5 ms·

Anyone have a good theory here? Last I heard from Trump he was urging everyone to “take the great American vaccines” (that he, Trump, sped along, he said) So t

by graeme 5y ago

Anyone have a good theory here? Last I heard from Trump he was urging everyone to “take the great American vaccines” (that he, Trump, sped along, he said) So this isn’t the Republican following the siren song of Trump. They seem to be doing their own thing. And in so doing, making their own job harder because they’ll see more infections. What is this: a grassroots competition to pander to their base which has lumped vaccines in with other pandemic measured they like? I have not delved into their narratives so I’m out of the loop and confused on what is driving things. It isn’t Trump that I can tell.

TulliusCicero 5y ago
Trump has encouraged a general sentiment of opposition to experts, and he's been kind of lukewarm on promoting the vaccines compared to Democrat leaders. Unfortunately, the GOP has increasingly embraced conspiratorial thinking, and that includes vaccine skepticism and hesitation.
- redis_mlc 5y ago
  > Trump has encouraged a general sentiment of opposition to experts Trump knew since May 2020 that Fauci was lying - he had the DOE LLNL investigate the lab leak theory, and LLNL reported that COVID-19 was possibly from a lab. So yeah, he doesn't believe experts who can't stop lying. https://wjla.com/news/nation-world/exclusive-classified-study-found-covid-19-could-have-originated-in-chinese-lab https://wjla.com/news/nation-world/exclusive-classified-stud... > he's been kind of lukewarm on promoting the vaccines compared to Democrat leaders Trump's Warpspeed (Spring 2020) funded the vaccines. I haven't heard him say any negative things about them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed Republicans/Trumpists believe in personal choice, so I wouldn't expect him to be a cheerleader for getting a shot. > the GOP has increasingly embraced conspiratorial thinking, After Fauci lying for over a year, 2 failed impeachments, being deplatformed on social media, being told they have no standing to dispute elections, being told CRT doesn't exist - half of the country knows what a Marxist conspiracy feels like first-hand, and they're pissed. Most of the major stories about Trump since 2019 on CNN, MSNBC and WaPo have been retracted in 2021 (after the election). I suggest you stop reading those sources and spend a couple months reading Fox and NTD - I can't think of anything they're retracted. Do a Youtube search for "cpac trump full speech 2021" - the only full version is on Sky Australia's channel - for now. All the copies on US channels have been blocked or prevented.
  - redis_mlc 5y ago
    Here's CNN attacking the nuclear family again today (it's a Marxist technique to restructure society): Don't fall into the nuclear family 'parent trap': What kids need most is love https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/14/health/kids-parents-love-wellness-opinion/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/14/health/kids-parents-love-well...
- busymom0 5y ago
  I am more and more disappointed in HN to constantly devolve into "blame GOP" for everything politics. Before elections, majority of media was singing the opposite tunes of what they are singing now. I will quote all left leaning media to make my point. Here's CNN in March 2020: > The timetable for a coronavirus vaccine is 18 months. Experts say that's risky: Eighteen months might sound like a long time, but in vaccine years, it's a blink. That's the long end of the Trump administration's time window for developing a coronavirus vaccine, and some leaders in the field say this is too fast -- and could come at the expense of safety. https://archive.is/TJhly https://archive.is/TJhly Here's Business Insider in Apr 1, 2020: > Fauci said it will take 12 to 18 months to get a coronavirus vaccine in the US. Experts say a quick approval could be risky. Some experts say reaching that target may be challenging, because vaccines require a lot of testing. One worry is "immune enhancement," normally spotted in animal testing, whereby a vaccine actually weakens a person's response to the virus. Even a year-and-a-half would be staggeringly fast for vaccine development, and some experts have voiced concerns that a vaccine produced on that timeline could hurtle too quickly through safety trials. https://archive.is/hPiFW https://archive.is/hPiFW Here's CNN in September 2020: > Past vaccine disasters show why rushing a coronavirus vaccine now would be 'colossally stupid'. On April 12, 1955 the government announced the first vaccine to protect kids against polio. Within days, labs had made thousands of lots of the vaccine. Batches made by one company, Cutter Labs, accidentally contained live polio virus and it caused an outbreak. More than 200,000 children got the polio vaccine, but within days the government had to abandon the program. "Forty thousand kids got polio. Some had low levels, a couple hundred were left with paralysis, and about 10 died," said Dr. Howard Markel, a