I’m not much for Pit rants but I need to get this off my chest.
For all those who are able to get the vaccine and refuse to do so, I hope covid gets them and takes them out so they aren’t a problem anymore.
All they are doing is putting our most vulnerable at risk. If they don’t care about other people, I can’t bring myself to give a shit about them.
I feel better. Thank you for indulging me.
On the bright side, the virus will quickly burn through that population. On the not so bright side, I worry about the next variant that might render all that hard work in developing the vaccine completely useless. We’re a variant or two from having a nightmare virus that kills us off like the Black Death.
So you’re saying there’s a chance I’ll be able to repurpose my costume from last Halloween?
Absolutely.
I dig it, btw
The quicker it burns through them, the sooner the virus will have nowhere to go to mutate.
It’s always mutating - every new person it infects, the virus tries a new trick. It’s just a matter of which variants can compete with other variants. It’s no surprise that the wild virus came from China, no surprise that the worst variant came from India. You’ve got basically 1/3 of the world’s population in those two countries, and the virus had a lot of opportunities to present a potent version of itself. What I worry about is that the U.S., with its large population and large numbers of unvaccinated people, could be the place that creates the variant from hell.
^^ My concern as well. But it’s those who just think that since many others are vaccinated, they’ll protect them. Meanwhile we get an even more brand new variant— I dunno, the Omega variant— that requires three vaccinations. Another lock-down, unvaxxed protests…
Just today (July 19), I read some Letters to the Editor in the Los Angeles Times expressing similar sentiments – Here’s an excerpt from one of them, by M. C. in Sherman Oaks:
England dropped the last major tranche of lockdown restrictions yesterday, so naturally a bunch of idiots came out to protest against vaccinations.
I think it’s pretty clear that the UK’s freedom day is going to turn out to be an unmitigated disaster, which will be obvious in a matter of weeks.
It’s obvious now. The new spike is well-advanced (I’m assuming this is partly football-driven, but I haven’t researched that), and the PM and Chancellor are now self-isolating after the freaking Health Secretary tested positive for COVID.
And that was before “Freedom Day”.
This. The Trumpist assholes who refuse to get vaccinated (because “free-dumb”) are basically virus-mutation labs who pose an existential risk to everyone else. I’d be fine with it if we could be assured that it would kill them off before spawning dangerous mutations, but there’s no guarantee of that.
Got into an argument with someone a few days ago who insisted that all the positive COVID results for asymptomatic people were false positives. “How come no one ever gets the flu but has no symptoms?”
It’s because we don’t tend to test people who don’t have any symptoms except in extraordinary circumstances, dumbass. If you catch the flu but don’t have any symptoms, how would you know and why would you test for it? Asymptomatic carriers of infectious diseases may not be a majority but they’re hardly unknown.
For a comparison to COVID-19, you’d have to go back to the last global health scare in which lots of asymptomatic people got themselves tested: HIV/AIDS. And lo and behold, there were lots of HIV-positive results for people who had no symptoms at all, some of whom never developed any.
I think this attitude is unnecessarily harsh. I hate the trumpist anti-vaxxers too, who think not getting vaxxed is a triumph against the libs or something, but there are other reasons people don’t get vaccinated.
Full disclosure: my wife has not gotten vaccinated yet. She’s not a trumpy (she hates him with a passion) or an anti-vaxxer otherwise. She’s been very responsible with mask-wearing and other Covid protocols thoughout the pandemic. She almost got vaxxed when she took our 15 yo to get the shot as soon as it was available to him, but she chickened out.
Her reasoning is that she feels it was too rushed into use with insufficient testing. I disagree with her on this. Yes, I know all the arguments against this. She keeps sending me articles about someone who became paralyzed or got a dangerous clot soon after getting the shot, saying “See? See?” We’ve had many discussions that have come to argument, but she’s holding her ground for now. I’ve stopped pushing her on it since it does no good.
If anyone has advice for me on how I can convince her please share, because unlike the OP I’d like to keep her around for awhile!
Since this is The Pit, I want to quote this infuriating (but possibly just nutso) post from the “Now that I’m vaxxed” thread. 
My bold.
“What’s the difference?”
Um… multiple millions of people dead (that we’ve been able to count). Probably multiples more. And more dying every day. THAT’S the difference.
Well, I immediately think, “ignorant and uneducated”. Small Pox killed millions but, after the vaccine was spread worldwide, it has been over 40 years since the last reported case. Polio killed and crippled millions of children but, after the vaccine was spread worldwide, the last reported case in the United States was also over 40 years ago. Anyone who thinks vaccines are “poison” just because they heard and saw garbage on the Internet deserves their fate. Natures’s law of “natural selection” i s good one.
Yeah, @Mr_Hoogly’s stupefying ignorance & petulance needs a direct calling out. Not a single goddamn excuse he used is reality-based. It’s just stream of irrational nonsense.
You can send her the articles showing that 99% of people killed by Covid were unvaccinated. For every blood clot there are hundreds if not thousands of deaths from not being vaccinated.
Or, if you trend this way, get into a screaming, crying argument about how you don’t want to lose her just because she was fearmongered into avoiding the one thing that could save her.
Yeah, I’ve tried logic and facts. No good so far.
Like I said it’s come to argument (though not quite the crying and screaming stage) and it hasn’t worked. She tends to get stubborn and hunker down if I try to push her too much on something, so I’ve stopped pushing her on it for now.
My parents are elderly (78 and 81). They will not get the vaccine because their primary care provider cannot “strongly recommend” the vaccine. I wasn’t there to hear the conversation, but if that is what he said, he should have his medical license revoked. Of course, they watch Fox so that might not have been what he said but what they heard. They also attend a very conservative church which I’m sure is filled with other elderly, non-vaccinated folks. It’s only a matter of time…