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COVID provided a larger stage for the anti-vaccine people, but this has been an issue long before. In the US you have also Trump/MAGA amplifying them, making it

by fabian2k 11mo ago

COVID provided a larger stage for the anti-vaccine people, but this has been an issue long before. In the US you have also Trump/MAGA amplifying them, making it worse. Vaccines are incredibly effective, and we're wasting all that again and children will needlessly suffer and die.

mc32 11mo ago
Agreed; vaccinations save lives, lots of them. But the but we also should blame the establishment for making people suspicious by being quasi-scientific and at times authoritarian about things. For example fining and threatening arrest of people alone at a beach with no one nearby during Covid, etc., as well as the obviously stupidity of six feet of separation. If something is contagious via aerosol six feet is not going to impact spread very much. Sweden took a much more pragmatic approach and didn’t suffer for it. They’ve got a lesson we can learn.
- Larrikin 11mo ago
  These sound like things someone that doesn't vaccinate their kids would say as justification
  - brightball 11mo ago
    This sounds like the type of dismissive response that reinforces distrustful sentiments.
    - SpicyLemonZest 11mo ago
      When someone comes up with a clever reason why drunk driving might be OK, I don't get in an evidence-based debate with them. It may very well be the case that they've found a scientific error in official guidelines! But if I carefully explain why the error doesn't change the baseline conclusion, they'll just find something else to fixate on. They're not looking for an increased understanding of pharmacology; they've decided that they want to drive drunk, and they're shopping for a reason why it's not shameful to inflict pointless risk on themselves and their community.
      - mangodrunk 11mo ago
        If your argument can’t hold up to scrutiny, then I think you may not know the position well enough or you need to adjust it. We can explain and show evidence why driving drunk is dangerous. We can show that vaccines are safe and effective. I don’t like wasting time with bad faith people, but to assume anyone who disagrees is wrong and not worthy of discussion is bad.
        SpicyLemonZest 11mo ago
        I don't agree. I think that shame is an important social technology for things like vaccines and drunk driving, where there's really no rational basis for disagreement. I don't know any vaccine hesitant parents who encountered some clever argument that proved to them they need to vaccinate their kids, but I know multiple who overcame their hesitation because they understood that it was expected of them and they would be judged harshly otherwise.
        mangodrunk 11mo ago
        Thanks for explaining your reasoning. I can see shame working for some, but I don’t think that is effective for a large group. It also has the adverse effect of making those who are shaming others look wrong and scared of discussing the subject. Also, there is a point where you can be wrong or need to adjust your perspective. Shaming others is not a good way to go about that. The enlightenment wasn’t built on shame but instead it used reason and open inquiry. It was a rejection of using shame which was a prevalent part of forced rules.
        brightball 11mo ago
        > really no rational basis for disagreement If you want to have a good faith version of this conversation, I've seen many people have voiced rational concerns and be shouted down because people simply don't want to hear it. Primary example - Many parents, including myself, made sure our kids got every single one of their vaccines...but we wanted to avoided giving more than 2 per month so we altered the schedule slightly. Fully vaccinated, just took a simple precaution that put our minds at ease. The number of people who will call you "antivax" for that, for simply questioning the dosing schedule and taking a minor precaution is shocking. And that's what really made all of this so much worse. Nobody that I saw, prior to the Covid vax at least, questioned whether or not vaccines did what they said they do. People just question whether sometimes there can be side effects. The answer to that is obviously yes. There are vaccine courts and people have been awarded lots of money from them. So the next rational question that anyone would ask is..."If there can sometimes be side effects, in what circumstances are they likely? Are there any precautions that can be taken if we can identify what those circumstances may be?" It's no different than if somebody is lactose intolerant, has a gluten allergy or a peanut allergy. Some people are predisposed not to respond well to conditions that many of us have no issue with. That's not a rational basis for disagreeing on the efficacy of vaccines themselves. It is a rational basis to ask about the conditions that can create unintended side effects; we already know they are happening. Denying that is irrational on its own...so why not have the conversation?
    - FireBeyond 11mo ago
      Yeah, how dare we use non-attacking language to describe objectively accurate states and conditions. It's a small step from there to the people who chided -me- because I said I was no longer willing to discuss in good faith with people who argued about "post birth abortions" (that they knew to be a lie) or adrenachrome farming from babies in pizza parlor basements. That it was my fault for these views propagating for not being willing to "understand" their perspective. Their perspectives are a lie They know they're a lie. They just don't. fucking. care. And then they whine about people being "dismissive" of them.
      - Larrikin 11mo ago
        It is sad that I know you meant post birth abortions, and that it was such a prevalent lie.
        FireBeyond 11mo ago
        Thank you, fixed. And yes, and some cases absurdly, ridiculously so. I think the worst I heard was something like: > And in several Demoncrat [sic] states, abortion is legal up until one month post-delivery! That is evil! What do these morons (the ones who might actually believe what they say) think that looks like? Have birth, go home with your child, a few weeks later you're just not feeling it, and you go back to the hospital and hand over your infant and say "I'd like my post-birth abortion, please?"?!?
    - Supermancho 11mo ago
      > This sounds like the type of dismissive response that reinforces distrustful sentiments. Notably, Mary Mallon (Typhoid Mary) was never convinced either. This didn't make her less dangerous. The big difference is the average lethality. If we were talking about Polio, people's paranoia is a lot less important.
  - mangodrunk 11mo ago
    No, it doesn’t. Your comment is one that is politically motivated and so you can’t participate in an honest discussion on the subject. What do you disagree with specifically?
- add-sub-mul-div 11mo ago
  No, let's blame people who replace the imperfect "establishment" with something much worse based on Facebook repost anecdotes.
- moralestapia 11mo ago
  100% agree. I don't blame anyone for not trusting the government. Anyone who's read (or lived) history and with a rational mind would scrutinize every single thing coming from them, particularly if their health is involved. Another thing that doesn't help, but this is almost exclusively a memerican problem, is that people enjoy polarizing these issues to their absolute extremes. Things are either vantablack or HDR-white. And if you happen to be on the other end "you should die or go to prison". Chill. It's OK to question things.
  - fabian2k 11mo ago
    You don't have to trust the government. There are plenty of institutions that can explain the value of vaccinations. If you only distrust your own government, just look at the recommendations in other countries.
    - 9rx 11mo ago
      That's the problem, though. It is those other countries that the pro-nationalist movement, where a lot of this stems from, don't trust. Things like worldwide consensus on the need for vaccinations are seen as an attempt to subvert their own nation.