pediatrician, distinguished professor, and director of the Center for the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan. The government suspended the vaccination program until it could determine what went wrong. > From 1955 to 1963, between 10% and 30% of polio vaccines were contaminated with simian virus 40 (SV40). > "The way they would grow the virus was on monkey tissues. These rhesus macaques were imported from India, tens of thousands of them," medical anthropologist S. Lochlann Jain said. "They were gang caged and in those conditions, the ones that didn't die on the journey, many got sick, and the viruses spread quickly," added Jain, who taught a history of vaccines course at Stanford and is working on a publication about the incident. Scientists wrongly thought the formaldehyde they used would kill the virus. "It was being transferred to millions of Americans," Jain said. "Many believe this issue wasn't adequately pursued," Jain said. Some studies showed a possible link between the virus and cancer. The US Centers for Disease Control website, however, said most studies are "reassuring" and find no link. > The government launched the program in about seven months and 40 million people got vaccinated against swine flu, according to the CDC. That vaccination campaign was later linked to cases of a neurological disorder called Guillain-Barre syndrome, which can develop after an infection or, rarely, after vaccination with a live vaccine. "Unfortunately, due to that vaccine, and the fact that it was done so hastily, there were a few hundred cases of Guillain-Barre, although it's not definitive that they were linked," Kinch said. The CDC said the increased risk was about 1 additional case of Gullain-Barre for every 100,000 people who got the swine flu vaccine. Due to this small association, the government stopped the program to investigate. "It was kind of a fiasco," Markel said. "The good news is that there never was an epidemic of swine flu. So we were safe, but that shows you what could happen." > Markel said people's mistrust of the system makes the idea that the FDA would rush this process before late stage clinical trials are complete "colossally stupid." "This is one of the most ridiculous things I've heard this administration say," Markel said. "All it takes is one bad side effect to basically botch a vaccine program that we desperately need against this virus. It's a prescription for disaster." One, the vaccine may not be safe. Two, if it is not safe, people will lose faith in vaccines. Three, if a vaccine doesn't offer complete protection, people will have a false sense of security and increase their risk. Four, if a substandard vaccine gets an EUA, a better vaccine may never get approval, because people would be reluctant to enroll in trials and risk getting a placebo instead of a vaccine. https://archive.ph/ https://archive.ph/ Last year, scientists were too busy playing politics. > "... it was scarier to be associated with Trump and to become a tool for racists, so people didn't want to publicly call for an investigation into lab origins." https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/lab-leak-theory-science-scientists-rcna1191 https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/lab-leak-theory... It never occurred to these people that claiming the virus came from bats because they eat bats there is the more "xenophobic" thing and not the possible lab leak caused due to poor handling. The next time someone asks us to trust the science, our response should be "okay, but can I trust the scientists?" And if they can be so easily manipulated based on politics, what else are they and the dissenters being silenced on? I can find several such examples of opposite tunes. But now that the political pendulum has swung to the other side, everything's done a 180. Instead of addressing the hesitance of people due to conflicting messaging, we have devolved into blaming the GOP and Trump for everything.
desine 5y ago
It's interesting that even six months since he left office you're still searching for reasons to blame him. But to answer your question - some people are distrustful of the government. I think even the most tankie pro-government-interverntionalists will recognize the United States Federal Government does not have a clean slate record. These distrusting people tend to vote towards the party or group that markets itself as small government (regardless of actual voting history or policy). If you want to tie that to President Trump, he did run on "draining the swamp" of the corrupt people in said government. Realistically, though, it has little to do with him. He was a symptom, not a cause.
- graeme 5y ago
