Why does the data change so much on the boundaries of states? I would expect the data to be locally correlated, and there wouldn't be discrepancies between neighboring rural counties that are in different states.
"State of residence" was a predictor in their linear model. A person's state (and its government) will probably affect the outcome variable to some extend, so it's not really surprising that it might be retained as a significant term. However, I find it hard to believe it's so important. I wonder if that predictor is simply confounded with some unobserved variable relating to methods of surveying that differed by state.
why are people so quick to wish away the concept of state lines? if there were no (or less) obviously visible state lines in the data, and everything was more of a gradient, I would be immensely surprised.
There's got to be something substantially skewing the data.
Even just looking at counties I'm familiar with it doesn't pass the sniff test.
You've got the "hicks live here" county that's the same color as the "yuppies buy houses in these suburbs" county that's the same color as the "not much English gets spoken here" county and so on. And yet it's all different than the adjacent counties that happen to be across state lines that have similar demographics.
Ah ok. So we are looking at pretty large inaccuracies then. Typically you only want to draw in the county boundaries if you have reliable county level data. I’d call that a flaw.
My thought exactly. If you took out the borders, many states would still be visible. I would expect the boundary between Tennessee and Kentucky, for example, to be more-or-less invisible, as between Texas and Arkansas. But even Oklahoma is distinguishable from northern Texas, despite basically no cultural or political difference across the Red River.
people live in cities/towns/etc. which are exist in counties which exist in states. the data is per-county. vaccination policies/attitudes are largely defined by governors, who lead states. states often have a shared culture, but sometimes different parts of states have varying cultures.
often, population density affects culture/attitudes toward these sorts of things. as with many such maps, adding an additional analysis layer denoting population density would yield interesting results. (though if you intuitively know the population densities of various "outlier" states, and you know where major cities are in the lesser-populated states, you can already intuitively draw some correlations yourself.)
The model probably takes into account the state as a variable, and states vary as far as average hesitancy goes and in terms of vaccine distribution strategy.
Very good point. I wonder if there are local state policies in effect that artifact the data or if there is some sort of state-level estimator being used.
"Hesitancy" nice word. The implication that everyone does want this vaccine is nice; after all, not wanting it would be some sort of mental defect right?
"My body, my choice" ain't just a political slogan; it makes sense. I'm glad these vaccines are available, but I had this crud early and I'll pass on the vaccine thx.
It's a good day to be a Masshole. According to the spreadsheet, MA is least hesitant by state and together with VT, sweeps the first 14 counties (and the first 19, if you ignore SF).
MA has about 30% of people fully vaccinated. In Israel, the rate of new cases cratered once that number hit close to 50% and has stayed extremely low ever since (despite reopenings and the rate of new vaccinations there slowing to a crawl).
Vaccines were distributed based on population, not demand. We can't vaccinate people fast enough because we didn't get enough doses (see my other post in this thread). Now that other states have a stockpile sitting around, MA might get more doses and with general availability this week, our numbers should improve.
Sewerage isn’t particularly accurate. Australian cities have been Covid free for the last 6 months yet there are continual reports of virus in the sewerage. It seems some recovered cases shed the virus for months after the infectious period.
They got vaccinated so quickly because such a large fraction of them needed to do so as a condition of employment. Healthcare is a massive industry in MA.
Not even close to true. Demand is so high here, MA was only able to offer vaccines to the general public starting this week. If you were lucky enough to even be eligible last week, you needed to use bots to find an appointment.
Compare that to Texas, where shots are going begging at freaking Walmart. It's extremely infuriating. MA's vaccination rate is solely limited by available doses and meanwhile vaccines are expiring unused on the shelf in other states. We could have hit herd immunity by now if we were given the chance.
Demand is high because all the low risk people in healthcare (and all the other industries that got priority) got in line right away and are/were competing with the high risk people and seniors.
Basically we dumped a ton of volume into the vaccination funnel from the get go (because we were vaccinating such a wide range of people so early on because of the employment based qualification criteria) so while there was a backup we were always running the "actually vaccinating people" part of the system at full tilt. Other states poured a comparative trickle into the funnel. While there was no backup up top you didn't have the bottom of the vaccine pipeline running at 100%.
Vaccinating healthcare workers first makes perfect sense when you're dealing with a virus that has the potential to overwhelm your healthcare capacity.
But early eligibility != required to do your job. The vaccine system was only as "full tilt" as we had doses available. We had capacity for substantially more shots in arms but there was nothing to give. That said, I do agree with the State's priorities. As much as it pains me personally, retail is higher than my comfy WFH butt.
