5 ms·

What is the benefit accrued from stigmatizing the unvaccinated? From where I'm sitting in Montana, with no mandates, low vaccine uptake, and nobody giving a cr

What is the benefit accrued from stigmatizing the unvaccinated? From where I'm sitting in Montana, with no mandates, low vaccine uptake, and nobody giving a crap about the "OMG CASES THE CASES", the firmament remains.

_ph_ 5y ago
Of course, states like Montana will be hit the least by infectious diseases. The reason is population density. To spread a virus, you first need to meet another person. Montana is actually larger than Germany area-wise. But has less inhabitants than the city of Cologne. Overall the population density of Germany is 80x that of Montana. Equally the disease spread is worse and as are the consequences.
caslon 5y ago
It is a position that goes against all available data. We should absolutely stigmatize stupidity. People making crowd-harming decisions despite available evidence should be shamed. People stopped dying because of (their own) stupidity a long time ago. Selection can still occur if we stigmatize bad behaviors enough. On the other hand, if we don't stigmatize it, people who are innocent of the sin of stupidity will be harmed. That said, selection would also do its good work in this case, just less effectively and with a sadder outcome for all. The only way to have an intelligent nation that's pushing forward in terms of technological progress is to have a nation that embraces intelligence and shuns nonsensical stupidity.
- NateEag 5y ago
  Do you have some evidence that shaming people changes their behavior?
  - caslon 5y ago
    Here's an obvious one: As a society, we went from a period of it being socially acceptable to marry ridiculously young girls as an old man to the present day where it's unheard of. People will point to the law being the reason for this, but that's not actually the truth, really. The age of consent isn't really that high; in many states it's unrestricted at sixteen and much lower with loopholes. Also, in many cases, the raising of the age of consent is a historically-recent thing that followed the shaming. We've managed to (largely) eradicate the case of "man finds a fourteen-to-sixteen year old girl and erases her future by making her responsible for children" in under a hundred years, and it came from shaming, not law.
    - NateEag 5y ago
      Has the incidence of this kind of terribleness actually gotten lower, or do people just talk about how awful it is? I hear a lot of horrible stories about sexual abuse and enslavement in the modern world, so I'm not sure this has actually changed materially. I would be glad to see evidence that it actually has changed.
- TigeriusKirk 5y ago
  >We should absolutely stigmatize stupidity. Would that include stigmatizing people who insist on continuing a tactic that quite observably has flipped into being counterproductive?
  - caslon 5y ago
    The tactic of socially shaming people hasn't flipped into being counterproductive. Making it socially unacceptable for the unvaccinated to do things like have popular media careers, maintain work, and similar things puts selection pressure on them in addition to what they're receiving for not taking the shot, even if it doesn't end up with them vaccinated. It will end up with others vaccinated.
- nomfortable 5y ago
  Right now in Australia, there is a huge gap between indigenous vs. non-indigenous vaccination rates. Would your strategy be to stigmatize indigenous Australians as stupid, or to stigmatize them in other ways (which ones?) in order to convince them to get vaccinated?
  - caslon 5y ago
    Anyone who isn't vaccinated for anything but physician-verified medical reasons is stupid, and should be stigmatized as such. The act of not shaming idiots in communities based on nothing but race is racist. Bad actors should be shamed until there is pressure for them to not reproduce, whether that's with death or just the natural outcome of being seen as unintelligent and therefore less desirable. There are many communities of racial minorities that are undervaccinated in comparison to the general population. They aren't absolved of the consequences of their actions because of the color of their skin. That would be pretty racist.
    - sjwalter 5y ago
      Dude, you're stupid to not be vaccinated if you already have recovered from covid and have superior natural immunity? That's an extremely silly take. It's like you think this is about compliance rather than, you know, ending the pandemic.
      - caslon 5y ago
        Unironically yes. There are simple steps that can be taken to drastically reduce the amount of harm caused unto you and by you unto others and transmission through vaccinated individuals is lowered. We would have been done with this before any variants arrived if stupidity wasn't celebrated. Since it's too late to genuinely fix now, the best thing that can happen is shaming stupidity. Applying evolutionary pressure to individuals that take bad actions is an incredibly good idea. Making the unvaccinated modern lepers is good for society as a whole. It's not compliance, it's acting rationally. Politically, I'm not even very far from the group most adamant about not getting vaccinated (card-carrying anti-Democrat, here), yet I still acknowledge that not getting vaccinated is an incredible act of stupidity. People who celebrate stupidity instead of acting rationally in times of plague should have evolutionary pressure applied. It's too late to turn back time and fix the pandemic by forcing them to act rationally, but by applying pressure to prevent them from having success in society, we can make them much less likely to be around the next time this happens. The society of the United States has been doing things like this since it began quite successfully, and it would be ridiculous to stop doing it now.
- HPsquared 5y ago
  Stupidity is in the eye of the beholder.
- brutusborn 5y ago
  You haven't considered the most important part of this: is stigma good at changing behaviours? If you stigmatise something and shame people for it, you tend to push people underground. At that point rational discourse can't exist because there are social pressures to not reveal the unpopular opinion, and thus discussion doesn't occur. It's foolish to think that people have stopped dying from stupidity, it happens every day in every country on earth. And it's foolish to think you can cure "the sin" of stupidity by using shame. This doesn't mean we ignore people's bad decisions, but that we must be realistic about the utility of our response.
