https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/01/anti-vaccine-nonsense-will-likely-kill-thousands-this-season-fda-officials-say/
Top regulatory officials call for clinicians to speak up and drown out misinformation.
Holy shit I thought this was only about Covid. These absolute idiots are breaking herd immunity for the entire field of virus based diseases.
Rabies is the real litmus test to see if people really have the balls to be anti-vaxxers or not, lol.
That, or smallpox.
As long as it disproportionately affects red states, I’m all for it. Let’s go. Cull these fucking mouth breathers.
Problem is, a good chunk of these mouth breathers were vaccinated as kids, and their innocent, unknowing children get to reap the costs.
Remember how many German anti-vaxxer emmigrated to Columbia (or Paraguay?) where they had to send their children to school and what happened first day they vaccinated them without asking the parents 😄😄😄😄
Ignoring how fucked up it is to take pleasure in people's deaths, let me remind you that there are some people, even in blue states, that cannot receive various vaccinations due to health risks and thus are entirely reliant on herd immunity.
Also, disproportionately doesn't mean "solely".
My mom has lymphoma. She gets extremely sick from even minor colds. I am very worried about losing her to an infection, and the thought that it could be a vaccine-preventable infection fills me with rage
Well, given that the vast majority of these folks are aligned to a particular political party.... And it's an election year during covid/flu/rsv season...
Carry on!
I just saw somewhere that (of course it's Florida) politicians in Florida are calling to stop distribution of vaccines there because of "potential to cause cancer."
Hmmm... Now you care about carcinogens? You know what helps prevent carcinogens from entering the ecosystem? Corporate regulations. Oops I said the bad R word... They don't actually give a shit about what causes cancer, it's just another political stunt...
We really need to come back to reality as a country. Unfortunately it will take another thirty years.
Unfortunately it will take us actually taking action against propagandists, but since they're "the press" they get a free pass to do whatever they want.
It's a horrible scenario to be in, because you definitely don't want to open that can of worms with the current political system. Who gets to decide what is propaganda and what isn't? I could easily see a Trump administration labeling all media that isn't right wing media as "propaganda unfit for consumption."
So we rely on the intelligence of the common individual to see through the bullshit... As we all know common sense isn't common :(
Fortunately this isn't government mandated "cleansing", these people are being told to get vaccinated/wear masks/use hand sanitizer. They're being given every opportunity and encouragement to protect themselves.
Definitely Darwinism doing what Darwinism does.
I just feel bad for the immunocompromised people who will unfortunately inevitably get caught up in the assholes who refuse to take necessary precautions.
I don't think this counts as eugenics, as nobody is forcing them to kill themselves. This looks more like natural selection to me. I'm all for it.
I hope you would agree, it is wrong to see people as totally atomized, neatly seperated, each in their own little castle with their own small set of things. We are all part of a World just as that World is part of all of us. Sometimes we make it a little better and sometimes we make it a little worse, but surely it is not as simple as to say anyone is the sole cause of their suffering nor, that they are the only recipient. For example: would it not be terrible for those, that love them to lose such a very dear peace of their world, and as an extension of themselves, even if it is in part responsible for their own demise?
You also mentioned natural selection, but it is clear, that not all thing one could label natural are good, just or desirable. 'Can we perhaps even build a new nature?', 'In a world where we can sustain everyone, should we not just do it without any kind of selection?' - those are just two questions, that come to my mind, but I don't feel like thinking about them, still wanted to write them down.
This is as much eugenics as when that cult all killed themselves. Exact same situation.
I’m well past feeling bad for stupid people who die needless and preventable deaths, and I’m well past feeling anything but hostility towards those who, through stubborn and willful ignorance, would threaten my life and the lives of those I care for, not to mention everyone else around them— especially the elderly and infirmed.
it’s as simple as that, and any equivocation on these points is just them trying to pass responsibility for their own social and moral failures onto others. and for that, fuck them.
edit: subject-verb agreement
If only they were islands to themselves and didn't take innocent people down with them in pursuit of their Darwin Awards
If you are a liberal and a vegetarian then you do not eat meat. If you are a conservative and a vegetarian you are the only one allowed to eat meat.
that’s one of the things about conservative philosophy, especially today, is the subscription to the concept of solipsism, at least to the part f that philosophy which states that nothing outside of the self exists, not really, except as a projection of the self. meaning, in actuality, everything one sees and experiences is, in actuality, simply part of one’s imagination— a “projection” on one’s ego whose existence is purely to fulfill a need of the self and is represented/projected as such.
it’s a particularly sociopathic and self-serving view of the world, which illustrates very quickly the types of people it attracts as an ideology and those to whom it’s an easy and quick defense.