This is the survey question, as part of a broader Household Pulse Survey: “Once a vaccine to prevent COVID-19 is available to you, would you…get a vaccine?” No mention of a follow up for rationale.
This is a pretty interesting map/graph. I also like that they linked to the data in table form.
Not really surprised at the areas that are darkest, but still feel worried that lots of areas near 20%. Specifically the levels of non-Hispanic Black hesitancy in the South is really rough.
Hopefully over time this improves especially as private enterprises put some pressure on getting vaccinated
As someone who lives in Cincinnati, my perception is that the restrictions (reflecting to some extent public opinion) have been mostly middle-of-the-pack in both OH and KY. OH's governor is a moderate Republican who may lose his primary over having restrictions at all, and KY's governor is a Democrat who narrowly won the office in 2019 in a state that's generally pretty conservative. The blurred borders make total sense to me in that context, because not much changes across them.
Ohio border is clearly visible but KY/WV blends well. I don't get it though, why would Athens County, OH be almost 4 points higher on the hesitancy scale than Lewis County, KY despite having better vaccination stats?
I have much greater confidence that vaccination of non-white populations in the South will climb to acceptable levels than I do when it comes to GOP base of rural white people with no college.
completely baffling to see people imply that college attendance is a prerequisite for having informed views and perspectives on things like politics, in twenty twenty-one.
> Hopefully over time this improves especially as private enterprises put some pressure on getting vaccinated
I really hope I don't lose my job because I don't want to take an experimental, unapproved vaccine for a disease that hospitalizes less than 5% of people across all age groups when I work from home, am a healthy weight, and am under forty.
The risk for me is, in fact, comparable to the flu, and the vaccine has similar drawbacks to the flu vaccine.
Also are you surprised that Black people in the South don't want this experimental vaccine after the Tuskegee Experiment? Combine that with the awful side effects documented on Reddit in r/covidvaccinated and the refusal of the drug company lawyers to accept liability if something is wrong, the very people pushing the vaccine still wearing two masks, the profit incentive of a new annual vaccine, and new reports of menstrual "changes" caused by the vaccines that are rolling in and you know what? I'll take my chances with COVID's death rate, since it's only killed 14000 Americans under forty.
This comment will probably get removed but I'm done buying into #BlueAnon conspiracy theories.
In fact, the risk for you is that you infect someone you care about and they end up hospitalized or dead. That is a very real risk that has played out countless times during this pandemic and has cost thousands and thousands of lives.
It's been way longer than a year for that concept. This concept has been around for other diseases, secondhand smoke, reckless/drunk driving, etc. Different people accept it to varying degrees, usually based on topic and personal beliefs.
The concern has always been that COVID-19 hospitalizations would overwhelm our healthcare capacity, resulting in excess deaths due to lack of care. That is because the disease spreads so easily and because it results in a high rate of hospitalizations (high enough to threaten healthcare capacity).
"What are we doing?! This is not an existential threat!"
We were saving lives by moderating the spread of this disease so it did not overwhelm our healthcare capacity. For the most part it worked.
Protection isn't 100%, so the best way to protect the most vulnerable among us for everyone to get vaccinated. There are also a small number of people who cannot get vaccinated for medical reasons, and having as many people as possible vaccinated helps protect those people too.
"the refusal of the drug company lawyers to accept liability if something is wrong"
In theory the government is supposed to provide a settlement under the countermeasure version of the national vaccine injury compensation fund. I say in theory because the system doesn't work as well as it's marketed to (based on personal experience).
Also, I'm not sure why you are being downvoted. Maybe just an unpopular opinion or the inflammatory remark? I'm of a similar opinion. I don't go anywhere except the food store, have an N95 mask (owned prior to the pandemic), work from home, under 35 with no comorbidities, only elderly I have contact with are family who have already recieved their vaccinations. If they are saying that this might be an annual vaccine and I fit low risk profiles for attributes and actions, then I might as well wait until I'm forced to go back to the office to get it.
iirc these non-FDA-approved (instead, emergency-use-authorized) products use a separate compensation fund compared to the typical vaccine compensation fund. but having these compensation funds instead of allowing legal action against manufacturers of products is kind of ridiculous on its own, when you get down to it... but it's become highly uncool to question the motives of big pharma in the past year.
Yeah, that's why I said it was the countermeasure version. I just can't remember the actual name and am too lazy to look it up (or maybe too burnt out to care).
