Just because that’s how the right makes decisions doesn’t mean it’s how the left does.
I’m sure that’s true for some things. Not this one. There are, after all, a number of Republican governors who have done great jobs in combating the pandemic.
I quoted pro-vaccine statements by Trump to him (give the guy some credit, at least) and he ignores them so I don’t know. It would be nice if Trump came out more loudly for vaccines, but the beast is out and maybe Trump feels that some of his anti-vaxx supporters would turn on him.
I agree with this. I’m all over the map politically, but anti-vaxx was always a fringe, tinfoil wearing, small minority of society. Republicans got their kids vaccinated.
The degree to which Covid has turned a large segment of our society into anti vaxxers is astounding to me. I see no other explanation than trump.
The bottom line is that it’s finally sinking in that they can’t manage the missing step “2. Sweep the past year and a half of Republican denial/misinformation/sabotage down the memory hole” in this plan:
- Blame Biden for COVID resurgence.
- ???
- Profit!
Perhaps it would be best if you read a post before responding. V said very clearly that he is for vaccination only not very loudly.
If Trump had won he might have come out for vaccinations more loudly, since he wouldn’t have the problem of low death rates making Biden look good. And I think it is a mistake to attribute too much rationality to anti-vaxx Trump supporters.
Actually I have to admit, that if,
- Pfizer had released their postive vaccine results before the election
and - Trump had won re-election
I might have joined the vaccine hesitants at least at first. Trump was clearly exerting undue political influence on the FDA and CDC, and it was entirely possible that he could have forced them to accept out a vaccine that wasn’t fully vetted to give Trump a win before the election.
My hesitancy would have evaporated once European countries started approving them but I would have been skeptical about recommendations from a Trumpified CDC.
I actually suspect that Pfizer held off announcing their results until a few days after the election specifically to allay the fears of people like me.
ISTM that by then they were invested in the narrative that “the only folks in real danger are the old and ill people who are past their expiration date already”.
I think—hope—that the conservative mindset is starting to turn around on the subject of COVID vaccination, but the major tipping point is probably going to depend on when/whether they can find somebody to blame for the fact that they’re not already vaccinated (other than themselves and their conservative opinion leaders, that is).
Or perhaps if they can get the vaccine under duress, so to speak, while still whining about having been “forced” into it by liberal “totalitarianism” requiring vaccine passports or whatnot.
I read the post as saying Trump is for vaccination but not loudly, and I was asking whether @Voyager’s friend is against vaccination, which isn’t clear from the story (at least not to me).
Even if I misunderstood, it’s rude and unnecessary to accuse me of not reading the post.
I hope you’re wrong. If they’d announced it before the election, Trump might have talked it up as a great success and then his supporters would have been more likely to get it, which would have made way more of a difference than a few people like you.
Having watched my dad die of COVID in the hospital, I’d have to agree with this. While it was emotionally draining to see, from a purely intellectual POV, it wasn’t much. His respiration just slowed and slowed and eventually stopped. It was actually pretty peaceful.
You will seldom be wrong if you understand that conservatives will deny any phenomenon that implies they have a duty to help others, but they will jump all over anything that will permit them to demonize someone else. Additionally they minimize problems that happen under Republican administrations.
COVID: widespread pandemic. Admitting it’s serious implies admitting we have a duty to others in society, and it also suggests that a Republican president fucked up something very important. Therefore COVID must be denied or minimized at all costs.
Ebola: Not a pandemic. No civic duty is implied, so conservatives don’t need to deny its existence. Quite the contrary, it’s a fantastic opportunity for them to raise hysteria over a dark disease of dark people from darkest Africa, and blame a black Democrat president for it. Ebola really was a gift from heaven for Republicans, so it’s unsurprising that they swarmed on it like they did.
When you’re trying to understand conservative behavior, don’t look for a complicated explanation until you’ve ruled out racism, selfishness, and xenophobia. It’s seldom necessary to look farther than that.