  - gtirloni 11mo ago
    So after all this scrutinizing, they come to the conclusion vaccines don't work? Like, we the vaccine experts doing web searches and trusting social media posts from unknowns? Not the people that actually do work with it like scientists? Super interesting conclusion.
    - moralestapia 11mo ago
      [flagged]
      - gtirloni 11mo ago
        Have you come to the conclusion that vaccines don't work though? If not, what's even your point replying to me?
- mrob 11mo ago
  Six feet of separation is a reasonable defense against the larger droplets produced by talking or singing. If you're somewhere with good ventilation then these are the biggest threat. The more obvious stupidity was around face masks, first by denying they worked at all, and then by acting like coarse weave cloth was as good as N95 or FFP3.
  - mc32 11mo ago
    Agree with all you say but would add that those large droplets from sneezing etc are not the greatest vehicle for the virus so it’s like fighting a house fire with Solo cups of water.
    - whatevertrevor 11mo ago
      Right, but if memory serves me correctly droplet based transmission was the prevailing theory for the first few months while the WHO was oscillating like a pendulum on its masking recommendations.
      - chasd00 11mo ago
        > droplet based transmission was the prevailing theory for the first few months iirc that was the prevailing theory until after the vaccines came out. I don't recall it ever being in the news when it was determined to be airborne. By that time, COVID wasn't even newsworthy.
        whatevertrevor 11mo ago
        Definitely, I don't think official channels recognized aerosolized transmission until way too late, and even when they did it was very low key and non-committal. I'm on team "ball was dropped badly re pandemic policy and communication", though I personally don't extend that to blind distrust in institutions in general. It was a tough (arguably unprecedented) situation in a media landscape primed for misinformation.
- tehjoker 11mo ago
  Aerosols diffuse and often (not always depending on airstream) become less dense 6 feet away. Yes if the wind is blowing the density won't be impacted much, but on the other hand the stream will move past you on its own instead of lingering unless there is a dense crowd generating a constant amount. There were also scary studies coming out of China (though this was later) showing a single positive guy going for a run in a park infecting loads of people. The dynamics have only changed because people have partial immunity now, but it was like wildfire and it is still going up and down in terms of transmission. To be honest, I think it's fine there was some over-reaction. Millions of people died. I think it's ok to be slightly uncomfortable for a little bit under such extreme circumstances. To be quite honest, there was an under-reaction. We had an opportunity to shut it down and decided not to follow the science like China did because of American exceptionalism. Now we are living with it forever until there is a better vaccine. China protected their entire population until a vaccine was made available. This means their death rate was likely a third of ours. Their official statistics paint too rosy a picture (they claim only ~60k died), but a simple back of the napkin calculation 0.1% vaccinated die, 1% unvaccinated die, means they did 10x better than let-it-rip. We did something like 3x better than let-it-rip.
  - throwaway173738 11mo ago
    If you saw some of the videos from India of their hospitals being overwhelmed and of people being given welding gas for oxygen because they couldn’t produce pure gas fast enough you might not have considered it an overreaction. They were cremating so many people at once it was a major contributor to air pollution during one major outbreak. The real danger for most people wasn’t the virus, it was the hospitals being so overwhelmed by the virus that they would no longer be able to provide care for other stuff.
    - tehjoker 11mo ago
      Excellent point. Some of this happened in America too, though not to the same horrific extent as India. Iirc hospitals in Florida nearly ran out of oxygen and in some cases patients died for lack of oxygen.
- bigfudge 11mo ago
  This sort of argument is reductio ad absurdum. At the start of COVID there was no 99.999% sure scientific evidence about anything. Policy was drawn up on the basis of first principles, both on the knowledge of the virus and on behavioural norms among the public, and especially key groups who needed to follow the rules to save lives. Enforcing public safety rules is hard. Knowing where to draw the line is hard for individual enforcement officers. That's what, in times of public crisis, it's important to overlook edge cases like these because they serve the larger purpose.
  - FabHK 11mo ago
    > Knowing where to draw the line is hard Not only that. If the line is way too far on one side or the other, everyone agrees that it is, and then it's shifted. If the line is approximately at the optimum, some agree it is, and those that disagree are about half convinced that it's too far this way, half it's too far that way. So, having maximum disagreement is in itself arguably an indicator that you got it approximately right.
  - mangodrunk 11mo ago
    How was avoiding open areas in small groups and washing your groceries first principles? They also claimed that you shouldn’t wear a mask but instead focus on washing your hands. It’s unfortunate how many don’t want to learn from the mistakes made during the epidemic.
  - jandrewrogers 11mo ago
    > Policy was drawn up on the basis of first principles I played a small role in this that allowed me to see how these decisions were made. I think we should be honest at this point about how much of the policy was driven by vibes and politics. We had better data than people assume and it had almost no bearing on the decisions that were made. Multiple governments had high-quality models that suggested a much lower IFR than what was widely reported, and in hindsight were proven correct. The news cycle was captured by people pushing doomsday scenarios and many people decided it was politically inconvenient to contradict that prevailing narrative. There weren't any complex motives, it was cowardice mixed with a bit of opportunism. I got to see this from the inside and I have no doubt that it would happen again, which gives me little confidence in the institutions. There was an enormous amount of pressure to be seen to be doing something from the top in most countries, which led to a lot of the pointless theater that happened. It is unfortunate but the poor reputation of public health officials due to COVID is well-deserved.
- ryandv 11mo ago
  [flagged]
  - moralestapia 11mo ago
    All of this is true. Not just true, but verifiably true. We all lived through it as well. Let me say that again, you (the reader) saw these things with your own eyes, you heard these things with your own ears, not just for a couple days but for more than a year. You know this is true. And yet, why would some people choose to ignore that it happened? To me, this is/was an even greater eye-opener than the disease or the vaccine itself.
    - ryandv 11mo ago
      [flagged]
      - thunderfork 11mo ago
        [dead]
  - scottbez1 11mo ago
    None of those bullet points are contradictory though? They are all completely aligned with a policy reducing non-essential public exposure, with a tiered approach for transport that limits public exposure where better alternatives exist.
    - ryandv 11mo ago
      > tiered approach for transport that limits public exposure where better alternatives exist. Travelling to a testing center almost certainly puts me within proximity of COVID patients at one point, particularly in the waiting room. Sitting in waiting rooms is how I got the case the city notified me of in the first place. Cycling and exercise is not only a solitary activity, it is also conducted outdoors where we were told risk of airborne transmission was de minimis. It in fact limits public exposure more than travelling to a public place full of probable COVID patients.
- JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
  > we also should blame the establishment for making people suspicious People are responsible for themselves. Mindlessly doing the opposite of what the government says is as dogmatic as blindly following it.
  - ben_w 11mo ago
    A person is responsible for themselves. People collectively are sufficiently manipulable that society only functions when certain manipulations are forbidden. This is true even though, as you say, mindlessly doing the opposite of what the government says is as dogmatic as blindly following it (a lesson I learned as a toddler, from my sister doing the "yes no yes no yes no no yes oops" trick on me). Public communications is hard at the best of times let alone during a novel pandemic with high uncertainty on correct actions, but it's what the government needs to be good at to function, so them messing communications up is… well, I was going to say "blame worthy", but then I remember that air travel got good by avoiding blame culture, so shall we say "a learning opportunity"?
- chasd00 11mo ago
  heh our county judge (Dallas County, TX) drove around my neighborhood and yelled at people walking their dog to get back inside. I met him at a fundraiser toward the end of the pandemic and asked him why he wasn't wearing a mask, he just turned around and walked away. Lots of people who wished they were powerful delighted in finely having their little hobby authoritarian regime to play in. The most depressing part of the COVID discussion was seeing HN jump on anyone daring to even discuss what Sweden was doing. I lost a lot of respect for HN then but I don't know why i ever assumed this community was immune to toxic group think behavior.
  - op00to 11mo ago
    Got eeeem!
- mangodrunk 11mo ago
  I agree with you and unfortunately it looks like many haven’t learned from mistakes that were made or want to even explore the possibility.
saghm 11mo ago
> In the US you have also Trump/MAGA amplifying them Not just amplifying them, but literally putting some of them in charge of vaccine policy: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/how-rfk-jr-s-hand-picked-cdc-advisory-panel-voted-on-covid-vaccines-and-more https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/how-rfk-jr-s-hand-picked...
mrweasel 11mo ago
How can people be so incredibly blind to the effectiveness of vaccines? Denmark is expecting to have cervical cancer eliminated in the next 10 - 15 year, because of the HPV vaccine, and some countries in the Western world now struggles with measles again?
- deleted 11mo ago
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- ModernMech 11mo ago
  That's the problem with effective measures -- if they're effective, you won't notice them working at all. It's only apparent they are effective when they reduce the disease, or their removal causes the disease to surge. But when the disease is eradicated, "vaccines are effective at stopping the spread of measles" is just as apparent to regular people as "vaccines don't do anything, measles just aren't a big deal to begin with, actually, they've been lying to you this whole time." One position asks you to get jabbed with a needle, the other asks you to do nothing. So people are very happy to do nothing if they're not forced to get jabbed.
  - mikepurvis 11mo ago
    Absolutely agree. That said, I feel like COVID sits in a bit of a special place where it was evolving and changing so quickly alongside rapidly developed and deployed vaccines— to this day I don't think I've seen anything conclusive on how much of COVID going way could be attributed to: - effective, widespread vaccine deployment - the virus naturally evolving to a less-lethal state - it all having been overblown from the get-go My instinct is like 60/30/10, but it would be great to see someone make an actual case based on hard data, of which surely there is plenty.
    - mrguyorama 11mo ago
      >- the virus naturally evolving to a less-lethal state This "effect" is massively overblown. Covid still attacks the same receptors with are all over the body and still causes damaging inflammation. Grandma getting COVID is still terrifying, just like it's always been terrifying when they get the flu. Meanwhile my mom has permanent heart damage from Covid. Not the early strain either. The vaccines have been a huge help but more generally, everyone developed some amount of immunity, even people who are anti-vaxxers. It's just around now, and our body's have had to adapt to fighting it off all the time. It's endemic. "There's a second version of virulent seasonal respiratory (but not just that) infection now" isn't exactly a great outcome. Primarily what happened is we learned better treatment, so it isn't so deadly even when you have it bad. Ventilation is much rarer for example. Covid hasn't gone away. How can you possibly think that? I know like ten people who seem to catch covid (tested, not just random diseases) multiple times a year now. Instead a lot of people with strong ideological reasons to believe it's not a big deal insist on ignoring it's everpresent negative effects. Including our current presidential administration.
freealf 11mo ago
In Canada, two people have already died. Both were infants who were too young to be vaccinated. Herd immunity matters.
deleted 11mo ago
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fred_is_fred 11mo ago
COVID flipped the script on who was anti-vax. It was primarily well-educated upper-class white liberal "granolas" - now it's poorly educated MAGA Wal-Mart folks.
- wnevets 11mo ago
  > It was primarily well-educated upper-class white liberal "granolas" I don't think those people stopped being antivax, if anything they feel vindicated.
- pclmulqdq 11mo ago
  By the numbers, the upper-class white people were a very small fraction of the anti-vaxxers in the US. The majority were (and still are) Mennonites, Amish, and ultra-conservative Jewish communities.
- code4life 11mo ago
  You should consider thinking of people as precious, rather than these odd fine tuned segregated negative groups seemingly based on skin color, political leanings or social status.
orochimaaru 11mo ago
Vaccines are incredibly effective and definitely not connected to autism. That being said there is a rather large distrust of them after Covid. The fact that media and government both colluded to suppress information related to Covid vaccine side effects is troubling. Don’t use govt control to suppress speech on social media. It’s not conducive to any sort of trust building. Before I’m labelled a “maga/trump” talking points peddler - my kids are vaccinated (yes, including the hpv), I haven’t done covid shots more than the one required time. We do flu shots but not picky about it. Kids have had the flu (a & b) and they’ve handled it pretty well.
- ulfw 11mo ago
  > Don’t use govt control to suppress speech on social media. It’s not conducive to any sort of trust building. So then how do you deal with other state actors who have whole machineries spreading lies and disinformation on social networks?
- tensor 11mo ago
  The media was fine on the covid shots and if you're not taking them then you're doing yourself and your family harm. Yes, there are side effects. Those side effects are far far milder than the actual illness, which you are pretty much guaranteed to get. So your option are mild side effect + mild disease or severe disease.
  - kypro 11mo ago
    [flagged]
    - code4life 11mo ago
      They refuse to look critically at the trade offs. I don’t even know how thats possible at this point. Everything in life has trade offs. Everything.
      - worik 11mo ago
        > They refuse to look critically at the trade offs. That is a bald assertion. I do not agree. Of course it depends what you mean by "they", but medical researchers do look critically at the trade offs There were failures of communication from fear that nuance would be misunderstood as uncertainty Also for large sections of the population, many in my community, the state generally and the medical establishment in particular, have no credibility for the sadistic way they have been treated.