  No, I was trying to prevent poor quality replies that blamed him. Because most people’s first instinct for a lot of general pandemic countermeasures skepticism is to think “trump”. I actually think Trump’s vaccine procurement was one of the best things his administration did. As for your theory, is isn’t that convincing. Lots of government skeptic states had vaccination programs. Only now that that has become political are they cutting them. I’m wondering how it came to be so political and more specifically how the politicians purposefully make their own lives harder. Something like business lockdowns or a mask mandate at the least have costs: you get pandemic control but restrict people. However, bringing vaccines to people who want them is basically a free lunch for a govt: you save much more than you spend and coerce no one. So what are the incentives driving this?
  - desine 5y ago
    Apologies, I misunderstood your tone. >you [...] coerce no one. I disagree with that point. Where I live, there has been a very strong coercion angle. It's very obviously government sponsored.
raphlinus 5y ago
I think it's more useful to look at propaganda channels that have wide reach, rather than Trump. For example, Tucker Carlson is doing full-on death cult antivax.
- graeme 5y ago
  So that has created an incentive for the local politicians to make their own lives harder, more or less? Plausible. What’s driving Carlson’s incentives?
  - raphlinus 5y ago
    I wish I knew, and that would shed much light on the disinformation landscape if it were known. He's almost certainly vaccinated himself (he refuses to say, and Rupert Murdoch is), so it's unlikely he believes his own bullshit.
- loonster 5y ago
  The big propaganda channels are google, facebook, reddit, twitter, apple. They severely limited free speech and only promoted the official narrative. By making it harder to find legitimate opposition sources, people have turned to less legitimate ones. Tucker Carlson is just riding the wave and tell his viewers what they want to hear. Many conservatives abandoned him after his refusal to to publish the Hunter Biden Laptop information.
war1025 5y ago
People don't like the government telling them how to live their lives. They especially don't like the government telling them how to parent. And they extra especially don't like the government going behind their backs and telling their kids that their parents don't know how to parent. The wording is "stop vaccine outreach to kids" not "stop vaccine outreach to parents" This really doesn't seem that surprising to me.
tehwebguy 5y ago
One theory is that Trump feels like he didn't get enough credit for the vaccines so he and the GOP politicians and media are trying to discredit them entirely. It's not clear that he's directing this but check out any republican news station or politician talking about vaccines in the last month, it's unreal. Republican & far right influencers, some of the widest reaching influencers in any category, are publicly pushing back on vaccines daily now. Another theory is that vaccines are an increasingly easy topic for victim complex radicalization. People like to think they are smarter than their doctor, there was already a growing grift industry pushing vaccine skepticism, plus it's new. There's probably no easier way to radicalize someone already in your base than to say, "Hey you know how you already didn't trust that new guy in office (and I've been saying he didn't really win for months)? Now he is forcing you get a shot you don't need!" It's pretty wild to think that there are people today actively encouraging people not to vaccinate against this thing but then again there have been people pushing against basically every vaccine for many years. All of them selling something: books, event tickets, snake oil type "health" products or just pulling in YouTube ad revenue. Some people will do literally anything to get what they want in life, I guess it's really not different from a president starting a war for personal or shallow political reasons or a destructive industry leader burying a damning report but it's still super surprising to see it in real time as opposed to decades after the fact.
tzs 5y ago
> Anyone have a good theory here? Last I heard from Trump he was urging everyone to “take the great American vaccines” (that he, Trump, sped along, he said). Over on Gab, TheDonald, and similar places I've seen people reconcile that with their anti-vaccination beliefs in a couple ways: 1. It's part of his long term 4D chess plan to eliminate the Libs and to MAGA. Libs will respond to pro vaccination messages, get the 5G microchip DNA rewriting population control injection being pushed under the guise of a COVID vaccine, and there will be no more Libs next generation. Patriots are smart enough to recognize this for a fake out to eliminate the Libs and avoid the vaccine, or 2. The Jews got to him.
readflaggedcomm 5y ago
The Vice President said she wouldn't take any vaccine Trump promoted. Maybe the denialism is entirely partisan.
- ModernMech 5y ago
  She said she wouldn’t take any vaccine Trump promoted if independent scientists didn’t also promote it. Her reasoning being Trump had lied so much about COVID at that point, there was no reason to trust anything he said. In fact she did take one of the vaccines Trump promoted, and she did so publicly, because they were independently verified to work. Interestingly Trump got his shot in private and never revealed that fact.

