News

Holy shit I thought this was only about Covid. These absolute idiots are breaking herd immunity for the entire field of virus based diseases.

Fucking sucks for immunocompromised people as well I'm sure

Well, given that the vast majority of these folks are aligned to a particular political party.... And it's an election year during covid/flu/rsv season...

Carry on!

Ever since April 2020, whenever I hear something about vaccines, I just assume the worst.

I never got rid of my mask or hand sanitizer. Keep some in your car too. We're all responsible for our own germs because culturally and legally, your right to life is considered less important than the right to stupidity.

Only 19% of people have gotten the latest lastest Covid vaccine.

The first one was giant walk in clinics where you just told them your name and address. Completely free. The largest vaccine drive in US history.

The second round was at pharmacies and some popup spots. Free but they bill via insurance.

The third was at pharmacies only and free only if you didn't have insurance.

I know I am speculating here but is it possible, just remotely possible that trying to reduce costs in the short run by managed inconvenience and using crony capitalism is a factor in the decline of vaccination? And furthermore costs us as a society more with more deaths, more disability, more sick time taken, less time for students in school, less overally human happiness than just doing the way that proved it worked amazingly well 2 years ago. Could it be that by making things harder for people they are less likely to do it? Do humans really respond to incentives and short term cost savings do not always translate to greater long term prosperity?

Oh man this is like way too wild. No way I am right about any of this.

A lot of people here are claiming something "like this is a problem that only affects these idiots". Sadly, that's not the case. A number of these vaccines are only roughly 80% effective. The efficacy of these lies in herd immunity, where the 20% of people who did get the vaccine, but are not protected, will never encounter the disease because the other 80% can't get it to spread it to them.

Let's say you need 70% of people to be protected to maintain herd immunity. Then just 10% of the population needs to be idiots, and the disease spreads to the 30% that isn't protected. Of that 30%, 20 points are people who were not idiots and got vaccinated, but unfortunately are not protected. The idiots will get sick, but twice as many not-idiots will get sick too. Unfortunately, for some of these diseases, the idiots will be hurting many more people than themselves.

The affected people are not necessarily immunocompromised. For example, after two doses of the mumps vaccine, 88% of people are immune. Immunity decreases with time, so the proportion that's immune is lower than that. Let's guess at 80%. You, the person reading this, can be a normal healthy person who got the mumps vaccine, and you have a 1 in 5 chance that you're not immune. Those are some pretty big odds.

Do we have that many darwin awards to give out?

We can't drown out botnets without botnets of our own. Information war is war, but lacks attrition, so the opponents never actually get defeated.

So, we can either accept this status quo, or we can escalate. But I don't think we can just try harder, we're givin her all she's got, Jim. It's not like medical professionals are known for having tons of free time and extra morale to burn away on twitter.

So, we need technical assistance, of some sort.

Hah. Needless.

I’ve come to accept that I’ll have to work until I’m dead. So one thing that doesn’t make me upset is less people. Specifically less people to take my job—younger people.

So, anti-vaxers, if you really wanna pwn me, you’ll make sure your kids live long enough to take my job.

We need a new disfiguring disease that scares the shit out of people. We were too good and eliminated smallpox. We nearly eliminated polio and measles. Monkeypox failed (thank you, doctors, scientists, and everyone who got vaccinated!)

...So now we need a new one that causes people to either get extremely fucked up and live, or extremely fucked up and then die horribly, and slow enough to warn people in their communities.

Apparently, a subset of the population cannot remember the olden days, and vaccines in schools aren't compulsory anymore.

These people have gone too long without people they love dying in front of them from things like prolonged diarrhea lung, mucus intoxication and blood tears. Also the holocaust survivors and WW2 soldiers have mostly passed away.

We have a collective goldfish memory and right wing governments constantly sabotaging public education. We also lack empathy on the whole. Civilization doesn't feel like it can sustain much longer.

Looks at notes: We'll need to get that up to hundreds of thousands before anyone even starts to think about doing something about it.