I agree entirely, and this wouldn't have been a problem if governments hadn't used these half-baked ideas as a reason to coerce people to lock down, wear masks, or receive experimental medical treatments.
> They have been far less wrong than the rest.
Not at all. Again and again, the @realjhol model was far more accurate than the Imperial College model. Many such cases. Sad to see my alma mater fail so badly.
> Not at all. Again and again, the @realjhol model was far more accurate than the Imperial College model. Many such cases. Sad to see my alma mater fail so badly.
The risk from catching sars-cov-2 was/is way higher than the risk from vaccination. This is proven by the fact that some 13 billion doses have been administered with little harm, while some 700 million infections have caused 7 million deaths. You have drawn the wrong conclusions and made incorrect decisions based on your ineptitude. You are Dunning-Kruger instantiated.
Turns out that just winning an election doesn't help you enact a lasting win against the swamp, when 95% of the people qualified to serve in your cabinet are DC swamp creatures or are at least adjacent to the swamp
While any sane person would agree in general, it isn't hard to find examples of experts in any domain who made some mistake in that domain at some point.
Also, normal people are absolutely terrible about probability.
Combined, I therefore suspect it's "I know they're normally right, but not about this."
In this case it's not disagreement with one expert, or even a few. The vaccination schedule is based on a consensus of experts. Not only across organizations, like the CDC, AAP, FDA, but across nations too, more or less.
It's truly bizarre to _radically_ disagree, especially as a layperson.
I mostly share your assessment, except that I think the word "bizarre" presumes how normal people behave. These kinds of attitudes have been around since at least the Spanish Flu pandemic, so it's important to… how do I phrase this? To account for such attitudes when planning public health campaigns, and not just dismiss such people as arrogant fools with no self-awareness.
You don't know me and that is fine. In early January 2020 I predicted the entire pandemic, including the mask lie(before they lied), the supply run (My entire family picked off full shelves), the effort from people, the vaccine issues, and the aftermath.
If I followed what you suggested, I would be without my mother. So maybe, just maybe, you are wrong.
Faith has no impact on my decision to prefer not to be the guinea pig for experimental gene therapy, that results in micro clotting and turning your body into a spike protein factory.
I have no issue with traditional vaccination, but this is nothing like a vaccination. They wouldn't have needed to change the definition of vaccination if it was.
They wouldn't need to push this 24/7 on every possible platform if it worked as promised.
They wouldn't have to tell us that these super rare side effects that every one of my colleagues is experiencing is super rare and nothing to be concerned about.
If you find your opinions align with the mindless masses, perhaps you are among them.
This is actually not true - reverse transcriptase is present in your cells, and has been known to add code from viral RNA to your DNA, sometimes permanently.
13 billion doses administered. If they were one-thousandth as dangerous as you claim, we’d see a helluva lot more problems than we do. But we don’t. You’re jus plain wrong.
> Faith has no impact on my decision to prefer not to be the guinea pig for experimental gene therapy, that results in micro clotting and turning your body into a spike protein factory.
I guess fair, it's just the underlying cause for both the faith and your gross misunderstanding of high-school biology that's the same.
This is very true. I don't know if you're saying that about vaccination providers or anti-vax campaigners (Deliberate ambiguity? I ask because I do that sometime).
While there is a massive difference in evidence supporting these two sides, as I have a mere GCSE grade C in biology, I necessarily have to just have faith in the research methods and licensing regimes that made my 4 Covid jabs and humpteen others.
Not unadulterated faith, but I do have faith, and it is only faith. I can't do a double-blind replication even if I wanted to.
Why? There's no requirement that you get a credential from a particular group in society before being allowed to distrust them. If such a rule really existed it'd be a field day for scammers. For example nobody would be allowed to doubt any claim related to Web3 if they hadn't already spent years writing smart contracts. Or they wouldn't be allowed to decide Tesla FSD isn't safe enough, because they aren't themselves self driving car researchers.
It's really smart to distrust vaccine providers and public health authorities. Having blind faith in them is bad. You don't need a credential to see that, you just have to observe that they constantly make strong claims in favor of vaccines that they later walk back when it's too late, without any consequences whatsoever.
Because medicine is generally useful and functional.
Because doctors studied at the same university that taught me much of my profession.
Because nations in economic dispute with each other, nations with territorial disputes, even nations at war with each other, still all agree that the vaccines are a good idea.
-mixed messaging on basics from NIH on COVID in the early days, including outright lies (remember when wearing masks was bad for you?) -> Elites are clueless
-Mixed messaging from pretty much every global leader about the best approach to handling the pandemic, clearly showing there are many uncertainties and unknowns. HOWEVER instead of genuinely acknowledging and encouraging public discourse on these uncertainties beyond lip service, act in a very paternal manner then do whatever polls tell them to do. -> Elites are clueless and only care about retaining power
-Pfizer's CFO actually saying in a call in 2021 that when the pandemic is over, they will be able to drastically bump up the price on the vaccine, pricing out the global South ensuring a constant, annual "supply" of new variants to threaten the global North that can afford the annual booster. -> Elites are corrupt, in particular Pharma.
-The Sackler family faces zero consequences and kept their fortune. -> Elites are corrupt, in particular Pharma.
These are just three examples surrounding health and pharma, but like I said it's been brewing for decades (WMD, Banksters, Austerity, etc) and frankly I don't blame people for losing trust in authority like this. Especially given the education system is structured in a way to engender Trust in authority. Unless those in position of leadership face real consequences, inclusively serious prison time and loss of fortunes for their mistakes (accidental or otherwise) this corrosion will go on.
P.s. to the downvoters: please provide a comment including how any one of the above items does not erode trust in authority