No, Trump etc are not the establishment. They are effectively a foreign invader that the immune system of the establishment wants to evict. But we've reached cordyceps levels of infection at this point.
If you want to see the establishment's viewpoints, read the NY Times (the news articles, and analysis, but not the op-eds).
the GOP has been pulling for this since the HW Bush era.
dismantling the Dept of Education, reducing spending across all areas, reducing government involvement in healthcare -- take a look at the Fortune 100 list and see how many healthcare companies are in the top ranks -- have been top priorities for decades.
they're just saying the quiet part loud now, and acting on it.
Nuts, crims, and greedy billionaires out to blow up all of government because they don't understand it, privatize everything, and slash Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security while lying about the tax breaks they're going to get out of it.
> They may even go one step deeper and believe the vaccines aren't proven properly to know whether they work well enough.
They may even go further still and claim that the shot causes the flu—like RFK recently did with measles:
> Kennedy claimed the outbreak was likely caused by vaccines — contrary to evidence that showed low vaccination rates as the culprit. The false theory seems to stem from a misreading of a California Department of Public Health report that mentioned cases of a vaccine-induced rash, not vaccine-induced measles.
> The US declared that measles had been "eliminated" in 2000, but the country has seen outbreaks in recent years amid a rise in anti-vaccine sentiment. The last US measles death was in 2015, according to the Infectious Diseases Society of America.
> They may even go further still and claim that the shot causes the flu
If by "the flu" you're referring to the disease rather than a specific pathogen, a vaccine can cause the flu. Its common for vaccines to cause symptoms similar to the pathogen, though those symptoms are usually more mild.
Think about it for a second. A vaccine is meant to induce an immune response to allow the body to learn the pathogen before a natural infection. Symptoms are little more than the physical effects of your immune system doing its job and responding to a pathogen. Why wouldn't a good vaccine induce similar, though likely less severe, symptoms?
A flu vaccine cannot "cause the flu". It can mimic an immune response similar to the flu, but this response is much weaker than what occurs during an actual infection, where a live pathogen is actively spreading and causing harm. The flu vaccine contains an inactivated ('dead') virus or a component of the virus, meaning it cannot replicate or cause illness in the way a live virus does.
The assumption I started my last comment with is extremely important. I'm assuming we are referring to "the flu" as the disease not the influenza virus itself.
Disease is just a named collection of symptoms, that it. A vaccine absolutely can cause those symptoms, and when they occur together it would meet the definition of the disease. That obviously doesn't mean the vaccine caused an influence infection.
Few disease definitions actually take into account severity of symptoms. There are some examples where we have two named diseases where one is distinguished only by being more severe, but unless I'm missing something the flu doesn't fit into that category.
It seems like the results will be somewhat predictable: the impact flu has every year is variable, with some years being incredibly bad and some being not that bad. Part of that is attributed to the vaccine rate, and how effective the vaccine is (this meeting is key to decision making about our expectations and how to make an effective vaccine), and part is simply random (based on too many correlated values, preventing good estimates of causation).
If this meeting is cancelled, we would expect the vaccine to be less effective and would see greater impact (simply because it wasn't tailored to the be the most likely effective vaccine), but due to all the variables I mentioned it could even appear that "things got better after we did this" (post hoc ergo propter hoc).
There is no steel man here, RFK just wants to demonstrate that his beliefs about viruses are true. We may or may not get enough unambiguous data to make conclusions about his beliefs in a year or two, but given the concomitant reduction in the effectiveness of the CDC due to Trump policies, and the sycophantic nature of the people being placed into leadership roles, we may simply never know because the data would not be collected, or the research not funded, or the publications retracted.
Or RFK could somehow be right and we see a huge magic increase in public health across the country (not seen in other countries that keep vaccination). I am not aware of very many scientists who believe this will happen.
> If this meeting is cancelled, we would expect the vaccine to be less effective and would see greater impact (simply because it wasn't tailored to the be the most likely effective vaccine), but due to all the variables I mentioned it could even appear that "things got better after we did this" (post hoc ergo propter hoc).
