5 ms·

I agree. People today are far more anti-vaccine than they were a few years ago which is kinda crazy when you consider we went through a global pandemic where on

by kypro 1y ago

I agree. People today are far more anti-vaccine than they were a few years ago which is kinda crazy when you consider we went through a global pandemic where one of the only things that actually worked to stop people dying was the roll out of effective vaccines. I think if public health bodies just laid out the data they had honestly (good and bad) and said that they think most people should probably take it, but left it to people to decide, the vast, vast majority of people would still have gotten the vaccine but we wouldn't have allowed anti-vaccine sentiment to fester.

vkou 1y ago
> but left it to people to decide, the vast, vast majority of people would still have gotten the vaccine but we wouldn't have allowed anti-vaccine sentiment to fester. Nah, the same grifters who stand to make a political profit of turning everything into a wedge issue would have still hammered right into it. They've completely taken over public discourse on a wide range of subjects, that go well beyond COVID vaccines. As long as you can make a dollar by telling people that their (and your) ignorance is worth just as much - or more - than someone else's knowledge, you'll find no shortage of listeners for your sermon. And that popularity will build its own social proof. (Millions of fools can't all be wrong, after all.)
- kypro 1y ago
  I agree. Again the vast majority would have gotten the vaccine. There's always going to be people for all kinds of reasons pushing out bad ideas. That's part of the trade-off of living in a free society where there is no universal "right" opinion the public must hold. > They've completely taken over public discourse on a wide range of subjects Most people are not anti-vax. If "they've" "taken over public discourse" in other subjects to the point you are now holding a minority opinion you should consider whether "they" are right or wrong and why so many people believe what they do. If can't understand their position and disagree you should reach out to people in a non-confrontational way, understand their position, then explain why you disagree (if you still do at that point). If we all do a better job at this we'll converge towards truth. If you think talking and debate isn't the solution to disagreements I'd argue you don't really believe in our democratic system (which isn't a judgement).
  - vel0city 1y ago
    While I do agree "most people are not anti-vax", the rates of opting out of vaccines or doing delayed schedules or being very selective have gone way up. Some of these public school districts in Texas have >10% of students objecting to vaccines. My kids are effectively surrounded by unvaccinated kids whenever they go out in public. There's a 1 in 10 chance that kid on the playground has never had a vaccine, and that rate is increasing. A lot of the families I know actively having kids are pretty crunchy and are at least vaccine hesitant if not outright anti-vax. https://www.dshs.texas.gov/sites/default/files/LIDS-Immunizations/pdf/2023-2024_K-12_Conscientious_Exemptions_by_District.pdf https://www.dshs.texas.gov/sites/default/files/LIDS-Immuniza...
stefantalpalaru 1y ago
> one of the only things that actually worked to stop people dying was the roll out of effective vaccines "A total of 913 participants were included in the final analysis. The adjusted ORs for COVID-19 infection among vaccinated individuals compared to unvaccinated individuals were 1.85 (95% CI: 1.33-2.57, p < 0.001). The odds of contracting COVID-19 increased with the number of vaccine doses: one to two doses (OR: 1.63, 95% CI: 1.08-2.46, p = 0.020), three to four doses (OR: 2.04, 95% CI: 1.35-3.08, p = 0.001), and five to seven doses (OR: 2.21, 95% CI: 1.07-4.56, p = 0.033)." - ["Behavioral and Health Outcomes of mRNA COVID-19 Vaccination: A Case-Control Study in Japanese Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises" (2024)](https://www.cureus.com/articles/313843-behavioral-and-health-outcomes-of-mrna-covid-19-vaccination-a-case-control-study-in-japanese-small-and-medium-sized-enterprises#!/ https://www.cureus.com/articles/313843-behavioral-and-health...) "the bivalent-vaccinated group had a slightly but statistically significantly higher infection rate than the unvaccinated group in the statewide category and the age ≥50 years category" - ["COVID-19 Infection Rates in Vaccinated and Unvaccinated Inmates: A Retrospective Cohort Study" (2023)](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10482361/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10482361/) "The risk of COVID-19 also varied by the number of COVID-19 vaccine doses previously received. The higher the number of vaccines previously received, the higher the risk of contracting COVID-19" - ["Effectiveness of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Bivalent Vaccine" (2022)](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.12.17.22283625v1.full https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.12.17.22283625v...) "Confirmed infection rates increased according to time elapsed since the last immunity-conferring event in all cohorts. For unvaccinated previously infected individuals they increased from 10.5 per 100,000 risk-days for those previously infected 4-6 months ago to 30.2 for those previously infected over a year ago. For individuals receiving a single dose following prior infection they increased from 3.7 per 100,000 person days among those vaccinated in the past two months to 11.6 for those vaccinated over 6 months ago. For vaccinated previously uninfected individuals the rate per 100,000 person days increased from 21.1 for persons vaccinated within the first two months to 88.9 for those vaccinated more than 6 months ago." - ["Protection and waning of natural and hybrid COVID-19 immunity" (2021)](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.04.21267114v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.04.21267114v...)
trollbridge 1y ago
And the attempts at censorship have played a part in people drifting towards being more vaccine-hesitant or anti-vaccine. It's often a lot better to just let kooks speak freely.
- vFunct 1y ago
  It's less about censorship and more about more people becoming middle-class and therefore thinking they're smarter than researchers. There is nobody more confident in themselves than the middle-class.
  - khazhoux 1y ago
    That’s a very confident statement presented without a hint of evidence.
    - vFunct 1y ago
