• @ShinkanTrain@lemmy.ml
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    1439 months ago

    I used to think one of the biggest reasons there’s so many antivaxx people is that, because they’re so effective, people no longer have the fear of seeing their children in an iron lung, struggling to breathe. Then Covid respirators happened and antivaxx fucks somehow got worse

    • @leadore@lemmy.world
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      109 months ago

      I used to think one of the biggest reasons there’s so many antivaxx people is that, because they’re so effective, people no longer have the fear of seeing their children in an iron lung, struggling to breathe.

      Yes, I think that’s absolutely right. The antivaxxers are people who didn’t experience what it was like before vaccines.

      Then Covid respirators happened and antivaxx fucks somehow got worse

      I think part of it is that the effects of Covid were hidden from the public. The hospitals didn’t let anyone in to see the rows of beds with people on respirators, so the public didn’t see that on the news. They showed the refrigerated trucks but not the bodies in the trucks. So in the “pics or it didn’t happen” timeline we’re in, people didn’t believe it was that bad. Even the aftereffects of long covid are barely recognized or mentioned. The whole thing has been bizarre.

      In olden times, everyone saw the dead bodies openly carried off on carts, or saw piles of them buried in mass graves. Their relatives died right there in front of them, not hidden away in a hospital where they themselves weren’t allowed to enter. Before, everyone directly experienced the crisis and suffering it caused. This time, the ugly reality was hidden from most of us other than the direct caregivers.

      Side note: during the Vietnam war, reporters and camera crews were there and it was all shown on TV, the bodies, the wounded, the chaos. But the powers that be learned lessons from the horrified reaction of the public: do not show your failures on TV; keep your population in the dark. And we never saw our war casualties on TV again. Cameras were there, but we were shown nothing but scripted “reality TV”, if anything at all.

      They followed the same script with Covid. This is supposed to be the information age but we’re more in the dark than ever. Real information is either not provided or is buried in misinformation. Remember the Florida whistleblower who leaked how the State was skewing their covid statistics and was quickly arrested and smeared?

    • @ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml
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      429 months ago

      It’s also why Trump is president-elect currently. People are stupid and are forgetting just how bad things can be.

        • Yog-Sothoth
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          29 months ago

          they think because he inherited a recovering economy, that he himself had some major part in it.

        • @Serinus@lemmy.world
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          49 months ago

          I doubt this will compare to four years ago. It’s going to be much worse.

          I’m hoping he keels over in the next month and we get President Vance. I know three things about him.

          He’s really condescending towards people who didn’t “escape” rural areas (from his book).
          He’s close with Peter Thiel.
          He doesn’t believe anything political he says. He previously said Trump is a dictator. He says what he needs to say to gain power.

          There’s a non-zero chance that he’s full of shit, and then turns out to be a great president. Either way, an unknown quantity is better than the one we’re about to get. Hopefully it happens before the appointments, since the appointments can’t be worse. Trump is what, 78?

          • @Revan343@lemmy.ca
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            39 months ago

            I think there’s zero chance he turns out to be a great president, but there’s probably a decent chance he’d turn out to be a mediocre president

            • @leadore@lemmy.world
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              9 months ago

              The most important thing is that Vance wouldn’t have the hold over the whole party to be able to make them bow to his every whim like Trump does. Yes, they would still try to get project 2025 implemented, but they’d be less likely to be able to keep enough of their party in line to do it.

          • @Makeitstop@lemmy.world
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            19 months ago

            I’ve just been hoping for the long shot that a plane carrying both of them will go down before the electoral college meets. If it also takes Musk, Johnson, Kennedy, and a bunch of others from his inner circle, so much the better.

            • @Serinus@lemmy.world
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              29 months ago

              He’s not my first choice, but if the choice is Trump, Vance, or Johnson, I’d choose Vance.

    • @john89@lemmy.ca
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      9 months ago

      My brother had to be convinced to get the vaccine.

      He’s legitimately removed (I’m trying to say “re-tar-ded”, but apparently it automatically saying “removed.” Seriously? We’re not allowed to say “re-tar-ded”, a completely accurate medical term?) and had to go to a special school because of it.

      I think a lot of conservatives fall into this camp, but don’t realize it because of how poor social programs are in red states.