There is an alternative here - a population left to fight an outbreak through natural immunity will be stronger in the end. That's definitely not a popular opinion, and it may not be worth the cost, but it does align with large drops in death rates of past outbreaks which generally happened before a vaccine was even available.
> There is no steel man here
That's not how steel manning an argument works. The whole point is to make the most generous version of the argument, usually assuming the best intent. There is always a most generous explanation that would lead to the argument made, you just may not like it or may not think its likely.
> Or RFK could somehow be right and we see a huge magic increase in public health across the country (not seen in other countries that keep vaccination). I am not aware of very many scientists who believe this will happen
I don't know RFK's stance particularly well, but I would guess that he wouldn't expect a noticeable increase in health over a short timeline and without improving peoples' health in general. I'm pretty sure I've seen him argue for removing toxins from our food and water, reducing dependence on pharmaceuticals, etc. All of those are important factors and it isn't realistic to assume that removing only one factor would magically fix everything.
> a population left to fight an outbreak through natural immunity will be stronger in the end.
Most people get the flu multiple times during their lives already. When is this natural immunity supposed to kick in and stop the elderly and infirm from dying from it?
Hell, why didn't this natural immunity protect the hundreds of millions of people who died prior to the introduction of vaccines from reoccurring outbreaks over the millennia? Never mind those who suffered lifetime disabilities from deafness to warped limbs.
> Measles mortality fell markedly (>90%) from the 19th century to mid-20th century prior to introduction of measles vaccine or the widespread use of antibiotics for secondary bacterial infections [1][2]
This story is similar for most infections we now vaccinate for, death rates were dropping dramatically years before vaccines were introduced.
The flu isn't a stable thing though, there are multiple strains of what we call "the flu" and its constantly adapting/mutating. Previous infection is no guarantee of protection, just like previous vaccination us no guarantee.
> When is this natural immunity supposed to kick in and stop the elderly and infirm from dying from it?
That's a whole different ball game. You're talking about immunocompromised individuals, their immune system isn't well prepared to respond to natural infection PR vaccination. Vaccines can still help, though they're usually less effective and more likely to cause symptoms similar to the original disease you're vaccinating against.
A vaccine isn't a magic bullet for preventing death. Vaccines still depend on the immune system doing its job effectively.
So to be clear you’re arguing let’s kill a whole bunch of people to “increase” the population’s strength, although you express some mild concern about the “cost” of doing that? Is that the argument here?
Vaccines attempt to induce natural immunity not reinforce it. This is precisely why vaccines are less effective for those with preexisting conditions and immune disorders - their immune system can't as easily respond to and learn from the vaccine. An effective vaccine stimulates the immune system after introducing enough material similar to the natural pathogen that the immune system can learn to respond to it. I could just be misunderstanding your meaning hear, but "reinforce" sounds to me more like an additional layer of defence - a beam reinforcing a homes foundation is adds additional strength to existing beams rather than making the existing beams themselves stronger.
I'm not arguing that we kill anyone. You're implying that choosing not to intervene with vaccines is murder, which I would disagree with, but even then I left open the door for that cost to not be worth it.
My argument here was simply that if vaccines aren't used, as happened for effectively all of natural history, the population remaining (assuming some remain) is stronger for it.
That doesn't meant we should choose not to administer vaccines if we have them and they are proven safe and effective. That also does not mean that we should actively kill anyone, eugenics is a pretty messed up idea.
> This is precisely why vaccines are less effective for those with preexisting conditions and immune disorders - their immune system can't as easily respond to and learn from the vaccine.
You've missed a significant strength of vaccines by focusing on individuals rather than on populations.
Vaccines slow the transmission rate through a population and reduce the severity of infection.
In a population with a high vaccination rates those few with weak immune systems have less exposure to infection.
It's similar to back burning and fuel reduction in combating wildfires.
I understand the argument for herd immunity, I've just never seen a study proving it out. The idea is compelling and modelling studies seem to show that its possible, but that is still different from a controlled study showing it happening.
Early on in the Covid pandemic response claims of herd immunity were being thrown around and Fauci was claiming a threshold of 60-65% vaccine rate for it to work. As time went on that number kept going up, eventually he admitted that they used a low number to start with only because they didn't think people would comply if the required vaccine rate seemed unrealistically high.