roadside_picnic 11mo ago
It's easy to blame Trump/MAGA if you refuse to recognize that many of the same companies producing these vaccines also played a major role in fueling the current opioid crisis which is coincidentally disproportionately impacting these very communities. Not to mention the reproducibility crisis which makes "trust the science" claims as naive as their inverse. The core issue isn't with "antivaxxers" but with the continual erosion of trust that created the sentiment in the first place. The foundation of being willing to inject yourself with something that you personally can't verify the effectiveness or safety of is trust. At every level our social institutions: the government, large corporations, and academia, have continually chipped away at the foundations of social trust necessary for these things.
- mikeyouse 11mo ago
  Just absolute nonsense retconning. Purdue (OxyContin) was the primary company responsible for the epidemic, J&J to a much lesser extent, and then a bunch of PMBs and providers looked the other way. Purdue has nothing to do with vaccines. J&J licensed a covid vaccine from Janssen but otherwise none of those companies have anything to do with vaccines at all. People have lower trust in doctors, hospitals and pharma companies because people they do trust (Trump, RFK and the parade of misfits now running US health policy) lie to them to get them to distrust doctors and pharma companies. It’s not some complicated bank shot.
- JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
  > if you refuse to recognize that many of the same companies producing these vaccines also played a major role in fueling the current opioid crisis which is coincidentally disproportionately impacting these very communities Moderna has no opioid division. And while Mennonites have a multinational drug problem [1][2], I see no evidence they were “disproportionately” impacted by opioids. This sounds like post hoc rationalisation, not causation. These folks were never going to get vaccinated. [1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-jan-28-me-18060-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-jan-28-me-18060... [2] https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/1.2937000 https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/1.2937000
  - 11mo ago
bilsbie 11mo ago
If they’re as effective as you claim would you support ending liability protections for manufacturers?
JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
> Vaccines are incredibly effective, and we're wasting all that again and children will needlessly suffer and die I’ve sort of accepted society will bifurcate into diseased and undiseased branches. As long as the latter don’t have to pay for the former’s stupidity, I’m over it. (By analogy: “the ‘stupid motorist law’ is a law in the U.S. state of Arizona that states that any motorist who becomes stranded after driving around barricades to enter a flooded stretch of roadway may be charged for the cost of their rescue” [1].) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stupid_motorist_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stupid_motorist_law
gadders 11mo ago
Lumping all vaccines together makes as much as sense as lumping all medicines together. Vaccines in principle are good, not all implementations are equally good.
- azan_ 11mo ago
  Are there any vaccines that do not have overwhelmingly positive risk/benefit ratio? (Covid and flu vaccines definitely do!)
  - M95D 11mo ago
    The rabies vaccine is not usually used unless the person is at risk. This vaccine can be administered after a bite if the animal is suspected to be infected. Vaccines made of inactivated (killed) or attenuated (alive, but defective) pathogens are usually more dangerous. Inactivation may not be effective and a virulent pathogen may survive and attenuated pathogens may pick up virulence factors and become fully functional from a different (related) patogen that happes to infect the patient at the same time. Also, when vaccines are prepared from infected animals, manufacturing accidents may happen, such as contamination with something else infectious. These types of vaccines were mostly replaced by fully synthetic vaccines. You may read about the old polio vaccine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine
ericmcer 11mo ago
Generally agree, but I also don't like how dogmatic people are about this. It feels like a cult where there is no room for nuance on either side. Are we too dumb to believe some vaccines are life saving miracles and that others may not be necessary? Why is it so all or none? Especially given things like most European nations not vaccinating against RSV, Hep A or Varicella. Are they all psycho anti-vax nutjobs? It seems much better to go through them one by one, and say: "Measles is universally recommended, has saved countless lives, lets do that one. Covid-19 vaccine for a 6 month old, USA is the only country still recommending it, skip it."
greenchair 11mo ago
[flagged]
truth13told 11mo ago
[dead]
pessimizer 11mo ago
When authorities continually lie, eventually there will be an erosion in trust. It is both unsurprising, and likely irreversible. MBA thinking, where the value of institutions and brands are their good names, and spending that value lies in how long you can be dishonest and still have loyal customers and defenders destroys institutions and brands. The Lancet started it with that stupid Wakefield "study" that it refused to retract for a decade, which launched something that was associated with crystal healing into the mainstream; the destruction of the reputation of the integrity of medical research through bribery of scientists and doctors continued it; and covid lies made it permanent. It's over. Not vaccines, but any trust in medicine. We've gone from trusting the "consensus" far too much, to realizing how the "consensus" is constructed and not trusting anything any more. Just drifting with no moorings. It's no different than when the US used fake vaccination programs in order to find Osama bin Laden, which led to local vaccination volunteers being murdered, and many people in the Middle East deciding that vaccination was a Western plot. You may not know about this because people in the West don't care when other people die unless it is socially useful for them; don't care unless it affects us and our lifestyles. Even during covid, the US launched a multimillion dollar antivax propaganda program in the Philippines in order to convince people that Sinovax would kill them just to get one up on China. Harris explained in a speech (and she wasn't alone) how she would be wary to take any vaccine from any Trump administration-directed program. This fanatical chauvinism is only important in the West in order to get one up on other people. To display that you're more supportive of institutions than your stupid, evil populist neighbor. To show that there's nothing that they can do to kill your loyalty, because you understand subtlety. You're pragmatic, you know that the dummies need to be lied to to be herded into the right direction. But if you're loyal no matter what and avoid talking about public failures when they are most relevant, even beatifying the architects of those failures, who has been herded? Take your vaccines and ask people if they're vaccinated before you let them around your infants. Don't pretend that your lording it over others is out of concern for them, though. It's just snotty, ultra-partisan ego inflation. Medical science has lost the trust of the Western public because it has become completely overwhelmed by bribery and cronyism just like every other Western institution. Complete recycling of those institutions is the only way to get that trust back, and it's what the institutionalists spend all their time fighting against. Generally this is because they draw their middle-class salaries from these institutions and were active participants in these frauds - at the least dutifully shunning their families, friends and strangers for questioning them.