by graeme 5y ago

TulliusCicero 5y ago

Trump has encouraged a general sentiment of opposition to experts, and he's been kind of lukewarm on promoting the vaccines compared to Democrat leaders. Unfortunately, the GOP has increasingly embraced conspiratorial thinking, and that includes vaccine skepticism and hesitation.

redis_mlc 5y ago
> Trump has encouraged a general sentiment of opposition to experts Trump knew since May 2020 that Fauci was lying - he had the DOE LLNL investigate the lab leak theory, and LLNL reported that COVID-19 was possibly from a lab. So yeah, he doesn't believe experts who can't stop lying. https://wjla.com/news/nation-world/exclusive-classified-study-found-covid-19-could-have-originated-in-chinese-lab https://wjla.com/news/nation-world/exclusive-classified-stud... > he's been kind of lukewarm on promoting the vaccines compared to Democrat leaders Trump's Warpspeed (Spring 2020) funded the vaccines. I haven't heard him say any negative things about them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed Republicans/Trumpists believe in personal choice, so I wouldn't expect him to be a cheerleader for getting a shot. > the GOP has increasingly embraced conspiratorial thinking, After Fauci lying for over a year, 2 failed impeachments, being deplatformed on social media, being told they have no standing to dispute elections, being told CRT doesn't exist - half of the country knows what a Marxist conspiracy feels like first-hand, and they're pissed. Most of the major stories about Trump since 2019 on CNN, MSNBC and WaPo have been retracted in 2021 (after the election). I suggest you stop reading those sources and spend a couple months reading Fox and NTD - I can't think of anything they're retracted. Do a Youtube search for "cpac trump full speech 2021" - the only full version is on Sky Australia's channel - for now. All the copies on US channels have been blocked or prevented.
- redis_mlc 5y ago
  Here's CNN attacking the nuclear family again today (it's a Marxist technique to restructure society): Don't fall into the nuclear family 'parent trap': What kids need most is love https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/14/health/kids-parents-love-wellness-opinion/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/14/health/kids-parents-love-well...
busymom0 5y ago
I am more and more disappointed in HN to constantly devolve into "blame GOP" for everything politics. Before elections, majority of media was singing the opposite tunes of what they are singing now. I will quote all left leaning media to make my point. Here's CNN in March 2020: > The timetable for a coronavirus vaccine is 18 months. Experts say that's risky: Eighteen months might sound like a long time, but in vaccine years, it's a blink. That's the long end of the Trump administration's time window for developing a coronavirus vaccine, and some leaders in the field say this is too fast -- and could come at the expense of safety. https://archive.is/TJhly https://archive.is/TJhly Here's Business Insider in Apr 1, 2020: > Fauci said it will take 12 to 18 months to get a coronavirus vaccine in the US. Experts say a quick approval could be risky. Some experts say reaching that target may be challenging, because vaccines require a lot of testing. One worry is "immune enhancement," normally spotted in animal testing, whereby a vaccine actually weakens a person's response to the virus. Even a year-and-a-half would be staggeringly fast for vaccine development, and some experts have voiced concerns that a vaccine produced on that timeline could hurtle too quickly through safety trials. https://archive.is/hPiFW https://archive.is/hPiFW Here's CNN in September 2020: > Past vaccine disasters show why rushing a coronavirus vaccine now would be 'colossally stupid'. On April 12, 1955 the government announced the first vaccine to protect kids against polio. Within days, labs had made thousands of lots of the vaccine. Batches made by one company, Cutter Labs, accidentally contained live polio virus and it caused an outbreak. More than 200,000 children got the polio vaccine, but within days the government had