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Views like your own do not seem uncommon to me, but they seem disconnected from common sense and I can't tell if I'm taking words too literally or if people have internalized so many weird perspectives on things that they've lost their clear-sightedness.
1: If somebody wins democratically, then that's democracy. If you dislike a democratic process, then you're arguing against democracy, and not for it. I can't make sense of rejecting a democratic result with the argument that something democratic is a threat to democracy.
2: I do not see anybody, anywhere, downplay the importance of vaccines and antibiotics. Not even when I follow your link. People dislike one specific vaccine (if you can even call it that), because it wasn't tested properly. And many of the connected companies have some shady histories. I don't even think it's relevant if these companies did anything bad or not, or if the vaccine is harmless or not. A large amount of people lost all trust in these companies and those who support them, and for perfectly valid reasons.
3: The correlation between IQ and ideology is weak, and it doesn't tell you which side is more correct.
Regarding 1: I don't know that I'm convinced by this. Suppose someone is the candidate of the "End Democracy Party." Someone who is pro-democracy could understandably be disappointed with their election. Of course, that would still be the democratic result, so their complaint is really with the populace that they have, that it is not a suitable one to attempt to maintain a democracy in.
Similarly, one could be disappointed with a decrease in the effectiveness in democratic governance. I think this was closer to what they were complaining about: that this indicates the need to win the "stupid vote," pointing to tangible harms wrought by people finding the wrong things appealing. "Democracy makes us listen to and appeal to the people with the bad opinions" is a valid critique of democracy, and so saying that that seems to be more the case than they once thought is an entirely reasonable sentiment.
2 is false. Vaccine skepticism in general has definitely risen since 2020 (the people putting in place mandates should really have considered the second order effects).
I'll in large part grant 3, though.
If a majority of people want to end democracy, I cannot think of an argument against it. If you're pro-democracy because you think the majorty is right, then you wouldn't be justified in stopping the majority from ending democracy. If you value democracy because it's correct, then you're also saying that you're wrong when the majority disagrees with you, which it would in this example. I can still save it, though. Suppose democracy was not about correctness, but rather about freedom. Then it would pain you to see people having the freedom to choose that they wouldn't want to be free anymore. But this choice imposes on the freedoms of those who still wants to be free. But if people say "I like democracy" when what they mean is "I like freedom", then people become confused and we reach the wrong conclusions, so it's important not to confuse ends and means. Democracy is not your highest value, it's something else which is unstated and which correlates with democracy.
Yes, but then it's not democracy which is optimized for, but rather "good opinions", which democracy once did better. But now we have a problem, for while I can agree with your take, there's no objective way to measure if we're correct or if we're mislead. For democracy used to be how we measured, and now we have made something out to be more important than democracy, which we have no way to measure.
Vaccine skepticism can be blamed on those who promoted the vaccines. They repeatedly acted like people who were out to mislead you and put you in danger, while stating the opposite. For instance, they said "These vaccines are completely safe", but also that neither these companies, nor the government, would be to blame if getting the vaccine went horribly wrong for you. "I promise you this is safe, but I take no responsibility for the consequences" is a statement which will make people distrust you. Now, this doesn't imply that the vaccine isn't safe, merely that it's reasonable and logical to doubt that it is. About 10 more things like this happened (documents being held back, people being told that herd immunity would occur, being being told that the vaccine prevented you from spreading or getting Covid, both claims which turned out to be false), etc etc etc.
So, again, even if the vaccine is perfectly safe, the only reasonable response to somebody repeatedly lying to you, and even trying to use political and legal pressure to force you to inject something in your body which hasn't even been properly tested, is resistance. It's not the counter-movements fault that people distrust vaccines, but the sheer incompetence of the main movement.
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RFK supporters I know personally are highly vaccine skeptical and believe in a kind of vaccine/autism link bailey. They do not support vaccinating kids for e.g. measles due to low death rates and are convinced that the only reason kids get so many vaccines is due to the pernicious influence of pharma companies. They are members of Facebook groups of hundreds of people where the consensus view aligns with their beliefs.
The vaccine schedule now includes hundreds of vaccines and the incentives are all screwed up. I think it's pretty reasonable to believe in vaccines as a technology in general and that a lot of them have been captured by special interests.
False. I count 32 doses recommended to all children from age 0 to 18, not counting a yearly flu vaccine and one dose of a covid vaccine.
