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I believe it’s due to the way the COVID vaccine was handled. As an overly-broad rule of thumb, the right values freedom more than safety. The COVID vaccine was

I believe it’s due to the way the COVID vaccine was handled. As an overly-broad rule of thumb, the right values freedom more than safety. The COVID vaccine was an example of very heavy-handed enforcement and I think whether for right or wrong the backlash has affected all vaccines. My personal take, unrelated to politics, is that getting a vaccine for a virus from last year while the current strain has mutated isn’t a particularly stellar strategy, especially when I get the effects of the flu from the vaccine anyway. I just roll the dice most years and I haven’t had the flu in over 10 years so it’s not worth it to me.

happytoexplain 2y ago
Yes, but this doesn't explain the safety-related fear-mongering that is also popular on the right (it gives you autism, etc).
swiftcoder 2y ago
> The COVID vaccine was an example of very heavy-handed enforcement In what country? Certainly not the US. The only federal vaccine mandate that actually survived contact with the judiciary was for healthcare workers in medicare-funded hospitals. There were obvious a variety of employers requiring their employees to be vaccinated, but that's not the government in any shape or form.
- zmgsabst 2y ago
  There were numerous state level policies at the advice of federal agencies such as the CDC, that prohibited participation in public events.
  - theossuary 2y ago
    You'd think conservatives would be happy with states exercising their rights
- abduhl 2y ago
  Employers were induced into requiring vaccination based on an impermissible OSHA rule that made vaccination mandatory. Acting as if the federal mandates eventually being stopped by the legal process means they did not shape private action is disingenuous. The federal government’s response to Covid is one of the primary reasons we have seen such a huge backlash to the administrative state, culminating in Donald Trump’s purported current quest to dismantle it, ironically by using its own power to destabilize and destroy it. I say purported because whether Trump’s goal is to dismantle the administrative state or to reform it as a tool for himself, his friends, and his donors remains to be seen. It’s probably the latter.
  - Izkata 2y ago
    One of the things I've picked up on over the years, very few people have even heard of the OSHA mandate. It was: Every employer with 100+ employees would be required to have all employees get a COVID vaccination. From memory, the series of events was: * The initial mandate was issued * It got challenged in courts and blocked * Biden went on record speaking to the public, telling employers to do it anyway while they appealed * The appeal failed and it was blocked again * Only then did that administration drop it During that interim where it was being appealed my at-the-time-fully-remote company was hinting they might be following it.
    - adamtaylor_13 2y ago
      Yep I remember this quite vividly, and my brother even quit his job because they said get the jab or hit the road.
0xcde4c3db 2y ago
> The COVID vaccine was an example of very heavy-handed enforcement Do you have some concrete examples of this? I recall a lot of hyperventilating about the possibility of "vaccine passports" (complete with "mark of the beast" references), and a handful of instances where people got angry about COVID vaccination being folded into (decades-old) policies covering mandatory vaccinations for school/work, but not much beyond that. I carried a mask in case places had mask policies, but it never even occurred to me that I might need to prove that I was vaccinated.
- notahacker 2y ago
  Much of the US right was also making loud noises about non-vaccine miracle cures and expressing scepticism about the vaccine before it was even approved... And yeah, the irony is that throwing money at vaccine rollouts was one of the few good things the last Trump administration did, but trying to talk about it was about the only thing that could get him booed by his own fanbase
- zmgsabst 2y ago
  States, eg WA, had policies that prevented activities unless you were vaccinated.
  - UncleMeat 2y ago
    They consistently had "or wear a mask" options.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      Many private functions/companies required both. It's simply counterfactual to say there were no vaccination mandates--and they weren't limited to healthcare settings.
      - UncleMeat 2y ago
        Quite different from state policies at this point.
whoitwas 2y ago
This makes no sense because Trump did all the covid stuff. It was corrected when Biden took office. I agree that covid enabled this transition away from reality, but because of people becoming segregated and always online. Your personal take is wrong and you should get vaxxed for flu as doctors recommend.
DebtDeflation 2y ago
As recently as a year ago, the right wing vaccine opposition was focused almost exclusively on mRNA Covid vaccines. This sudden opposition to ALL vaccines, from Polio to Flu vaccines, dates back to when RFK announced he was suspending his campaign and joining Trump or shortly thereafter.
jameskilton 2y ago
Wow. This comment showcases everything that's wrong with America today. Trying to keep Americans alive is somehow political. The party of "pro life" was so against trying to save lives that we ended up with the highest COVID death rate in the world, and overall had between 4 and 5 million deaths above the normal rates (see CDC excess deaths between 2020 and 2022). Also, the vaccine IS NOT ABOUT YOU. Vaccinations are about protecting the people who cannot get vaccinated. When you have 97%+ of the populace vaccinated then you are also protecting the most vulnerable from the same. This is why Measles is showing up again, because the people decrying vaccines have caused the coverage to drop below the critical threshold. Until Americans, and even more importantly the "Christian Right" can wake up and actually start acting like Christ tells us to (feed the hungry, heal the sick, give to the poor, love your enemy, give away your wealth), the cruelty America is inflicting on ourselves and the world will only get worse.
- ifyoubuildit 2y ago
  The covid vaccine is mostly about you. A couple months of partial protection against infection is not saving the world.
  - ramchip 2y ago
    Where do you get "a couple months of partial protection" from? The numbers I saw are very different, take for instance: > COVID-19 vaccine efficacy or effectiveness against severe disease remained high, although it did decrease somewhat by 6 months after full vaccination. By contrast, vaccine efficacy or effectiveness against infection and symptomatic disease decreased approximately 20–30 percentage points by 6 months. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8863502/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8863502/
    - ifyoubuildit 2y ago
      > In most studies, the vaccine efficacy or effectiveness against severe disease remained high (≥70%) for up to 6 months after vaccination for all four vaccines that we evaluated (and mostly ≥80% for the two mRNA vaccines). This is the only place I could find in your source that mentions the efficacy numbers (not the drop in efficacy, which is what this is focused on), and it is only against severe disease. The first one that came up for my search was this: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2600(23)00015-2/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2... The findings section shows that by the time omicron was around, you were at around 43% against infection by 112 days. That was then. What is it today? How many people do you need to jab to prevent one transmission? And how many people are doing that? Uptake is very low today. There was a time when "the VAX is not about you!" was plausible. That time has passed.
malcolmgreaves 2y ago
The right doesn’t value freedom. Who convinced you of this lie? The right adores authoritarian rulers. They adore a rigid social order that dictates what privileges certain people have. The right is the most anti-freedom a political movement can get!
gilbetron 2y ago
> the right values freedom more than safety I would phrase it more as "the right doesn't like to be told what to do". The left generally values "freedom" more in my experience, but they like telling people what to do. I've always said that if Covid had been a little more deadly, or affected young people more, than the role would have been reversed and the Right would've been screaming to have the military force people to be indoors.

