9 ms·

I don't know. It should (and I think has) increase distrust in social media and big tech/gov but distrust in pharma? I don't know. I'm still waiting for every

by mhh__ 4y ago

I don't know. It should (and I think has) increase distrust in social media and big tech/gov but distrust in pharma? I don't know. I'm still waiting for everyone to drop dead from vaccine related injuries (I've paid this more earnest attention than most people this glib at least) — most people, I think correctly for the most part, regard the nu-antivax thing that came about during covid to basically be the realm of internet weirdos and agitators.

jacquesm 4y ago
And they haven't stopped agitating. And probably won't stop. Which makes me wonder: with the degree of weaponization of the internet on the side of the anti-vaxxers will the next pandemic be 'the big one'? Enough people that refuse vaccination and you are looking at an entirely different probable outcome. Here in NL a small army of foaming-at-the-mouth conspiracy theorists did their utmost to undermine the vaccination campaign with the most outrageous claims and I'm pretty sure that we can chalk up a number of unnecessary deaths to their efforts. They wouldn't be able to tell a virus from a bacterium but that didn't stop them from spouting one nonsense theory after another and organizing (sometimes violent) protests against health care workers and their equipment. This is a worrisome development.
- rtpg 4y ago
  There’s a revival of kids not being given other vaccines as well. The knock on effects from the absolute bad faith mess from discourse around vaccines is going to fuck up so much in public health for decades. I am sympathetic to skepticism when public health officials spent a lot of time lying to avoid having to explain complicated truths. But so many bad faith voices and outright scammers with nonsense vitamins to sell are going to get what they want.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    > There’s a revival of kids not being given other vaccines as well. Yes, the anti-vaxx (and anti-government) sentiment has received an enormous boost from this, time will tell what the damage is but a resurgence of things like Polio is not out of the question. > I am sympathetic to skepticism when public health officials spent a lot of time lying to avoid having to explain complicated truths. I'm partially ok with that. They really should give out a double helping of advice: one that is dumbed down for those that lack the necessary background, one that is more on the level for those interested or that do have the necessary background. As it is the dumbed down version is all we've got and the result is that it is too easy to poke holes in it. At the same time, some of the under-preparedness would have been much harder to deal with without the occasional white lie, it stopped a lot of profiteering and kept some items in supply when otherwise there would have been a run on them. > But so many bad faith voices and outright scammers with nonsense vitamins to sell are going to get what they want. Yes, and fwiw I think those people should have gone to jail. We're working on a couple of those cases here NL at the moment and I'm really curious what the outcome will be.
    - Yhippa 4y ago
      > time will tell what the damage is but a resurgence of things like Polio is not out of the question. We're about to find out, buddy. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/04/how-polio-silently-spread-in-new-york-and-left-a-person-paralyzed.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/04/how-polio-silently-spread-in...
      - jacquesm 4y ago
        Ugh. Ok. Let's hope they manage to contain it and that the anti-vaxx crowd will realize in time what kind of risks they are playing with.
    - ckvjdonee 4y ago
      The white lie didn't stop profiteering, it was transparent for anyone watching with their eyes open and only made hoarding worse. Telling the truth would have resulted in far less supply shocks, instead, half the population willfully ignored the obvious lie by putting their heads in the sand and the other half ratcheted up their preparedness (because the govt clearly lying about everything at this point)
- ryandrake 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    I fear you are right. The interesting thing to me is not what happened during COVID-19, but during the previous pandemic, the one that wasn't and that was nipped in the bud due to some very fortuitous circumstances and the speedy action of authorities and health care officials in many countries collaborating with unprecedented efficiency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS COVID-19 had some parameters slightly different, for instance the incubation time was a bit longer allowing it to spread undetected. There is no reason to make any assumptions about the various parameters of the next pandemic but they could very well be worse than COVID-19 and the way we've dealt with this one makes me quite skeptical about our ability to come through this sort of thing unscathed, especially not if every Tom, Dick & Harry are going to run interference. We got lucky, twice.
