Hot as in, I’m feeling kind of feverish because I’m now sick because we let whooping cough spread to prove a point to people who get their medical information from Facebook.
I mean you could listen to the reasons that people who have lost trust in the institutions say they lost trust, and then try and rectify those reasons. But to do that is to admit that MAYBE the US govt didn't handle COVID perfectly. And that's a conversation many folks are unwilling to have. So this is the alternative we're left with.
It's uglier this way for sure and will cause more suffering. Sucks.
Those reasons are simple. People they trust are lying to them for monetary and political gain about a subject they personally know nothing about.
That's it. That's all there is to it.
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> But to do that is to admit that MAYBE the US govt didn't handle COVID perfectly.
My friend, antivax bullshit has been swelling long before COVID. Turns out there's way more money and power in peddling these people snake oil than something that will help their health.
And secondly, whatever complaints you have about handling COVID, the vaccines for it were and are safe and effective, but no amount of evidence will ever convince them.
Current estimate is that some 5.6 billion people took at least one dose of a COVID vaccine[0]. You would think that if there severe complications, we would have seen them in, I don't know, hundreds of millions of people by now. Any day now, I am sure those people will all get super cancer and/or turn into zombies.
I'm reminded of the M.A.D.D. campaigns to reduce drunk driving with faked crash scenes in front of schools. They would set up a crashed car with dummy "bodies" strewn (and even scattered blood/glass) across walkways where everyone could see them.
I don't think it was a particularly effective tactic.
I was able to dig up this paper that showed 66% of the COVID unvaccinated regretted their decision after hospitalization. The rest were undeterred, even after hospitalization, mostly due to ideology and conspiracies.
But the problem is that I wouldn’t be comfortable risking public health to prove 2/3 of a point to vaccine skeptics who should’ve known better anyway. The Hippocratic oath is to do no harm, and I wouldn’t want a loved one with a suppressed immune system or lung problems to get seriously sick because we let the disease spread by choice.
The real vectors of disinformation are social media, and antivax deaths are downstream of that.
But we don't have any kind of cultural immunity to the kind of propagandised and designed messaging that drives these campaigns.
In the absence of that, learning through consequences - and coming in with the messaging after they happen - is the only thing that can make a difference.
