> Public health officials say it started when an international traveller attended a wedding in New Brunswick last October. New Brunswick's outbreak ended in January, but guests at that wedding had already brought the virus to southwestern Ontario, where that province's outbreak was concentrated among closely knit Mennonite communities.
International travel + spread among low-vaccination communities.
Certain religious and cultural groups, including Mennonite populations — where the first outbreak began on Oct. 27, 2024, after an international traveller from Thailand attended a wedding in New Brunswick and guests then returned to southwestern Ontario — and Amish populations, were disproportionately affected.
> Measles, a dangerous illness that for decades has rarely infected Canadians, is back – and spreading. [...] Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., left, now the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services, stands with protesters in Olympia, Wash., in 2019, opposing a bill to tighten measles, mumps and rubella vaccine requirements for school-aged children.
Reading this, it's a challenge to feel empathy. Everyone deserves some degree of empathy, idiots too. Yet this topic seems so needlessly self inflicted. Maybe it's a more nuanced topic than I'm aware of, is there a strong argument against vaccination?
There are different sources of antivax attitudes in different communities. For some, there's a religious or cultural basis. For others, they are simply the victims of a well-funded and concerted misinformation campaign.
A good example if the ultra-orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn for whom a gloosy booklet seems to bear a lot of responsibility [1] and this predates Covid. It's particularly interesting because certain preventable diseases can cause male infertility.
This became such a big problem that Israel had to counter this misinformation so ultra-Orthodox communities would get Covid vaccines [2].
The outbreak then spread to Alberta where travelers returned from a wedding in southwestern Ontario. However, there was at least 6 unique entries into Alberta so it wasn't a single outbreak, but in fact, 6 separate outbreaks. Some entered the province following travel to Mexico, again to attend weddings I believe.
Historically, these outbreaks have nothing to do with "MAHA"/RFK types. It's religious fundamentalist groups that lack herd immunity (because nobody in the community is vaccinated) every time.
And yet, the parent of one such child who died of measles because of being unvaccinated went on video for Children’s Health Defense (RFK's anti-vaccine group) to claim how vaccines are bad and measles are good.
The claim that these the religious fundamentalist groups have nothing to do with anti-vaccine propaganda inflicted by MAHA types is disingenuous or simply poorly informed.
Please go ahead and find me a transmission chain of any of these nearly eradicated infectious diseases that went through someone involved in MAHA or Children's Health Defense. If you go looking, you will find that every single outbreak of Measles, Polio, or any similar disease in North America goes through a fundamentalist religious community. The Wakefield/RFK groups are really not large or tightly-connected enough to do this.
What you can blame RFK for (and what you should blame him for) is cutting funding to identify these possible transmission events and intercept them. This is an area where the Trump admin made severe cuts, on the back of RFK's ideological bent against the concept of infectious disease and the "government efficiency" wave. As a result, responses to outbreaks in these religious communities are much, much slower. It is not a "MAHA wave" that is causing outbreaks like this, it's the loss of funding.
RFKjr and the 2019 Samoa measles outbreak comes to mind where he went to Samoa to boost vaccine hesitancy after some kids died due to a mistakenly adulterated vaccination.
This kind of messaging is why Samoa had 30% vaccination rate while nearby islands had 99% vaccination when measles infected the island later that same year.
I don’t see how you can dismiss RFKjr’s messaging. Are you claiming he has no impact on public opinion?
Sorry, can you point to where Samoa is on a map of North America?
The messaging gets a few thousand kooks riled up, and it's been going back decades to the Wakefield study and all the random kooks who think their child got autism from a vaccine. RFK is not new. His message is marginally more popular in the US, but it is not causing a huge wave of vaccine hesitancy.
Places like Samoa have additional problems with vaccination in that the standard of care isn't that high and sometimes those errors cause people to avoid care. In the Samoa case you cited there, the inciting incident involved two kids dying due to a nurse's error which wasn't investigated. If getting a vaccine involves some risk of getting poisoned by an incompetent nurse, you might also think twice about getting a vaccine. This is very different than the RFK situation of yelling about things that don't happen (vaccines causing autism, birth defects, etc.).
What changed was less funding to the agencies that surveil for disease spread so they can intercept outbreaks. The US CDC funded these programs all over the world.
It's a little hard to believe that people who famously don't use computers were infected by an "misinformation", a rather loathsome neologism. There was famously a really serious outbreak in the NYC Orthodox community from 1989 to about 1991. Unvaccinated communities are a sort of immunological tinder box, and you never know when a stray spark might land.
This is the result of a failure of public health to reach out to these religious communities in effective ways for decades.