  - mns 4y ago
    Well, most of the measures in most of the European countries were ruled as unconstitutional: locked into our houses not being allowed to get out, curfews afterwards at night and so on (and of course all these rules were set in place by politicians that never respected any of them - and worse, a lot of them made money by importing and selling back to the state masks and other PPE equipment). Most of the people, even if they took the vaccines, but dared to say anything about forcing people to get them or commenting on the absurdity of police patrolling parks and stopping any groups of more than 3 people, forcing masks outside in cold weather (not even bothering to read the instructions on the box) were all labelled antivaxxers, corona deniers and right wing nazis. So a lot of people decided to shut up and let the new religion of “I believe in science” do their thing. But next time when a serious pandemic hits, the trust has already been eroded.
    - Nursie 4y ago
      “Unconstitutional” in which countries and by what constitution? I learned that a lot of people think contrarianism makes them smart, and that even if everything everyone was saying about covid was true, they felt it necessary to ‘resist’ purely for the sake of it. I never though that in a pandemic, so many people in so many places would both politicise public health measures and actively side with the virus. But here we are. Trust has indeed been lost, but it might not be where you think.
- etchalon 4y ago
  I worry, but also remember that much of the pandemic was just a replay of the Spanish Flu. Distrust in masking, distrust in vaccines, a complaint about the "media" keeping "the truth" from the public.
- rajin444 4y ago
  > This is a worrisome development. Governments are working with private corporations to promote misinformation and silence real information and you’re worried about…anti vaxxers? I can maybe steel man a utilitarian stance for this position though I’m afraid it’s weak to “surely the lepers won’t eat my face”.
  - 40amxn40 4y ago
    A very eye opening realization I had after 2020 is that the vast majority of people have absolutely zero critical thinking skills, and that applies specially to snobby intellectual circles like academia or this very forum. They are the most indoctrinated people on Earth and it's like talking to a wall.
  - notacoward 4y ago
    > promote misinformation and silence real information "misinformation" and "real information" as rationally believed at the time or only with 20/20 hindsight? It's an important distinction. Also, what about the recommendations that did stand the test of time, or the misinformation about vaccine risks and alternative treatments that was rightly suppressed because it was false and harmful? If this is to be anything but an exercise in anti-authoritarian self-congratulation, people need to own up to their own mistakes as well.
    - Zpalmtree 4y ago
      Oops, we suppressed correct info, but it's not our fault, we didn't know it was correct!
  - seattle_spring 4y ago
    Which “real information” was silenced? I sure hope you’re not referring to that farce of an article from ZeroHedge about “weaponized lab-grown covid.” What misinformation was promoted? Are you still on about the first week or 2 when they said masking was ineffective?
    - kornhole 4y ago
- JeremyNT 4y ago
  I think in a weird way COVID 19 fell into a strange area of lethality. For those looking at population data, it was horrific, but on a personal level the worst outcomes were rare enough that many people could avoid encountering any deaths or even severe illness in their inner circles. This made it rather easy to be an antivaxer, since people could just put their heads in the sand and remain blissfully ignorant of the scope of the disease. The deaths were just statistics, as were the benefits of vaccination. I think in a more severe pandemic, where more people would be losing friends or loved ones, they wouldn't have the luxury of this ignorance and they would be lining up to get a vaccine.
  - Traubenfuchs 4y ago
    Many young and healthy people still don‘t know anyone personally who died due to covid, nor anyone claiming to have long covid. Covid was never dangerous to <50/60 year olds.
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      > Covid was never dangerous to <50/60 year olds. In the US alone you're talking about 75K people dead under 50. And over 50 the numbers rise rapidly.
      - Karsteski 4y ago
        Can't really do much with absolute numbers, they must be per capita and compared to other ailments
        maxerickson 4y ago
        The absolute numbers are actually a pretty good rebuttal to a comment that says "never". If you want to talk about it as a rate that's fine, but the pre-vaccine risk of dying from covid for a healthy person in their 40s or 50s was probably comparable to their lifetime risk of dying in a vehicular collision, it's not a small thing.
  - 4y ago