to abandon the program. "Forty thousand kids got polio. Some had low levels, a couple hundred were left with paralysis, and about 10 died," said Dr. Howard Markel, a pediatrician, distinguished professor, and director of the Center for the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan. The government suspended the vaccination program until it could determine what went wrong. > From 1955 to 1963, between 10% and 30% of polio vaccines were contaminated with simian virus 40 (SV40). > "The way they would grow the virus was on monkey tissues. These rhesus macaques were imported from India, tens of thousands of them," medical anthropologist S. Lochlann Jain said. "They were gang caged and in those conditions, the ones that didn't die on the journey, many got sick, and the viruses spread quickly," added Jain, who taught a history of vaccines course at Stanford and is working on a publication about the incident. Scientists wrongly thought the formaldehyde they used would kill the virus. "It was being transferred to millions of Americans," Jain said. "Many believe this issue wasn't adequately pursued," Jain said. Some studies showed a possible link between the virus and cancer. The US Centers for Disease Control website, however, said most studies are "reassuring" and find no link. > The government launched the program in about seven months and 40 million people got vaccinated against swine flu, according to the CDC. That vaccination campaign was later linked to cases of a neurological disorder called Guillain-Barre syndrome, which can develop after an infection or, rarely, after vaccination with a live vaccine. "Unfortunately, due to that vaccine, and the fact that it was done so hastily, there were a few hundred cases of Guillain-Barre, although it's not definitive that they were linked," Kinch said. The CDC said the increased risk was about 1 additional case of Gullain-Barre for every 100,000 people who got the swine flu vaccine. Due to this small association, the government stopped the program to investigate. "It was kind of a fiasco," Markel said. "The good news is that there never was an epidemic of swine flu. So we were safe, but that shows you what could happen." > Markel said people's mistrust of the system makes the idea that the FDA would rush this process before late stage clinical trials are complete "colossally stupid." "This is one of the most ridiculous things I've heard this administration say," Markel said. "All it takes is one bad side effect to basically botch a vaccine program that we desperately need against this virus. It's a prescription for disaster." One, the vaccine may not be safe. Two, if it is not safe, people will lose faith in vaccines. Three, if a vaccine doesn't offer complete protection, people will have a false sense of security and increase their risk. Four, if a substandard vaccine gets an EUA, a better vaccine may never get approval, because people would be reluctant to enroll in trials and risk getting a placebo instead of a vaccine. https://archive.ph/ https://archive.ph/ Last year, scientists were too busy playing politics. > "... it was scarier to be associated with Trump and to become a tool for racists, so people didn't want to publicly call for an investigation into lab origins." https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/lab-leak-theory-science-scientists-rcna1191 https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/lab-leak-theory... It never occurred to these people that claiming the virus came from bats because they eat bats there is the more "xenophobic" thing and not the possible lab leak caused due to poor handling. The next time someone asks us to trust the science, our response should be "okay, but can I trust the scientists?" And if they can be so easily manipulated based on politics, what else are they and the dissenters being silenced on? I can find several such examples of opposite tunes. But now that the political pendulum has swung to the other side, everything's done a 180. Instead of addressing the hesitance of people due to conflicting messaging, we have devolved into blaming the GOP and Trump for everything.