That stray spark’s survival is heavily influenced by the herd immunity of the rest of the population.
Put another way if the overall population sees an average of 0.5 or 0.95 infections per case there’s zero chance of a huge outbreak. But odds of a case making it to a vulnerable population is wildly higher in the second case.
I'm not sure about Mennonites. One of their communities writes about it and seems to suggest only 1 of the 40 or so communities is hardliners against vaccination. But I also note this is written in a really neutral way (could be to placate government, dunno): https://www.mennoniteusa.org/measles/
What changed was that they were free-riders on the rest of the population and one day the rest of the population no longer met the threshold.
One could say it is because of the spread of misinformation and that might be the proximate cause.
But if a drug addict periodically overdoses and needs naloxone, and one day a supply chain issue makes it hard to access and he dies, did the supply chain kill him or his drug addiction? Perhaps monocausal explanations are insufficient.
Mass immigration from countries where measles is endemic? India has over 10,000 cases per year and makes up the plurality of Canada's immigration intake. Canada has a very high two-shot vaccination rate, but there are pockets like the Mennonite communities that are vulnerable.
Only for stays greater than six months. So an unvaccinated person can fly in from wherever and stay for 180 days legally, or just overstay their visa. That's plenty of time to spread measles.
this is a racist dog whistle. Stop with the "mass immigration" BS.
India, contrary to what the racists believe, has a long and successful vaccination program. A country of 1.5 billion people has around a 70% MMR vaccination rate among infants. Canada's in the 80% range and dropping.
Canada had eliminated measles, it was reintroduced by travel from a country where measles was endemic. This is not rocket science. High-volume international travel from countries where measles is endemic, like India, poses a public health risk to countries that have eliminated the disease. The same goes for tuberculosis, hepatitis, etc.
The vaccination rates in some parts of Alberta are less than 30%. Per capita, Alberta has the highest incident rate. The rhetoric around vaccinations, social media, a perhaps complacency towards distant threats have all contributed to this situation.
The challenge is that solving this is easier but only if people are willing to get vaccinated.
There’s, ironically, heavy overlap between the group who insist that we crack down on society’s ‘freeloaders’ and the group that freeloads on those who responsibly vaccinate.
The Hutterites in Alberta, from what I've heard on various talks etc, aren't anti-vaxx in the traditional sense. There is definitely some attitudes like that, but the reason the vaccination rate was so slow was a mix of distrust of healthcare professionals and also difficulty in accessing the vaccine. People would have to travel to a public health clinic which is typically quite far away.
The uptake in vaccine rates among these groups in Alberta has actually gone way up since the outbreak, and since the healthcare organization has made the vaccine more readily available.
The last time I was on a bus travelling out east, there was a Mennonite man who was talking about vaccines with the bus driver. I was surprised to overhear that he was pro vaccine, and that there isn't anything in his belief system that mandates he be anti-vaccine.
So I don't know what drives the anti-vaxx view for Mennonites, but from what this man was saying it doesn't seem to be something that is inherent to being a Mennonite (like blood transfusions for JWs).
I live in a region with a lot of Amish and Mennonite groups. As I understand it, there's no central authority, but each community can make their own rules. Also, he may have been following his own instincts, independent of his sect.
I wonder if it's simply the fact that there really isn't anything driving them to get their kids vaccinated rather than a particular religious conviction. In Ontario, the old-order Mennonite and Amish groups have separate schooling for their kids and aren't integrated into the medical system here (not even being a part of our public health insurance system). Your family doctor and public health agency (through the schools) are the avenues the vast majority have to vaccination and so being apart from that, the old-order families would need to make a special effort to get vaccinated above and beyond what most people need to do.
"Previously, Moore shared that this outbreak in Ontario was traced back to a Mennonite wedding in New Brunswick, and is spreading primarily in Mennonite and Amish communities where vaccination rates lag. The vast majority of those cases are in southwestern Ontario."
"Most cases this year are in regions where local vaccination rates are as low as 30 percent.
Those towns are home to a culturally conservative Mennonite group with ties to Mexico that has historically been less likely to accept vaccines. The group primarily speaks Plautdietsch, a Low German dialect spoken almost entirely by Mennonites."
Most of the cases in Texas are in school-age children between ages 5 and 17 who are either unvaccinated or have unknown vaccination status, and a few are among children who received a single dose of the MMR vaccine.
What is known about this outbreak and the community where it’s occurring?
This outbreak started in a Mennonite community in West Texas where there are low vaccination rates. Many of the children are homeschooled or attend smaller private schools, and many are unvaccinated.