happytoexplain 2y ago

Yes, but this doesn't explain the safety-related fear-mongering that is also popular on the right (it gives you autism, etc).

swiftcoder 2y ago

> The COVID vaccine was an example of very heavy-handed enforcement In what country? Certainly not the US. The only federal vaccine mandate that actually survived contact with the judiciary was for healthcare workers in medicare-funded hospitals. There were obvious a variety of employers requiring their employees to be vaccinated, but that's not the government in any shape or form.

zmgsabst 2y ago
There were numerous state level policies at the advice of federal agencies such as the CDC, that prohibited participation in public events.
- theossuary 2y ago
  You'd think conservatives would be happy with states exercising their rights
abduhl 2y ago
Employers were induced into requiring vaccination based on an impermissible OSHA rule that made vaccination mandatory. Acting as if the federal mandates eventually being stopped by the legal process means they did not shape private action is disingenuous. The federal government’s response to Covid is one of the primary reasons we have seen such a huge backlash to the administrative state, culminating in Donald Trump’s purported current quest to dismantle it, ironically by using its own power to destabilize and destroy it. I say purported because whether Trump’s goal is to dismantle the administrative state or to reform it as a tool for himself, his friends, and his donors remains to be seen. It’s probably the latter.
- Izkata 2y ago
  One of the things I've picked up on over the years, very few people have even heard of the OSHA mandate. It was: Every employer with 100+ employees would be required to have all employees get a COVID vaccination. From memory, the series of events was: * The initial mandate was issued * It got challenged in courts and blocked * Biden went on record speaking to the public, telling employers to do it anyway while they appealed * The appeal failed and it was blocked again * Only then did that administration drop it During that interim where it was being appealed my at-the-time-fully-remote company was hinting they might be following it.
  - adamtaylor_13 2y ago
    Yep I remember this quite vividly, and my brother even quit his job because they said get the jab or hit the road.