Herd immunity is almost certainly a thing at a certain immunity rate, the question that goes unanswered is what that rate actually is. For there to even be a case for vaccine mandates, of even just the arguments that people ought to get vaccinated due to herd immunity, we have to know the % of immunized population and the risk of vaccine side effects.
My understanding is that we don't have a solid understanding of the exact tipping point for herd immunity, and that at least during the covid pandemic response we didn't have a solid understanding of the true risks of adverse side effects to the vaccines either.
We know how many people died before we had vaccines, especially children. There is no argument here. We eradicated or almost eradicated a whole bunch of terrible diseases with vaccines.
What you're proposing here is simply murder. We know what would happen, many more people would die.
> Measles mortality fell markedly (>90%) from the 19th century to mid-20th century prior to introduction of measles vaccine or the widespread use of antibiotics for secondary bacterial infections [1][2]
This story is similar for most infections we now vaccinate for, death rates were dropping dramatically years before vaccines were introduced.
I wouldn't propose that people should be stopped from taking a vaccine if they want it.
I'm a strong supporter of informed consent. In this context that simply means that people need to know the pros and cons of a vaccine, what isn't known or scientifically studied yet, and they can make their own mind up.
We don't keep up any relevant research to prove that out. Vaccine studies don't use placebo controls, meaning we only know how they compare against what is usually the last approved vaccine. If you tell people that we know for certain that more people would die today without a particular vaccine you're lying, we simply can't know that without testing it.
> And herd immunity protects those that can't be protected by vaccines, your "experiment" would put them at risk as well.
How can we know herd immunity works as we predict it should without testing it? Its an untested hypothesis, and that's totally fine if we're not willing to risk testing it. We can't act as though it is scientific fact at that point though, its a hypothesis that a large majority agree with but that has yet to be tested in any significant way.
I hope there's a slightly different timeline where people with hopelessness or depression have a place in nature to pursue purpose, community, diet, exercise, and meaningful labour. I think we all know in our gut that this would be of incredible benefit to most of these people. And I hope the public in this world are horrified by the idea that anyone could instead pump them full of addictive or unknown drugs and leave them to fester in their obesity, drug dependency, poverty, loneliness, emptiness and misery.
I don’t entirely disagree with you but this is a _very_ different world, that requires unraveling like everything about our modern society. I don’t think there’s a whole lot of overlap between RFK jr’s vision of the world, and the current chainsaw approach to government that calls every piece or government spending an entitlement.
Our current approach is to not fund adequately support our citizens and if you’re poor, good luck.
The public, thus far, is generally ok with this. They’d be even more okay shipping them to underfunded camps where they are even more out of sight out of mind.
It's about encouraging the free market. Drug makers will naturally compete and it's up to the American public to reward the flu shot with the most efficacy, or in some cases, not take a shot at all and rely on natural immunization. This will spur competition and bring prices down.
That’s an interesting comment. I often see this repeated - that HN as a whole leans libertarian - but I don’t see it personally. Just as many people will jump in to point out that market failures are common for reasons of monopolistic behaviour, regulatory capture, etc, as will people regurgitating Reagan, Thatcher and Thiel.
Last I spoke to a nurse about this she explained something interesting to me - in selecting the next flu shot they actually watch the opposite hemisphere to predict most likely strain to vax.
So despite US shenanigans rest of world may still be OK
Both hemispheres do this if I'm not mistaken. They look to the other hemisphere's winter and expect that 6 month delay will still help predict what's coming.
Flu strains usually originate from Asia (usually China), where flu is more likely to jump from chicken to human. But that was in the past, it is completely possible that the USA could move backwards in health and become the new spot where flu jumps to humans (eg by not culling flocks where infections are found because of rising egg prices). Trump could do a lot of damage in four years, we might end up completely flipped from where were a decade ago by the end of it (China as the preeminent respected world power, the USA as a big nation of unvaxed people where bird flu jumps to humans, Fujian Type N flu is replaced with Tenesee type M flu)
China has seemed to play a larger role in novel viruses with zoological origins. The average flu season isn't driven by novel viruses, if they were every year would progress more similarly to CoV2.
