Ignoring how fucked up it is to take pleasure in people's deaths, let me remind you that there are some people, even in blue states, that cannot receive various vaccinations due to health risks and thus are entirely reliant on herd immunity.
My mom has lymphoma. She gets extremely sick from even minor colds. I am very worried about losing her to an infection, and the thought that it could be a vaccine-preventable infection fills me with rage
Well, given that the vast majority of these folks are aligned to a particular political party.... And it's an election year during covid/flu/rsv season...
Fortunately this isn't government mandated "cleansing", these people are being told to get vaccinated/wear masks/use hand sanitizer. They're being given every opportunity and encouragement to protect themselves.
Definitely Darwinism doing what Darwinism does.
I just feel bad for the immunocompromised people who will unfortunately inevitably get caught up in the assholes who refuse to take necessary precautions.
I just saw somewhere that (of course it's Florida) politicians in Florida are calling to stop distribution of vaccines there because of "potential to cause cancer."
Hmmm... Now you care about carcinogens? You know what helps prevent carcinogens from entering the ecosystem? Corporate regulations. Oops I said the bad R word... They don't actually give a shit about what causes cancer, it's just another political stunt...
I’m well past feeling bad for stupid people who die needless and preventable deaths, and I’m well past feeling anything but hostility towards those who, through stubborn and willful ignorance, would threaten my life and the lives of those I care for, not to mention everyone else around them— especially the elderly and infirmed.
it’s as simple as that, and any equivocation on these points is just them trying to pass responsibility for their own social and moral failures onto others. and for that, fuck them.
that’s one of the things about conservative philosophy, especially today, is the subscription to the concept of solipsism, at least to the part f that philosophy which states that nothing outside of the self exists, not really, except as a projection of the self. meaning, in actuality, everything one sees and experiences is, in actuality, simply part of one’s imagination— a “projection” on one’s ego whose existence is purely to fulfill a need of the self and is represented/projected as such.
it’s a particularly sociopathic and self-serving view of the world, which illustrates very quickly the types of people it attracts as an ideology and those to whom it’s an easy and quick defense.
I wish it were that simple. But those people are going to take up hospital beds, nurses, doctors, etc away from people who got vaccinated (or couldn’t due to medical conditions). They’ll drive up medical prices even more. They’ll spread their diseases to those with compromised immune systems.
I don’t feel sorry for them, but they’ll harm and kill others on their way out.
perhaps you missed the part where I nether pity them, accept their excuses or equivocations, or accept, in any way, any reason for their refusal of their civic, social, or moral responsibilities? because when you say:
I wish it were that simple
please explain wtf you mean that I didn’t address pretty explicitly in my first comment
As for driving insurance prices. I remember there was a law that was introduced in NY that allowed insurance to do that. Everyone was saying it was symbolic, because they already could set different prices for unvaccinated.
Ever since April 2020, whenever I hear something about vaccines, I just assume the worst.
I never got rid of my mask or hand sanitizer. Keep some in your car too. We're all responsible for our own germs because culturally and legally, your right to life is considered less important than the right to stupidity.
Only 19% of people have gotten the latest lastest Covid vaccine.
The first one was giant walk in clinics where you just told them your name and address. Completely free. The largest vaccine drive in US history.
The second round was at pharmacies and some popup spots. Free but they bill via insurance.
The third was at pharmacies only and free only if you didn't have insurance.
I know I am speculating here but is it possible, just remotely possible that trying to reduce costs in the short run by managed inconvenience and using crony capitalism is a factor in the decline of vaccination? And furthermore costs us as a society more with more deaths, more disability, more sick time taken, less time for students in school, less overally human happiness than just doing the way that proved it worked amazingly well 2 years ago. Could it be that by making things harder for people they are less likely to do it? Do humans really respond to incentives and short term cost savings do not always translate to greater long term prosperity?
Oh man this is like way too wild. No way I am right about any of this.
Covid vaccines remain free to anyone with insurance, including Medicare. They are immediately available at just about any pharmacy. Access is not the problem.
My sister's insurance didn't cover it. Which is wild, and I thought should be, but she fought it hard and that was the final answer. She had to go to a free vaccine event to get it because she couldn't afford the several hundred dollars they wanted without insurance.
If it is not a problem how come last month they would not go forward without my insurance information and made a big stink about having problems confirming everything?
The third was at pharmacies only and free only if you didn’t have insurance.
For people in the USA: The covid vaccine is free for people with insurance.
Additionally, at least some doctor's offices have it (mine does, but I don't want to assume they all do), and there are vaccine clinics where they do flu/covid/etc that show up periodically if that's more your style.