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines-children/schedules/index.html
This is a perfect example of the belief set I am talking about. The RFK supporters I know believe that kids are getting tens of vaccines in a single day.
Okay. Which vaccines in particular do you believe in?
how many of these doses include multiple vaccines?
to be frank, it's asinine to claim someone "wrong" if they believe MMR is 3 vaccines instead of one
why wouldn't you count these?
"hundreds" is wrong, but so is "32" even if we accept 1 dose=1 vaccine which is hardly some sort of objective fact
Sure, we can break down dtap and mmr into three vaccinations. That brings the total to 48. Still a far cry from hundreds, so I don't see what's asinine about saying that hundreds is wrong. There's just no way you can torture the numbers to get to hundreds.
Simply because in my experience most kids don't get these on a regular basis.
they're on the schedule
hundreds is wrong, but so is 32
the number of vaccines on the CDC schedule for a child born today through age 18 is ~80
How is it 80? 48 I counted above, plus 18 flu, plus 2 covid makes 68.
boosters and multi year shots and "ask your doctor about RSV" means, in practicality, you should get the RSV "vaccine"
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What’s your experience?
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My mistake, I should have said dozens. I think I saw "hundreds" somewhere recently and internalized that for some reason.
The technology for smallpox vaccines could be totally sound, and the company that makes the shots puts too much mercury in them or something. A batch could be bad. Maybe the adjuvants are too strong. We have good heuristics for noticing when something causes noticeable immediate side effects, but not when something contributes to chronic stress. Maybe every shot contains one of the 32 arms of Exodia, and you need to catch them all to visit the shadow realm.
Children in the US are no longer vaccinated for smallpox because the disease is extinct.
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So... there's no actual vaccine that you "believe in", and your belief is strictly in the theoretical (but so far unattained) possibility of producing a good vaccine?
It's imminently reasonable to suspect that some vaccines are not manufactured well. That would be a very explanation for why 1) vaccines are a good technology that save lives 2) some people seem to be getting sick from them.
But there's no way to distinguish well manufactured and poorly manufactured vaccines?
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Let's not do the thing where the poster is directionally correct, but we're nitpicking the details. Yeah, it's not 100 shots, but it's a lot, and it's a lot more than before.
Let's flip it. Why should an infant be receiving Hep B and Covid vaccines? Why should they receive any vaccines that they didn't in 1990 (or whenever the Chicken Pox vaccine came out).
The post-1990s vaccines to have vanishingly little benefit and unquantified risk.
Wait a second. There is no "directionally correct" here - the poster said not 100 but "hundreds" and the true number is around 30. It's "directionally correct" in the sense that the sign is right, but that's about it. If he said "thousands", would that still be "directionally correct"?
And it's not a semantic nit, because we can mostly all agree that the ideal number of vaccines is greater than 0 and less than "hundreds". So where exactly we are on that spectrum is basically the entire discussion.
I don't think there's a good reason to vaccinate infants against COVID.
I don't know why infants are vaccinated against hep B but it's been recommended for newborns since the 1991 (and patented in 1972), so by your heuristic that one seems pretty safe.
It's not clear to me that this is the case, but I'd be curious to see if anyone has actually looked at this rigorously. I don't know off the top of my head which ones are post 1990s.
*not including the annual flu shots (sometimes multiple) and covid shots
I guess we'll just forget those even exist
Please show your math for "hundreds" of vaccinations on the schedule. I went through and counted, you can surely put some minimal effort in rather than low effort sneers.
where did I claim there were "hundreds" of vaccines on the schedule? It's around 17 "vaccines" and 80 "doses"
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The RFK-associated site I saw claimed 7 shots in one day, which appears to be true. (RSV, Hep B, Rotavirus, DTaP, Hib, Pneumococcal, Polio).
That's much closer to the truth but not necessarily true.
So taking those two at 2 months instead of 3 months cuts the number to 5.
And polio is a going concern only in a couple of third world eastern hemisphere countries, so you can safely skip that one.
Polio doesn't work like that.
IPV which we use in the US (and basically anywhere where with the infrastructure to manage the necessary cold-chain) has no effect on infection or transmission of polio. It is highly effective at preventing severe disease (although polio normally presents as just a cold with no distinguishing symptoms, so we've never actually studied the vaccine's impact on mild disease), which is what we mean when we say the US has "eradicated polio". In practice, polio spreads largely through poor sanitation, not direct person-to-person contact, so improved sanitation has probably actually reduced spread a fair bit, but there's no reason to believe the vaccine has done so. And we don't know because no one tests for polio (although there's some small push to start doing some wastewater testing).