  • AmidFuror
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    149 months ago

    Can anyone find independent reports of this massive celebration for the announcement of the results of the Francis Field Trial in 1955?

    Edit: Found a Wiki summary

  • DarkThoughts
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    149 months ago

    I think social media algorithms have fried people’s brains. Imagine we’d ban them, go back to content being kinda diverse and random, without adversaries able to game the system and push massive swaths of propaganda to people. The fact alone that most youths get their news from freaking TicTok of all places…

    • @Pacattack57@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      You know your local news network has a TikTok right? There’s nothing wrong with news from social media. The problem is that media is unregulated and people are allowed to lie and pass off that information factual.

      • DarkThoughts
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        39 months ago

        You know your local news network has a TikTok right?

        That’s not what people watch though. People get their news from “influencers”, often time those with far right alignments, or straight from fascist parties who are the ones with the most reach on TicTok.

        The problem is that media is unregulated and people are allowed to lie and pass off that information factual.

        That’s literally what the free press is, and a fundamental pillar of a free and democratic society. Regulated media is censored media, and exactly what fascists want. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_the_press

        • @Pacattack57@lemmy.world
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          29 months ago

          Being “press” does not give you blanket protection from lies. Alex Jones just lost his company because he lied about Sandy Hook victims.

          • DarkThoughts
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            19 months ago

            He didn’t lost his company because he lied as a press entity, he was lying for years without issues, he lost his company because he directly defamed the victims and their loved ones, which caused a massive lawsuit by them that went in their favor. Even in the US there’s still a few restrictions to free speech, and defamation is one of them.

    • Carighan Maconar
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      49 months ago

      Why would anybody bad them, >50% in the US just voted to expand them massively and apply them ~everything. Oh and that money for the masses sucks versus money for grifters only, so I for one welcome Freedom Coin 2025 which rugpulls about 2 weeks after introduction.

    • @corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
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      29 months ago

      This guy’s awesome. It reads as if he’s trying to dilute the great news by suggesting wars ending a decade before or moon landings 10 years are are really why everyone’s cheering.

      • @Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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        29 months ago

        I don’t think he’s necessarily trying to dismiss this as express curiosity about that kind of reaction to that news and adding in other examples where the whole nation would have celebrated something.

        If anything, he seems to be saying that the invention of the polio vaccine is in the same class of news as the others, not that people were only celebrating the polio vaccine because they were happy about these other events that were well passed or still to come in the future.

  • @ghterve@lemmy.world
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    59 months ago

    I kinda suspect that shared joy might repeat if a cancer vaccine was revealed.

    We didn’t collectively suffer long enough from COVID for its vaccine to be universally embraced…

  • Flying Squid
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    219 months ago

    On the other hand, half a century earlier-

    So I guess the stupid waxes and wanes?

    • @Maggoty@lemmy.world
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      59 months ago

      You know I wonder how much of this is because we stopped doing pubic service announcements for a while?

    • @Allonzee@lemmy.world
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      69 months ago

      Something something smart people make good times that makes stupid people that make hard times that makes smart people?

    • @JasonDJ@lemmy.zip
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      29 months ago

      I bet the wave of stupid correlates to the popularity of yellow journalism or the prevalence of its practices.

  • @cley_faye@lemmy.world
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    169 months ago

    Too bad that’s not the great America some people wants to bring back. Nobody would mind this one.

  • @john89@lemmy.ca
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    89 months ago

    If anything, this should tell us the trolls won.

    Or at least have been more successful then they ever should have been.

    • @Allonzee@lemmy.world
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      -49 months ago

      Honestly, they are compared a lot, and while seat belts should be encouraged, I don’t think they should be mandated for adults.

      Unlike masks, you’re only going to hurt yourself.

      Then again I strongly believe in the right of any adult to end their own life, even if they’re physically healthy, or it’s not their life.

      • @JamesFire@lemmy.world
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        79 months ago

        Unlike masks, you’re only going to hurt yourself.

        Absolutely wrong. Seatbelts prevent people from turning into projectiles as well, which most definitely can harm other people.

        • @Allonzee@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          In the event of a crash, a soft gooey human is probably the least likely object that flies out of that car to seriously injure someone else, and if that gooey human hits anything the car is made of first, the gooey human loses and is just further bruised against things harder than a human.