I've never seen a study comparing the relative efficacy of culling vs. not culling chicken flocks. Unless you have sources for that, you're assuming culling is always best. One consideration there is that culling entire flocks ensures that we are never able to select breeding animals based on those with natural immunity. Maybe that is the right choice, but I don't think we have ever studied that.
Egg prices haven't yet seemed to play an impact in flock culling rates. We have murdered 166 million birds based on a recent article [1] - extremely few of those were ever tested, they just happened to be in a house with a bird either confirmed or suspected of infection. At least based on that article, culling hasn't helped contain the outbreak.
The CDC/FDA assumed culling was better, I’m not an expert. And the point has always been to prevent a human outbreak, not reduce egg prices.
Trump is coming in and saying culling isn’t needed, and he is finding experts that agree with his opinion to back it up. Whatever policy choice coming up, it will be one where science is abused to justify a pre-determined decision rather than using science to come up with the right decision.
> The CDC/FDA assumed culling was better, I’m not an expert.
You are taking an agency's assumption as a fact though, its functionally yours at that point. It doesn't matter if someone else says it, it matters if you agree with the logic of how they got there.
> And the point has always been to prevent a human outbreak, not reduce egg prices.
Human transmission has yet to be proven. Culling hundreds of millions of birds to avoid human transmission when we don't even know if that's possible seems idiotic at best, sadistic at worst.
Only the quacks say that, the science is firmly in the corner that not only is bird (or bat) to human transmission is possible, it has already happened a few times this season.
This is where having someone like Trump as president isn’t just annoying, but downright deadly.
Not long ago the CDC itself was saying that mammals couldn't catch this strain of avian flu and we had nothing to worry about. Then they found a few milk cows believed to be infected, but they assured us it couldn't kill cows and that the infection couldn't be transmitted through milk.
Where along the way did we go from scientific knowledge that it couldn't jump to humans to only quacks believing such nonsense? More importantly, where are the controlled studies proving transmission from infected birds to humans?
Proving transmissibility of such a pathogen would require something along the lines of Koch's postulates. Unless I missed something extremely important, we haven't done this type of study yet.
I'm not following what CDC said as I'm not from the US, but in my country we had early warning of a big flu season. Poultry farmers were advised to get the flu vaccine in October last year (it's decentralised in my country so it might only have been a local directive), so I doubt a scientific paper ever said 'mammals can't catch this strain'.
My point wasn't that transmission had been scientifically disproven though. My point was that the CDC itself was saying that this avian flu couldn't jump to humans - they no longer say this but the earlier commenter claimed that only a quack would say human transmission hasn't been proven.
Where I would expect a scientific paper to come in is to provide a controlled study show transmission from an infected bird to a healthy human. Maybe that has been done, but if so I haven't seen it or ever heard it mentioned anywhere.
> My point was that the CDC itself was saying that this avian flu couldn't jump to humans - they no longer say this but the earlier commenter claimed that only a quack would say human transmission hasn't been proven.
Almost all medical research is in the field, and they don't do controlled studies on humans anymore to see if they can get bird flu or not by being in contact with infected birds (can't get it passed the ethics board). It feels like I'm arguing with someone on the spectrum, who states that "we didn't think it was this way before, but now we think it? Impossible!" It is an exhausting argument and I really don't think it is worth our time, except that guy is now president - sigh.
You're still missing the point of my raising that the CDC in recent history claimed that transmissibility isn't possible from birds to humans. They didn't claim we don't know if its possible, they claimed that it isn't which implies that scientific research has found that transmission didn't work.
Raising that here is important because in an earlier comment you said only a quack would claim that transmissibility hasn't been proven.
You even seem to acknowledge here that it hasn't been tested or proven yet, or that we even bother testing it today. Field research is all well and good, and it often is the best we can do in the moment, but that doesn't change what the research and data shows.
We don't do controlled studies to test transmissibility, meaning we don't test for transmissibility, meaning it has yet to be proven. I'm not sure how that chain of reasoning leaps to the realm of quackery.
> "we didn't think it was this way before, but now we think it? Impossible!"
There's a solid argument behind this view though (to be clear, I don't see that as an argument Trump has made).
