We just got back from a cross-country train trip. We booked a roomette even on the daytime-only bit, because we were concerned enough to want to reduce exposure.
At a guess, I’d say less than 10% of the other passengers had masks on at any point. Probably less. The times we had to walk through the coach section, very few people had them on.
And even in Oregon / California, basically nobody wore masks in public. Except us weird Easterners.
A month earlier, in Florida, I think I literally saw one person wearing a mask the whole time. I think this probably helped us: any local person seeing us would assume we were insane, and keep his / her distance for safety reasons :).
I drive truck. When I stop at truck stops, I might see one or two others wearing masks. Of course, it was only slightly better during the worst of it, because the restaurants in the chains usually have Fox News on constantly.
I just talked to a relative who stated confidently that it has been proven that the vaccinations were utterly ineffective. I was too tired to ask her where she heard this news. As far as COVID is concerned, she only pays attention to “news” that confirm her anti-vaxxer beliefs. Sad!
I see this a lot online, too, and I’ve been trying to come up with a way to counter it in reasonable debate.
The trouble is that there’s a general idea that, say, polio vaccines or smallpox vaccines confer very close to 100% sterilizing immunity for life – and that a working COVID vaccine should/would do the same. While I understand and trust that polio and smallpox vaccines weren’t 100% sterilizing … I can’t explain in debate how you go from “a vaccine that confers (say) 80% protection from polio transmission” to “polio practically eradicated from public life”.
Every time a public figure gets COVID (especially a politician or double-especially a public health figure), that’s another arrow in the debate quiver for anti-vaxxers: “People still get COVID even after vaccination!”. “Getting COVID” is the pass/fail standard, while invoking “protection from infirmity or death” is seen as a cop-out. If a vaccine can’t get us back to the ground conditions of 2019, that vaccine “isn’t working”.
But that didn’t happen overnight. That took decades of vaccinating people and a particularly aggressive campaign in the late 80’s.
Also, if the other person is the one drawing the comparisons to polio, there’s nothing wrong with saying ‘but this isn’t polio’. OTOH, if they’re younger than 50 or 60, they probably don’t remember a time when polio wasn’t considered eradicated. I was born in 1980 and never considered polio a threat.
Personally, at this point in time, I’ve mostly given up on the whole debate. Anti-vaxxers are going to anti-vax and while I know there’s going to be some collateral damage (amongst vaccinated as well unvaccinated that would if they could but for whatever reason can’t be vaccinated) this will hopefully be a mostly self correcting problem as the people that choose not to get vaccinated are the ones most likely to get sick.
Lastly there’s this, which I think is probably one of the biggest issues and a better education and understanding of how science works through these novel problems would go a long way.
I’ve been at this point for months now. We’re recycling the same arguments over and over again. If the Anti-vaxxers and Anti-maskers haven’t understood it by now, they never will.
At this point, I just wonder how many million people would have to die before they’d stop and reconsider their convictions. If there’s another pandemic in the next decade, it’s going to be nasty, because all this crap is already built-in to the cultural wars. Every disease we discover from here on out will be another “Fauci plan to instill commiefascismmicrochips!”
Apparently the inactive polio vaccine currently used in the US is almost entirely non-sterilizing, and the CDC is actively considering bringing back the sterilizing weakened-virus vaccine which the vaccinated person CAN SHED and PASS ON and which can BECOME FULL STRENGTH AGAIN causing an outbreak because there is community transmission of polio in the US for the first time in decades. We switched to the safer non-sterilizing version in 2010 iirc.
This seems like a pretty drastic change, but drastic times demand drastic measures.
Well, we can say with certainly, the answer is ‘more than 6’.
More than 6 million people would have to die before they reconsider their convictions. We know that to be provable true (because more than 6 million people have already died).
Faith is belief in something that you cannot or have not personally proven by direct observation. Faith tells me the sun is going to come up tomorrow, and that drinking the water from my tap isn’t going to kill me. Faith tells me the bridge will hold me. I have faith in the COVID vaccine because I have faith in the nurse and the CDC and the drug trial process.