matheusmoreira 4y ago
> I'm still waiting for everyone to drop dead from vaccine related injuries I didn't have to wait at all. There was a noticeable increase in thromboembolic events after COVID-19 vaccination started in my city. Plenty of people were saved by friends in the emergency room. The problem of course is not the vaccines, it's this insistence that they are risk-free. They are not. There is no such thing as zero risk in medicine. When you claim something false like that and people start to notice events that contradict your words, they will no longer trust you. This is why the cost benefit analysis must be detailed and presented clearly to people. They should make the choice of their own accord. Trying to impose it on them is how you get "anti-vaxxers" who no longer trust anything you say. I don't blame them. This is not even a modern phenomenon. Over a century ago there was a revolt in my country over forced vaccination. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_Revolt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_Revolt > To eradicate smallpox, Dr. Cruz convinced the Congress to approve the Mandatory Vaccination Law on October 31, 1904, authorizing sanitary brigade workers, accompanied by police, to enter homes and apply the vaccine by force.
- acdha 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - matheusmoreira 4y ago
    > they’re far less dangerous than getting COVID Of course but that's not what authorities and all kinds of pro-vaccination people were saying at the time. General statements about safety don't inspire confidence. There's a possibility that the vaccines are beneficial for some groups but not others, for example. Even today in my country they do everything possible to coerce people into vaccination. They come just short of abolishing personal freedom and consent. This is not how things are supposed to be done. People should want to take vaccines because there's data that shows benefit. Losing their trust means they won't even trust the data.
    - acdha 4y ago
      > Of course but that's not what authorities and all kinds of pro-vaccination people were saying at the time. It most certainly was in the United States, starting with the initial vaccine availability notices and the information sheet you were given at the time.
fortran77 4y ago
Our government, and the moderators at Twitter, lumped reasonable skeptics in the same category as grifter-anti-vax types (i.e., people pushing zinc, or colloidal silver, or chiropractic as "cures" for covid). People who had reasonable questions--like "why do some countries consider recovery from COVID as being equivalent to being vaccinated while the US doesn't" or people who were skeptical that loose-fitting cloth masks that most people wore below their nose did more good than harm--were de-platformed along with the true quacks. Experienced doctors with specific expertise in infectious disease were deplatformed for questioning if it was necessary for healthy young people to be vaccinted. This, and the fact that social media sites bow to Government pressure for this sort of moderations, is what's alarming to many reasonable people.
- acdha 4y ago
  > People who had reasonable questions--like "why do some countries consider recovery from COVID as being equivalent to being vaccinated while the US doesn't" or people who were skeptical that loose-fitting cloth masks that most people wore below their nose did more good than harm--were de-platformed along with the true quacks. Experienced doctors with specific expertise in infectious disease were deplatformed for questioning if it was necessary for healthy young people to be vaccinted. Do you have any non-vague examples? I saw those questions debated heavily throughout the pandemic and nobody was “deplatformed” for it. This makes me curious whether there’s other context important to understanding what happened — and why the complaints about moderation didn’t feature such sympathetic cases rather than the usual suspects.
  - brigandish 4y ago
    > the complaints about moderation didn’t feature such sympathetic cases rather than the usual suspects Jay Battacharya[1][2] of the Great Barrington Declaration fame - is he a usual case? From [3]: > In October 2020, Collins criticized the Great Barrington Declaration's "focused protection" herd immunity strategy, calling it "a fringe component of epidemiology. This is not mainstream science. It's dangerous. It fits into the political views of certain parts of our confused political establishment." In a private email to Fauci, Collins called the authors of the declaration "fringe epidemiologists" and said that "There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises". The Wall Street Journal's editorial board accused Collins of "work[ing] with the media to trash the Great Barrington Declaration." and of "Shut[ting] Down Covid Debate". Here's a bit more from the WSJ article[4] mentioned: > In public, Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins urge Americans to “follow the science.” In private, the two sainted public-health