The purpose of the funds was good. It was supposed to provide an easy mechanism for victims to recover damages that would not be as arduous as traditional litigation. The purpose was to increase public trust in vaccines that are commonly required/pushed by the government. It does perform this for the common or known side effects listed in the compensation table. Although some of the amounts approved as caps may not take into account individual differences, and don't provide great flexibility.
It's extremely difficult if it's a rare issue or if the underlying mechanism is not known. This mechanism part is the real downside. You could be completely healthy, get a shot, and two days later be airlifted to the ICU with a heart issue that has no family history or even an explanation for the cause other than "some people just have this" (no genetics really identified yet either). How can you prove it was the vaccine if they don't know the factors that would normally cause it? There are other reports of the issue in VAERS, the patient is in one of the lowest risk populations for first time presentation, etc. Even if you don't have a conclusive underlying mechanism, there's no opposing theory for the "natural" mechanism that would normally cause it (even stuff like which genes cause it), but the special vaccine court will most likely say 'too bad, it might be a coincidence'. If they do that, this seems contrary to intended purpose of building public trust in vaccines and compensating victims in a less confrontational system. Now you don't fight a company, you have to fight the government.
it's too bad this post & the one after it go over the edge of acceptable discourse here, because a lot of people who read & post here agree with your overall analysis, even though they don't often speak up on these issues. you are definitely not alone in your frustration.
it's been over four years, how have we still not learned the number one lesson from the 2016 US Presidential Election: that highly-engaged views and opinions expressed online so as to create an outward appearance of nearly-uniform perspective, do not necessarily represent the views of the collective whole, because many people with the unpopular view/opinion will actively choose to not express it, for fear of ostracization? there are many people in tech who don't share the popular view/opinion on many different subjects, and instead keep quiet about it. sometimes they push back on things in very measured amounts here and there; other times, they make throwaways just to fire off a rant of their true feelings, knowing the throwaway will be banned. most of the time though, they just shut up.
I would just add that in many subjects, the split between the dominant and secondary policy/idea/candidate is small, like 45% to 40%. That's not a lot of difference and leaves a fairly large minority feeling disenfranchised when the media paints whatever the subject is as closed/absolute/etc.
it's true that there's a simmering underbelly of racist grievance and that it can be stoked and amplified, but let's check in in a few months and see if silicon valley is or isn't vaccinated before we start declaring that there's a broad silent consensus against scientific truths.
I wasn't aware that residing in SV was a prerequisite for posting to HN? especially after a year of increased remote work? I have little doubt that the vast majority of HN readers/posters who reside in SV are going to be vaccinated within a few months and will have zero qualms about it.
> Also are you surprised that Black people in the South don't want this experimental vaccine after the Tuskegee Experiment?
Is a super important and valid point. Historically Black people have had their human rights violated in similar situations. Johnson and Johnson also knowingly targeted Black people with baby powder marketing after they knew it caused cancer. As much as I think it's important to get vaccinated, I wouldn't take the JJ vaccine on principal and personal fear that it's potentially not safe, just based on the company making it (rational or not).
For me? Honestly, no. I've been avoiding J&J products as much as possible (it's impossible to fully do it) for years.
I won't even say that the issues with the J&J vaccine are indicative or related to their past actions. But who knows? It definitely doesn't look good or assuage anyone's fears.
they've already tried blatantly racist things like producing rap songs/videos promoting vaccination and offering VIP access to strip clubs for the vaccinated. seems like people are out of ideas.
I hope this will change the more people have been vaccinated and are eligible. I know several people who a few months ago said that they would "never" get the vaccine and a few months they all got it or are in line.
Every 4 years you also have a lot of people saying "if XXX wins the presidency I'll move to Canada/Mexico". They are all still there.
It's good to ask people but they also change their minds quickly once they have more information.
Because San Diego leans right, and current conservatives are more likely to be anti-vaccine [0]. (This is interesting in and of itself, as in previous years, California’s antivax tended to be rich and liberal. Times change!)
Tentative thinking... As someone who likely had CoV in early 2020, and who has had 1 of 2 Moderna vaccines, I am getting my antibodies tested every few months. At the point at which they start declining I would feel better get the 2nd dose; or if the booster is released beforehand. That aside, I can't see the upside in my second dose given the long haul reaction I had to dose #1. I wish the CDC would weigh in formally on 2nd doses for those who had Covid and/or high antibody responses.