Science is a well defined process. When we haven't studied transmissibility for whatever reason we simply can't say that transmission isn't possible.
As soon as the CDC gets out over their skis and makes that claim without scientific research to back it up they turned a scientific question into a political one. They can't say whether transmission is possible or not. By making this claim they're only trying to reassure the public of something they want people to believe but can't actually prove.
Like i said i'm not in the US, but our "healthcare secretary" equivalent similarly uttered "mask don't work, don't buy them, and if you have some, give them to hospital" at the start of Covid, amongst a littany of other disinformation, so honestly, not surprised.
It's like the GIEC group 3. If you really want to understand what is happening, you need to read group 1 and 2 data directly (i did that during Covid, it took 3 month and a new notetaking app), because you have science, and "science" (what's funny is that one of the justification for lying was "avoid sentiment of helplessness and despair").
Anyway, not surprising, USians "elites" seems super-condescending all the time (on both side), i think it's baked into their personality, so they lie to "reassure" or shit like this. We have the same in our country, even if its not as widespread.
This is a remarkably stupid decision. Flu vaccines are incredibly successful not just from a public health standpoint but also a business productivity standpoint.
I guess we're going to relearn this lesson the hard way. Especially with businesses also demanding people come back to the office to work.
A big part of the problem is a lot of people don't understand this. How often do you hear people say, "I got the flu vaccine and still got the flu".
However, most people who say they have "the flu" are using the term colloquially and it is unlikely that they actually had influenza.
Further, as we saw with the COVID vaccines, people are incapable of understanding that vaccines don't create an impenetrable barrier. Instead it lowers risk of infection and increases likelihood of a milder case.
I got a really bad flu last year because I delayed my shots. At 48, it was nothing like I experienced when I was younger, just mucus filling my chest for a week, uncomfortable to breathe with a scratchy wheeze. I don’t mind getting the flu I got when I was younger, but I will get my vaccinations on time to avoid going through that again.
I get how flu vaccines become more important as you age, COVID also (lest you win a Herman Caine award). Younger people getting vaccinated also helps limit transmission to older people who are more likely to die from it, but doing so requires a bit more empathy than just pure self interest.
Well I guess once the Bird Flu jumps to Humans, which due to Trump's and Musk's Stupidity will happen, and next years flu arrival we will have another yet another Trump Caused pandemic.
To be fair, a fair share of pandemics, antibiotic resistance, and climate change common root cause is industrial meat agriculture. Ano-ochlo-kleptocrats are and will screw up the basis of organized civilization in America because they don't know anything about anything.
We never really addressed the issues of the Civil War. Desegregation caused white men to destroy the social fabric of the nation. We used to have municipal pools that were free to use. Ambulances used to be free as well as trash collection. The idea of communities running services ended with desegregation and white flight from the cities. Now we have become an “i’ve got mine, fuck you” nation.
If a bunch of old people on Social Security die several years early due to influenza... Yay! They saved money and extended Social Security! Or can raid it for other things...
It seems like the bigger win financially would be back room deals with pharmaceutical companies selling the next vaccine.
Saving money on social security because more unhealthy people died doesn't directly make anyone in charge any more rich. Unless I missed something you can't short Social Security liabilities.
It’s a collusion to create chaos and dismantle the system that can track what they are doing. You think “flu vaccine”, they steal elsewhere. Today a vaccine, last week an email to justify jobs, earlier USAID, next week something else. It’s a distraction.
Its interesting to see so many conspiracy theories pop up on a more left-leaning site.
The last 6-8 years has largely seen democrats deriding republicans (or MAGA specifically) for sharing unproven claims of a deep state, pedophile rings, etc. Now we're seeing a growing list of conspiracy theories related to what and why the Trump administration is up to.
The theories may even be right in the end, that does happen. They're just currently based on speculation and presumed intent.
I didn't actually mean to imply that I was calling you out as a conspiracy theorist here. I replied here because it seemed to fit well with the comment thread, but was more trying to comment on the general ethos I've seen here in the US and how many conspiracy theories now seem to be talked about in the media from the other side of the aisle as it were (Democratic leaning media instead of Republican leaning).