Genuinely didn't know that, thought polio being eradicated in the western hemisphere+even slightly non-shithole parts of the eastern hemisphere was due to vaccines, like smallpox. Thanks for the context.
In practice I suspect countries which don't have to worry about cholera can skip polio shots, but I now understand why it's still on the vaccine schedule.
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What's old is new again
Ah, yes, third world migrants are the gift that keeps on giving.
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7 shots in one appointment, however, is a plausible claim, even if it isn't necessary to do it that way.
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It's actually pretty easy to find such people in some corners of the Internet. For example: https://x.com/Inversionism/status/1857457277860540898.
Easy to find them on 4chan, too.
This is literally my first time seeing such a person. I've never intentionally looked for them, but I've interacted with quite a lot of people in the past few years.
Of all people that I have seen who refuse to get the Covid vaccine, everyone still get (and support) literally every other vaccine. I'd estimate people who are against all vaccines to be 0.1-1% of the population at most. You can't really go lower than that. 1% of the population has an IQ below 65, 1% of the population are psychopaths, 1% of the population are pedophiles. If an issue is so rare than it applies to about 1%, I don't think coordinated efforts to improve them (like education, peer pressure, or more laws) is going to help any. I just accept that a small portion of the population is a little crazy by statistic necessity.
Umm, the percentage of people who are just generally anti vax is not a majority, but it’s much higher than 1%.
I usually go to more right-leaning websites and communities, and I recall seeing maybe 6 or 7 actual neonazis, but I have never seen anyone write that all vaccines are bad. Maybe a tiny bit of tech-savviness filters out the low-IQ schizophrenics who recommends "all-natural" alternatives to everything. 1% sounds like a lot, though, but I can't refute it if I include the offline population and Facebook users.
Yeah, I imagine there's some level of selection in who you end up interacting with.
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Yes, it's much higher than 1%.
It's worth pointing out that nearly all the anti-vaxxers were far left until Covid.
Near Seattle, there is a place called Vashon Island which has long been famous for its loony leftists. Until recently, they had one of the worst childhood vaccinations rates in the country. About 20% of children weren't vaccinated.
Of course, when Covid came around, they immediately pivoted to pro-vax and are lining up to get boosters at rates far above the national and state average: https://www.perplexity.ai/search/what-is-the-anti-vax-rate-in-v-w87v8jS0S26qIiStqdWwUw
I don't think that's true.
It's true that being categorically anti-vax was extremely rare to the point of being unheard of among normie republicans, but the Alex Jones crowd had conspiracy theories out the wazoo about vaccines and it was common to object to the HPV vaccine. Yes, my filter bubble is less likely to vaccinate their kids against MMR, but the fringes already didn't trust vaccines. It's probably more accurate to say that antivaxxers were mostly far left; the far right getting majorly into alt medicine and opposition to vaccines was not my top prediction five years ago, but it's not a surprise at all. Normie republicans listening to the far right post covid, on the other hand...
Isn't this more of a 'why should my son take a shot so your daughter can (slightly) lessen the risk of her slutting around' thing than a true concern about vax safety?
Opposite valence- the culture war objection was ‘why are you assuming my daughter is a whore?’.
I mean, yes, but the fact that vaccine safety was brought up as a serious objection to it indicates that anti-vax sentiment on the right isn’t entirely foreign.
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That was a big part of it, but maybe another part was it seems like it requires a few doses and lots of people are afraid of needles and want to minimize the number to just the bare essentials (an underappreciated element of vaccine opposition). I was too old by the time it became common, so HPV was never folded into my normal course of vaccination. I'm fairly pro-vaccine, so if I thought my monogamous self would benefit from it I would have consented. But then it became, "well, now I have to talk to my doctor about my lack of sexual partners, do I really want to have this conversation to get a shot that's not even marketed for my protection?"
Really, the fact that the HPV vaccine is marketed as protection from promiscuous sex is a bad, bad strategy because it pushes culture war buttons. But maybe that's the only reason at all it has any value. Does the HPV vaccine provide any protection against the many other kinds of HPV infections people can be exposed to, like warts on various parts of the body and things like that?
No. The line is that it protects against the 2-3 most dangerous ones in terms of causing cancer, but I'm not entirely sure how true that is.
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