      You know that there are studies addressing this, right? I didn't just make it up. Here's an overview study that reviewed other studies: https://jphe.amegroups.org/article/view/9493/html https://jphe.amegroups.org/article/view/9493/html "Pre-COVID-19 interviews with a high-income vaccine hesitant sample in Perth, Australia found that vaccine hesitancy was based on an inflated sense of agency in making medical decisions without doctors or public health officials, and a preference for “natural” methods of healthcare (30)." "A similar study in the United States reported on interviews from 25 White mothers in a wealthy community who refused vaccination for their children (31). These participants reported high levels of perceived personal efficacy in making health decisions for their children and higher confidence in preventing illness through individual “natural” measures such as eating organic food and exercising. Additionally, these participants report lower perceived risk of infection or disease, which is contrasted with their high perceived risk of vaccination." "Vaccine hesitancy among those with privilege may be more than just a product of resource access. There is evidence that individuals with high socioeconomic status perceive themselves to be more capable, hardworking, important, and deserving of resources and privileges than others (32,33)"
dotnet00 1y ago
[flagged]
- xdennis 1y ago
  > I think the anti-vax thing is mostly because the average Western education level is just abysmal. What does the West have to do with it? Non-westerners are even more into folk medicine and witch doctors.
  - andrewmcwatters 1y ago
    And yet, SEA and others are still better educated than us.
    - LeafItAlone 1y ago
      >SEA and others are still better educated than us. Honest question: is this true? What’s the data around this? If it is true, why are there so many people from SEA in American universities? Wouldn’t they stay in their home country or another in the area? I’m truly trying to learn here and square this statement with what I’ve come to understand so far.
  - dotnet00 1y ago
    They're into folk medicine, but their anti-vax issues generally come from people who don't have any means of knowing better (i.e. never been to school, dropped out at a very early grade, isolated, not even literate). Typically just education and having a doctor or a local elder respectfully explain to them that the Polio shot will help prevent their child from being paralyzed for life is enough to convince them. Meanwhile the 'educated' Westerner, to whom Polio is a third-world disease, will convince themselves that the doctor is lying for some reason, will choose to take the 75% chance of an asymptomatic infection because they don't truly appreciate how bad it can otherwise be, will use their access to a vast collection of humanity's information to cherry pick data that supports their position (most likely while also claiming to seek debate despite not intending to seriously consider opposing evidence), and if their gamble fails, will probably just blame immigrants, government or 'big pharma' for doing it.
logicchains 1y ago
>where one of the only things that actually worked to stop people dying was the roll out of effective vaccines. The only reason you believe that is because all information to the contrary was systematically censored and removed from the media you consume. The actual data doesn't support that, there are even cases where it increased mortality, like https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11278956/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11278956/ and increased the chance of future covid infections, like https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39803093/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39803093/ .
- rpiguy 1y ago
  I appreciate you. People have become more anti-Vax because the Covid vaccines were at best ineffective and as you said anything contra-narrative is buried or ignored. If you push a shitty product and force people to take it to keep their jobs it’s going to turn them into skeptics of all vaccines, even the very effective ones. More harm than good was done there. The government should have approved them for voluntary use so the fallout would not have been so bad.
  - OrvalWintermute 1y ago
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    - deepburner 1y ago
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      - OrvalWintermute 1y ago
        [flagged]
- cynicalkane 1y ago
  This is typical of Covid conspiracy theorists, or conspiracy theorists of any sort: one or two papers on one side prove something, but an overwhelming mountain of evidence on the other side does not prove something. The theorist makes no explanation as to how a planetful of scientists missed the obvious truth that some random dudes found; they just assert that it happened, or make some hand-waving explanation about how an inexplicable planet-wide force of censors is silencing the few unremarkable randos who somehow have the truth. The first paper seems to claim a very standard cohort study is subject to "immortal time bias", an effect whereby measuring outcomes can seem to change them. The typical example of sampling time bias is that slow-growing cancers are more survivable than fast-growing ones, but also more likely to be measured by a screening, giving a correlation between screening and survivablility. So you get a time effect where more fast-acting cancers do not end up in the measurement, biasing the data. But in measurements such that one outcome or the other does not bias the odds of that outcome being sampled, there can be no measurement time effect, which is why it's not corrected for in studies like this. The authors do not explain why measurement time effects would have anything to do with detecting or not detecting death rates in the abstract, or anywhere else in the paper, because they are quacks, who apply arbitrary math to get the outcome they want. As another commenter pointed out, randomized controlled trials -- which cannot possibly have this made-up time effect -- often clearly show a strongly positive effect for vaccination. I did not read the second paper.
someNameIG 1y ago
It's more that people in general* connect to personal stories far more than impersonal factual data. It's easy to connect to seeing people say they had adverse reactions to a vaccine than statistical data showing it's safer to get vaccinated than not. It's also easier to believe conspiracies, its easier to think bad things happen due to the intent of bad people, than the world being a complex hard to understand place with no intent behind things happening. These are just things that some of the population will be more attracted to, I don't think it has anything to do with censorship, lockdowns, or mandates. At most the blame can be at institutions for lacking in their ability to do effective scientific communication. *And this skews more to less educated and intelligent.
boxerab 1y ago
Yes! This MUST be why the VAERS adverse event tracker went through the roof right after the rollout began, and why excess death remains sky high in many countries to this day - because a product that didn't stop you from catching or spreading the virus was one of the only things preventing deaths. Couldn't have been our, you know, immune system or anything like that, or that the average age at death was 80 along with several co-morbidities.
gm678 1y ago
That didn't happen in a vacuum; there was also a _lot_ of money going into pushing anti vaccine propaganda, both for mundane scam reasons and for political reasons: https://x.com/robert_zubrin/status/1863572439084699918?lang=fr https://x.com/robert_zubrin/status/1863572439084699918?lang=...
nxm 1y ago
Issue is when we weren't/aren't even allowed to question the efficacy or long-term side effects of any vaccine.