This is not atypical for the larger outbreaks that we’ve seen in the United States in the recent past. In 2019, the U.S. saw 1,274 measles cases, including a large outbreak of slightly more than 900 cases in an Orthodox Jewish community in New York. In 2014, there was a measles outbreak of 383 cases in an Amish community in Ohio.
For some reason many of the mainstream media reports won't reference that the Canadian outbreaks are occurring in mainly Mennonite communities. Perhaps they're trying to avoid singling them out.
Dense groups of unvaccinated people are just waiting for a biological match to be lit...
I think it's more likely they want to leave the impression that this is all caused by "far right" anti-vaxxers and not a religious group with roots that go back hundreds of years.
COVID provided a larger stage for the anti-vaccine people, but this has been an issue long before. In the US you have also Trump/MAGA amplifying them, making it worse.
Vaccines are incredibly effective, and we're wasting all that again and children will needlessly suffer and die.
Vaccines are incredibly effective and definitely not connected to autism. That being said there is a rather large distrust of them after Covid. The fact that media and government both colluded to suppress information related to Covid vaccine side effects is troubling.
Don’t use govt control to suppress speech on social media. It’s not conducive to any sort of trust building.
Before I’m labelled a “maga/trump” talking points peddler - my kids are vaccinated (yes, including the hpv), I haven’t done covid shots more than the one required time. We do flu shots but not picky about it. Kids have had the flu (a & b) and they’ve handled it pretty well.
Also easy to forget how much negative sentiment, on the opposite political side, there was prior to the vaccine being approved. The NYT had an article on how it would take 10 years for the vaccine to be developed and approved! Operation Warp Speed was a project from the first Trump administration. One could rationally blame Trump for the vaccine skepticism. It's arguable it never would have been rush approved if it had been someone else in the White House!
I wish I had cataloged all of the stuff I read and listened to in 2020. There are things where the references are basically impossible to find. All of it mainstream news sources. There was concern expressed in 2020 that the covid vaccine could trigger resistance to other existing vaccines, and that's exactly what happened.
Also worth name dropping one of the most interesting books I've ever read: _The Pox of Liberty: How the Constitution Left Americans Rich, Free, and Prone to Infection_. Apparently so obscure that Amazon tries to auto correct the search.
> It's arguable it never would have been rush approved if it had been someone else in the White House!
I don't think so. Biden pushed the Covid vaccines even harder than Trump did. If Trump had been in the White House I don't think Covid vaccines would have been mandated.
> Also easy to forget how much negative sentiment, on the opposite political side, there was prior to the vaccine being approved. The NYT had an article on how it would take 10 years for the vaccine to be developed and approved!
I looked up that article. Nowhere does it indicate that papers like the NYT were opposed to speeding up the development, approval, and distribution of vaccines.
Are you implying that if it were Democrats in the white house we would've had protracted approval?
Vaccines often take 10 years to bring to market. We want a new vaccine as fast as possible, where each month matters.
The fact is that starting from the early stages of development, most vaccines fail. We cannot afford to fail, so we need to plan for success. To do that, we must think and invest as ambitiously as we can — and that means in a Covid vaccine advance market commitment.
> my kids are vaccinated (yes, including the hpv), I haven’t done covid shots more than the one required time
Same. The way the COVID vaccine was used as a political wedge issue contributed to suspicions. I hope lessons were learned on both sides but I doubt it.
The media was fine on the covid shots and if you're not taking them then you're doing yourself and your family harm. Yes, there are side effects. Those side effects are far far milder than the actual illness, which you are pretty much guaranteed to get. So your option are mild side effect + mild disease or severe disease.
Those are not the options. COVID is exceedingly mild for many people (if I've ever had it, I didn't notice), and severe only for a few. The risk needs to be evaluated in relation to each person.
I rarely get sick. I haven't had flu or even a cold in at least 10 years. I don't get flu vaccines because in my estimation I don't need them. By contrast, for something like tetanus vaccines, I do get those periodically as my hobbies expose me to cuts and dirt.
These are in fact the options. "I'm special" is common but wrong thinking. These likelihood numbers apply to you too. If you want to gamble that you'll get few side effects from covid, then great news your odds of getting side effects from the vaccine are even less!
Flu and covid vacines don't prevent the illness. They just "maybe" soften their impact, but even that is not guaranteed as virus mutates fast. Don't throw them into the same bag as truly life changing polio or smallpox vaciness.
Millions of people died from covid. It's not the flu. Vaccines don't just "maybe" reduce the impact, they DO reduce the impact. It's extremely well documented. Even now, with the milder strains of covid that are common, it still reduces your chance of hospitalization and death by 57%.