mc32 11mo ago

Agreed; vaccinations save lives, lots of them. But the but we also should blame the establishment for making people suspicious by being quasi-scientific and at times authoritarian about things. For example fining and threatening arrest of people alone at a beach with no one nearby during Covid, etc., as well as the obviously stupidity of six feet of separation. If something is contagious via aerosol six feet is not going to impact spread very much. Sweden took a much more pragmatic approach and didn’t suffer for it. They’ve got a lesson we can learn.

Larrikin 11mo ago
These sound like things someone that doesn't vaccinate their kids would say as justification
- brightball 11mo ago
  This sounds like the type of dismissive response that reinforces distrustful sentiments.
  - SpicyLemonZest 11mo ago
    When someone comes up with a clever reason why drunk driving might be OK, I don't get in an evidence-based debate with them. It may very well be the case that they've found a scientific error in official guidelines! But if I carefully explain why the error doesn't change the baseline conclusion, they'll just find something else to fixate on. They're not looking for an increased understanding of pharmacology; they've decided that they want to drive drunk, and they're shopping for a reason why it's not shameful to inflict pointless risk on themselves and their community.
    - mangodrunk 11mo ago
      If your argument can’t hold up to scrutiny, then I think you may not know the position well enough or you need to adjust it. We can explain and show evidence why driving drunk is dangerous. We can show that vaccines are safe and effective. I don’t like wasting time with bad faith people, but to assume anyone who disagrees is wrong and not worthy of discussion is bad.
      - SpicyLemonZest 11mo ago
        I don't agree. I think that shame is an important social technology for things like vaccines and drunk driving, where there's really no rational basis for disagreement. I don't know any vaccine hesitant parents who encountered some clever argument that proved to them they need to vaccinate their kids, but I know multiple who overcame their hesitation because they understood that it was expected of them and they would be judged harshly otherwise.
        mangodrunk 11mo ago
        Thanks for explaining your reasoning. I can see shame working for some, but I don’t think that is effective for a large group. It also has the adverse effect of making those who are shaming others look wrong and scared of discussing the subject. Also, there is a point where you can be wrong or need to adjust your perspective. Shaming others is not a good way to go about that. The enlightenment wasn’t built on shame but instead it used reason and open inquiry. It was a rejection of using shame which was a prevalent part of forced rules.
        brightball 11mo ago
        > really no rational basis for disagreement If you want to have a good faith version of this conversation, I've seen many people have voiced rational concerns and be shouted down because people simply don't want to hear it. Primary example - Many parents, including myself, made sure our kids got every single one of their vaccines...but we wanted to avoided giving more than 2 per month so we altered the schedule slightly. Fully vaccinated, just took a simple precaution that put our minds at ease. The number of people who will call you "antivax" for that, for simply questioning the dosing schedule and taking a minor precaution is shocking. And that's what really made all of this so much worse. Nobody that I saw, prior to the Covid vax at least, questioned whether or not vaccines did what they said they do. People just question whether sometimes there can be side effects. The answer to that is obviously yes. There are vaccine courts and people have been awarded lots of money from them. So the next rational question that anyone would ask is..."If there can sometimes be side effects, in what circumstances are they likely? Are there any precautions that can be taken if we can identify what those circumstances may be?" It's no different than if somebody is lactose intolerant, has a gluten allergy or a peanut allergy. Some people are predisposed not to respond well to conditions that many of us have no issue with. That's not a rational basis for disagreeing on the efficacy of vaccines themselves. It is a rational basis to ask about the conditions that can create unintended side effects; we already know they are happening. Denying that is irrational on its own...so why not have the conversation?
  - FireBeyond 11mo ago
    Yeah, how dare we use non-attacking language to describe objectively accurate states and conditions. It's a small step from there to the people who chided -me- because I said I was no longer willing to discuss in good faith with people who argued about "post birth abortions" (that they knew to be a lie) or adrenachrome farming from babies in pizza parlor basements. That it was my fault for these views propagating for not being willing to "understand" their perspective. Their perspectives are a lie They know they're a lie. They just don't. fucking. care. And then they whine about people being "dismissive" of them.
    - Larrikin 11mo ago
      It is sad that I know you meant post birth abortions, and that it was such a prevalent lie.
      - FireBeyond 11mo ago
        Thank you, fixed. And yes, and some cases absurdly, ridiculously so. I think the worst I heard was something like: > And in several Demoncrat [sic] states, abortion is legal up until one month post-delivery! That is evil! What do these morons (the ones who might actually believe what they say) think that looks like? Have birth, go home with your child, a few weeks later you're just not feeling it, and you go back to the hospital and hand over your infant and say "I'd like my post-birth abortion, please?"?!?
  - Supermancho 11mo ago
    > This sounds like the type of dismissive response that reinforces distrustful sentiments. Notably, Mary Mallon (Typhoid Mary) was never convinced either. This didn't make her less dangerous. The big difference is the average lethality. If we were talking about Polio, people's paranoia is a lot less important.
- mangodrunk 11mo ago
  No, it doesn’t. Your comment is one that is politically motivated and so you can’t participate in an honest discussion on the subject. What do you disagree with specifically?
add-sub-mul-div 11mo ago
No, let's blame people who replace the imperfect "establishment" with something much worse based on Facebook repost anecdotes.
moralestapia 11mo ago
100% agree. I don't blame anyone for not trusting the government. Anyone who's read (or lived) history and with a rational mind would scrutinize every single thing coming from them, particularly if their health is involved. Another thing that doesn't help, but this is almost exclusively a memerican problem, is that people enjoy polarizing these issues to their absolute extremes. Things are either vantablack or HDR-white. And if you happen to be on the other end "you should die or go to prison". Chill. It's OK to question things.
- fabian2k 11mo ago
  You don't have to trust the government. There are plenty of institutions that can explain the value of vaccinations. If you only distrust your own government, just look at the recommendations in other countries.
  - 9rx 11mo ago
    That's the problem, though. It is those other countries that the pro-nationalist movement, where a lot of this stems from, don't trust. Things like worldwide consensus on the need for vaccinations are seen as an attempt to subvert their own nation.
- gtirloni 11mo ago
  So after all this scrutinizing, they come to the conclusion vaccines don't work? Like, we the vaccine experts doing web searches and trusting social media posts from unknowns? Not the people that actually do work with it like scientists? Super interesting conclusion.
  - moralestapia 11mo ago
    [flagged]
    - gtirloni 11mo ago
      Have you come to the conclusion that vaccines don't work though? If not, what's even your point replying to me?
mrob 11mo ago
Six feet of separation is a reasonable defense against the larger droplets produced by talking or singing. If you're somewhere with good ventilation then these are the biggest threat. The more obvious stupidity was around face masks, first by denying they worked at all, and then by acting like coarse weave cloth was as good as N95 or FFP3.
- mc32 11mo ago
  Agree with all you say but would add that those large droplets from sneezing etc are not the greatest vehicle for the virus so it’s like fighting a house fire with Solo cups of water.
  - whatevertrevor 11mo ago
    Right, but if memory serves me correctly droplet based transmission was the prevailing theory for the first few months while the WHO was oscillating like a pendulum on its masking recommendations.