  - caslon 5y ago
    Stigma is absolutely good at changing behaviors. I listed an obvious one here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29297156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29297156 You can absolutely cure stupidity with shame. The renaissance of science and industry during the period from 1914-1980 can largely be attributed to the wars producing propaganda painting being unintelligent undesirable. Regrettably though not unfortunately, people have by and large stopped dying from stupidity. We have made the world very safe and it is much harder to get yourself killed because of stupidity. There are a handful of ways to nowadays, but they're mostly over the course of such a long period of time that there's no selection pressure from them. The recent pandemic has been a help, but it's unlikely to kill as much as seriously maim younger people who refuse to vaccinate themselves, so it's mostly people dying due to the stupidity of others.
    - brutusborn 5y ago
      I'm open to evidence on the efficacy of shame, but your other comment does not provide that.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- belter 5y ago
  > "It is a position that goes against all available data. We should absolutely stigmatize stupidity. People making crowd-harming decisions despite available evidence should be shamed." Is then also stupidity not to force vaccinated people to be tested regularly? "all available data" shows they spread the virus, therefore also being "crowd-harming"? "How do vaccinated people spread Delta? What the science says" https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02187-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02187-1
- sjwalter 5y ago
  No it doesn't. All available data show that those with natural immunity are immune to covid far more than those with vaccine immunity. Why should those with natural immunity be stigmatized? Is this about immunity and getting out of a pandemic or is it about compliance and control or about something else entirely? Should be about the first, to me, and if so, natural immunity should not be stigmatized at all.
  - 08-15 5y ago
    You may be confused. At least here in Germany, we (mostly) implement 2G: "Geimpft oder genesen." -- vaccinated or recovered. (Depending on context, "getestet", meaning tested negatively, is also fine.) So no, "natural immunity" is not treated any differently from "artificial immunity", and it absolutely is about getting out of a pandemic without too many people dying. By the way, there is no difference. Immunity is immunity.
  - moistly 5y ago
    “So who is capable of mounting this ‘superhuman’ or ‘hybrid’ immune response? People who have had a ‘hybrid’ exposure to the virus. Specifically, they were infected with the coronavirus in 2020 and then immunized with mRNA vaccines…” * Natural immunity is not nearly enough. Everyone should get vaccinated. Those who have had covid should get vaccinated so that they can get a chance of super-human SARS-variants protection. Those who have not caught covid so that they avoid the very high risk of long covid, and of course to reduce their risk of hospitalization by an order of magnitude. * https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/09/07/1033677208/new-studies-find-evidence-of-superhuman-immunity-to-covid-19-in-some-individuals https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/09/07/1033677...
- blindmute 5y ago
  I completely agree with you that shame works. I think people who pretend that shame changes nothing haven't been to Asia. But the world has already shamed these people as much as any group can be shamed in current year; there's not really any higher level of shame that can be given out at this point. The ones remaining are unaffected by shame. So I'm not saying your plan is ineffective, I'm saying your plan was already executed and finished. That's why we're at 80-something percent instead of what it would have been.
kungito 5y ago
I'd say the USA is very specific because of so many places having such low population density. This is probably why Europe is most impacted by covid on paper: high population density, high urbanisation percentage and high levels of testing+reporting. Maybe it's worse in some high density poor countries but from what I understand they just pretend the problem does not exist
michaelt 5y ago
I believe the hope is, if being unvaccinated is stigmatised, people who are on the fence will become vaccinated, then we can finally beat this pandemic, saving tens of thousands of lives. Of course, the fact being obese is stigmatised doesn't stop loads of people being obese, I doubt stigmatisation isn't a silver bullet for health issues.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  Is there any actual indications that even if everyone was vaccinated this pandemic would go away?
- sjwalter 5y ago
  Please, tell me, by what strategy do you propose we use these vaccines to end the pandemic? Please consider in your response that the pfizer vaccine wanes to 20% efficacy after 5 months [1] and the others are no better. As well consider those vaccinated still catch and spread the disease. [1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2114114 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2114114 From where I'm sitting it seems the vaccine maximalists believe the way we end the pandemic is a global 2-3x/year dosing regiment for all the earth's citizens.
breischl 5y ago
> From where I'm sitting in Montana, with no mandates, low vaccine uptake, and nobody giving a crap about the "OMG CASES THE CASES", the firmament remains. You should check out places like Alaska, where the hospitals are (or were a couple weeks ago, anyway) overwhelmed. Even aside from the people directly affected by COVID, it affects anyone else who may have needed to use those hospitals for things like unrelated accidents, other diseases, complications from births, etc. "It's not a problem right here, right now, so therefore it's not a problem at all anywhere." is not exactly a great argument.
- tzs 5y ago
  No need for him to check out Alaska. That also happened recently in his state of Montana. If he finds that not to be a cause for concern I doubt he will find Alaska's mismanagement of COVID persuasive. (And it was mostly not elderly people filling the ICUs. The average age of COVID patients in Montana ICUs was under 50. Before delta it was 80).
wffurr 5y ago
That's a real comfort to the people I know in Montana who died of the virus.