I've heard and read a lot about this in the past couple weeks and I sincerely hope public health officials and media don't freak out. We need to stay the course on this and emphasize the positive.
1. Vaccines are still difficult to get in a lot of places. I and my partner only just got appointments for this weekend for our first dose. As long as appointments are required and you have to fight to get a spot at 9am it is going to be difficult to get hesitent people to sign up. I think hesitency will go down dramatically when you can just walk in without an appointment and get it.
2. I really don't understand why Public Health officials keep downplaying the vaccines. They are still talking about everyone masking for months, limited gatherings, no vacations, etc. Why is it always doom and gloom? There is no evidence to support this level of paranoia and the messaging should be the exact opposite. These vaccines are scientific miracles. Get the vaccine and go out and have fun again!
3. The worst thing we can do at this point is to start shaming people for being hesitant. I don't think it has started just yet but I can see it bubbling in certain circles. I was just in a work meeting where we were talking about vaccines and everyone on the call was on board BUT some people only wanted the JandJ one because it used older tech and they didn't want to try the new mRNA ones. This was with a group of all college educated software developers...
There is no evidence at all to support this form of hesitancy and yet there it is. Are they Anti-vax? Kind of, but would it have helped matters to argue that they were wrong and that they were helping kill their neighbors by only wanting one of the vaccines? No, let them have their hesitancy, continue vaccinating, and in 6 months when hundreds of thousands of people have it and nothing bad happens they will quietly go get it done.
We know the vaccines work. Just make them widely available and the proof will be in the results.
Friends, tell me how I should be more positive or community minded in thinking about this.
Because right now, I say -- "anyone who doesn't want a vaccine, well you live with the consequences and if you can't come to rational understanding that it's your own life being saved, then I shed no tears over your choice".
People who do it out of religious (or Republican) dogma, I'm not sympathetic. People who believe in conspiracy theories, I'm not sympathetic. People who have some "cultural history" skeptical of government vaccines, well you have to learn to get over that, one way or another. I'm not that sympathetic. What's the likelihood that the entire US is being subjected to a racially based cruel experiment?
You don't want life saving vaccine, produced from the effort and focus of an entire nation, to bring us out of the worst crisis in a generation? Well, I don't mind if there are fewer of you.
Aside from the issue where people who are not vaccinated affect those who cannot get vaccinated, it's your own life you're gambling with. Go right ahead.
I think if you actually asked the people you are talking about how to be more concerned about them, they would (in the full spectrum of civility) tell you it's not necessary.
That said, there's a combination of nature and nurture at play, in this case I would suspect mostly nurture, and that's something that most people can't control. So if you want to feel bad for them, feel bad that they didn't have the benefit of the nurturing you had to value the things you do.
While I think you are wording things more harshly than myself, I am largely in agreement.
It is still difficult to get a vaccine in a lot of places in the country but once we get to summer and there are walk in clinics everywhere my sympathy levels for people who get sick out of vaccine stubbornness is going to be zero.
At some point you need to take personal responsibility for your own health.
It’s not just about saving the life of the person being vaccinated. It’s about not giving the virus anymore “fuel” to burn through. Every infection is a roll of many dice. Statistically at some point someone’s mutation will overcome even the vaccines we’ve made. If that spreads we’d be back in February of 2020.
You get the idea. The point is this isn’t about any individual persons life. This is about the vaccine being our only weapon that can actually stop this pandemic. If we just went on without a vaccine then we probably would see a variant arise that could live longer on surfaces or otherwise spread immensely more effectively or even more deadly. There’s nothing stopping a mutation from really killing 50-75% or more of people. The speed of evolution depends in part on the speed of replication -even in viruses. It’s a war of virus vs humanity.
I think that's wishful thinking. This will be globally endemic just as the flu is. It will continue mutating in the unvaccinated population as well as the non-human carriers (like pets). Sure, if a lot of people are vaccinated, then it might slow the timeline down for when that mutation will emerge.
"There’s nothing stopping a mutation from really killing 50-75% or more of people. It’s a war of virus vs humanity."
A neverending war, as it always has been. I think the 50-75% casualty numbers are highly unlikely.
Last I heard, pets were still a one in a million or smaller likelihood. Doesn’t seem a likely place for a disease to bounce around long term. The unvaccinated population is the far greater problem.
Probably. My point is that even 100% vaccination won't fully stop it since there are other carriers in the environment. They slaughtered a bunch of minks due to infection, so I would imagine there are other reservoirs out there (wild weasels, pet ferrets, some other species). After all, one theory is this virus got it's start though human-animal contact.