          Can you point me to a single instance of someone being injured or died because the corpse of another human, and not hard metal, plastic, or glass was launched out of the vehicle and managed to hit them?

          Because that seems like a cartoonish outcome of a crash that’s high speed enough to do so. Like one in a billion, about as likely as being next to a car crash and being killed by the shrapnel of the used gum that was under the seat.

  • @zephorah@lemm.ee
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    569 months ago

    RFK and conspiracy thinking right alongside Luigi are ALL symptoms indicating the same problem: a health care system that enriches CEOs at the bankruptcy and death of the masses.

    At base it’s like the Hepatitis C cure when it rolled out. A $ amount is put on this cure, only X number of people get it each month, up to a certain $ amount across all claimants, and the rest are SOL. Healthcare itself is like that. We did 18 NICU babies already this month, or we did 32 cardiac cath procedures this month, time to delay, deny, defend.

    Wouldn’t it be cool if you could figure a way around needing that healthcare? If you could do 6 simple steps that are entirely under your own power, cheaply or for free, and fix your health on your own? What a dream that would be. This need for health independence is as predictable as a Luigi.

    RFK is like a cherry on the shit sundae of our present system. He’s symbolic of the need for something other that we can maybe have more control over. Unfortunately, drinking raw milk has a higher potential of adding more problems.

    • @EatATaco@lemm.ee
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      -19 months ago

      People have opposed vaccines since they were first introduced. I find your explanation just trying to force it into the current discussion around health insurance.

      I would argue that it’s primarily because some people can’t fathom that the world is a chaotic place and shit just happens without sinister forces making it happen. Its exactly why the devil is such a popular theme in Christianity, because they need some evil force acting behind the scenes to justify the fact that absolutely terrible things happen while also believing in some supremely powerful and benevolent God.

      With the pandemic, and people losing their shit because they were in lock down, the idea that this evil force was making it happen and fucking with them really took hold…and that made the “freedom” from it, a vaccine, a very good target for people pushing their conspiracy theories that this was a good way to push some sinister agenda…and with the amount of fear at the time, people were susceptible. Once you’ve opened the door for vaccines being a vehicle for sinister agenda, that just opens the door for questioning previous vaccines as well.

      • @zephorah@lemm.ee
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        19 months ago

        Everything you’ve said is correct. The basic chaos and statistics of life is too much to process for some people. However, the number of vaccine deniers is now a movement, and growing, and being given lip service by people in charge. That doesn’t happen in a vacuum.

        We are both correct in our main assertions.

        • @EatATaco@lemm.ee
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          19 months ago

          That doesn’t happen in a vacuum.

          I agree. And I think that non-vacuum isn’t that our health system is whack, but that we just went through a traumatizing time as a society that left people very fearful and looking for answers. It’s a convenient and easy one that the conmen are more than happy to advantage of for their personal gain.

          I guess I see our positions as very different. . .you attribute it to people trying to avoid our healthcare system, I see it as people just looking for something to blame for how crappy shit was during the pandemic; our healthcare system has been shit for a long time, but the rise to prominence of this anti-vaccine movement happened during the pandemic. I don’t think the timing is coincidental.

          But I appreciate the cordial response.

          • @zephorah@lemm.ee
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            19 months ago

            As someone inside the healthcare system, I can confidently state that COVID simply brought out a lot of festering problems that already existed. The pandemic didn’t create those problems, it revealed them.

            The one “but” here is that COVID did help speed up the timeline on doctor/nurse/caregiver burnout as well and create a bottleneck in getting care due to sheer numbers which is still happening right now. How long are you waiting for your next PCP appointment, or to get established with one? (One example).

            And as another “but”. What I just said above was already the trajectory of the system. We simply had a little healthcare “inflation” that sped all of that up.

    • @prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      19 months ago

      If you could do 6 simple steps that are entirely under your own power, cheaply or for free, and fix your health on your own?

      This is so specific that i would be remiss if I didn’t ask what those 6 things were…

    • @MutilationWave@lemmy.world
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      139 months ago

      drinking raw milk

      will be the least of our problems from RFK. He killed more than 20 children in Samoa with his smallpox vaccine denial.