_ph_ 5y ago

Of course, states like Montana will be hit the least by infectious diseases. The reason is population density. To spread a virus, you first need to meet another person. Montana is actually larger than Germany area-wise. But has less inhabitants than the city of Cologne. Overall the population density of Germany is 80x that of Montana. Equally the disease spread is worse and as are the consequences.

caslon 5y ago

It is a position that goes against all available data. We should absolutely stigmatize stupidity. People making crowd-harming decisions despite available evidence should be shamed. People stopped dying because of (their own) stupidity a long time ago. Selection can still occur if we stigmatize bad behaviors enough. On the other hand, if we don't stigmatize it, people who are innocent of the sin of stupidity will be harmed. That said, selection would also do its good work in this case, just less effectively and with a sadder outcome for all. The only way to have an intelligent nation that's pushing forward in terms of technological progress is to have a nation that embraces intelligence and shuns nonsensical stupidity.

NateEag 5y ago
Do you have some evidence that shaming people changes their behavior?
- caslon 5y ago
  Here's an obvious one: As a society, we went from a period of it being socially acceptable to marry ridiculously young girls as an old man to the present day where it's unheard of. People will point to the law being the reason for this, but that's not actually the truth, really. The age of consent isn't really that high; in many states it's unrestricted at sixteen and much lower with loopholes. Also, in many cases, the raising of the age of consent is a historically-recent thing that followed the shaming. We've managed to (largely) eradicate the case of "man finds a fourteen-to-sixteen year old girl and erases her future by making her responsible for children" in under a hundred years, and it came from shaming, not law.
  - NateEag 5y ago
    Has the incidence of this kind of terribleness actually gotten lower, or do people just talk about how awful it is? I hear a lot of horrible stories about sexual abuse and enslavement in the modern world, so I'm not sure this has actually changed materially. I would be glad to see evidence that it actually has changed.
TigeriusKirk 5y ago
>We should absolutely stigmatize stupidity. Would that include stigmatizing people who insist on continuing a tactic that quite observably has flipped into being counterproductive?
- caslon 5y ago
  The tactic of socially shaming people hasn't flipped into being counterproductive. Making it socially unacceptable for the unvaccinated to do things like have popular media careers, maintain work, and similar things puts selection pressure on them in addition to what they're receiving for not taking the shot, even if it doesn't end up with them vaccinated. It will end up with others vaccinated.
nomfortable 5y ago
Right now in Australia, there is a huge gap between indigenous vs. non-indigenous vaccination rates. Would your strategy be to stigmatize indigenous Australians as stupid, or to stigmatize them in other ways (which ones?) in order to convince them to get vaccinated?
- caslon 5y ago
  Anyone who isn't vaccinated for anything but physician-verified medical reasons is stupid, and should be stigmatized as such. The act of not shaming idiots in communities based on nothing but race is racist. Bad actors should be shamed until there is pressure for them to not reproduce, whether that's with death or just the natural outcome of being seen as unintelligent and therefore less desirable. There are many communities of racial minorities that are undervaccinated in comparison to the general population. They aren't absolved of the consequences of their actions because of the color of their skin. That would be pretty racist.
  - sjwalter 5y ago
    Dude, you're stupid to not be vaccinated if you already have recovered from covid and have superior natural immunity? That's an extremely silly take. It's like you think this is about compliance rather than, you know, ending the pandemic.
    - caslon 5y ago
      Unironically yes. There are simple steps that can be taken to drastically reduce the amount of harm caused unto you and by you unto others and transmission through vaccinated individuals is lowered. We would have been done with this before any variants arrived if stupidity wasn't celebrated. Since it's too late to genuinely fix now, the best thing that can happen is shaming stupidity. Applying evolutionary pressure to individuals that take bad actions is an incredibly good idea. Making the unvaccinated modern lepers is good for society as a whole. It's not compliance, it's acting rationally. Politically, I'm not even very far from the group most adamant about not getting vaccinated (card-carrying anti-Democrat, here), yet I still acknowledge that not getting vaccinated is an incredible act of stupidity. People who celebrate stupidity instead of acting rationally in times of plague should have evolutionary pressure applied. It's too late to turn back time and fix the pandemic by forcing them to act rationally, but by applying pressure to prevent them from having success in society, we can make them much less likely to be around the next time this happens. The society of the United States has been doing things like this since it began quite successfully, and it would be ridiculous to stop doing it now.