For the overwhelming majority of "young" (which can be interpreted rather generously) people who had significantly negative responses to COVID, there were severe preexisting conditions. By contrast vaccine induced myocarditis and similar side effects occurred at a frequency much higher in these age groups, particularly those in the male + younger side of young, than would be accepted for a "normal" vaccine.
Major side effects from typical vaccines run in the 1:100k to 1:1000k range, while COVID vaccine myocarditis alone was somewhere in the 1:10k range for young males, and much higher with proactive testing for such as opposed to the 1:10k figures which relied on data from people showing up at the ER with heart issues.
And obviously speaking of vaccine "OR" COVID is misleading because it turned out that the vaccines didn't stop people from getting COVID - repeatedly, spreading COVID, and even dying of COVID. It, ideally, reduced the probability of severe outcomes, in exchange for a relatively high frequency of side effects, and that was it. But lots of people got really rich off the whole thing, so there's that at least.
Haha, well not quite 90% but many do. And I think a responsible, and transparent, government response to COVID would have been centered around this. Make it clear that there are many uncertainties but so far it seems that the people most negatively affected by the disease are those with major preexisting conditions, or the elderly. And that the ability of the vaccines to stop transmission or even infection are not clear.
Instead so much of the rhetoric was based on complete lies. I think people forget just how completely dishonest "we" were. [1] And why do montages like the one I just linked to get removed from YouTube? It's not fake or fabricated in any way, shape, or fashion. Nor are those comments even taken out of context. It's simply a record of the statements made by public figures and politicians. Apparently that's against YouTube's terms of service.
> They refuse to look critically at the trade offs.
That is a bald assertion. I do not agree.
Of course it depends what you mean by "they", but medical researchers do look critically at the trade offs
There were failures of communication from fear that nuance would be misunderstood as uncertainty
Also for large sections of the population, many in my community, the state generally and the medical establishment in particular, have no credibility for the sadistic way they have been treated.
The covid vaccine was not given to young adults nor children until much later iterations of the vaccine were available, and were specifically reduced in potency for that age group.
If you recall, the initial strains of covid for the elderly had a side effect that could occur with shockingly high probability. That side effect was "dead." The very first vaccines were rushed and given to the elderly to prevent this. There was no "misinformation." The media reported information as it came in.
Understanding of the virus and the vaccines did changes fairly quickly during that time, so I get that it could be confusing for people, but there was no secret effort to mislead anyone, and overall the covid vaccine was one of the biggest successes in our lifetime.
mRNA vaccines open up huge possibilities for a range of illnesses, including cancer. The covid vaccine was developed in record time, and was overall pretty damn effective at preventing the side effect of "dead."
What COVID vaccine side effects? The only one I know apart from just mild reactions in the week that follows is the minuscule increase in myocarditis in young males, and the increase in myocarditis is even higher from normal COVID exposure, so it's arguable vaccine actually lower your overall chances.
The J&J vaccine (which I received) was ultimately pulled due in part to blood clots which resulted in one documented death [1]. The AstraZeneca vaccine suffered the same fate.
It has been affirmed that the risks of the vaccine are less than the risks of the virus. Still, we shouldn’t shout “the vaccines are safe” so loudly that we can’t document and discuss real side effects and relative risks between competing solutions.
We’ve ultimately reached the correct outcome here, removing an inferior product from the market.
> we shouldn’t shout “the vaccines are safe” so loudly that we can’t document and discuss real side effects and relative risks between competing solutions
When people say “vaccines are safe” they usually mean “vaccines are generally safe” but when people say “vaccines are not safe” they usually mean “all vaccines are not safe at all times”. Those two are very different opinions and you’re demanding accountability from the side that already willing to display it.
I think “minuscule” is an understatement. I knew of 2 teenagers who were hospitalized for myocarditis - both healthy and played sports at high school. Compared to that I know of no one who has had issues with the polio, norovirus, hib, hepatitis, etc. Even the often “dreaded” mmr is ok. I’ve known of kids having sustained reactions to mmrv.
I think general aches and chills were not an issue. But myocarditis and blood clots should be looked at and not brushed under “minuscule”
I haven't followed all the details, but the parts I've seen all pretty much said that the risk of myocarditis from a COVID infection is still larger than from the vaccines. This is all very low incidence, so it's hard to get robust data.
But as you can assume that COVID is widespread enough that almost everyone will get it at some point, the risk from the vaccine is not larger than that from the infection, likely it is much lower (especially if we include more than myocarditis).