officials schemed to quash dissenting views from top scientists. That’s the troubling but fair conclusion from emails obtained recently via the Freedom of Information Act by the American Institute for Economic Research. From a recent interview in Unherd[5]: > And this all began when you joined Twitter in August 2021, many months after you had signed the “Great Barrington Declaration” speaking against lockdowns and calling for an alternative approach to the pandemic. > That first day in August 2021 when I joined Twitter, apparently Twitter received a number of unspecified complaints about me. It’s not clear, from my time at Twitter headquarters, exactly from who. Their systems are not set up to answer that question very easily, although apparently people are looking into that. And that then induced Twitter to put me on this trends blacklist to make sure that my tweets didn’t reach a broad audience outside of my own network… It took somebody at Twitter — a human at Twitter had to think about it. The setting was then renewed repeatedly through 2021 and 2022. Maybe deplatforming is not the same as having your Twitter account meddled with but it seems similar enough. There's also Martin Kulldorf[6][7]: > Was Martin Kulldorff also on the Trends Blacklist? > He had been, actually. His first placement on the trends blacklist was in July of 2020, when he was advocating for opening schools… He told me that what he was doing on Twitter was: whenever someone was mentioning that schools should close, he would post a link to the Swedish study that showed that when schools had opened in spring of 2020, no children had died and very few teachers had gotten sick relative to other workers in the population. He posted over and over and over, he said, and was more active on Twitter than at any other time. That’s exactly when the trends blacklist was applied on him, in July 2020. And then again, three more times in 2022. Although there was no active trends blacklist for Martin at the moment. > Is it still active for you? > It was still active when I was at Twitter. I hope it’s been removed. My tweets seem to go more viral nowadays. Jay Bhattacharya is Professor of medicine at Stanford University and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He directs Stanford's Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging. Martin Kulldorff, PhD, is a biostatistician, epidemiologist and (edit: was until 2021) professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Bhattacharya https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Bhattacharya [2] https://profiles.stanford.edu/jay-bhattacharya https://profiles.stanford.edu/jay-bhattacharya [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Collins#NIH_director https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Collins#NIH_director [4] https://www.wsj.com/articles/fauci-collins-emails-great-barrington-declaration-covid-pandemic-lockdown-11640129116 https://www.wsj.com/articles/fauci-collins-emails-great-barr... [5] https://unherd.com/2022/12/what-i-discovered-at-twitter-hq/ https://unherd.com/2022/12/what-i-discovered-at-twitter-hq/ [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Kulldorff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Kulldorff [7] https://www.dfhcc.harvard.edu/insider/member-detail/member/martin-kulldorff-phd/ https://www.dfhcc.harvard.edu/insider/member-detail/member/m...
itbeho 4y ago
Many people felt they couldn't even question the pharma/big gov narrative without being branded "internet weirdos and agitators" or anti-vax.
- Nursie 4y ago
  This is in part because whackos of all stripes often start with “I’m just asking questions here!” and then proceed to spout their nonsense. The ‘signal’ of a people who are genuinely asking questions or voicing concerns is drowned by the ‘noise’ of charlatans, amoral self-publicists and genuine crazies.
solarpunk 4y ago
man, skip talking about the vaccines, what about the refusal to simply utilize MASKS???
- jacquesm 4y ago
  If you have them...
- barry-cotter 4y ago
  Are you referring to how the US Surgeon General told everyone masks didn’t work or something else?
- 1123581321 4y ago
  It wasn’t simple. Next time, it will be important to be transparent about the tradeoffs of different types of material, and any need to route masks towards certain sectors being temporary. The strategy to feed the public a series of simplified messages was harmful from a public health perspective and sets the next pandemic response up for unnecessary challenges. All this is compatible with mandatory mask wearing, too. The rhetoric from the public about masks being simple and obvious had the same problem on the friends-and-family scale.
- ofcoursenate 4y ago
  In France a government official was explaining (while France had supply shortages) that masks required complex training to wear properly, and she herself did not know how to wear one, and so were useless to most people. A few weeks later an emergency law was passed and you would receive a fine if not wearing them. Similar situation in many countries.