by kypro 1y ago

vkou 1y ago

> but left it to people to decide, the vast, vast majority of people would still have gotten the vaccine but we wouldn't have allowed anti-vaccine sentiment to fester. Nah, the same grifters who stand to make a political profit of turning everything into a wedge issue would have still hammered right into it. They've completely taken over public discourse on a wide range of subjects, that go well beyond COVID vaccines. As long as you can make a dollar by telling people that their (and your) ignorance is worth just as much - or more - than someone else's knowledge, you'll find no shortage of listeners for your sermon. And that popularity will build its own social proof. (Millions of fools can't all be wrong, after all.)

kypro 1y ago
I agree. Again the vast majority would have gotten the vaccine. There's always going to be people for all kinds of reasons pushing out bad ideas. That's part of the trade-off of living in a free society where there is no universal "right" opinion the public must hold. > They've completely taken over public discourse on a wide range of subjects Most people are not anti-vax. If "they've" "taken over public discourse" in other subjects to the point you are now holding a minority opinion you should consider whether "they" are right or wrong and why so many people believe what they do. If can't understand their position and disagree you should reach out to people in a non-confrontational way, understand their position, then explain why you disagree (if you still do at that point). If we all do a better job at this we'll converge towards truth. If you think talking and debate isn't the solution to disagreements I'd argue you don't really believe in our democratic system (which isn't a judgement).
- vel0city 1y ago
  While I do agree "most people are not anti-vax", the rates of opting out of vaccines or doing delayed schedules or being very selective have gone way up. Some of these public school districts in Texas have >10% of students objecting to vaccines. My kids are effectively surrounded by unvaccinated kids whenever they go out in public. There's a 1 in 10 chance that kid on the playground has never had a vaccine, and that rate is increasing. A lot of the families I know actively having kids are pretty crunchy and are at least vaccine hesitant if not outright anti-vax. https://www.dshs.texas.gov/sites/default/files/LIDS-Immunizations/pdf/2023-2024_K-12_Conscientious_Exemptions_by_District.pdf https://www.dshs.texas.gov/sites/default/files/LIDS-Immuniza...