Thinking of this reply for a bit. From "How to survive a pandemic" by Dr. Greger, I recall this being an avian flu. So it's possible for covid to bounce around in them. Quick search, I'm seeing articles about even newer coronaviruses being discovered in birds. I don't think the wild population is the threat to most worry about creating future variants of covid. The biggest threat is probably where there are the biggest populations of birds in close quarters with one another and humans - on farms. Given how mink farms were recently slaughtered to stop the spread of covid amongst them, similar measures would be taken with poultry.
Avian viruses on farms have always been a big concern among the epidemiologists, if Dr Greger's book is any indication. Stopping the virus movements among humans and similar mass slaughterings among livestock could work. I takeaway that it's a statistics problem as to when and not if we see another virus capable of becoming a serious pandemic again.
The extent to which society learned how to monitor and react to new viruses during the covid-19 pandemic may well determine our fates next time.
Its not a racially based cruel experiment probably, but it is an experiment on the mass population. The long term effects are untested and unknown, the only accurate description of it is that it is a massive experiment.
Look into the 70s swine flu vaccination effort, similar fear based advertisement with lack of accountability.
When you have a system with
A) massive profit incentive (pfizer and moderna now 'suggesting' annual shots will be neccesary)
B) a populace accepting headlines without verification of what's claimed
C) no accountability if it turns out the vaccine isn't safe
You can't seriously expect that to be accepted. If any individual wants to take those chances with the belief they're doing something good for their community, great, let them take that risk. But the concept of mandating this or even socially expecting your friends and family to take part in this experiment, is absurd, and extremely bewildering to see.
This virus is somewhat more deadly and infectious than the flu or existing cold virus, but looking at the actual numbers of those lost to it, its in fact not much different than the flu. Having lost friends to the flu, I'm not sure people have an understanding of how deadly it actually is. We accept the deadliness of the flu and move on with life because the alternative would defeat much of the point of living. Same as we get in cars every day which kill thousands constantly. Having a suggestion of everyone to simply be more hygienic and socially distance is reasonable, everything else is way beyond necessity.
This is a common statement about the vaccines currently being deployed. What is less common is that the expositor of this perspective has considered that the same is true of the virus itself.
Shingles afflicts people decades after they have recovered from chicken pox. I remember HIV treatments in the 90s that were thought to work until it was later discovered that the virus can hide in various organs and wreak havoc later.
Regardless of the comparisons to other pathogens, nobody today can make a credible claim about the impact a Covid infection will have on a person 20 years later.
As a society, the choice is crystal clear: vaccines that do not kill people today versus a virus that demonstrably overwhelms health systems, killing lots of people now. This is as close to an IQ test as it gets in public policy.
>As a society, the choice is crystal clear: vaccines that do not kill people today
The vaccines are killing an alarming number of people today.
>versus a virus that demonstrably overwhelms health systems,
This is not true. Hospitals were and have been fairly empty. Small hospitals at times have been overloaded and imagery from those exaggerated as though its a general pattern when it's not.
>killing lots of people now. This is as close to an IQ test as it gets in public policy.
The death numbers are slightly higher than that of the flu.
Take a look at historical deaths and those this year attributed to COVID. It doesn't add up to any sort of justification of the handling over the last year, nor the push for vaccination.
The IQ test is if you assume headlines are honest condensation of information or not. Every single day I see tens of articles claiming things about COVID that sound terrifying, only to turn out to be the most fearful bad-faith interpretation of the actual information brought up in the article.
This perspective would seem more reasonable if it weren't based on headlines alone. The sort of headlines it's based on, when you dig into how they conclude to those headlines, often are fairly detached. There are cases of wild stories, but nothing consistent. We don't go in a panic over this sort of possibility with flu strains, when the same possibility does exist. Don't compare COVID to HIV, there isn't a good reason to. COVID is mildly more deadly then the flu, if you wouldn't be scared of dying from the flu, its unreasonable to be afraid of COVID.
> if you wouldn't be scared of dying from the flu, its unreasonable to be afraid of COVID.
I'm actually more worried that (as in the fall), my city will have to convert our convention center to a field hospital because the local ICUs are full. And then I'm worried that I (or someone I care about) will experience one of the normal things that send people to hospitals, only there won't be capacity to see them in a timely fashion.
And honestly I'm damn sick of the necessary curbs that keep this thing from killing even more people. (It's possible to prefer society arrange itself in such a fashion that we try not to make it actively hostile to the vulnerable.)