I wish it were that simple. But those people are going to take up hospital beds, nurses, doctors, etc away from people who got vaccinated (or couldn’t due to medical conditions). They’ll drive up medical prices even more. They’ll spread their diseases to those with compromised immune systems.
I don’t feel sorry for them, but they’ll harm and kill others on their way out.
perhaps you missed the part where I nether pity them, accept their excuses or equivocations, or accept, in any way, any reason for their refusal of their civic, social, or moral responsibilities? because when you say:
I wish it were that simple
please explain wtf you mean that I didn’t address pretty explicitly in my first comment
As for driving insurance prices. I remember there was a law that was introduced in NY that allowed insurance to do that. Everyone was saying it was symbolic, because they already could set different prices for unvaccinated.
Couldn't they just do that?
It's really too bad that Covid wasn't deadlier. Can we get Covid Classic back?
Super Covid?
Airborne Ebola?
The worst part is they aren't hurting themselves, since they were vaccinated as children, but their kids will suffer instead
Unfortunately, we're talking about child vaccination rates rapidly dropping. I don't know about you, but I have never met a 3 month old or a 3 year old anti-vaxxer. As much as I disagree with their parents' decision (I'm immunocompromised), I hate that innocent children are going to face the cruel brunt of what is coming.
So you admit you’ve never met a three-year-old anti-vaxxer while also admitting it was their parents’ decision… How am I supposed to respond to such a self-contradictory and anti-intellectual comment as that? 
No 3 year old is an anti-vaxxer, silly goose. They're unvaccinated because their parents are anti-vaxxers.
Unvaccinated does not equal anti-vax. Are you able to grasp that?
Ever since April 2020, whenever I hear something about vaccines, I just assume the worst.
I never got rid of my mask or hand sanitizer. Keep some in your car too. We're all responsible for our own germs because culturally and legally, your right to life is considered less important than the right to stupidity.
Only 19% of people have gotten the latest lastest Covid vaccine.
The first one was giant walk in clinics where you just told them your name and address. Completely free. The largest vaccine drive in US history.
The second round was at pharmacies and some popup spots. Free but they bill via insurance.
The third was at pharmacies only and free only if you didn't have insurance.
I know I am speculating here but is it possible, just remotely possible that trying to reduce costs in the short run by managed inconvenience and using crony capitalism is a factor in the decline of vaccination? And furthermore costs us as a society more with more deaths, more disability, more sick time taken, less time for students in school, less overally human happiness than just doing the way that proved it worked amazingly well 2 years ago. Could it be that by making things harder for people they are less likely to do it? Do humans really respond to incentives and short term cost savings do not always translate to greater long term prosperity?
Oh man this is like way too wild. No way I am right about any of this.
Covid vaccines remain free to anyone with insurance, including Medicare. They are immediately available at just about any pharmacy. Access is not the problem.
My sister's insurance didn't cover it. Which is wild, and I thought should be, but she fought it hard and that was the final answer. She had to go to a free vaccine event to get it because she couldn't afford the several hundred dollars they wanted without insurance.
yeah, despite this being legally required. This is the absolute shit of privatized health insurance in the US. These companies know they can just obfuscate, deny, and delay with impunity, and they do so.
If it is not a problem how come last month they would not go forward without my insurance information and made a big stink about having problems confirming everything?
because back in september the government transitioned from direct funding to an insurance mandate based system. So yes you have to provide your insurance information.
Why is there a 2nd middleman? The retailer is already a middleman buying in bulk and selling to consumers. If the vaccine costs x amount why not just pay the pharmacy the x instead of the government paying y + x to an insurance company? The insurance company isn't adding any value to the process. They aren't coordinating the logistics, they aren't pushing their users to come in, they aren't providing anything.