by mhh__ 4y ago

jacquesm 4y ago

And they haven't stopped agitating. And probably won't stop. Which makes me wonder: with the degree of weaponization of the internet on the side of the anti-vaxxers will the next pandemic be 'the big one'? Enough people that refuse vaccination and you are looking at an entirely different probable outcome. Here in NL a small army of foaming-at-the-mouth conspiracy theorists did their utmost to undermine the vaccination campaign with the most outrageous claims and I'm pretty sure that we can chalk up a number of unnecessary deaths to their efforts. They wouldn't be able to tell a virus from a bacterium but that didn't stop them from spouting one nonsense theory after another and organizing (sometimes violent) protests against health care workers and their equipment. This is a worrisome development.

rtpg 4y ago
There’s a revival of kids not being given other vaccines as well. The knock on effects from the absolute bad faith mess from discourse around vaccines is going to fuck up so much in public health for decades. I am sympathetic to skepticism when public health officials spent a lot of time lying to avoid having to explain complicated truths. But so many bad faith voices and outright scammers with nonsense vitamins to sell are going to get what they want.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  > There’s a revival of kids not being given other vaccines as well. Yes, the anti-vaxx (and anti-government) sentiment has received an enormous boost from this, time will tell what the damage is but a resurgence of things like Polio is not out of the question. > I am sympathetic to skepticism when public health officials spent a lot of time lying to avoid having to explain complicated truths. I'm partially ok with that. They really should give out a double helping of advice: one that is dumbed down for those that lack the necessary background, one that is more on the level for those interested or that do have the necessary background. As it is the dumbed down version is all we've got and the result is that it is too easy to poke holes in it. At the same time, some of the under-preparedness would have been much harder to deal with without the occasional white lie, it stopped a lot of profiteering and kept some items in supply when otherwise there would have been a run on them. > But so many bad faith voices and outright scammers with nonsense vitamins to sell are going to get what they want. Yes, and fwiw I think those people should have gone to jail. We're working on a couple of those cases here NL at the moment and I'm really curious what the outcome will be.
  - Yhippa 4y ago
    > time will tell what the damage is but a resurgence of things like Polio is not out of the question. We're about to find out, buddy. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/04/how-polio-silently-spread-in-new-york-and-left-a-person-paralyzed.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/04/how-polio-silently-spread-in...
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      Ugh. Ok. Let's hope they manage to contain it and that the anti-vaxx crowd will realize in time what kind of risks they are playing with.
  - ckvjdonee 4y ago
    The white lie didn't stop profiteering, it was transparent for anyone watching with their eyes open and only made hoarding worse. Telling the truth would have resulted in far less supply shocks, instead, half the population willfully ignored the obvious lie by putting their heads in the sand and the other half ratcheted up their preparedness (because the govt clearly lying about everything at this point)
ryandrake 4y ago
[flagged]
- jacquesm 4y ago
  I fear you are right. The interesting thing to me is not what happened during COVID-19, but during the previous pandemic, the one that wasn't and that was nipped in the bud due to some very fortuitous circumstances and the speedy action of authorities and health care officials in many countries collaborating with unprecedented efficiency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS COVID-19 had some parameters slightly different, for instance the incubation time was a bit longer allowing it to spread undetected. There is no reason to make any assumptions about the various parameters of the next pandemic but they could very well be worse than COVID-19 and the way we've dealt with this one makes me quite skeptical about our ability to come through this sort of thing unscathed, especially not if every Tom, Dick & Harry are going to run interference. We got lucky, twice.
- mns 4y ago
