Gee, are we that smart?
You kmow that the unvaxxed aren’t all conservatives, right?
African Americans are the largest demographic group of unvaxxed people. Hispanics aren’t far behind. This is not a Republican Demographic. In New York, only 28% of the Black poulation is vaccinated.
The next big split in vaccination is age. Young people are far less likely to vaccinate than are older people. Most of those college students chanting ‘fuck Joe Biden’ at football games are not primarily Republican.
It’s certainly true that there is more vaccine hesitancy on the right. I suspect that’s because everything is political now, and Democrats/Liberals are in power. Remember the vaccine hesitancy on the left while Trump was still President?
Anyway, the primary difference in vaccination rates appears to be race, unfortunately.
Anyway, as someone trying to get more conservatives to vaccinate, I have to say thst this constant politicization of the issue is not helpful.
So, it’s them explicitly extending to CoVid the whole narrative of “we only voted for Trump because Hillary called us deplorable”.
Damn. I need to somehow convince the Right Wingers that it would greatly trigger and offend me to receive large cash donations.
I think it’s more of a ‘I told you so’ that no one wants to tell. Basically:
Blue: You need this vaccine or you will die
Red: Never will I support your side, no vaccine for me, or mask either
Blue, Please reconsider
Red: Die Blue person Die, I would rather die then go blue
Blue: One last chance
Red: cough, cough, can’t breath
Blue: So sorry
Red: (choking - on death bed), I won, there is one less blue, I didn’t convert so I didn’t add to the number of blue, and now I can die, you lose
Blue RIP Red, RIP.
You are telling this to the wrong people. We know that. You need to go to Breitbart.com and tell them that.
At this point, the Republican death cult has no organizing principles beyond the two that Trump gave them:
- Avoid responsibility at all costs.
- Own the libs.
As long as libs are promoting vaccines as the responsible choice, being antivax lets Republicans accomplish both goals. They’re literally willing to die in order to accomplish these goals, and to sacrifice their own families. Death cult.
The genius of the Breitbart piece is how it upends that narrative. Look, Breitbart says: you don’t have to feel responsible for killing grandma! The evil libs made you do it! If you take the vaccine, you thwart their plan, and you OWN THE LIBS!!!
Fuckin whatever it takes. If the cultists want to think taking the vaccine somehow outmaneuvers libs, I say we shrug, grin sheepishly, and say, “You got us! PWNED!!!”
No, it isn’t. And since the o.p. is about a far-right conservative commentator whinging about how “Stern and the left” are using some Jedi-mindfuck reverse psychology to somehow persuade conservatives to not get vaccinated, I guess the “constant politicization” is on the left, eh? They’ve sure done a job convincing right-wing bloggers and influencers to persuade conservatives that the COVID-19 pandemic is a hoax and that vaccines are some government plot to…do something.
Man, if ‘The Left’ is so persuasive, why did they bother with all that #Occupy Wall Street bullshit that did fuck all to rein in investment banks and financial institutions?
Stranger
Kaiser says 45 percent (compared to 56 percent for NY State whites).
As for Republicans, the statistics aren’t as clear because hardly anyone is asked that at time of vaccination. But the gap between Trump counties and Biden counties is greater (40 percent to 53 percent):
And - comparing counties surely underestimates the Trumper - Biden lover split because lots of Trump voters live in Biden counties and vice-versa.
There are traditionally plenty of Democrats who distrust the products of scientific research. For whatever reason, we are seeing a big political gap with COVID vaccines that we might not see with, say, opposition to GMO seeds.
This graph shows how silly Sam’s distraction is
And here’s a chart showing percentage vaccinated cross-referenced to percentage voting for Trump, county by county:
I’d really like to see the source data for that one.
Look, there is no doubt that there are more conservatives than liberals among the unvaxxed. But it’s more complex than that. For one thing, Republicans tend to be more rural, so it may be a sign more of a rural/urban split than an ideological one, at least partially. Also, many of the red states have large Black and Hispanic populations, and they are way behind everyone else in vaccinations.
Here in Alberta, we have the lowest vaccination rate in the country, but it’s not that far behind the rest of the country. And we have a lot of conservatives.
There is a weird bump in the data on age. Generally the younger you are the less likely to be vaccinated, which makes some sense. But there’s a weird dip - 40-50 year olds are less likely to vaccinate than either 30-40 or 50-60. So, Gen-X basically. I think that’s true in the U.S. as well. I have no idea why.
If your idea of how to improve vaccination rates is just to browbeat and mock conservatives, you’re missing a whole lot of other people that aren’t getting vaxxed for reasons other than the political team they play for.
The vaccine didn’t happen during that man’s presidency. It may have been being developed, but there was no opportunity for “leftists” to not get it. I got it pretty early, in March '21.
No.
We’re not that smart. We’re also not that stupid. But we’re definitely not that smart.
I mean, this is the Democratic party. It doesn’t “execute plans” or “organize” or “agree.” Those activities are all beyond our capabilities.
Oh for fucks sake. “Everything is political now”? Oh I guess COVID was just randomly politicized equally by both sides for no reason!
“Everything’s political now” is bullshit PR work for the people who deliberately made the issue political and killed millions of people and forced us to shut down parts of our lives for years.