> those impacted by myocarditis would not have had it without the shot
How do you know?
One could easily say that since the risk of myocarditis is much higher after COVID infection than vaccination, that vaccines prevented far more cases of myocarditis than they caused.
The other thing that made mandates controversial was the fact that the vaccine didn't stop transmission. If the vaccine only helps the person that takes it, then it should be personal choice.
> If the vaccine only helps the person that takes it, then it should be personal choice.
If unvaccinated people seek treatment for Covid, should they get put lower down the priority list than vaccinated people? Otherwise that person's "personal choice" is negatively affecting someone else, right?
Given demonstrated cuts in transmission and severe disease, proven mandate effects on uptake and outcomes, and established legal grounding, the claim that evidence was insufficient to justify mandates is not supported.
That Kampf piece isn’t what you're trying to sell it as. It’s a opinion-based book chapter in a Springer volume, not a peer-reviewed research paper. That means it wasn’t reviewed by independent subject-matter experts or subjected to methodological scrutiny. It’s basically an editorial essay compiled from selectively cited studies which measure viral load (Ct values) instead of actual transmission. The author even admits “the epidemiological relevance remains uncertain,” which is academic code for “this doesn't matter.”
The argument also ignores that PCR viral load is a weak proxy for contagiousness. Ct values vary by swab technique, timing, and test type, and don’t necessarily correlate with live virus or infectious period. Real transmission studies look at secondary attack rates (how often close contacts get infected) which is the gold standard for measuring infectiousness. Kampf doesn’t do that. He just stacks correlational lab data and calls it proof that vaccines don’t reduce transmission. That’s not how epidemiology works.
If you actually read the peer-reviewed literature, the evidence directly contradicts his claim. Madewell et al. (JAMA Netw Open 2022, 5(4): e229317) analyzed dozens of household studies and found vaccination reduced both susceptibility and infectiousness, though less for later variants.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
And a Spanish cohort study (PMC10975059, 2023) found vaccinated index cases had an adjusted odds ratio of 0.21 for transmitting compared to unvaccinated.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10975059/
So when someone waves around a non-peer-reviewed book chapter that literally says “the relevance remains uncertain” as if it’s the definitive takedown of global vaccine data, they’re not being honest... or they don’t understand what they’re citing. The serious literature is consistent: vaccines shorten infectious periods, lower secondary attack rates, and reduce transmission risk. Kampf’s chapter is opinion dressed up as research, and anyone presenting it as “proof” just revealed they didn’t read past the abstract.
Get out of here with what you think the study says. You didn’t read it, you skimmed a line and built a conspiracy out of it. You’re advertising that you don’t understand the difference between a book chapter and peer-reviewed research.
Ah yes, the standard bad-faith argument playbook: shift from evidence to ideology, invent a straw man, and move the goalposts when the facts don’t cooperate.
I never mentioned a conspiracy. You made that up so you’d have an easier argument to knock down. We were talking about evidence and methodology, and now you’ve pivoted to “government overreach” and “panic.”
Guidance changed because the data changed. That’s what science is supposed to do. New variants, new evidence, new risk assessments. We update, refine, repeat. Calling that “lying” or “overreach” is just admitting you don’t understand how empirical reasoning works.
I personally knew people young and old who died from COVID. The mortality spike wasn’t some abstract statistic. It was families, coworkers, and neighbors. When you downplay that or call the response “panic,” what you’re really saying is you’re fine with more people dying unnecessarily as long as you’re not inconvenienced.
You can keep moving the goalposts if it helps you avoid the obvious, but the facts don’t change. The vaccines worked, the mandates increased uptake, and the alternative was a lot more dead people.
>>You didn’t read it, you skimmed a line and built a conspiracy out of it.
>>I never mentioned a conspiracy.
Well that's awkward.
Yes a very, very few young people died from it (mostly with pre-existing conditions) and a lot of old people died from it.
Although the definitions of "dying from COVID" were so broad and numerous as to be meaningless, and the mortality spike lacks credibility as a result. And how do you calculate the numbers of lives saved? Against modelling? That worked well.
The vaccines worked, but were over-prescribed to people that didn't need them and were at risk from side-effects. The economy cratered, people lost their jobs, babies and toddlers were developmentally delayed due to mask wearing and other students had their education affected by school & university closures.
You could catch the virus standing up in a restaurant, but not if you sat down. You should stay at home and might die, unless you needed to attend a BLM rally, then it was OK. You must keep a distance of 6ft from other people, but 5ft 6" was dangerous. You should wear a mask, even though cloth won't stop the virus and meta-reviews showed they didn't work at the population level. You shouldn't go to work if you have an email job as you might die, but if you have a working class job in a store on the tills you can meet hundreds of people a day with no issues. This science stuff is good.