It's not exactly a conspiracy when they're literally outright saying this is what they're doing. Like Elon Musk is out there regurgitating every single stupid reason you can think of for dismantling the government, you can spend like an hour trawling his feed and realize that all of these conspiracies are just things he's outright admitting.
> It’s a collusion to create chaos and dismantle the system that can track what they are doing. You think “flu vaccine”, they steal elsewhere. Today a vaccine, last week an email to justify jobs, earlier USAID, next week something else. It’s a distraction.
This is the comment I was replying to. I at least haven't seen any direct acknowledgements if this being the goal, and the comment or even refers to it as collusion with predictions of what comes next. That seems squarely in the conspiracy theory realm to me, in line with all the theories thrown around while Biden was in office or Hillary was running.
Sure, I saw that interview clip and raised it elsewhere on HN. That still doesn't move this from conspiracy to confirmed plan as described in the earlier comment.
There's nothing wrong with a conspiracy theory. They're just often backed by anecdotal or circumstantial evidence and aren't yet really proven. This still falls into that bucket.
Interestingly enough, plenty of conspiracy theories turn out to be at least partially true, the same could happen here.
Tom Nichols made a good point about this - he is from a very Trump-supporting demographic (white working class, baby boomer), and his observation was that all of his Trump-supporting friends and family are doing much better off now then when they were growing up. In terms of housing, food, access to healthcare, stress about money - they are a huge step above where they were in the 60s and 70s.
So whatever hurt these people suffered wasn't material. It's just resentment about other people (minorities, the "urban elite") having status or power.
I think various parties have managed to frame political discourse in America as an us vs. them, ingroup vs. outgroup, purely partisan sport. All that matters to people is that their team scores points and the other team loses points. There are no real principles or foundational beliefs, evidenced by how easily people flip their opinions on issues depending on who's acting on them. Biden using Executive Orders? Bad. Trump using Executive Orders? Good.
It's just a game, and winning the game feels good.
The people who voted Trump and don't wear the paraphernalia occasionally check news and from what I can tell aren't regularly doomscrolling. They'll probably get disagreeable if you talk politics with them. But in general daily interactions, they are polite and helpful. (Not to say I agree with their vote-- you're just asking about their temperament.)
But to a person the diehards I've met seem to be plugged in for a good portion of the day to their devices for outrage porn doomscrolling and posting incrementally angrier content.
Digression-- One time I looked up a Bill Burr bit about sandwiches on Youtube. For weeks it recommended manosphere bullshit and white-supremacist-adjacent conspiracy theory content.
MAGA is just one of the set of social media users who, for various reasons, clicked their way down those recommendation rabbitholes.
I'd bet there are at least a dozen devs reading this who could find the exact commit that Youtube began sending a predictable portion of their userbase down radicalization rabbit holes like these. Perhaps some time in the future there will be a memorial where that diff is etched in a large slab of stone.
I live in a very red state and mostly know Trump voters. I disagree with them on plenty of political topics (though that was true with Biden voters as well).
I don't consider many of them hateful though, and they are helpful to neighbors.
The last 2-8 years has felt very strange to me comparing what I experience day to day and how I often see our society more broadly described.
I've lived in Seattle, Europe, and the southern US over that time. Everywhere I've been I found people in the area to be friendly and helpful. Watch TV though and it sure seems like whoever the "other side" for a particular context are a bunch of horrible, hateful, angry people that just don't get it.
With regards to MAGA specifically. I don't find most of the ideas I hear floated as more hateful than the overtone coming from the democratic side of the aisle during the pandemic response. Anyone who chose not to get vaccinated was demonized and painted as a murder who hates old people. Anyone who disagreed with the main narrative was generally ostracized and slapped with labels like "anti-vaxxer" or "anti-science".
It's very common for people who do or support terrible things to also be nice to their neighbors, or more generally to be nice to the people they can identify with and know on a personal level. They just don't see the people that they can't identify with as fully human and worthy of the same dignity.
This is not to say that your neighbors are evil people - I'm just saying that you can't just judge people by how they interact with people in their in-group.
I don't actually think I would have fallen into the "in-group" for most of my neighbors over the years.
