I agree with “outsized influence”.
But I don’t think zealous anti-vaxxers, gun nuts, or pro-lifers are “statistically tiny” either. They are all minorities, and they have more voice than their numbers deserve, but they’re not that rare. Perhaps this distinction is somewhat nitty on my part, but I think it is true.
Can someone help me rebut this video? Seems suspect.
Shared by someone I hoped would be better.
that’s not really the only reason. there’s also a sea of misinformation that’s fueling political dissent in uk (where johnson also lied about covid) and germany (where merkel didn’t).
There’s a study out demonstrating that vaccinated people with breakthrough infections are significantly less likely to transmit the virus than infected unvaccinated people, even when viral loads are identical.
The study followed 24,706 healthcare workers and observed 161 infections, combining data for both AZ and Pfizer vaccines. The viral loads as measured by PCR amplification were lower among the vaccinated, but not significantly so (P = 0.53):
But then they actually tried to culture the virus from the samples:
An identical viral load is not as infective in a vaccinated person. The reason for this is explained here:
https://twitter.com/SmallRedOne/status/1425133972523257863
The averages were 84.9% infectious for unvaccinated and 68.6% for vaccinated (P = 0.005) so being vaccinated makes 1 in 6 COVID-positive people not infectious when they otherwise would have been - obviously on top of making it much less likely to get infected in the first place.
Cloudy skies, low evaporation
Yep. Without Trump lying about it, there would be a spirit of bipartisan cooperation and amity, just like with every other big policy issue these days.
Yeah that tweet is very much missing the point imo. The problem with Nate’s tweet is that it assumes that conservatives are acting according to some coherent ideology. US conservatism now has exactly 2 heuristics: 1) is someone trying to make me (or by extension America) do something, in which case I’m against it, or 2) does it trigger the libs, in which case I’m for it. That’s it. Everything in the conservative response to COVID can be traced back to that. It’s not really Trump running the show. He got booed at his own rally the other day in Alabama for telling people they should take the vaccine!
what is he wrong about
I think you’re reading way too much into it
The fact that the conservative id is incoherent means that its evolution is highly contingent. A normal GOP president would have had some kind of actual plan to rally political support behind the Global War on COVID and pin political blame on the bureaucracies for failing to protect us. What’s unique about Trump is that he’s both a sociopathic narcissist, but also hopelessly inept at actually running the federal government. I mean, the whole point of not having any principles is so that you can take the most advantageous position whenever you want. How do you end up on the wrong side of Safe and Effective Wonder Drug vs. Maybe You’ll Just Die and That’s the Way It Is without being able to blame principle??
Concretely, a smart GOP president would have gotten vaccines approved before Election Day, and would have made those vaccines broadly mandatory long, long ago. They would have done half a dozen things of contestable legality to respond to the crisis. It would be a huge political firestorm. The irony is that people think COVID is “politicized,” but what’s actually striking is how depoliticized our response has been, at least in the conventional sense. What we have instead is a culture war that plays out in tweeted clips of rural school board meetings and the deworming aisle of your local ag-supply store. The politics you learn in grade school with bills becoming law and agencies making regulations is actually noticeably absent. The people and the bureaucracy are mostly just muddling their way through with no real leadership. As a result, you’re seeing ideologies being shaped purely by the ~engagement~ algorithms on Facebook and YouTube and Twitter, not by actual politics.
I won’t pretend to understand the exact pathology of the antivaxxers, but you can see the mechanism in the way the online left has somehow made closing the schools indefinitely their #1 issue elements of the online left have become vocally attached to school shutdowns while becoming less intensely concerned with bars and restaurants being open. (Edited to be less inflammatory.) A year ago, there was at least some consciousness that closing schools was a last resort, and nonessential businesses should be closed first, but that’s faded away now, outcompeted by the variant that gets to post pics of the occasional photogenic 7-year-old who died of COVID. But the key to this whole dynamic is that it’s all bullshit. There’s barely even the pretense that any of this discourse is linked up in any way to actual policy. You just believe whatever feels best to believe, then get super-angry about it on social media.
lol
Edit: I’m still lol’ing at the edited version.
Jesus Christ bob that’s some dishonest bs
This post could be one of those terrible WaPo pieces where goofy blurs out the face at the end. Ridiculous false equivalence and both sides nonsense.
Personally, I find there’s only so much energy for fighting back. Of course I would love to close bars, I wanted to close everything and just pay people to stay home. But given limited time in the day most people will of course focus on schools because that’s where their kids go and that’s who they care most about.
The anti-vax movement used to have a big chunk of its base in the far-left up to 2012 or so. It was a weird coalition of woo-woo crystal healing lefties and also rightwing guys with BS religious exemptions. It was always a fringe movement on either side because no one was really all that worked up about childhood vaccinations. COVID forced the issue into the mainstream; everyone has to have a “take” on basic science now.
It’s possible that Trump could have embraced vaccination and taken the virus seriously early on and influenced some people, but this is an issue that plays so well into the paranoiac style of modern conservatism that it’s inevitable Republicans would become anti-vaxx. The government is lying to you, big corporations are lying to you, do your own research, etc. I certainly don’t think Trump is close to being the only reason COVID got politicized, it’s more like Trump is just riding the wave of mass idiocy and choosing policy positions based on what his facebook-addicted crowds want to hear.
Am I misremembering last year? Trump was very pro vaccine, wasn’t he? He was always bragging about how quickly they were getting done, bought a whole bunch of doses when it wasn’t at all clear that they’d be ready for another few years.
Where is this notion that Trump caused people to be antivax coming from? Just the general idea that he played down Covid as a whole?
I wouldn’t say “very” pro-vaccine. He could have gone much harder for it.
And even if we grant that, it would have been buried among the noise of everything he was wrong about (musing about bleach treatments, “everyone who wants a test can get a test”, “we have the virus under control”, etc.)
I think he more followed than led initially.
They made him say that stuff. If you pay close attention to the coded messages, he was telling everyone not to get the vaccine because it had the kidnapped kids in it. You have to do your own research bub.