0xcde4c3db 2y ago

> The COVID vaccine was an example of very heavy-handed enforcement Do you have some concrete examples of this? I recall a lot of hyperventilating about the possibility of "vaccine passports" (complete with "mark of the beast" references), and a handful of instances where people got angry about COVID vaccination being folded into (decades-old) policies covering mandatory vaccinations for school/work, but not much beyond that. I carried a mask in case places had mask policies, but it never even occurred to me that I might need to prove that I was vaccinated.

notahacker 2y ago
Much of the US right was also making loud noises about non-vaccine miracle cures and expressing scepticism about the vaccine before it was even approved... And yeah, the irony is that throwing money at vaccine rollouts was one of the few good things the last Trump administration did, but trying to talk about it was about the only thing that could get him booed by his own fanbase
zmgsabst 2y ago
States, eg WA, had policies that prevented activities unless you were vaccinated.
- UncleMeat 2y ago
  They consistently had "or wear a mask" options.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    Many private functions/companies required both. It's simply counterfactual to say there were no vaccination mandates--and they weren't limited to healthcare settings.
    - UncleMeat 2y ago
      Quite different from state policies at this point.

whoitwas 2y ago

This makes no sense because Trump did all the covid stuff. It was corrected when Biden took office. I agree that covid enabled this transition away from reality, but because of people becoming segregated and always online. Your personal take is wrong and you should get vaxxed for flu as doctors recommend.

DebtDeflation 2y ago

As recently as a year ago, the right wing vaccine opposition was focused almost exclusively on mRNA Covid vaccines. This sudden opposition to ALL vaccines, from Polio to Flu vaccines, dates back to when RFK announced he was suspending his campaign and joining Trump or shortly thereafter.

jameskilton 2y ago

Wow. This comment showcases everything that's wrong with America today. Trying to keep Americans alive is somehow political. The party of "pro life" was so against trying to save lives that we ended up with the highest COVID death rate in the world, and overall had between 4 and 5 million deaths above the normal rates (see CDC excess deaths between 2020 and 2022). Also, the vaccine IS NOT ABOUT YOU. Vaccinations are about protecting the people who cannot get vaccinated. When you have 97%+ of the populace vaccinated then you are also protecting the most vulnerable from the same. This is why Measles is showing up again, because the people decrying vaccines have caused the coverage to drop below the critical threshold. Until Americans, and even more importantly the "Christian Right" can wake up and actually start acting like Christ tells us to (feed the hungry, heal the sick, give to the poor, love your enemy, give away your wealth), the cruelty America is inflicting on ourselves and the world will only get worse.

ifyoubuildit 2y ago
The covid vaccine is mostly about you. A couple months of partial protection against infection is not saving the world.
- ramchip 2y ago
  Where do you get "a couple months of partial protection" from? The numbers I saw are very different, take for instance: > COVID-19 vaccine efficacy or effectiveness against severe disease remained high, although it did decrease somewhat by 6 months after full vaccination. By contrast, vaccine efficacy or effectiveness against infection and symptomatic disease decreased approximately 20–30 percentage points by 6 months. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8863502/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8863502/
  - ifyoubuildit 2y ago
    > In most studies, the vaccine efficacy or effectiveness against severe disease remained high (≥70%) for up to 6 months after vaccination for all four vaccines that we evaluated (and mostly ≥80% for the two mRNA vaccines). This is the only place I could find in your source that mentions the efficacy numbers (not the drop in efficacy, which is what this is focused on), and it is only against severe disease. The first one that came up for my search was this: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2600(23)00015-2/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2... The findings section shows that by the time omicron was around, you were at around 43% against infection by 112 days. That was then. What is it today? How many people do you need to jab to prevent one transmission? And how many people are doing that? Uptake is very low today. There was a time when "the VAX is not about you!" was plausible. That time has passed.

malcolmgreaves 2y ago

The right doesn’t value freedom. Who convinced you of this lie? The right adores authoritarian rulers. They adore a rigid social order that dictates what privileges certain people have. The right is the most anti-freedom a political movement can get!

gilbetron 2y ago

> the right values freedom more than safety I would phrase it more as "the right doesn't like to be told what to do". The left generally values "freedom" more in my experience, but they like telling people what to do. I've always said that if Covid had been a little more deadly, or affected young people more, than the role would have been reversed and the Right would've been screaming to have the military force people to be indoors.