This isn't hyperbole, it was 5 months ago. My governor is GOP and doesn't consider Covid to be real. Yet he still authorized giant field hospitals. He still won't open the governor's mansion for tours, in spite of saying all restrictions are lifted (he's not an idiot, he just plays one on TV. Nobody is really stupid enough to want unvaccinated people coming through their house all day.) He has never done any of this for the flu.
Consider yourself fortunate that this did not happen in your area. But don't pretend it didn't happen or is just the media.
And then the main thrust of what I said is this. Nobody knows what a Covid infection today will mean in 20 years. It obviously has neurological impact in some patients. Does that carry long-term import? Nobody knows. Easier to not get it, since vaccines are available and free.
You're sure those are ICUs full of people in critical condition due to COVID? How many went to the hospital the instant they got COVID despite lack of critical symptoms?
I don't think you're trying to be hyperbolic, I think you've been fed accurate information clothed in fear so as to lead to a bad-faith worst case interpretation of that data.
The most intelligent people I know who have the most experience in the medical field, have always suggested, and still do with the COVID vaccine, to wait a minimum of 5 years before expecting safety in something like that.
To be clear, to the response "be glad it isn't in your area", it is, I've had people directly claim to me a local hospital is overrun with patients. A friend had to goto the same hospital for unrelated reasons. Parking lot was nearly empty, calm and boring inside. Someone is lying, my friend doesn't have a trackrecord of lying, quite the opposite. The news media on the other hand, I can't say the same.
Hospitals here have difficulties finding space for traffic accident victims, they don't just let anyone with COVID book a space in the ICU, and never have. Seriously, be glad it isn't so bad in your area and stop trivializing it.
> You're sure those are ICUs full of people in critical condition due to COVID?
You got me, I didn't triage each patient at all the hospitals in a major metro area. You're probably right that everyone came in at the same time for muscle cramps and sprains. The hospitals pretended to give them Covid tests but really just said they all tested positive because that's how unethical medical practitioners are these days. Further, the hospital administrators lied about census numbers in a coordinated fashion so that the census numbers would match predictions from infection data weeks prior. Then, the Covid-denying governor decided to open massive field hospitals because he thought that projecting the image of being overrun with a plague was a good strategy to help Senators from his party win reelection.
You're probably right, Occam was completely wrong.
your posts here hit the nail on the head with regards to something I've been trying to articulate about this situation, plus many others in the past few years:
why does everyone assume—when obviously, demonstrably massive profit incentives are on the line—that everyone in key positions of power will act 100% honestly and altruistically?
I'm not even advocating that everyone be a complete vaccine-denier or whatever, I'm just kind of shocked at the immune system response-like reaction to even skepticism of the situation, given that the aforementioned factors are at play. it's never, "well, I understand and empathize with your skepticism, but I still believe what I believe to be the truth." instead, you get attacked for even sharing mild skepticism!
Skepticism is often warranted, but frequently the vaccine skeptics pair skepticism with denial of accepted facts.
So for example in this case, the skeptic asserts that the virus is not much worse than the flu. This, despite evidence that basically everyone on earth has seen that this is not the case. (Many people personally know someone who has died of Covid in the last year, despite not ever having known anyone who has died of the flu over the prior decades of their lives.)
Even prominent Covid denialist Trump a) took an experimental antibody treatment and then b) got an early dose of the vaccine after c) spending trillions of taxpayer dollars on Covid relief efforts. If someone like Trump who actually thinks it's the flu also behaves as if it's a serious disease, it makes skeptics like OP here seem much less credible.
What's interesting about the vaccine skepticism on HN is that in any biotech thread, the discussion is around how the FDA is too strict (skeptical) about approving new therapies. But now people suddenly think the FDA is too loose in approving new therapies? The irony is that the FDA is already the skeptic here (see the J&J pause, for example). Occam, again.
I'm not commenting on your third paragraph because calling Trump a "covid denialist" is too ridiculous and unrelated to what is being discussed to even begin to explore.
in your second paragraph, you use anecdotes as a means of persuasion, despite referring to "accepted facts" two sentences prior.
none of this addresses my point which is that well-reasoned skepticism is usually met with seemingly dogmatic opposition. for example, elsewhere in the threads here, it was posited that perhaps not every death that was reported as being due to covid was accurately reported as such, given that a.) it's possible to die with covid in your system without it being the thing that killed you (especially assuming the popular "asymptomatic carrier" assertion is true) and b.) that there are demonstrable profit motives for hospitals (many of which, including my local one, have been condensed into mega-corporations in the past couple of decades). this is a reasoned, reasonable cause for skepticism. yet again, to express things like this is to be deemed a "conspiracy theorist," and to have one's reputation diminished and one's statements nullified as a result.
e: re: 4th paragraph, how is one supposed to experience cognitive dissonance from holding both of the following ideas in their mind at the same time?