In most cases I've had pretty wildly different political and religious views, and for a period was myself an immigrant that could hardly speak the local language.
My honest view is that people individually and in small groups are surprisingly friendly, helpful, and welcoming. Its only when the community or group gets too big and people start defining teams that things get nasty.
>With regards to MAGA specifically. I don't find most of the ideas I hear floated as more hateful than the overtone coming from the democratic side
This is eyebrow-raising. I have no defense for any political party for all the un-subtle criticisms they inevitably put out, Democrats or otherwise. But to suggest that MAGA are, on par, less hateful than Democrats, begs expounding. In other words, you can certainly make that argument, but it flies in the face of common understanding - which doesn't mean it's not true! It just means you have to give a little more than just stating it. It's like saying, "Actually, Genghis Khan didn't conquer very much", and leaving it at that instead of presenting some kind of insight.
Of course, there is always simply the bubble explanation (my bubble is not representative, or your bubble is not representative), however... regarding the degree of MAGA's hatred for liberals and the people liberals defend? I hate being curt but: Come on.
I didn't get vaccinated for Covid after spending months reading whitepapers and listening to vaccine experts discuss the pandemic as it played out through 2020.
I experienced plenty of hate thrown my way for 2 or 3 years after that decision, including in speeches from the president.
I don't know how to quantify hatefulness, especially in a large group, well enough to absolutely compare the two. I do strongly stand behind the fact that plenty of hate was thrown towards anyone who disagreed with the narrative during the pandemic response though. More than MAGA? No clue, but a relative comparison doesn't make it better in absolute terms.
I think part of why the shots became so controversial, is because the disease adapted anyway. You're basically having to decide on "less bad" vs "roll the dice" when you inevitably get COVID. People were already needing encouragement to get a flu shot; now you need two every 6-12 months? And then you had the whole sidebar discussion of getting Ivermectin, or snake oil silver supplements, or whatever else that was suggested as a cure; you don't get that with discussions over flu. So yeah, it all got uglier than it needed to be.
We in the US still haven't fully come to grips with the loss of over a million people to COVID. And now we're going to kick the can on proven public health measures, that have nothing to do with COVID, because of the off chance someone will become socially isolated / "less cool" to take care of their "freak" neurodivergent child.
I can only speak to my experience in the US and Europe during the pandemic, but I didn't feel singled out because people were aware that the virus kept adapting.
That was actually one of the key lessons I heard from virologists early on in 2020 - viruses like this tend to mutate quickly and escape vaccine-induced immunity. It wasn't until the vaccines were announced that the story changed and we were being told that the vaccines were effective and would only require one or two shots for permanent protection.
It got ugly because scientific study, and more importantly the limits of scientific understanding, was thrown out in favor of a more religious take on the whole field. Media organizations, late night talk shows, and even comedians were doing segments shaming anyone that was attempting to do their ow research (aka learn, consider the trade offs for themselves, and practice informed consent).
I think your experience may be different than others. A lot of people are skeptical of, or can't afford, medical interventions in chronic issues and serious illness. You had anti-vaxxers posting stuff like how the shot was going to make you sterile, or even kill you disproportionately to the virus itself. Your research sounds higher-quality than what most folks even bothered with, and that makes room for the mockery you pointed out.
Oh there was absolutely crazy information being shared around, we definitely agree there.
I had a coworker try to explain how 5G caused covid. Granted there is no technical reason why an EMF couldn't cause similar symptoms, there just wasn't any well founded research showing that and a much more simple explanation already had better scientific support (the novel virus).
Mockery is a tricky one though. Mocking any particular idea seems reasonable enough. Most people at the time were lumping in anyone that chose not to get the vaccine as an anti-vaxxer, wacko, conspiracy theorist, etc.
This sort of rhetoric might've worked pre-Presidency but you would have to be either deliberately ignorant or outright agree with some of the hateful rhetoric of the president. Things like depriving transgender individuals of their basic rights, moving to denaturalize citizens, the white house posting illegal immigration deportation ASMR [1] and many, many more.
Oh I don't agree with any of the examples you raised. I also don't know how to compare levels of hate, though.