Huh? The person with health insurance has already paid the insurance company. That person owes zero dollars to anyone for the vaccine. The government also is not involved in the transaction. The payment is from the insurance company to the pharmacy.
Insurance does add value. It buffers people from variations in health costs. In the case here of one $200 vaccine dose, sure many people could pay directly. Also many people can’t. In either case that $200 is a barrier to getting vaccinated. It is in society’s interest, our interest, to have high vaccination rates so we try to remove the barriers to getting vaccinated.
I think for profit health insurance is a shitty system but as long as we have this shitty system I want the government to regulate the crap out of those insurers. Like requiring no cost vaccines.
You might be right about the Covid vaccine, but this article is mostly referring to young children and vaccines such as measles. I don't think it would be about distribution changes in that case.
More parents are requesting exemptions, with the implication being that more people have become polarized against all vaccines.
The third was at pharmacies only and free only if you didn’t have insurance.
For people in the USA: The covid vaccine is free for people with insurance.
Additionally, at least some doctor's offices have it (mine does, but I don't want to assume they all do), and there are vaccine clinics where they do flu/covid/etc that show up periodically if that's more your style.
I'm not specifically calling out the user I quoted, just making a general statement because I've seen that exact sentiment ("the covid vaccine is no longer free") like 4 or 5 times on lemmy in just the past day. It's disinformation/misinformation and it leads to situations where misinformed people decide not to get vaccinated, in part, because they think it's going to cost them money.
If the provider you were seeking the vaccine from didn't already have up-to-date, accurate, and valid insurance information for you, then that would be one reason for asking. Realistically, a random internet stranger isn't going to know the answer to your specific situation. However, if you want to know more about your specific circumstances, you may consider contacting them again and asking for clarification.
I got my vaccine while in the weird period after getting a new job where you don't have your health insurance info yet.
I paid $200 for it.
I'd do it again - got covid a few weeks ago and it was pretty light, likely a result of the vaccine - but damn, that's a hard ask for a huge portion of the population.
The rollout for the 2023 vaccine was awful. I wouldn't be surprised that some folks gave up because you just couldn't get an appointment and then it was out of mind.
The third was at pharmacies only and free only if you didn't have insurance.
I have insurance and didn't pay for any of them.
A lot of people here are claiming something "like this is a problem that only affects these idiots". Sadly, that's not the case. A number of these vaccines are only roughly 80% effective. The efficacy of these lies in herd immunity, where the 20% of people who did get the vaccine, but are not protected, will never encounter the disease because the other 80% can't get it to spread it to them.
Let's say you need 70% of people to be protected to maintain herd immunity. Then just 10% of the population needs to be idiots, and the disease spreads to the 30% that isn't protected. Of that 30%, 20 points are people who were not idiots and got vaccinated, but unfortunately are not protected. The idiots will get sick, but twice as many not-idiots will get sick too. Unfortunately, for some of these diseases, the idiots will be hurting many more people than themselves.
The affected people are not necessarily immunocompromised. For example, after two doses of the mumps vaccine, 88% of people are immune. Immunity decreases with time, so the proportion that's immune is lower than that. Let's guess at 80%. You, the person reading this, can be a normal healthy person who got the mumps vaccine, and you have a 1 in 5 chance that you're not immune. Those are some pretty big odds.
Yes, the immunocompromised people are relying on the herd for protection, and the morons are letting them down
Well, I wasn't even considering them. That's a particularly vulnerable group, but I was referring to uncompromised people for whom the vaccine is not effective, or for whom immunity has waned.
Unfortunately, many people don't consider them :( Getting a vaccine is not just for ourselves. It's an investment in civilization.
You guys are still spreading this misinformation? Like two years ago know we've known the vaccines do not prevent transmission, it's not protecting the immunocompromised at all.
"It's"? Are you talking about covid? Because we're talking about other diseases, and if you're claiming that a population fully vaccinated against mumps, other than the immunocompromised, doesn't protect the immunocompromised from mumps, feel free to look up and compare current and past rates for mumps infections.