  Well, most of the measures in most of the European countries were ruled as unconstitutional: locked into our houses not being allowed to get out, curfews afterwards at night and so on (and of course all these rules were set in place by politicians that never respected any of them - and worse, a lot of them made money by importing and selling back to the state masks and other PPE equipment). Most of the people, even if they took the vaccines, but dared to say anything about forcing people to get them or commenting on the absurdity of police patrolling parks and stopping any groups of more than 3 people, forcing masks outside in cold weather (not even bothering to read the instructions on the box) were all labelled antivaxxers, corona deniers and right wing nazis. So a lot of people decided to shut up and let the new religion of “I believe in science” do their thing. But next time when a serious pandemic hits, the trust has already been eroded.
  - Nursie 4y ago
    “Unconstitutional” in which countries and by what constitution? I learned that a lot of people think contrarianism makes them smart, and that even if everything everyone was saying about covid was true, they felt it necessary to ‘resist’ purely for the sake of it. I never though that in a pandemic, so many people in so many places would both politicise public health measures and actively side with the virus. But here we are. Trust has indeed been lost, but it might not be where you think.
etchalon 4y ago
I worry, but also remember that much of the pandemic was just a replay of the Spanish Flu. Distrust in masking, distrust in vaccines, a complaint about the "media" keeping "the truth" from the public.
rajin444 4y ago
> This is a worrisome development. Governments are working with private corporations to promote misinformation and silence real information and you’re worried about…anti vaxxers? I can maybe steel man a utilitarian stance for this position though I’m afraid it’s weak to “surely the lepers won’t eat my face”.
- 40amxn40 4y ago
  A very eye opening realization I had after 2020 is that the vast majority of people have absolutely zero critical thinking skills, and that applies specially to snobby intellectual circles like academia or this very forum. They are the most indoctrinated people on Earth and it's like talking to a wall.
- notacoward 4y ago
  > promote misinformation and silence real information "misinformation" and "real information" as rationally believed at the time or only with 20/20 hindsight? It's an important distinction. Also, what about the recommendations that did stand the test of time, or the misinformation about vaccine risks and alternative treatments that was rightly suppressed because it was false and harmful? If this is to be anything but an exercise in anti-authoritarian self-congratulation, people need to own up to their own mistakes as well.
  - Zpalmtree 4y ago
    Oops, we suppressed correct info, but it's not our fault, we didn't know it was correct!
- seattle_spring 4y ago
  Which “real information” was silenced? I sure hope you’re not referring to that farce of an article from ZeroHedge about “weaponized lab-grown covid.” What misinformation was promoted? Are you still on about the first week or 2 when they said masking was ineffective?
  - kornhole 4y ago
JeremyNT 4y ago
I think in a weird way COVID 19 fell into a strange area of lethality. For those looking at population data, it was horrific, but on a personal level the worst outcomes were rare enough that many people could avoid encountering any deaths or even severe illness in their inner circles. This made it rather easy to be an antivaxer, since people could just put their heads in the sand and remain blissfully ignorant of the scope of the disease. The deaths were just statistics, as were the benefits of vaccination. I think in a more severe pandemic, where more people would be losing friends or loved ones, they wouldn't have the luxury of this ignorance and they would be lining up to get a vaccine.
- Traubenfuchs 4y ago
  Many young and healthy people still don‘t know anyone personally who died due to covid, nor anyone claiming to have long covid. Covid was never dangerous to <50/60 year olds.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    > Covid was never dangerous to <50/60 year olds. In the US alone you're talking about 75K people dead under 50. And over 50 the numbers rise rapidly.
    - Karsteski 4y ago
      Can't really do much with absolute numbers, they must be per capita and compared to other ailments
      - maxerickson 4y ago
        The absolute numbers are actually a pretty good rebuttal to a comment that says "never". If you want to talk about it as a rate that's fine, but the pre-vaccine risk of dying from covid for a healthy person in their 40s or 50s was probably comparable to their lifetime risk of dying in a vehicular collision, it's not a small thing.
- 4y ago

