The mistake was mandates. They might have saved some lives in the near-term, but Americans don't like being told what to do, and the long-term policy consequences could be much worse than the extra 5% coverage mandates brought.
There was no mistake. In no other civilized society, requiring people to do something so small to actually care for each other would be considered a breach of civil rights. Americans are just special
Unfortunately, because of how special Americans are, the outcome of being stuck with this current administration was inevitable. It was going to happen sooner or later.
Im glad at least its happening sooner when Im still fairly young and have the flexibility to peace out if I need to.
Public health policy for Americans that doesn't take into account the special characteristics of Americans is a mistake. It doesn't matter if the chosen policy would be the correct policy anywhere else.
When you come out of the gate with masks aren't effective, just was your hands, then go to masks are mandatory, Americans are going to be upset because you're making them do something that you just told them not to do. They're also going to distrust future recommendations. When a new mandate comes through, they're going to be less likely to comply and more likely to make a big fuss.
Combine that with less than effective outreach on reasonable expectations of the vaccine in terms of reduction of illness and immune response to the injection, and it's a recipie for mistrust.
And since many of the mandates were found unenforcable, it weakens the potential power of future mandates, should there be a need.
It wasn't just Americans who were against the vaccine mandates. Across the world many people were upset about being forced to take vaccines under threat of being forced out of their jobs, colleges etc
That was not an option for me, whether it was parents (under 18 at the time), school, extracurriculars, travelling abroad (also for extracurriculars), and more, the vast majority required vaccinations to participate/attend.
Sure, you could just say "well just ruin your future and NEET it up forever", but is that really any different than having it literally mandated? Remember, at the time it was heavily pushed that mandates would not be going away in the future, so the implication was anything forgone in the present would be for naught when you're inevitably forced to recieive it eventually anyway.
Granted, at the time I thought nothing if it, and happily got my first two doses. It was actually the experience of suffering side-effects from the second vaccine and getting labelled "anti-vax" when asking those around me for help that really turned me off the whole movement, forever.
MAGA is populist-leftist in a lot of ways. Really if you took the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 out of the picture it would be much more so.
Old school union Democrats were often fiercely anti immigration too. Trump turned Ohio from purple to red and carried a lot of that region by pulling in these people.
I’m not personally a fan of populism of either left or right variety. It almost always has a negative outcome. It turns out that experts, even if they are sometimes assholes, often do really know something, and purging them and putting crackpots and apparatchiks in charge has consequences. People who don’t know how to do things don’t do them as well.
RFK is going to be an epic disaster. I think he’s the worst person in the administration in terms of potential long term blast radius. He’s a crank who will kill people with new agey granola anti medicine bullshit.
I used to regard that stuff as part of the loony left. I guess it was. Trump is the Sauron of crackpottery, gathering all con artists and crackpots to himself as if by some magical magnetism.
I lived in Orange County CA at the start of the pandemic and moved to Cincinnati in the great diaspora. Went shopping in both places. Was never asked about a vaccine. I did have to mask up.
I don’t recall being asked about a vaccine anywhere. If I worked certain jobs I can imagine it, and those would be jobs where it would make sense.
There are countries that had a stricter response, but this is a US centric discussion. Hearing Americans complain about lock downs makes me roll my eyes. The USA did not have “lock downs” outside a few very dense metros you were free to leave at any time.
HN has actually always been extremely pro-vaccine, it's a little weird considering there are some authentic hacker types here (yeah yeah "hacker news is to hacker as hotdog is to dog" and all) but it's the one position that's held by an overwhelming majority of the site that really stands out.
You'd probably find more people in any given thread pushing back against the tech stack the OP site is using, lol
There used to be a lot less of us critics around 2020/2021, I don't know if it's a case of less moderation around such topics nowadays (doubtful, I'd expect dang to be pretty good even in the COVID heyday) or if there's more of us that have since wisened up or developed health conditions ourselves.
You couldn’t be more wrong about “In no other civilized society, requiring people to do something so small to actually care for each other would be considered a breach of civil rights”.
First of all, a medical treatment which is enforced by the government is a major thing, no matter how small the intervention may appear.
In Germany a limited mandate for healthcare workers was introduced. This didn’t force people to accept a vaccine, but they could be temporarily forbidden from coming to work.
This was declared valid by the constitutional court.
Forcing people to get the vaccine would clearly contradict the constitution on the other hand.
I meant something small as in whatever mandates were implemented, not actually forcing people to take the vaccine. I fully agree with "either get vaccinated or stay away from people" mandates that were implemented.
There was major backlash against mandates everywhere they were imposed, even including in places like China which has an extremely social culture paired with a government with authoritarian level power and relatively low tolerance for public dissent.
Asking people to inject themselves with something that was rushed out the door, most using novel technology, and whose results did not come remotely close to the early rhetoric (which included claims that you would not get infected or spread COVID if vaccinated) is not something that people would ever organically rush to adopt.
China doesn't have extremely social culture. It has developed rapid economic growth and societally there are quite a few issues.
The only country that had a very good societal response was Japan, as a result they had one of the lowest death rates in the world, even with their aging population, while having the law in place that pretty much only restrict government power to closing certain places, without being able to enforce quarantine. The initial decision of the government was even against imposing emergency powers, but eventually all parties agreed that emergency powers were necessary.
>Asking people to inject themselves with something that was rushed out the door, most using novel technology, and whose results did not come remotely close to the early rhetoric (which included claims that you would not get infected or spread COVID if vaccinated) is not something that people would ever organically rush to adopt.
And yet, those same people eat food that contains who knows what, was processed with random chemicals that may or may not cause cancer, buy meat from animals injected with chemicals that they don't know the contents of, smoke, drink alchol, vape.
But suddenly, when it comes to taking a vaccine with technology that not only has been around for a while, but also adequately tested, the "government can't be trusted".
The negative response to vaccine was never about government distrust, it was pretty much a very easy ideological line to draw in the sand. This is why every single anti vaxxer person on their way to the grave breathing through a ventilator was changing their mind and telling people to take the vaccine, because when shit actually gets real, ideology matters less.
And equivalently now, maybe (and hopefully), when US is embroiled in civil unrest with martial law in place, and people can't feed their families, they will realize that having a black woman president would have been probably a much better outcome than voting for a convicted felon who sold them lies of individual liberty.