I took issue with Obama-era ICE raids, Biden's speeches regarding anyone that decided not to get vaccinated, Bush's description of really most of the middle east. Hell, even how many have talked about Russians as though every single Russian citizen supports the Ukraine war is hateful.
Hate is almost a given when groups are given a name and we begin othering people. That's nothing new to human history and has seemed to be more and more common over the last decade or two.
The flu vaccines target specific strains that they expect to be common during flu season. In order to do this, the FDA collaborates with a bunch of different agencies and groups around the world to do collect data, track flu viruses etc. The sort of thing that a government agency is generally really good at doing and companies are generally really bad at.
Normally it's around this time period that decisions around which strains to target are discussed, because it takes around six months to incubate the vaccine. Then once a decision is made, that information is passed to manufacturers.
Without this meeting, there's no guidance around which strains to target. Without guidance, manufacturers have no clue what to do. So the odds are it either highly delays the vaccine if not promptly rescheduled or we simply just don't get one this season.
Sounds like bad news. But can the manufacturers meet among themselves to hash it out? Would they? And if they did, would they make a worse or different decision than if the FDA were involved?
The decisions will still be made, but by other Northern Hemisphere countries. Manufacturing might remain local, since the infrastructure is there. Or maybe that will get shutdown if it is cheaper to ship from India or China.
This is absolutely idiotic behavior on the part of the government. However, I wouldn’t be surprised to see an announcement within the week that the manufacturers are having their own meeting. They aren’t going to destroy years of goodwill and a thriving vaccine business just because a total flake got put in charge of the FDA for what is hopefully a limited time.
Presumably it may be rescheduled? Let's say personnel is in flux at the moment. Might make sense to bump out an important meeting until things stabilize?
There is so much breathless hysteria in the media predicting or implying a prediction, and when 99% of it fails to materialize there is never a follow up.
> The F.D.A. sent an email to members of the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee on Monday afternoon informing them of the cancellation, according to a senior official familiar with the decision. There was no reason given. The panel was to meet March 13.
> One committee member, Dr. Paul Offit of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, an outspoken critic of Mr. Kennedy, confirmed the cancellation and warned that it could interfere with or delay production of flu vaccines.
> “It’s a six-month production cycle,” Dr. Offit said. “So one can only assume that we’re not picking flu strains this year.”
Considering the flu kills tens of thousands every year and hospitalized hundreds of thousands more, with the potential of evolving to be more lethal - yes this is important.
If the Trump, GOP and Musk fucked up staffing by firing people who have the expertise to make these decisions, yes they are at fault. If RFK Jr is interfering with this for his anti-vax and anti-science crusade, he is also at vault.
They are “assuming” a major unannounced policy change based on… a single meeting cancelation. By this cause/effect protocol, I have personally witnessed dozens of multi billion dollar project cancellations, or so I assume.
RFK Jr has never proposed canning the vaccine program. He wants certain studies performed, which presumably would run in parallel with the existing program.
The constant hysteria really makes me want to quit the internet. It seems to get worse every year.
It's a highly time sensitive meeting around setting manufacturing targets for the upcoming flu season. It's the kind of thing that when delayed causes actual adverse problems as opposed to cancelling a sprint standup or whatever.
I find (after a verrrrry long time of arguing with people on the internet), when somebody acts as obtuse as the person you're replying to, they really aren't ignorant, they're trolling, or looking for an emotional argument. One of the common tells is making an obtuse statement that's fairly vague (to draw out responses) and then writing long replies to those that show much more cynicism/disingenous, which provoke people further, followed by "see! this is just an example of how deluded the people who disagree with me are!"
have you considered the possibility that despite sanewashing this, it is really a problem? That the current administration is not normal? That perhaps there really is cause for alarm?
you don't cancel something on short notice and not provide a follow up date. That's not the way any of this works. It's not "breathless", they literally picked an antivaxxer to head up the US government's health agency. That's not breathless either, it's a fact, backed by years of evidence. They are trying to dismantle all programs that help the general populace. The people heading up this charge want everything to be in the hands of private millionaires and billionaires. Merely look at whom was picked to head up this stuff. I don't think anyone paying attention can miss something so obvious
This isn't entirely cynical, I do assume there are some pragmatists who might think this way.