stefantalpalaru 1y ago

> one of the only things that actually worked to stop people dying was the roll out of effective vaccines "A total of 913 participants were included in the final analysis. The adjusted ORs for COVID-19 infection among vaccinated individuals compared to unvaccinated individuals were 1.85 (95% CI: 1.33-2.57, p < 0.001). The odds of contracting COVID-19 increased with the number of vaccine doses: one to two doses (OR: 1.63, 95% CI: 1.08-2.46, p = 0.020), three to four doses (OR: 2.04, 95% CI: 1.35-3.08, p = 0.001), and five to seven doses (OR: 2.21, 95% CI: 1.07-4.56, p = 0.033)." - ["Behavioral and Health Outcomes of mRNA COVID-19 Vaccination: A Case-Control Study in Japanese Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises" (2024)](https://www.cureus.com/articles/313843-behavioral-and-health-outcomes-of-mrna-covid-19-vaccination-a-case-control-study-in-japanese-small-and-medium-sized-enterprises#!/ https://www.cureus.com/articles/313843-behavioral-and-health...) "the bivalent-vaccinated group had a slightly but statistically significantly higher infection rate than the unvaccinated group in the statewide category and the age ≥50 years category" - ["COVID-19 Infection Rates in Vaccinated and Unvaccinated Inmates: A Retrospective Cohort Study" (2023)](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10482361/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10482361/) "The risk of COVID-19 also varied by the number of COVID-19 vaccine doses previously received. The higher the number of vaccines previously received, the higher the risk of contracting COVID-19" - ["Effectiveness of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Bivalent Vaccine" (2022)](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.12.17.22283625v1.full https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.12.17.22283625v...) "Confirmed infection rates increased according to time elapsed since the last immunity-conferring event in all cohorts. For unvaccinated previously infected individuals they increased from 10.5 per 100,000 risk-days for those previously infected 4-6 months ago to 30.2 for those previously infected over a year ago. For individuals receiving a single dose following prior infection they increased from 3.7 per 100,000 person days among those vaccinated in the past two months to 11.6 for those vaccinated over 6 months ago. For vaccinated previously uninfected individuals the rate per 100,000 person days increased from 21.1 for persons vaccinated within the first two months to 88.9 for those vaccinated more than 6 months ago." - ["Protection and waning of natural and hybrid COVID-19 immunity" (2021)](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.04.21267114v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.04.21267114v...)

trollbridge 1y ago

And the attempts at censorship have played a part in people drifting towards being more vaccine-hesitant or anti-vaccine. It's often a lot better to just let kooks speak freely.

vFunct 1y ago
It's less about censorship and more about more people becoming middle-class and therefore thinking they're smarter than researchers. There is nobody more confident in themselves than the middle-class.
- khazhoux 1y ago
  That’s a very confident statement presented without a hint of evidence.
  - vFunct 1y ago
    You know that there are studies addressing this, right? I didn't just make it up. Here's an overview study that reviewed other studies: https://jphe.amegroups.org/article/view/9493/html https://jphe.amegroups.org/article/view/9493/html "Pre-COVID-19 interviews with a high-income vaccine hesitant sample in Perth, Australia found that vaccine hesitancy was based on an inflated sense of agency in making medical decisions without doctors or public health officials, and a preference for “natural” methods of healthcare (30)." "A similar study in the United States reported on interviews from 25 White mothers in a wealthy community who refused vaccination for their children (31). These participants reported high levels of perceived personal efficacy in making health decisions for their children and higher confidence in preventing illness through individual “natural” measures such as eating organic food and exercising. Additionally, these participants report lower perceived risk of infection or disease, which is contrasted with their high perceived risk of vaccination." "Vaccine hesitancy among those with privilege may be more than just a product of resource access. There is evidence that individuals with high socioeconomic status perceive themselves to be more capable, hardworking, important, and deserving of resources and privileges than others (32,33)"

dotnet00 1y ago

[flagged]