    - chasd00 11mo ago
      > droplet based transmission was the prevailing theory for the first few months iirc that was the prevailing theory until after the vaccines came out. I don't recall it ever being in the news when it was determined to be airborne. By that time, COVID wasn't even newsworthy.
      - whatevertrevor 11mo ago
        Definitely, I don't think official channels recognized aerosolized transmission until way too late, and even when they did it was very low key and non-committal. I'm on team "ball was dropped badly re pandemic policy and communication", though I personally don't extend that to blind distrust in institutions in general. It was a tough (arguably unprecedented) situation in a media landscape primed for misinformation.
tehjoker 11mo ago
Aerosols diffuse and often (not always depending on airstream) become less dense 6 feet away. Yes if the wind is blowing the density won't be impacted much, but on the other hand the stream will move past you on its own instead of lingering unless there is a dense crowd generating a constant amount. There were also scary studies coming out of China (though this was later) showing a single positive guy going for a run in a park infecting loads of people. The dynamics have only changed because people have partial immunity now, but it was like wildfire and it is still going up and down in terms of transmission. To be honest, I think it's fine there was some over-reaction. Millions of people died. I think it's ok to be slightly uncomfortable for a little bit under such extreme circumstances. To be quite honest, there was an under-reaction. We had an opportunity to shut it down and decided not to follow the science like China did because of American exceptionalism. Now we are living with it forever until there is a better vaccine. China protected their entire population until a vaccine was made available. This means their death rate was likely a third of ours. Their official statistics paint too rosy a picture (they claim only ~60k died), but a simple back of the napkin calculation 0.1% vaccinated die, 1% unvaccinated die, means they did 10x better than let-it-rip. We did something like 3x better than let-it-rip.
- throwaway173738 11mo ago
  If you saw some of the videos from India of their hospitals being overwhelmed and of people being given welding gas for oxygen because they couldn’t produce pure gas fast enough you might not have considered it an overreaction. They were cremating so many people at once it was a major contributor to air pollution during one major outbreak. The real danger for most people wasn’t the virus, it was the hospitals being so overwhelmed by the virus that they would no longer be able to provide care for other stuff.
  - tehjoker 11mo ago
    Excellent point. Some of this happened in America too, though not to the same horrific extent as India. Iirc hospitals in Florida nearly ran out of oxygen and in some cases patients died for lack of oxygen.
bigfudge 11mo ago
This sort of argument is reductio ad absurdum. At the start of COVID there was no 99.999% sure scientific evidence about anything. Policy was drawn up on the basis of first principles, both on the knowledge of the virus and on behavioural norms among the public, and especially key groups who needed to follow the rules to save lives. Enforcing public safety rules is hard. Knowing where to draw the line is hard for individual enforcement officers. That's what, in times of public crisis, it's important to overlook edge cases like these because they serve the larger purpose.
- FabHK 11mo ago
  > Knowing where to draw the line is hard Not only that. If the line is way too far on one side or the other, everyone agrees that it is, and then it's shifted. If the line is approximately at the optimum, some agree it is, and those that disagree are about half convinced that it's too far this way, half it's too far that way. So, having maximum disagreement is in itself arguably an indicator that you got it approximately right.
- mangodrunk 11mo ago
  How was avoiding open areas in small groups and washing your groceries first principles? They also claimed that you shouldn’t wear a mask but instead focus on washing your hands. It’s unfortunate how many don’t want to learn from the mistakes made during the epidemic.
- jandrewrogers 11mo ago
  > Policy was drawn up on the basis of first principles I played a small role in this that allowed me to see how these decisions were made. I think we should be honest at this point about how much of the policy was driven by vibes and politics. We had better data than people assume and it had almost no bearing on the decisions that were made. Multiple governments had high-quality models that suggested a much lower IFR than what was widely reported, and in hindsight were proven correct. The news cycle was captured by people pushing doomsday scenarios and many people decided it was politically inconvenient to contradict that prevailing narrative. There weren't any complex motives, it was cowardice mixed with a bit of opportunism. I got to see this from the inside and I have no doubt that it would happen again, which gives me little confidence in the institutions. There was an enormous amount of pressure to be seen to be doing something from the top in most countries, which led to a lot of the pointless theater that happened. It is unfortunate but the poor reputation of public health officials due to COVID is well-deserved.
ryandv 11mo ago
[flagged]
- moralestapia 11mo ago
  All of this is true. Not just true, but verifiably true. We all lived through it as well. Let me say that again, you (the reader) saw these things with your own eyes, you heard these things with your own ears, not just for a couple days but for more than a year. You know this is true. And yet, why would some people choose to ignore that it happened? To me, this is/was an even greater eye-opener than the disease or the vaccine itself.
  - ryandv 11mo ago
    [flagged]
    - thunderfork 11mo ago
      [dead]
- scottbez1 11mo ago
  None of those bullet points are contradictory though? They are all completely aligned with a policy reducing non-essential public exposure, with a tiered approach for transport that limits public exposure where better alternatives exist.
  - ryandv 11mo ago
    > tiered approach for transport that limits public exposure where better alternatives exist. Travelling to a testing center almost certainly puts me within proximity of COVID patients at one point, particularly in the waiting room. Sitting in waiting rooms is how I got the case the city notified me of in the first place. Cycling and exercise is not only a solitary activity, it is also conducted outdoors where we were told risk of airborne transmission was de minimis. It in fact limits public exposure more than travelling to a public place full of probable COVID patients.
JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
> we also should blame the establishment for making people suspicious People are responsible for themselves. Mindlessly doing the opposite of what the government says is as dogmatic as blindly following it.
- ben_w 11mo ago
  A person is responsible for themselves. People collectively are sufficiently manipulable that society only functions when certain manipulations are forbidden. This is true even though, as you say, mindlessly doing the opposite of what the government says is as dogmatic as blindly following it (a lesson I learned as a toddler, from my sister doing the "yes no yes no yes no no yes oops" trick on me). Public communications is hard at the best of times let alone during a novel pandemic with high uncertainty on correct actions, but it's what the government needs to be good at to function, so them messing communications up is… well, I was going to say "blame worthy", but then I remember that air travel got good by avoiding blame culture, so shall we say "a learning opportunity"?
chasd00 11mo ago
heh our county judge (Dallas County, TX) drove around my neighborhood and yelled at people walking their dog to get back inside. I met him at a fundraiser toward the end of the pandemic and asked him why he wasn't wearing a mask, he just turned around and walked away. Lots of people who wished they were powerful delighted in finely having their little hobby authoritarian regime to play in. The most depressing part of the COVID discussion was seeing HN jump on anyone daring to even discuss what Sweden was doing. I lost a lot of respect for HN then but I don't know why i ever assumed this community was immune to toxic group think behavior.
- op00to 11mo ago
  Got eeeem!
mangodrunk 11mo ago
I agree with you and unfortunately it looks like many haven’t learned from mistakes that were made or want to even explore the possibility.