>>And the alternative was a lot more dead people.
What, like in Sweden? I think we all know for the next pandemic the sensible response will be closer to the Great Barrington Declaration than whatever the fuck it was we thought we were doing before.
As bad as anti-vaxxers are claimed to be, people conflating someone who has concerns about novel medical treatment or general distrust of the pharma industry with people who think all vaccines are bad are far worse. They suppress actual scientific discussion and information propagation through fear, intimidation, and suppression.
I’ve come to discount the opinion of anyone who earnestly accuses some of being an anti-vaxxer. They have no moral or scientific high ground and obviously do not understand nuance.
> Don’t use govt control to suppress speech on social media. It’s not conducive to any sort of trust building
The federal government lied about masks. Local governments lied about lockdowns. Nobody lied about vaccines.
The folks who can’t be fucked to not get and spread measles weren’t tipped over the edge by the mask lies because they’re the same folks who wouldn’t follow a mask mandate.
When Trudeau said "[t]he best vaccine for you to take is the very first one that is offered to you," they were aware of the potential threats that AstraZeneca posed, and yet, it took about 15 more days before the government suspended its use. He was well aware of the risks he was taking by telling everyone it was safe, and yet, did it anyways (the fact that he even said such a thing indicates as much).
What were these "lies"? Lying requires an intent to deceive. You can be wrong about something without lying about it. During the early days of COVID, there was little information about the effectiveness of anything, and governments may have hastily made statements without yet having all the facts, but that's very different than intentionally deceiving.
> What were these "lies"? Lying requires an intent to deceive
“In early 2020, Fauci and other public health officials advised against mask use by the general public, citing both doubts about efficacy and a need to preserve limited supplies for healthcare workers” [1]. That second part brings it close to a lie. (There was no need to advise against mask use.)
America fucked up thrice: the mask misinformation in March, talking down the lab-release hypothesis (which would have motivated right-wing nutters into being less selfish), and not regulating local jurisdictions who took specific measures (e.g. no public outdoor gatherings in San Francisco, or vaccine mandates in open-air venues in New York).
Otherwise, we did pretty well. And I’m sceptical someone willing to put their family and community at risk would see things differently if any of the above changed.
> In early 2020, Fauci and other public health officials advised against mask use by the general public, citing both doubts about efficacy and a need to preserve limited supplies for healthcare workers”
Huge stretch to consider this intent to deceive. This is as much of a lie as imposing rations during wartime. And not even that much, since Fauci's statements were suggestions and not mandates. They were basically saying, "We're not yet sure if they work well, but we're looking into it. But for now, supplies are limited, so let's not deprive healthcare workers who actually need them."
> They were basically saying, "We're not yet sure if they work well, but we're looking into it. But for now, supplies are limited, so let's not deprive healthcare workers who actually need them."
No, they could have said that. In fact, they should have said that. Instead what they said was some convoluted statement actually saying something like there was no evidence for masks working (null hypothesis), worded such that most people not skilled in critical reading would interpret it as an indication that masks didn't work.
It was most certainly a black mark on public health officials, along with the various closures of open air venues - parks, beaches, etc. (of course not that these things justify any of the abject denialist craziness of the "other side")
Yea, I agree in the perfect world, with a cooperative public who want the best for everyone, they should have said that. In reality, (as we know now) the American public largely doesn't give a shit about anyone but themselves, and any argument to "do something to help someone else" was just going to be ridiculed and ignored. They had to structure the message in the form of "Right now, we think X works, Y doesn't, and to help yourselves, do X, and don't do Y." because any other message would be totally ignored. I wish we weren't surrounded by selfishness, but we are.
It seems like you switched your argument from they didn't lie to the lie was justified ?
But even in your framing, I think they could have simply not said anything for a few days to the general public while healthcare workers went and scooped up whatever was still floating around in the consumer inventory. Coming clean and saying we think this might help, but the supply is low and they're more important for healthcare workers would have built trust rather than creating another transparent move that undermined it.
I do get they were under significant pressure, especially with the anti-leadership above them causing unnecessary chaos for political gains. I just think if we're doing a postmortem here we should acknowledge that the lying was a mistake.