xdennis 1y ago
> I think the anti-vax thing is mostly because the average Western education level is just abysmal. What does the West have to do with it? Non-westerners are even more into folk medicine and witch doctors.
- andrewmcwatters 1y ago
  And yet, SEA and others are still better educated than us.
  - LeafItAlone 1y ago
    >SEA and others are still better educated than us. Honest question: is this true? What’s the data around this? If it is true, why are there so many people from SEA in American universities? Wouldn’t they stay in their home country or another in the area? I’m truly trying to learn here and square this statement with what I’ve come to understand so far.
- dotnet00 1y ago
  They're into folk medicine, but their anti-vax issues generally come from people who don't have any means of knowing better (i.e. never been to school, dropped out at a very early grade, isolated, not even literate). Typically just education and having a doctor or a local elder respectfully explain to them that the Polio shot will help prevent their child from being paralyzed for life is enough to convince them. Meanwhile the 'educated' Westerner, to whom Polio is a third-world disease, will convince themselves that the doctor is lying for some reason, will choose to take the 75% chance of an asymptomatic infection because they don't truly appreciate how bad it can otherwise be, will use their access to a vast collection of humanity's information to cherry pick data that supports their position (most likely while also claiming to seek debate despite not intending to seriously consider opposing evidence), and if their gamble fails, will probably just blame immigrants, government or 'big pharma' for doing it.

logicchains 1y ago

>where one of the only things that actually worked to stop people dying was the roll out of effective vaccines. The only reason you believe that is because all information to the contrary was systematically censored and removed from the media you consume. The actual data doesn't support that, there are even cases where it increased mortality, like https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11278956/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11278956/ and increased the chance of future covid infections, like https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39803093/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39803093/ .

rpiguy 1y ago
I appreciate you. People have become more anti-Vax because the Covid vaccines were at best ineffective and as you said anything contra-narrative is buried or ignored. If you push a shitty product and force people to take it to keep their jobs it’s going to turn them into skeptics of all vaccines, even the very effective ones. More harm than good was done there. The government should have approved them for voluntary use so the fallout would not have been so bad.
- OrvalWintermute 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - deepburner 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - OrvalWintermute 1y ago
      [flagged]
cynicalkane 1y ago
This is typical of Covid conspiracy theorists, or conspiracy theorists of any sort: one or two papers on one side prove something, but an overwhelming mountain of evidence on the other side does not prove something. The theorist makes no explanation as to how a planetful of scientists missed the obvious truth that some random dudes found; they just assert that it happened, or make some hand-waving explanation about how an inexplicable planet-wide force of censors is silencing the few unremarkable randos who somehow have the truth. The first paper seems to claim a very standard cohort study is subject to "immortal time bias", an effect whereby measuring outcomes can seem to change them. The typical example of sampling time bias is that slow-growing cancers are more survivable than fast-growing ones, but also more likely to be measured by a screening, giving a correlation between screening and survivablility. So you get a time effect where more fast-acting cancers do not end up in the measurement, biasing the data. But in measurements such that one outcome or the other does not bias the odds of that outcome being sampled, there can be no measurement time effect, which is why it's not corrected for in studies like this. The authors do not explain why measurement time effects would have anything to do with detecting or not detecting death rates in the abstract, or anywhere else in the paper, because they are quacks, who apply arbitrary math to get the outcome they want. As another commenter pointed out, randomized controlled trials -- which cannot possibly have this made-up time effect -- often clearly show a strongly positive effect for vaccination. I did not read the second paper.

someNameIG 1y ago

It's more that people in general* connect to personal stories far more than impersonal factual data. It's easy to connect to seeing people say they had adverse reactions to a vaccine than statistical data showing it's safer to get vaccinated than not. It's also easier to believe conspiracies, its easier to think bad things happen due to the intent of bad people, than the world being a complex hard to understand place with no intent behind things happening. These are just things that some of the population will be more attracted to, I don't think it has anything to do with censorship, lockdowns, or mandates. At most the blame can be at institutions for lacking in their ability to do effective scientific communication. *And this skews more to less educated and intelligent.

boxerab 1y ago

Yes! This MUST be why the VAERS adverse event tracker went through the roof right after the rollout began, and why excess death remains sky high in many countries to this day - because a product that didn't stop you from catching or spreading the virus was one of the only things preventing deaths. Couldn't have been our, you know, immune system or anything like that, or that the average age at death was 80 along with several co-morbidities.

gm678 1y ago

That didn't happen in a vacuum; there was also a _lot_ of money going into pushing anti vaccine propaganda, both for mundane scam reasons and for political reasons: https://x.com/robert_zubrin/status/1863572439084699918?lang=fr https://x.com/robert_zubrin/status/1863572439084699918?lang=...

nxm 1y ago

Issue is when we weren't/aren't even allowed to question the efficacy or long-term side effects of any vaccine.