matheusmoreira 4y ago

> I'm still waiting for everyone to drop dead from vaccine related injuries I didn't have to wait at all. There was a noticeable increase in thromboembolic events after COVID-19 vaccination started in my city. Plenty of people were saved by friends in the emergency room. The problem of course is not the vaccines, it's this insistence that they are risk-free. They are not. There is no such thing as zero risk in medicine. When you claim something false like that and people start to notice events that contradict your words, they will no longer trust you. This is why the cost benefit analysis must be detailed and presented clearly to people. They should make the choice of their own accord. Trying to impose it on them is how you get "anti-vaxxers" who no longer trust anything you say. I don't blame them. This is not even a modern phenomenon. Over a century ago there was a revolt in my country over forced vaccination. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_Revolt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_Revolt > To eradicate smallpox, Dr. Cruz convinced the Congress to approve the Mandatory Vaccination Law on October 31, 1904, authorizing sanitary brigade workers, accompanied by police, to enter homes and apply the vaccine by force.

acdha 4y ago
[flagged]
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  > they’re far less dangerous than getting COVID Of course but that's not what authorities and all kinds of pro-vaccination people were saying at the time. General statements about safety don't inspire confidence. There's a possibility that the vaccines are beneficial for some groups but not others, for example. Even today in my country they do everything possible to coerce people into vaccination. They come just short of abolishing personal freedom and consent. This is not how things are supposed to be done. People should want to take vaccines because there's data that shows benefit. Losing their trust means they won't even trust the data.
  - acdha 4y ago
    > Of course but that's not what authorities and all kinds of pro-vaccination people were saying at the time. It most certainly was in the United States, starting with the initial vaccine availability notices and the information sheet you were given at the time.

fortran77 4y ago

Our government, and the moderators at Twitter, lumped reasonable skeptics in the same category as grifter-anti-vax types (i.e., people pushing zinc, or colloidal silver, or chiropractic as "cures" for covid). People who had reasonable questions--like "why do some countries consider recovery from COVID as being equivalent to being vaccinated while the US doesn't" or people who were skeptical that loose-fitting cloth masks that most people wore below their nose did more good than harm--were de-platformed along with the true quacks. Experienced doctors with specific expertise in infectious disease were deplatformed for questioning if it was necessary for healthy young people to be vaccinted. This, and the fact that social media sites bow to Government pressure for this sort of moderations, is what's alarming to many reasonable people.