We know exactly why COVID “is political”, it’s because it was deliberately politicized by Trump in order to cover up his inept failure at handling it - and worse, the fact that he probably didn’t even want to handle it because he thought it would kill more democrats than republicans. And we know that there are tens of millions of cultists who will gobble that shit up, who would fight a culture war against the idea that 1+1=2 if their media/propaganda sphere told them to.
And we know there are people like you, who try to give an air of intellectualism when desperately trying to defend this malfeasance by implying that, oh, things are just political now, no one in particular can be blamed.
No, not really. I’m sure you’re going to take Harris’ quote at the debates out of context. She was saying - quite reasonably - that if one of Trump’s appointees pushed through any vaccines before the scientists thought it was ready, she would be skeptical of it. That she wouldn’t trust Trump or his administration to necessarily deliver a safe vaccine when he thought his election/political life depended on getting it out early, that she would look to what the scientists and other countries were saying. This is a perfectly reasonable and justifiable stance. It is not “vaccine hesitancy”, it is concern over deliberate political sabotage of the vaccine approval process.
It’s nothing at all like “Bill gates wants to put his mind control chips in you!” or “I don’t need a vaccine for a virus I don’t have!” or “I’m not gonna do it because people who knows something told me to do it!” or all of the absolutely bat shit stupid reasons that the people who have politicized the vaccine are giving.
So here’s what this article seems like to me: the republican propaganda network realizes at this point that COVID denialism is not going to work out well for them - approval ratings for the governors who proudly encouraged COVID are tanking, republicans are disproportionately dying, etc.
But they can’t just say “hey, we were wrong, get vaccinated!” - to these people, admitting you were wrong, changing your mind, or displaying any sort of growth as a person whatsoever is a great weakness and one of the worst things you can do as a person.
So how can you start to get your people to start taking vaccines without admitting you were wrong? Oh, well it was always an evil liberal conspiracy to make you not get the vaccine! It was their fault so many of us died! Since they don’t want us to take the vaccine, the worst thing we can do to them is take it! Everyone take the vaccine to own the libs!!!
I could see this being a feeler for this sort of strategy. Because the reality is that you cannot appeal to their reason, you cannot appeal to their care for their fellow man, you can only appeal to their spite for those they hate, because that is all they have. So you have to try to make them think that taking the vaccine is spiting the liberals.
“Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury…”
Stranger
And none of us have said this is our plan. The “leftists” (i.e. the center to center-right in the US) have been falling over backwards trying to accommodate these people. We give facts. We try emotional appeals. We research ways to get them to listen. It’s just that, human nature being what it is, frustrated people will lash out.
This thread is about how some right wingers are trying to spin their high antivax numbers into being the fault of thewse “leftists.” Even they realize that the way their antivaxxers are acting is mind-numbingly stupid. So they fall back on their usual scapegoat: It must be the liberals and Democrats making these people act this way! Then they use the frustration mentioned above as proof of some sort of conspiracy.
They ignore the real cause. The Left has always said this isn’t a political issue. It’s the Right that pushes this “can’t ever agree with the libs” stuff. It is their side that decided to use conspiracy theories to motivate political opposition. It is their side that spread the idea that the virus was no big deal, that masks didn’t work, that the vaccines were not safe since they came out after Trump lost, and so on. And now they can’t but the horse back in the barn.
This is stupid. It makes no sense. It is a mockworthy idea. And, since it’s coming from those who accept that vaccines work, it’s safer to laugh at. And, when you look at the sorry state of the current situation, sometimes you need the laugh to keep going.
As for the other antivaxxers and vaccine hesitant groups? The numbers show much better progress in overcoming these issues. Since their concerns were based on something real and not partisan BS, reality also helps allay their fears.
Libtards: “Fox news is a shockingly biased and selective source upon which to base your view of the world. If you rely on it you will be profoundly ignorant”
Right wing idiot: : “No it isn’t. Oh and by the way, how come I didn’t get told about this very important statistic? I blame the libtards!”
Why isn’t the conservative echo chamber designed to keep us outraged and keep us from hearing anything that contradicts what they’ve sold to us telling us about this thing that contradicts what they’ve sold to us!? IT MUST BE THE LIBERALS!
As I understand it, the liberal idea of how to improve vaccination rates is to employ teams of scientists to review data from vaccine studies, approve those that were demonstrated to be safe and effective, encourage (and if necessary, mandate) measures that would keep people from getting Covid-19 until they could be vaccinated, set up a schedule so that the people most at risk would be vaccinated first, create a network of sites where anyone could get vaccinated at no cost, hold press briefings and run PSAs encouraging people to check with their doctors and get vaccinated.
Sounded like a good plan to me.
It also reflects Republican politicians having antivaccine/government-can’t-control-us views much more commonly than Democrats. And even when they recognize the value of immunization as many do, they’re far too willing to pander to antivax elements in their constituency. Sen. Mitch McConnell, who’s firmly pro-vax, has been notably silent on calling out fellow politicians hampering the vaccination effort.
Minority resistance to vaccination, while a problem, has been exaggerated i.e. in Texas, where blacks aren’t lagging all that much behind whites in getting vaccinated.
Nobody’s idea of how to get more people vaccinated is solely to rag on right-wingers (straw man anyone?). And they give as good as they get in the vituperation department.
There’s a ton of patient, civil effort to provide good information on benefits and minimal risks of Covid vaccination. People who allow political differences and hurt feelings to cause serious risk to their own safety are dopes. And it’s hard to remedy stupid in the middle of a pandemic.