The bigger fuck up was having an anti-leader in the bully pulpit amplifying outlandish anti-society positions. The usual mainstream conservative right wing opinion would have been something like "wear a mask / stay home / etc to protect yourself and your own family". This would set normative societal behavior, even though some people would do otherwise for their own reasons (with one possible reason being a headstrong individualist desire to exercise freedom). But instead a large group of mainstream people, who would have otherwise been perfectly content following along with the system's recommendations, were basically goaded into denialism as mainstream pop culture. It's hard to look at this and conclude anything other that the occupier of said bully pulpit is either directly a foreign agent sowing division for division's sake, or at the very least demented in a social media bubble managed by foreign agents.
COVID should have been a slam-dunk country-uniting event, like 9/11. I didn't like GWB at all, but he and his staff managed to (briefly) unite Americans and get us all working in one basic direction[1]. If we actually had a respectable statesman in charge when COVID hit, we might have actually all come together to do the right thing. But, instead we had a belligerent clown who wasted no time before making it partisan and urging defiance and division. Absolute tragedy.
1: Unfortunately, that direction was a series of ridiculous overseas wars, but that's besides the point.
Sure they did. Go back and listen to what the media and politicians were saying about the vaccines when they were first released: you won't get COVID, you won't spread COVID. We ended up at "you'll still get COVID and spread COVID, but your symptoms will be lessened".
I'm not anti-vaccine by any means, but the story around COVID vaccines changed...a lot.
> Go back and listen to what the media was saying about the vaccines when they were first released: you won't get COVID, you won't spread COVID
You’re making the claim. Show me.
I remember this debate happening online. It was stupid then as it is now. The clinical outcomes were clear as day: reduced hospitalisation. And Jonas Salk’s original polio vaccine was non-sterilising and not only not non-infecting, but actively infecting.
I saw those statements. Sorry, no, can't be arsed to find proof, because it's not my claim. But it was definitely being stated, publicly, by authoritative-sounding people. IIRC at least some were in the administration (or in government health agencies, which from the public's perception amounts to the same thing).
The fact that you are unaware of it means you've got your head-in-the-sand.
"Calling on Americans to get vaccinated against Covid-19, Biden said, “If you’re vaccinated, you’re not going to be hospitalized, you’re not going to be in the ICU unit and you’re not going to die.”"
> But then, during a third exchange, Biden said that since the vaccines “cover” the highly transmissible Delta variant of the virus: “You’re not going to get Covid if you have these vaccinations.”
It's... literally the next paragraph. Right next to the part you quoted.
I see it now. That's misleading. It contains a nugget of truth inasmuch as a vaccinated person has lower odds of a SARS-CoV-2 infection turning into Covid, but it's not a guarantee. (Nothing in immunology is, but that's a punt.)
It should have been couched, it wasn't, and I can see someone seeing that as lying.
That said, if Biden had used more delicate words, do you think these folks would have taken their MMRs? Are people who make stupid decisions for the next decade because Trump lies about everything sympathetic because they couldn't evaluate source authority?
You asked for a source. I gave you one. It had multiple lies in it. You didn't even open the link.
Now you are pretending that someone can't go on YouTube and find more lies about the vaccines from the likes of people like Rachel Maddow. People have assembled long clips, it's a meme.
"Nuggets of truth", my lord, pure delusion.
"But but but what about some hypothetical scenario where the president didn't lie?"
You said they lied when they said "you won't get COVID, you won't spread COVID".
Someone doubted you. You responded by posting a quote from President Biden: "If you’re vaccinated, you’re not going to be hospitalized, you’re not going to be in the ICU unit and you’re not going to die."
That does not support your earlier claim. There is support for your earlier claim at the site you took the quote from, but the usual convention here is that if you quote a site you quote the part that supports your argument.
When someone asks you a question, and your response is to post some quotes from an article and a link to the article, people assume that the quotes are meant to answer the question. Most won't follow the link unless they either want to make sure you quoted accurately or they want to see if there is more interesting stuff in the article.
Those claims were true for the original COVID strain. They were not for the late strains, so that is why the message changed. Because the facts changed.
No. They lied, well one person specifically who I’ll refrain from naming because he is a lightening rod for controversy, lied by implying that herd immunity was possible and that it was the goal. It was the precise reason I took the vaccine and the precise reason I tried hard to convince many younger low risk friends to take “the” vaccine. It was 100% a lie, and that’s a matter of record.
Saying something you believe to be true isn't a lie, even if more information later makes you change your mind. You are expecting a level of perfection that just doesn't exist.