- the FDA is too strict when it comes to approving experimental, elective procedures and medications
- the FDA isn't strict enough when it comes to allowing several competing drugs to be emergency-use-authorized without sufficient testing, especially when for many people the choice is between taking an experimental drug and losing employment (or worse...?)
When you seem to be arguing that hospitals around the world all independently cooked the books to inflate COVID deaths because of nefarious profit motives, yes, that sounds like the definition of a conspiracy theory.
If you don't believe the reported COVID death numbers, you can look at excess deaths over prior years, which largely track with or exceeds the reported numbers for COVID deaths.
Ultimately, for most people it's pretty obvious at this point that COVID is a catastrophe of the likes we haven't seen in many decades. Trying to persuade people at this point is tiresome, it would be like living in 1943 and trying to persuade skeptics that, yes World War II is a big deal.
> When you seem to be arguing that hospitals around the world all independently cooked the books to inflate COVID deaths because of nefarious profit motives, yes, that sounds like the definition of a conspiracy theory.
except for the lack of conspiracy? when did the definition of "conspiracy" change to encompass the actions of individuals not explicitly working in concert with each other?
why is it so difficult to entertain a possible world wherein sars-cov-2 was hyped to be this massively devastating pandemic, and it was indeed pretty bad in terms of confirmed cases... but then when the number of deaths, while definitely nonzero, wasn't reaching the numbers it was "supposed to" on a per-hospital basis, many individual hospitals fudged some numbers here and there in order to get covid money since there was so much of it flying around into everyone else's pockets? this seems like a completely pragmatic, if unethical, course of action to take. there's a lot of hospitals in the US. do you find it likely that nothing along these lines happened at all, and that, again, with billions of dollars getting moved around here and there, and basically zero chance of getting caught, everyone in positions of decision-making unilaterally chose to act 100% as honestly and altruistically as possible?
again, I'm not asking you to accept this possible world as unconditionally Proven Fact or anything like that—I'm merely asking you to entertain the possibility, without breaking the glass and pulling the "Conspiracy Theory" lever. why is this sort of thinking seemingly beyond many peoples' abilities?
where does one acquire this massively optimistic outlook on human nature, especially with regard to those in positions of power, and in the presence of gargantuan amounts of money?
> do you find it likely that nothing along these lines happened at all, and that, again, with billions of dollars getting moved around here and there, and basically zero chance of getting caught, everyone in positions of decision-making unilaterally chose to act 100% as honestly and altruistically as possible
You seem to be excluding a large middle. You seem to be saying that either COVID is a fraud perpetrated on us by hospitals, or else I must be arguing there is no such thing as corruption.
Your theory is not impossible but it would require a large amount of evidence to believe or even seriously consider. It's similar to the argument that Trump was actually elected president, but large amounts of independent local fraud threw enough votes to Biden to flip the result.
There's also the problem of independent lines of evidence that also point to major Covid death (e.g. excess deaths), and the fact that the Covid pandemic is a global problem - does every country have Covid money incentives that explain inflated deaths?
> You seem to be excluding a large middle. You seem to be saying that either COVID is a fraud perpetrated on us by hospitals, or else I must be arguing there is no such thing as corruption.
I didn't leave the middle out at all... in fact, I was claiming that it was you who was leaving out the middle by asserting that a non-zero amount of corruption by multiple separate hospitals would be a "conspiracy theory."
my goal in the posts in this thread is not any specific worldview that I may or may not subscribe to, but instead to point out that skepticism is healthy and shouldn't be shouted down with cries of "conspiracy theory." especially for a situation fraught with other such discrepancies, if one is willing to look for them, and, again, not assume honesty and altruism for 100% of humans in positions of power who are involved.
your comparison example is a poor analogy, because the voter fraud theory is that there was a conspiracy of multiple state/local actors acting in concert to obtain a desired electoral result. this specific aspect of the larger "covid situation" requires no such conspiracy, only human greed and corruption on the individual scale.
you state that you still require evidence to "believe or even seriously consider" my hypothetical scenario. why is that the case? again, do you think it's more likely that everyone at every hospital in the US acted 100% honestly & altruistically in this regard? when it comes to the individual, it's "innocent until proven guilty," of course. but when looking at large numbers of unconnected individuals making discrete decisions, from positions of power, with billions of dollars on the line... why do you assume "uncorrupt until proven corrupt?"