saghm 11mo ago

> In the US you have also Trump/MAGA amplifying them Not just amplifying them, but literally putting some of them in charge of vaccine policy: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/how-rfk-jr-s-hand-picked-cdc-advisory-panel-voted-on-covid-vaccines-and-more https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/how-rfk-jr-s-hand-picked...

mrweasel 11mo ago

How can people be so incredibly blind to the effectiveness of vaccines? Denmark is expecting to have cervical cancer eliminated in the next 10 - 15 year, because of the HPV vaccine, and some countries in the Western world now struggles with measles again?

deleted 11mo ago
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ModernMech 11mo ago
That's the problem with effective measures -- if they're effective, you won't notice them working at all. It's only apparent they are effective when they reduce the disease, or their removal causes the disease to surge. But when the disease is eradicated, "vaccines are effective at stopping the spread of measles" is just as apparent to regular people as "vaccines don't do anything, measles just aren't a big deal to begin with, actually, they've been lying to you this whole time." One position asks you to get jabbed with a needle, the other asks you to do nothing. So people are very happy to do nothing if they're not forced to get jabbed.
- mikepurvis 11mo ago
  Absolutely agree. That said, I feel like COVID sits in a bit of a special place where it was evolving and changing so quickly alongside rapidly developed and deployed vaccines— to this day I don't think I've seen anything conclusive on how much of COVID going way could be attributed to: - effective, widespread vaccine deployment - the virus naturally evolving to a less-lethal state - it all having been overblown from the get-go My instinct is like 60/30/10, but it would be great to see someone make an actual case based on hard data, of which surely there is plenty.
  - mrguyorama 11mo ago
    >- the virus naturally evolving to a less-lethal state This "effect" is massively overblown. Covid still attacks the same receptors with are all over the body and still causes damaging inflammation. Grandma getting COVID is still terrifying, just like it's always been terrifying when they get the flu. Meanwhile my mom has permanent heart damage from Covid. Not the early strain either. The vaccines have been a huge help but more generally, everyone developed some amount of immunity, even people who are anti-vaxxers. It's just around now, and our body's have had to adapt to fighting it off all the time. It's endemic. "There's a second version of virulent seasonal respiratory (but not just that) infection now" isn't exactly a great outcome. Primarily what happened is we learned better treatment, so it isn't so deadly even when you have it bad. Ventilation is much rarer for example. Covid hasn't gone away. How can you possibly think that? I know like ten people who seem to catch covid (tested, not just random diseases) multiple times a year now. Instead a lot of people with strong ideological reasons to believe it's not a big deal insist on ignoring it's everpresent negative effects. Including our current presidential administration.

freealf 11mo ago

In Canada, two people have already died. Both were infants who were too young to be vaccinated. Herd immunity matters.

deleted 11mo ago

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fred_is_fred 11mo ago

COVID flipped the script on who was anti-vax. It was primarily well-educated upper-class white liberal "granolas" - now it's poorly educated MAGA Wal-Mart folks.

wnevets 11mo ago
> It was primarily well-educated upper-class white liberal "granolas" I don't think those people stopped being antivax, if anything they feel vindicated.
pclmulqdq 11mo ago
By the numbers, the upper-class white people were a very small fraction of the anti-vaxxers in the US. The majority were (and still are) Mennonites, Amish, and ultra-conservative Jewish communities.
code4life 11mo ago
You should consider thinking of people as precious, rather than these odd fine tuned segregated negative groups seemingly based on skin color, political leanings or social status.

orochimaaru 11mo ago

Vaccines are incredibly effective and definitely not connected to autism. That being said there is a rather large distrust of them after Covid. The fact that media and government both colluded to suppress information related to Covid vaccine side effects is troubling. Don’t use govt control to suppress speech on social media. It’s not conducive to any sort of trust building. Before I’m labelled a “maga/trump” talking points peddler - my kids are vaccinated (yes, including the hpv), I haven’t done covid shots more than the one required time. We do flu shots but not picky about it. Kids have had the flu (a & b) and they’ve handled it pretty well.

ulfw 11mo ago
> Don’t use govt control to suppress speech on social media. It’s not conducive to any sort of trust building. So then how do you deal with other state actors who have whole machineries spreading lies and disinformation on social networks?
tensor 11mo ago
The media was fine on the covid shots and if you're not taking them then you're doing yourself and your family harm. Yes, there are side effects. Those side effects are far far milder than the actual illness, which you are pretty much guaranteed to get. So your option are mild side effect + mild disease or severe disease.
- kypro 11mo ago
  [flagged]
  - code4life 11mo ago
    They refuse to look critically at the trade offs. I don’t even know how thats possible at this point. Everything in life has trade offs. Everything.
    - worik 11mo ago
      > They refuse to look critically at the trade offs. That is a bald assertion. I do not agree. Of course it depends what you mean by "they", but medical researchers do look critically at the trade offs There were failures of communication from fear that nuance would be misunderstood as uncertainty Also for large sections of the population, many in my community, the state generally and the medical establishment in particular, have no credibility for the sadistic way they have been treated.