    • katy ✨
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      59 months ago

      i mean unless you were like 10, chances are everyone was aware of fdr

      • @hperrin@lemmy.ca
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        429 months ago

        Fox News tells you not to believe your eyes, and conservatives trust Fox News more than their own eyes.

        • @Notyou@sopuli.xyz
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          59 months ago

          Why wouldn’t they trust Fox News over their own eyes? Fox News is the most trusted name in news. At least that’s what the viewers get told when they come back from commercial breaks. It’s not like Fox would lie to them. They are the most trusted name in news after all…

          Circular logic at its finest.

        • @infinite_ass@leminal.space
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          -389 months ago

          I didn’t see anybody die of covid. 2 relatives died after getting the shot tho, of apparently unrelated cause.

          Tell me what to believe.

          • m-p{3}
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            29 months ago

            The statistics and the science, not the anecdotes and inadequate sample size.

          • Carighan Maconar
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            99 months ago

            Ugh, that’s rough.

            That being said, like you said, people die. I can’t imagine how shitty it feels but given how the COVID vaccine is the most-empirically-tested-and-documented vaccine and as a result of it’s absolutely insane number uses uses (beaten only by the likes of Aspirin and Ibuprofene and so on), it’s hopefully understandable that we not only know but know with beyond-certainty that it’s side effects are insanely rare and extremely mild.

            The reason people can extremely rarely die from a vaccination (and then it happens ~directly after getting it!) is a reaction to the actual injection, not what you get injected with. This has happened in the past, it’s just extremely improbably. There’s also the chance of an allergic reaction but for most healthy adults we would know about this as COVID would be far from our first vaccine we’re getting, and with multiple billions of uses, we know that the COVID vaccine as a whole has no allergic interactions beyond standard ones.

            That’s not to downplay your loss, sorry if it sounds that way - english is not my primary language. Not at all. Just trying to illustrate how impossible it’d be for COVID to have a lethal effect without millions~tens-of-millions showing this, simply because we have such an amount of data points.

            That is to say, someobody could get a vaccine shot, then go home, and fry themselves an egg in a new pan they bought on the way home. There is a multiple orders of magnitude higher chance of poisoning from the pan because of an undocumented chemical in the coating than from the shot. We don’t have that much data on any particular pan, not even IKEA ones. Orders of magnitude less data.

              • @locuester@lemmy.zip
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                59 months ago

                You’re not alone. I also didn’t see either of those things, or know anyone that died from it.

                I’m also not denying those things exist, I’m simply affirming your reality.

              • Carighan Maconar
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                29 months ago

                Hrm, the full ERs were easy to find though, news were coming up multiple times a day which hospital is rejecting patients and of doctors and nurses collapsing from 40-80 hours continuous work.

                Mass graves… trickier. We tend to not want to be faced with mass deaths in general, which is why we tend to not glorify this as much as we do personal death. They were in the news though, and of course travel to any poorer country and they were/are easy to find.

                • @infinite_ass@leminal.space
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                  -79 months ago

                  We were discussing “seeing with your own eyes” vs “being told what to think by various propaganda organs”. The latter being less good.

      • @john89@lemmy.ca
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        39 months ago

        Trust me. I’ve been along live enough to recognize that if people don’t want to believe something, then they won’t.

      • Omega
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        109 months ago

        I knew three people who died from COVID and another after they recovered from COVID, unfortunately unless it’s their direct family they would just assume ‘theyre just making it all out to be covid’

        I assume most people would blame social media for this, but here’s my c/unpopularopinions take, it’s inevitable with a profit oriented news platform, where they try to scaremonger in both ‘we are all going to die’ and ‘government is putting chips in our bloodstream’ directions

        In other nations, unless a blunder by government policy, they werent as affected by the anti vaccine shenanigans, even though they were as affected by social media and such

        • @Fredselfish@lemmy.world
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          89 months ago

          Dude my grandmother died of Covid in August pf 2020, and yet my father and his sister who is a nurse and gave her the dease arge to this day weather covid is bullshit or not. AT HER funeral they argued about mask mandates. Maga brains will watch millions die from covid, and polio and still call it fake news.

        • Carighan Maconar
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          39 months ago

          And then there’s my ex who after COVID took nearly 9 months (!) to get normal use of their lung again. Fuck people who go all “COVID is bullshit”.