desine 5y ago

It's interesting that even six months since he left office you're still searching for reasons to blame him. But to answer your question - some people are distrustful of the government. I think even the most tankie pro-government-interverntionalists will recognize the United States Federal Government does not have a clean slate record. These distrusting people tend to vote towards the party or group that markets itself as small government (regardless of actual voting history or policy). If you want to tie that to President Trump, he did run on "draining the swamp" of the corrupt people in said government. Realistically, though, it has little to do with him. He was a symptom, not a cause.

graeme 5y ago
No, I was trying to prevent poor quality replies that blamed him. Because most people’s first instinct for a lot of general pandemic countermeasures skepticism is to think “trump”. I actually think Trump’s vaccine procurement was one of the best things his administration did. As for your theory, is isn’t that convincing. Lots of government skeptic states had vaccination programs. Only now that that has become political are they cutting them. I’m wondering how it came to be so political and more specifically how the politicians purposefully make their own lives harder. Something like business lockdowns or a mask mandate at the least have costs: you get pandemic control but restrict people. However, bringing vaccines to people who want them is basically a free lunch for a govt: you save much more than you spend and coerce no one. So what are the incentives driving this?
- desine 5y ago
  Apologies, I misunderstood your tone. >you [...] coerce no one. I disagree with that point. Where I live, there has been a very strong coercion angle. It's very obviously government sponsored.

raphlinus 5y ago

I think it's more useful to look at propaganda channels that have wide reach, rather than Trump. For example, Tucker Carlson is doing full-on death cult antivax.

graeme 5y ago
So that has created an incentive for the local politicians to make their own lives harder, more or less? Plausible. What’s driving Carlson’s incentives?
- raphlinus 5y ago
  I wish I knew, and that would shed much light on the disinformation landscape if it were known. He's almost certainly vaccinated himself (he refuses to say, and Rupert Murdoch is), so it's unlikely he believes his own bullshit.
loonster 5y ago
The big propaganda channels are google, facebook, reddit, twitter, apple. They severely limited free speech and only promoted the official narrative. By making it harder to find legitimate opposition sources, people have turned to less legitimate ones. Tucker Carlson is just riding the wave and tell his viewers what they want to hear. Many conservatives abandoned him after his refusal to to publish the Hunter Biden Laptop information.

war1025 5y ago

People don't like the government telling them how to live their lives. They especially don't like the government telling them how to parent. And they extra especially don't like the government going behind their backs and telling their kids that their parents don't know how to parent. The wording is "stop vaccine outreach to kids" not "stop vaccine outreach to parents" This really doesn't seem that surprising to me.

tehwebguy 5y ago

One theory is that Trump feels like he didn't get enough credit for the vaccines so he and the GOP politicians and media are trying to discredit them entirely. It's not clear that he's directing this but check out any republican news station or politician talking about vaccines in the last month, it's unreal. Republican & far right influencers, some of the widest reaching influencers in any category, are publicly pushing back on vaccines daily now. Another theory is that vaccines are an increasingly easy topic for victim complex radicalization. People like to think they are smarter than their doctor, there was already a growing grift industry pushing vaccine skepticism, plus it's new. There's probably no easier way to radicalize someone already in your base than to say, "Hey you know how you already didn't trust that new guy in office (and I've been saying he didn't really win for months)? Now he is forcing you get a shot you don't need!" It's pretty wild to think that there are people today actively encouraging people not to vaccinate against this thing but then again there have been people pushing against basically every vaccine for many years. All of them selling something: books, event tickets, snake oil type "health" products or just pulling in YouTube ad revenue. Some people will do literally anything to get what they want in life, I guess it's really not different from a president starting a war for personal or shallow political reasons or a destructive industry leader burying a damning report but it's still super surprising to see it in real time as opposed to decades after the fact.

tzs 5y ago

> Anyone have a good theory here? Last I heard from Trump he was urging everyone to “take the great American vaccines” (that he, Trump, sped along, he said). Over on Gab, TheDonald, and similar places I've seen people reconcile that with their anti-vaccination beliefs in a couple ways: 1. It's part of his long term 4D chess plan to eliminate the Libs and to MAGA. Libs will respond to pro vaccination messages, get the 5G microchip DNA rewriting population control injection being pushed under the guise of a COVID vaccine, and there will be no more Libs next generation. Patriots are smart enough to recognize this for a fake out to eliminate the Libs and avoid the vaccine, or 2. The Jews got to him.

readflaggedcomm 5y ago

The Vice President said she wouldn't take any vaccine Trump promoted. Maybe the denialism is entirely partisan.

ModernMech 5y ago
She said she wouldn’t take any vaccine Trump promoted if independent scientists didn’t also promote it. Her reasoning being Trump had lied so much about COVID at that point, there was no reason to trust anything he said. In fact she did take one of the vaccines Trump promoted, and she did so publicly, because they were independently verified to work. Interestingly Trump got his shot in private and never revealed that fact.