roadside_picnic 11mo ago

It's easy to blame Trump/MAGA if you refuse to recognize that many of the same companies producing these vaccines also played a major role in fueling the current opioid crisis which is coincidentally disproportionately impacting these very communities. Not to mention the reproducibility crisis which makes "trust the science" claims as naive as their inverse. The core issue isn't with "antivaxxers" but with the continual erosion of trust that created the sentiment in the first place. The foundation of being willing to inject yourself with something that you personally can't verify the effectiveness or safety of is trust. At every level our social institutions: the government, large corporations, and academia, have continually chipped away at the foundations of social trust necessary for these things.

mikeyouse 11mo ago
Just absolute nonsense retconning. Purdue (OxyContin) was the primary company responsible for the epidemic, J&J to a much lesser extent, and then a bunch of PMBs and providers looked the other way. Purdue has nothing to do with vaccines. J&J licensed a covid vaccine from Janssen but otherwise none of those companies have anything to do with vaccines at all. People have lower trust in doctors, hospitals and pharma companies because people they do trust (Trump, RFK and the parade of misfits now running US health policy) lie to them to get them to distrust doctors and pharma companies. It’s not some complicated bank shot.
JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
> if you refuse to recognize that many of the same companies producing these vaccines also played a major role in fueling the current opioid crisis which is coincidentally disproportionately impacting these very communities Moderna has no opioid division. And while Mennonites have a multinational drug problem [1][2], I see no evidence they were “disproportionately” impacted by opioids. This sounds like post hoc rationalisation, not causation. These folks were never going to get vaccinated. [1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-jan-28-me-18060-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-jan-28-me-18060... [2] https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/1.2937000 https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/1.2937000
- 11mo ago

bilsbie 11mo ago

If they’re as effective as you claim would you support ending liability protections for manufacturers?

JumpCrisscross 11mo ago

> Vaccines are incredibly effective, and we're wasting all that again and children will needlessly suffer and die I’ve sort of accepted society will bifurcate into diseased and undiseased branches. As long as the latter don’t have to pay for the former’s stupidity, I’m over it. (By analogy: “the ‘stupid motorist law’ is a law in the U.S. state of Arizona that states that any motorist who becomes stranded after driving around barricades to enter a flooded stretch of roadway may be charged for the cost of their rescue” [1].) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stupid_motorist_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stupid_motorist_law

gadders 11mo ago

Lumping all vaccines together makes as much as sense as lumping all medicines together. Vaccines in principle are good, not all implementations are equally good.

azan_ 11mo ago
Are there any vaccines that do not have overwhelmingly positive risk/benefit ratio? (Covid and flu vaccines definitely do!)
- M95D 11mo ago
  The rabies vaccine is not usually used unless the person is at risk. This vaccine can be administered after a bite if the animal is suspected to be infected. Vaccines made of inactivated (killed) or attenuated (alive, but defective) pathogens are usually more dangerous. Inactivation may not be effective and a virulent pathogen may survive and attenuated pathogens may pick up virulence factors and become fully functional from a different (related) patogen that happes to infect the patient at the same time. Also, when vaccines are prepared from infected animals, manufacturing accidents may happen, such as contamination with something else infectious. These types of vaccines were mostly replaced by fully synthetic vaccines. You may read about the old polio vaccine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine

ericmcer 11mo ago

Generally agree, but I also don't like how dogmatic people are about this. It feels like a cult where there is no room for nuance on either side. Are we too dumb to believe some vaccines are life saving miracles and that others may not be necessary? Why is it so all or none? Especially given things like most European nations not vaccinating against RSV, Hep A or Varicella. Are they all psycho anti-vax nutjobs? It seems much better to go through them one by one, and say: "Measles is universally recommended, has saved countless lives, lets do that one. Covid-19 vaccine for a 6 month old, USA is the only country still recommending it, skip it."

greenchair 11mo ago

[flagged]

truth13told 11mo ago

[dead]

pessimizer 11mo ago

When authorities continually lie, eventually there will be an erosion in trust. It is both unsurprising, and likely irreversible. MBA thinking, where the value of institutions and brands are their good names, and spending that value lies in how long you can be dishonest and still have loyal customers and defenders destroys institutions and brands. The Lancet started it with that stupid Wakefield "study" that it refused to retract for a decade, which launched something that was associated with crystal healing into the mainstream; the destruction of the reputation of the integrity of medical research through bribery of scientists and doctors continued it; and covid lies made it permanent. It's over. Not vaccines, but any trust in medicine. We've gone from trusting the "consensus" far too much, to realizing how the "consensus" is constructed and not trusting anything any more. Just drifting with no moorings. It's no different than when the US used fake vaccination programs in order to find Osama bin Laden, which led to local vaccination volunteers being murdered, and many people in the Middle East deciding that vaccination was a Western plot. You may not know about this because people in the West don't care when other people die unless it is socially useful for them; don't care unless it affects us and our lifestyles. Even during covid, the US launched a multimillion dollar antivax propaganda program in the Philippines in order to convince people that Sinovax would kill them just to get one up on China. Harris explained in a speech (and she wasn't alone) how she would be wary to take any vaccine from any Trump administration-directed program. This fanatical chauvinism is only important in the West in order to get one up on other people. To display that you're more supportive of institutions than your stupid, evil populist neighbor. To show that there's nothing that they can do to kill your loyalty, because you understand subtlety. You're pragmatic, you know that the dummies need to be lied to to be herded into the right direction. But if you're loyal no matter what and avoid talking about public failures when they are most relevant, even beatifying the architects of those failures, who has been herded? Take your vaccines and ask people if they're vaccinated before you let them around your infants. Don't pretend that your lording it over others is out of concern for them, though. It's just snotty, ultra-partisan ego inflation. Medical science has lost the trust of the Western public because it has become completely overwhelmed by bribery and cronyism just like every other Western institution. Complete recycling of those institutions is the only way to get that trust back, and it's what the institutionalists spend all their time fighting against. Generally this is because they draw their middle-class salaries from these institutions and were active participants in these frauds - at the least dutifully shunning their families, friends and strangers for questioning them.