> you state that you still require evidence to "believe or even seriously consider" my hypothetical scenario. why is that the case? again, do you think it's more likely that everyone at every hospital in the US acted 100% honestly & altruistically in this regard? when it comes to the individual, it's "innocent until proven guilty," of course. but when looking at large numbers of unconnected individuals making discrete decisions, from positions of power, with billions of dollars on the line... why do you assume "uncorrupt until proven corrupt?"
Again, I never claimed that there has been zero corruption, that is your strawman. What requires evidence is that corruption is the reason for large numbers of reported covid deaths, in the face of the obvious alternative explanation, which is that it's substantially more contagious and more deadly than the flu.
If I started from the assumption that if someone has a motive to do something nefarious then they probably did it, and then had to work to disprove it, that would be corrosive to all human relations. How could you even function in society under that worldview?
> If I started from the assumption that if someone has a motive to do something nefarious then they probably did it, and then had to work to disprove it, that would be corrosive to all human relations. How could you even function in society under that worldview?
again, for most individuals, you're right. when it comes to those in power, incentivized by large sums of money, with basically zero means of being caught, it's only pragmatic to assume that it happened. to what extent is up for debate to be sure, but only a few posts up, you instinctively deemed any amount of this hypothetical corruption a "conspiracy theory." why is that the reflexive term you reach for when presented with the scenario I outlined? why do you assume that those in power are uncorrupt until proven otherwise? where does this inherent, implicit complete trust in authority come from?
>why does everyone assume—when obviously, demonstrably massive profit incentives are on the line—that everyone in key positions of power will act 100% honestly and altruistically?
If I hit the nail on the head, you hammered it all the way in putting it that way. Thank you. It's really bewildering, I never expected to see something like this happen, I mean, to see a massive government/corporate push of something, sure, but to see so many just go along with it with seemingly little to no questioning of legitimacy...and when the ability to do further research with hard factual numbers you can think up your own conclusions from...its just bewildering.
a) But then why be afraid of the vaccine? We have sufficient data to tell its it's much less deadly than the flu.
b) I do get the flu vaccine every year, even though it's not very efficacious. Having the flu is awful, even if it's unlikely to kill me.
c) Your notion that COVID is mildly more deadly than the flu seems wildly off base. Despite all our efforts to contain the spread (which were sufficient to drive flu cases to effectively zero this season) it has killed > 500K in the U.S., 10-20x a typical flu season.
a) We do not have sufficient data, and threat of sterility is a serious concern which is yet to be ruled out
b) Thats your choice. I've never opted for the flu vaccine because the lack of accountability of its efficacy and profit incentives don't make sense as far as motivating any belief that that sort of thing is designed to be good for me
c) Examine the numbers of actual confirmed deaths from COVID vs comorbidities. Yes, it still is more deadly, and I clearly say that, but its not enough more to justify how its being treated.
If you scroll to the map with state-level data, you can see it has started to resemble the electoral college map. Having checked it out nearly everyday for months now, that resemblance is only growing stronger as time goes on.
At a certain point, there may need to be some designation given to certain states or counties - something like a travel advisory - so people know if an area has or is likely to have a COVID outbreak due to low vaccination levels.
Travel advisories may not be sufficient. At some point we may need the federal government to round up individuals who refused to get vaccines and put them in remedial education camps. These camps could be taxpayer neutral through a mandatory daily forced labor quota for each resident. Due to the potential for virulent "super spreaders" among the populations, residents must be kept in solitary confinement for their own safety. The overarching goal here would be rehabilitation, and we could give it a catchy name like "Ministry of Truth."
A CDC website noting areas with high chances of COVID outbreaks would be sufficient. The vaccines aren't 100% effective, so if you're in a high risk group you'd likely want to know which areas of the country to avoid.
But how would a website help high-risk individuals to know which unvaccinated individuals to avoid? Another idea could be mandatory tattoos for science deniers - the tattoos would have to be on a conspicuous place like the hand or forehead and visible from a safe enough distance to give people time to put on extra masks. This could be more "humane" than putting them in solitary confinement, but it's more likely to incur a taxpayer expense.