I doubt this has any bearing on it. Precisely 0.000001% of Americans ever saw an Ebola patient with active symptoms.
Conservatives wanted to blame Obama for a scary disease from Africa, so they seized on the lurid media description of the symptoms.
Conservatives want to absolve Trump of screwing up COVID, and refuse to admit they might have to wear a mask to protect a stranger. So they seize on anecdotes of people saying “it’s just a common cold”, ignoring all the ventilator horror stories.
And note, conservatives didn’t completely ignore COVID. When Trump talked about travel bans, conservatives were rabidly enthusiastic about “guarding against the COVID threat”, because it afforded a chance to torment outsiders. And they’re very serious about COVID when the conversation turns to figuring out how to blame China. But when protective measures inevitably turned to them having to do their duty to their fellow citizens, and for their President to show up and do his damned job… only then did their enthusiasm wane.
This is 100% about who they want to demonize and who they want to lionize. It’s nothing deeper than that, they’re just extremely shallow and selfish people.
I was a bit nervous myself, but just about that time the pharm companies took out full page ads in the Times saying they were not releasing anything until the studies were done. That made me feel a lot better. I wonder (and I have zero evidence for this) whether they delayed the announcement a few days until after the election to tell the anti-science idiot to go screw himself.
My only quibble is that he’s not my friend - just some idiot on the interWebs. I don’t know if he is against vaccination in general, but he’s against Covid vaccination because there could be some awful side effect ten years from now. I tried to get him to present any sort of cost-benefit analysis where an unknown side effect that affects an unknown number of people an unknown time in the future is more dangerous than people dying now.
No luck.
I didn’t think you misread my post at all.
I doubt it. Back in September Trump was already encouraging people to believe that a COVID vaccine would be available before the election, in defiance of the more rational assessments of public health officials.
Trump was willing to “talk up” the success of a COVID vaccine (in a dishonestly exaggerated way that ultimately did more harm than good to public understanding of the issue, as usual for him) precisely as long as he thought it might be crucial to the success of his re-election, and no longer. I don’t think the timing of Pfizer’s report would have done jack-shit to change that.
And by the way,
To the extent that “particular brand of idiocy” refers to COVID vaccine refusal, it was foreseen before December 2020 by, for instance, Anthony Fauci on the basis of polling data.
Glad to know I didn’t misread it. Is he implying he would get the Covid vaccination if Trump has won? What was his rationale for that? It seems odd, but apparently he was right that some Democratic voters might have been reluctant in that scenario. It’s the same vaccines either way.
We can’t visit the alternate universe where Trump won the election to see if more Americans got the vaccine. If he’d been able to advertise it as his success and been publicised getting vaccinated, that might’ve encouraged some of his supporters to do the same.
If he’d foreseen it in Dec 2019 then I’d be impressed. It was pretty obvious how things were going by the end of last year.
Here’s another example of experts changing their advice due to fads and pressure from industry, rather than good science:
QtM clung to the old orthodoxy, and in time was proved correct.
I can’t tell, but I doubt he’d admit it openly because then it would be obvious that his reasons were spurious. My only clue was his assumption that I’d be against the vaccine if Trump had won.
Democratic reluctance I saw was due to being worried that the proper checks were skipped for political reasons. Perhaps some Democrats would have been hesitant, but I doubt the percentage would be anywhere near that of Republicans today.
He ran away, so I can’t ask further questions.
I drop in on the Fox ranter triumvirate from time to time (Carlson, Hannity and Ingraham), and I caught some of Trump’s Arizona rant yesterday.
They’re actually starting to talk as if COVID exists.
I think it’s because now that Biden has been in office for a few months, they can blame it on him.
Kind of like how the financial crisis of 2007-2008 became the “Obama Recession.”
Yeah, that’s weird. If he had the same sort of fears, that approval was hurried for political reasons, why wouldn’t he say so?
I agree.