acdha 4y ago
> People who had reasonable questions--like "why do some countries consider recovery from COVID as being equivalent to being vaccinated while the US doesn't" or people who were skeptical that loose-fitting cloth masks that most people wore below their nose did more good than harm--were de-platformed along with the true quacks. Experienced doctors with specific expertise in infectious disease were deplatformed for questioning if it was necessary for healthy young people to be vaccinted. Do you have any non-vague examples? I saw those questions debated heavily throughout the pandemic and nobody was “deplatformed” for it. This makes me curious whether there’s other context important to understanding what happened — and why the complaints about moderation didn’t feature such sympathetic cases rather than the usual suspects.
- brigandish 4y ago
  > the complaints about moderation didn’t feature such sympathetic cases rather than the usual suspects Jay Battacharya[1][2] of the Great Barrington Declaration fame - is he a usual case? From [3]: > In October 2020, Collins criticized the Great Barrington Declaration's "focused protection" herd immunity strategy, calling it "a fringe component of epidemiology. This is not mainstream science. It's dangerous. It fits into the political views of certain parts of our confused political establishment." In a private email to Fauci, Collins called the authors of the declaration "fringe epidemiologists" and said that "There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises". The Wall Street Journal's editorial board accused Collins of "work[ing] with the media to trash the Great Barrington Declaration." and of "Shut[ting] Down Covid Debate". Here's a bit more from the WSJ article[4] mentioned: > In public, Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins urge Americans to “follow the science.” In private, the two sainted public-health officials schemed to quash dissenting views from top scientists. That’s the troubling but fair conclusion from emails obtained recently via the Freedom of Information Act by the American Institute for Economic Research. From a recent interview in Unherd[5]: > And this all began when you joined Twitter in August 2021, many months after you had signed the “Great Barrington Declaration” speaking against lockdowns and calling for an alternative approach to the pandemic. > That first day in August 2021 when I joined Twitter, apparently Twitter received a number of unspecified complaints about me. It’s not clear, from my time at Twitter headquarters, exactly from who. Their systems are not set up to answer that question very easily, although apparently people are looking into that. And that then induced Twitter to put me on this trends blacklist to make sure that my tweets didn’t reach a broad audience outside of my own network… It took somebody at Twitter — a human at Twitter had to think about it. The setting was then renewed repeatedly through 2021 and 2022. Maybe deplatforming is not the same as having your Twitter account meddled with but it seems similar enough. There's also Martin Kulldorf[6][7]: > Was Martin Kulldorff also on the Trends Blacklist? > He had been, actually. His first placement on the trends blacklist was in July of 2020, when he was advocating for opening schools… He told me that what he was doing on Twitter was: whenever someone was mentioning that schools should close, he would post a link to the Swedish study that showed that when schools had opened in spring of 2020, no children had died and very few teachers had gotten sick relative to other workers in the population. He posted over and over and over, he said, and was more active on Twitter than at any other time. That’s exactly when the trends blacklist was applied on him, in July 2020. And then again, three more times in 2022. Although there was no active trends blacklist for Martin at the moment. > Is it still active for you? > It was still active when I was at Twitter. I hope it’s been removed. My tweets seem to go more viral nowadays. Jay Bhattacharya is Professor of medicine at Stanford University and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He directs Stanford's Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging. Martin Kulldorff, PhD, is a biostatistician, epidemiologist and (edit: was until 2021) professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Bhattacharya https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Bhattacharya [2] https://profiles.stanford.edu/jay-bhattacharya https://profiles.stanford.edu/jay-bhattacharya [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Collins#NIH_director https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Collins#NIH_director [4] https://www.wsj.com/articles/fauci-collins-emails-great-barrington-declaration-covid-pandemic-lockdown-11640129116 https://www.wsj.com/articles/fauci-collins-emails-great-barr... [5] https://unherd.com/2022/12/what-i-discovered-at-twitter-hq/ https://unherd.com/2022/12/what-i-discovered-at-twitter-hq/ [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Kulldorff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Kulldorff [7] https://www.dfhcc.harvard.edu/insider/member-detail/member/martin-kulldorff-phd/ https://www.dfhcc.harvard.edu/insider/member-detail/member/m...

itbeho 4y ago

Many people felt they couldn't even question the pharma/big gov narrative without being branded "internet weirdos and agitators" or anti-vax.

Nursie 4y ago
This is in part because whackos of all stripes often start with “I’m just asking questions here!” and then proceed to spout their nonsense. The ‘signal’ of a people who are genuinely asking questions or voicing concerns is drowned by the ‘noise’ of charlatans, amoral self-publicists and genuine crazies.

solarpunk 4y ago

man, skip talking about the vaccines, what about the refusal to simply utilize MASKS???

jacquesm 4y ago
If you have them...
barry-cotter 4y ago
Are you referring to how the US Surgeon General told everyone masks didn’t work or something else?
1123581321 4y ago
It wasn’t simple. Next time, it will be important to be transparent about the tradeoffs of different types of material, and any need to route masks towards certain sectors being temporary. The strategy to feed the public a series of simplified messages was harmful from a public health perspective and sets the next pandemic response up for unnecessary challenges. All this is compatible with mandatory mask wearing, too. The rhetoric from the public about masks being simple and obvious had the same problem on the friends-and-family scale.
ofcoursenate 4y ago
In France a government official was explaining (while France had supply shortages) that masks required complex training to wear properly, and she herself did not know how to wear one, and so were useless to most people. A few weeks later an emergency law was passed and you would receive a fine if not wearing them. Similar situation in many countries.