HPsquared 5y ago
Stupidity is in the eye of the beholder.
brutusborn 5y ago
You haven't considered the most important part of this: is stigma good at changing behaviours? If you stigmatise something and shame people for it, you tend to push people underground. At that point rational discourse can't exist because there are social pressures to not reveal the unpopular opinion, and thus discussion doesn't occur. It's foolish to think that people have stopped dying from stupidity, it happens every day in every country on earth. And it's foolish to think you can cure "the sin" of stupidity by using shame. This doesn't mean we ignore people's bad decisions, but that we must be realistic about the utility of our response.
- caslon 5y ago
  Stigma is absolutely good at changing behaviors. I listed an obvious one here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29297156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29297156 You can absolutely cure stupidity with shame. The renaissance of science and industry during the period from 1914-1980 can largely be attributed to the wars producing propaganda painting being unintelligent undesirable. Regrettably though not unfortunately, people have by and large stopped dying from stupidity. We have made the world very safe and it is much harder to get yourself killed because of stupidity. There are a handful of ways to nowadays, but they're mostly over the course of such a long period of time that there's no selection pressure from them. The recent pandemic has been a help, but it's unlikely to kill as much as seriously maim younger people who refuse to vaccinate themselves, so it's mostly people dying due to the stupidity of others.
  - brutusborn 5y ago
    I'm open to evidence on the efficacy of shame, but your other comment does not provide that.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
belter 5y ago
> "It is a position that goes against all available data. We should absolutely stigmatize stupidity. People making crowd-harming decisions despite available evidence should be shamed." Is then also stupidity not to force vaccinated people to be tested regularly? "all available data" shows they spread the virus, therefore also being "crowd-harming"? "How do vaccinated people spread Delta? What the science says" https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02187-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02187-1
sjwalter 5y ago
No it doesn't. All available data show that those with natural immunity are immune to covid far more than those with vaccine immunity. Why should those with natural immunity be stigmatized? Is this about immunity and getting out of a pandemic or is it about compliance and control or about something else entirely? Should be about the first, to me, and if so, natural immunity should not be stigmatized at all.
- 08-15 5y ago
  You may be confused. At least here in Germany, we (mostly) implement 2G: "Geimpft oder genesen." -- vaccinated or recovered. (Depending on context, "getestet", meaning tested negatively, is also fine.) So no, "natural immunity" is not treated any differently from "artificial immunity", and it absolutely is about getting out of a pandemic without too many people dying. By the way, there is no difference. Immunity is immunity.
- moistly 5y ago
  “So who is capable of mounting this ‘superhuman’ or ‘hybrid’ immune response? People who have had a ‘hybrid’ exposure to the virus. Specifically, they were infected with the coronavirus in 2020 and then immunized with mRNA vaccines…” * Natural immunity is not nearly enough. Everyone should get vaccinated. Those who have had covid should get vaccinated so that they can get a chance of super-human SARS-variants protection. Those who have not caught covid so that they avoid the very high risk of long covid, and of course to reduce their risk of hospitalization by an order of magnitude. * https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/09/07/1033677208/new-studies-find-evidence-of-superhuman-immunity-to-covid-19-in-some-individuals https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/09/07/1033677...
blindmute 5y ago
I completely agree with you that shame works. I think people who pretend that shame changes nothing haven't been to Asia. But the world has already shamed these people as much as any group can be shamed in current year; there's not really any higher level of shame that can be given out at this point. The ones remaining are unaffected by shame. So I'm not saying your plan is ineffective, I'm saying your plan was already executed and finished. That's why we're at 80-something percent instead of what it would have been.