Calling faith a denial of observations is a misunderstanding of faith.
Points taken. I will note that these online challenges to “vaccines work” are almost exclusively U.S.-centric. In the U.S., polio virtually vanished within a decade and some Americans feel completely justified to ask aloud why the COVID vaccination effort isn’t having similar results (a decade not having yet passed notwithstanding).
“Before the dramatic drop off in new cases in the 80’s/90’s, the polio vaccine had been around in one form or another for 60 years. You’ll have to either give the covid vaccine a few decades to catch up or compare how well the covid vaccine is currently doing to how well the polio vaccine was doing in the 30’s.”
Or to shorten it a bit “the polio vaccine has been around for almost a century, the covid vaccine has only been around a few years so we’re still figuring it out.” In fact, that’s a great example of the tweet I posted earlier. People see all these issues with covid vaccines and assume the scientists don’t know what they’re doing (or lying to the public). However, they’re happy to blindly trust the polio vaccine even through it went through similar growing pains, they just didn’t see it, all they see is the end result.
Also interesting to note is that part of what helped push the vaccine forward was that polio targeted affluent kids, or said differently, it didn’t specifically target the poor.
At the centre of Lesser harms is an analysis of early attempts to develop a vaccine against polio. In spite of its relatively low impact in terms of overall mortality and morbidity, polio was seen as an especially threatening disease: it mainly killed or crippled children, was not related to poverty or poor sanitation, and nobody knew how it could be prevented
This virus was also notable for primarily impacting affluent children, making it a prime target for vaccine development, despite its relatively low mortality and morbidity
“This virus was also notable for primarily impacting affluent children, making it a prime target for vaccine development, despite its relatively low mortality and morbidity.”
What a snidely asinine statement.
Epidemics of polio broke out in industrialized countries in the late 19th and 20th centuries, so in that sense one could say that it had its most serious impact in relatively affluent societies, but it was hardly a disease of children from wealthy families.
And a disease that causes permanent paralysis in 1 of 200 infections does not have “low morbidity” by any sane definition.
The quoted passage is an example of Wikipedia editing by a moron.
Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers is maybe one of the most famous covidiots. This weekend as the Packers were playing against the Detroit Lions, I was amused by the thought that the Lions’ defensive line could maybe have each be handed a syringe full of of COVID vaccine. Rodgers might have moved around a bit more, and the Pack might not have lost the game.
The first polio vaccine came out in the 1950s. So in the 80s, the vaccine had been around for maybe 25 years. It has now been around for close to 70 years.
I won’t argue the rest of the article - beyond the fact that comparing the covid vaccine to polio vaccination is not the best comparison - it would be better compared to influenza vaccines, given the constant mutations, and likely reduction in severity versus full prevention.
Or bereft of legal support. The $430,000 raised for her legal defense in the Capitol insurrection case (she pleaded guilty) has surely run dry by now.
Another link describing Gold’s odyssey, including a photo of her and her underwear model, I mean, AFLDS communications director, inside the Capitol on Jan. 6:
So none of the parents in Beijing are thrilled with having online classes when the city’s education commission orders it. We teachers also are not happy with online classes. So, after being online from 7 November 2022 to 11 November 2022, everyone was happy that we got to go back to campus for in-person instruction.
Strike that. Evidently not everyone was happy about the campus being open again. One couple, parents of a student at my school, decided that, although both parents had tested positive and thus were on a stay-at-home order, still sent their child to the school. To the surprise of none, Friday’s mandatory nucleic acid testing of all students and staff had one positive (swabs from ten people are put into one vial for testing). Yesterday, the education commission ordered the school to go back to online classes effective 21 November 2022.
And it rolls on! Over the weekend, the city government ordered my school to close the campus, and for those of us living off campus to stay at home and self-monitor for seven days… A couple of the foreign teachers have already been sealed into their apartments by their neighborhood committees. My neighborhood committee just contacted me about an hour ago to add me on WeChat. I guess I’ll find out after lunch today if the wife and I are going to be prisoners at home.
Next person who tells me this virus is a hoax is getting quite the earful.