I'm not specifically calling out the user I quoted, just making a general statement because I've seen that exact sentiment ("the covid vaccine is no longer free") like 4 or 5 times on lemmy in just the past day. It's disinformation/misinformation and it leads to situations where misinformed people decide not to get vaccinated, in part, because they think it's going to cost them money.
I got my vaccine while in the weird period after getting a new job where you don't have your health insurance info yet.
I paid $200 for it.
I'd do it again - got covid a few weeks ago and it was pretty light, likely a result of the vaccine - but damn, that's a hard ask for a huge portion of the population.
The rollout for the 2023 vaccine was awful. I wouldn't be surprised that some folks gave up because you just couldn't get an appointment and then it was out of mind.
The third was at pharmacies only and free only if you didn't have insurance.
A lot of people here are claiming something "like this is a problem that only affects these idiots". Sadly, that's not the case. A number of these vaccines are only roughly 80% effective. The efficacy of these lies in herd immunity, where the 20% of people who did get the vaccine, but are not protected, will never encounter the disease because the other 80% can't get it to spread it to them.
Let's say you need 70% of people to be protected to maintain herd immunity. Then just 10% of the population needs to be idiots, and the disease spreads to the 30% that isn't protected. Of that 30%, 20 points are people who were not idiots and got vaccinated, but unfortunately are not protected. The idiots will get sick, but twice as many not-idiots will get sick too. Unfortunately, for some of these diseases, the idiots will be hurting many more people than themselves.
The affected people are not necessarily immunocompromised. For example, after two doses of the mumps vaccine, 88% of people are immune. Immunity decreases with time, so the proportion that's immune is lower than that. Let's guess at 80%. You, the person reading this, can be a normal healthy person who got the mumps vaccine, and you have a 1 in 5 chance that you're not immune. Those are some pretty big odds.
Well, I wasn't even considering them. That's a particularly vulnerable group, but I was referring to uncompromised people for whom the vaccine is not effective, or for whom immunity has waned.
We can't drown out botnets without botnets of our own. Information war is war, but lacks attrition, so the opponents never actually get defeated.
So, we can either accept this status quo, or we can escalate. But I don't think we can just try harder, we're givin her all she's got, Jim. It's not like medical professionals are known for having tons of free time and extra morale to burn away on twitter.
I’ve come to accept that I’ll have to work until I’m dead. So one thing that doesn’t make me upset is less people. Specifically less people to take my job—younger people.
So, anti-vaxers, if you really wanna pwn me, you’ll make sure your kids live long enough to take my job.
These people have gone too long without people they love dying in front of them from things like prolonged diarrhea lung, mucus intoxication and blood tears. Also the holocaust survivors and WW2 soldiers have mostly passed away.
We have a collective goldfish memory and right wing governments constantly sabotaging public education. We also lack empathy on the whole. Civilization doesn't feel like it can sustain much longer.
We saw it during COVID too though, so many people refusing vaccinations because they are complete morons who don't believe in science, as their family members die around them one by one, many of them still deciding that they won't let "the man" win and inject them with "that poison".
We need a new disfiguring disease that scares the shit out of people. We were too good and eliminated smallpox. We nearly eliminated polio and measles. Monkeypox failed (thank you, doctors, scientists, and everyone who got vaccinated!)
...So now we need a new one that causes people to either get extremely fucked up and live, or extremely fucked up and then die horribly, and slow enough to warn people in their communities.
Apparently, a subset of the population cannot remember the olden days, and vaccines in schools aren't compulsory anymore.
While I'm all for vaccination including covid vaccines, we would not have the distrust towards the mega pharmaceutical companies if they were not so untrustworthy. They sold their trust for profits a long time ago.
Do you trust automakers? What about Apple or Google? How do you feel about GMOs in food? I bet you still eat, have a smartphone and drive. I get that it is hard to trust megacorps and industries thst have the populace captive, yet fear of a vaccine is what illicits special irrational behavior in people.
In the US I don't trust the phone and big tech companies to not sell my data, i dont trust the automobile industry to not lobby aganst good public transportation, and i don't trust mega pharma to not SKU the test results when they could can away with it. I dont trust any of the above to not Astroturf, buy off ftc officials or anything if they are in a position to get away with it. Perhaps im just bitter because i was prescribed an absurd amount of opioids as a 16 year old. They were pushed so hard they told us it was safe they blantently lie
We didn't trust their business practices, or that they were treating not curing people (which comes from r&d startups anyway). Pfizer overcharges diabetics and shit, we never thought they put 5g chips in your DNA or whatever tf these nut jobs think. This is not an extension of corporate mistrust, it's anti science luddites keeping the population uneducated and sickly.
I feel bad for kids and for people who are vulnerable. The adults who are bringing down our society through idiotic decisions can’t die fast enough, imo.