Then, use your half a brain to extend that to COVID. The COVID vaccines do little to prevent transmission in that if you are vaccinated, and are exposed to the virus, you will still likely become infected. But the vaccines reduce the duration of infection and reduce the viral load shed by the infected person, thus reducing the probability that an infected person will spread to anyone else. If an infected person is infecting fewer people, that is a reduction in overall transmission. So when you say "’we've known the vaccines do not prevent transmission", you're completely wrong, or at the very least, equivocating, by conflating individual transmission with overall transmission rates. Here's a link, since I doubt you'll know what that means either: https://www.thefreedictionary.com/equivocating.
So much for "trust the science". You're blowing as much bullshit as the anti vaxxers here
We do have an infinite amount of them yes. Sadly they will all be printed on fancy paper at best this year because of the volume of them.
We can't drown out botnets without botnets of our own. Information war is war, but lacks attrition, so the opponents never actually get defeated.
So, we can either accept this status quo, or we can escalate. But I don't think we can just try harder, we're givin her all she's got, Jim. It's not like medical professionals are known for having tons of free time and extra morale to burn away on twitter.
So, we need technical assistance, of some sort.
I’ve come to accept that I’ll have to work until I’m dead. So one thing that doesn’t make me upset is less people. Specifically less people to take my job—younger people.
So, anti-vaxers, if you really wanna pwn me, you’ll make sure your kids live long enough to take my job.
We need a new disfiguring disease that scares the shit out of people. We were too good and eliminated smallpox. We nearly eliminated polio and measles. Monkeypox failed (thank you, doctors, scientists, and everyone who got vaccinated!)
...So now we need a new one that causes people to either get extremely fucked up and live, or extremely fucked up and then die horribly, and slow enough to warn people in their communities.
Apparently, a subset of the population cannot remember the olden days, and vaccines in schools aren't compulsory anymore.
These people have gone too long without people they love dying in front of them from things like prolonged diarrhea lung, mucus intoxication and blood tears. Also the holocaust survivors and WW2 soldiers have mostly passed away.
We have a collective goldfish memory and right wing governments constantly sabotaging public education. We also lack empathy on the whole. Civilization doesn't feel like it can sustain much longer.
We saw it during COVID too though, so many people refusing vaccinations because they are complete morons who don't believe in science, as their family members die around them one by one, many of them still deciding that they won't let "the man" win and inject them with "that poison".
Looks at notes: We'll need to get that up to hundreds of thousands before anyone even starts to think about doing something about it.
Don't worry though, the faster you approach a million, the more likely they'll just start to shrug it off and say it's the new normal.
While I'm all for vaccination including covid vaccines, we would not have the distrust towards the mega pharmaceutical companies if they were not so untrustworthy. They sold their trust for profits a long time ago.
Do you trust automakers? What about Apple or Google? How do you feel about GMOs in food? I bet you still eat, have a smartphone and drive. I get that it is hard to trust megacorps and industries thst have the populace captive, yet fear of a vaccine is what illicits special irrational behavior in people.
In the US I don't trust the phone and big tech companies to not sell my data, i dont trust the automobile industry to not lobby aganst good public transportation, and i don't trust mega pharma to not SKU the test results when they could can away with it. I dont trust any of the above to not Astroturf, buy off ftc officials or anything if they are in a position to get away with it. Perhaps im just bitter because i was prescribed an absurd amount of opioids as a 16 year old. They were pushed so hard they told us it was safe they blantently lie
We didn't trust their business practices, or that they were treating not curing people (which comes from r&d startups anyway). Pfizer overcharges diabetics and shit, we never thought they put 5g chips in your DNA or whatever tf these nut jobs think. This is not an extension of corporate mistrust, it's anti science luddites keeping the population uneducated and sickly.
I might be more cynical if they weren't being monitored by literally every government health agency on the planet.
I feel bad for kids and for people who are vulnerable. The adults who are bringing down our society through idiotic decisions can’t die fast enough, imo.
Forcing dummies to get vaccinated and saving their genetic material to propagate is a form of eugenics. Most people are against authoritarian enforced eugenics, yes?
We should have special schools and special military units where all the unvaccinated can congregate together in freedom.