kungito 5y ago

I'd say the USA is very specific because of so many places having such low population density. This is probably why Europe is most impacted by covid on paper: high population density, high urbanisation percentage and high levels of testing+reporting. Maybe it's worse in some high density poor countries but from what I understand they just pretend the problem does not exist

michaelt 5y ago

I believe the hope is, if being unvaccinated is stigmatised, people who are on the fence will become vaccinated, then we can finally beat this pandemic, saving tens of thousands of lives. Of course, the fact being obese is stigmatised doesn't stop loads of people being obese, I doubt stigmatisation isn't a silver bullet for health issues.

Ekaros 5y ago
Is there any actual indications that even if everyone was vaccinated this pandemic would go away?
sjwalter 5y ago
Please, tell me, by what strategy do you propose we use these vaccines to end the pandemic? Please consider in your response that the pfizer vaccine wanes to 20% efficacy after 5 months [1] and the others are no better. As well consider those vaccinated still catch and spread the disease. [1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2114114 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2114114 From where I'm sitting it seems the vaccine maximalists believe the way we end the pandemic is a global 2-3x/year dosing regiment for all the earth's citizens.

breischl 5y ago

> From where I'm sitting in Montana, with no mandates, low vaccine uptake, and nobody giving a crap about the "OMG CASES THE CASES", the firmament remains. You should check out places like Alaska, where the hospitals are (or were a couple weeks ago, anyway) overwhelmed. Even aside from the people directly affected by COVID, it affects anyone else who may have needed to use those hospitals for things like unrelated accidents, other diseases, complications from births, etc. "It's not a problem right here, right now, so therefore it's not a problem at all anywhere." is not exactly a great argument.

tzs 5y ago
No need for him to check out Alaska. That also happened recently in his state of Montana. If he finds that not to be a cause for concern I doubt he will find Alaska's mismanagement of COVID persuasive. (And it was mostly not elderly people filling the ICUs. The average age of COVID patients in Montana ICUs was under 50. Before delta it was 80).

wffurr 5y ago

That's a real comfort to the people I know in Montana who died of the virus.