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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   33193 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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There were honestly so many retcons over the course of COVID that I lost track. I can only hope someone more spiteful than me collected them all lest they be memoryholed. I at least remember when the WHO edited the definition of 'herd immunity' to exclude natural immunity after the vaccine came out, or when magazines retroactively attached prefaces to articles about how leaky vaccines might make diseases more virulent explaining this did not apply to COVID for unspecified reasons

I recall one genuinely intelligent friend who told me in late 2020 that "once the vaccines come everyone just needs to get jabbed and this will all be over" and in early 2022 "you should have gotten vaccinated because that's a fixed viral load whereas the virus in the wild might give you any sort of load and then you don't actually know what happened to you."

My impression from this and similar interactions: Arguments are soldiers and covid vaccinations are primarily a tribal signal.

In late 2020, I believed the same thing as your friend, that vaccines will stop transmission. It was very reasonable belief at the time, especially given the vaccine trial data. Had it actually been true, vaccine mandates would have made much more sense, and I wouldn’t have had minded them. Too bad it turned out false.

Yeah. I won't presume to claim that everyone who was optimistic about vaccines or supportive of mandates did not actually believe in the efficacy of these things; I just find it startling that some who were proven evidently wrong still retain their absolute certainty about it and simply muster new arguments in favor of old propositions. It's not impossible to do so with internal consistency, but I doubt that most are so consistent and suspect instead that they align their beliefs and arguments with whatever their tribal identity favors.

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