I believe Fauci knew enough to know that herd immunity wasn’t a real probability when he was on the news talking it up as the way we “return to normalcy”. Will there ever be a public trial to disprove my belief and vindicate what seem like glaring mistakes as honest scientific naivety rather than misguided public health messaging strategy? Maybe. But it seems few are interested in the actual historical facts and would rather let sleeping dogs lie, bygones be bygones, since it’s all water under the bridge anyway and we have new things to fear like book banning and transgender athletes and Tucker platforming people who think Macron’s wife’s a dude. I’m inclined instead to believe knowledge is power, history repeats itself and governments should be transparent and accountable, even if it means putting our kings on trial.
I wouldn't accuse you of being "maga/trump" purely based on the fact that he has ramped up speech suppression on social media way more than Biden could have dreamed of.
You got played, but not by scientists. You got played by pundits who turned evolving data into a culture-war slogan. Early messaging about herd immunity was based on what vaccines normally do: reduce spread enough that outbreaks die out. That worked against measles or polio, where the virus barely mutates. SARS-CoV-2 wasn’t like that. It evolved too fast, so the realistic goal shifted from elimination to control.
The definition of “vaccine” never secretly changed. It was clarified to include immune responses that reduce severe disease and transmission rather than guarantee sterilizing immunity. That’s immunology, not conspiracy. Every major vaccine like flu, pertussis, rotavirus all have that same property.
mRNA COVID vaccines still saved tens of millions of lives worldwide and sharply cut hospitalization rates, even after variants eroded transmission blocking. Boosters are needed because immunity wanes and variants keep changing, just like flu shots.
So yes: “trust, but verify” is good advice. But the verification process already happened through global trials, regulatory review, and post-marketing data. The people misleading you are the ones pretending scientific self-correction is the same as deceit.
> SARS-CoV-2 wasn’t like that. It evolved too fast, so the realistic goal shifted from elimination to control.
That's not what happened here though. These vaccines never stopped transmission, they suppressed symptoms and people just hoped/assumed they stopped transmission.
In late 2020 this was an open question people were talking about, because in development and safety testing they never even looked at transmission, only symptoms. Pfizer's announcement in particular was very careful to distinguish SARS-CoV-2 from COVID-19, intentionally not saying anything about infection/transmission. So they were being rolled out before we had any answers there. It became clear only a couple months later - well before any major "new variants" - that people were still getting infected at the same rates as before vaccination.
Right, because real science never updates. Once an idea gets said out loud, it’s locked in forever like when doctors insisted ulcers were caused by stress and spicy food, and we definitely didn’t discover Helicobacter pylori decades later living rent-free in stomachs.
Fauci’s “herd immunity” comments came before Delta and Omicron turned one virus into a family reunion. Updating that view wasn’t deceit. It was responding to evidence, something the “verify, don’t trust” crowd supposedly likes, except when the verification disagrees with their memes.
You have reached a different conclusion than I, viz that Fauci had no way of knowing his comments about herd immunity were potentially misleading, and that the variants were a complete surprise to him and that the unlikely goal of herd immunity was not really part of the definition of vaccines as we have come to know them. You and I will have to live in our different worlds. If you want to give your infant thrice yearly Covid boosters in perpetuity I totally support your right to do that. Hopefully you support my right to disagree and base my own decisions on my own reading of the literature (which isn’t as suppressed for many decades to come)?
But.....we agree that Covid exists, right? And that vaccines against it, just like vaccines against flu, do generally help by increasing your resistance to the ilness itself and its side effects.
If we agree on it....why wouldn't you take it? I got the impression from your post that you generally aren't going to?
Or more simply....who cares what Fauci said? I literally had to look up who that is.
Covid exists and there are claims which I suspect are at least directionally correct that getting regular vaccines (within 3 months of exposure iirc) can reduce some symptoms and prevent what seem to be rare complications. But, my doctor and my insurance company are not suggesting I get these boosters?/vaccines?, and they have a vested interest and better ability to weigh the evidence and make decisions about what pharmaceuticals they recommend as that’s their profession and making mistakes about it poses an existential risk for them. But I’m in a very low risk area and reasonably low risk so ymmv. Even the frail elderly people I know aren’t being vaccinated despite their thirst for it and fear of Covid. Personally, I worry a lot more about candida auris than I worry about covid.
Both my doctor and insurance company in the US recommend getting COVID vaccinations. I am a healthy adult. They make the same recommendations for my children.
I don't know if that's a widespread definition of "vaccine". I think it might be personal to you, and you might be imagining the societal consensus around it.
The Covid vaccines are thought to stave off about half of serious complications from the disease among older people. That is thought to amount to thousands of avoided deaths per year in America.
> I don't know if that's a widespread definition of "vaccine".
Wikipedia [1]: "A vaccine is a biological preparation that provides active acquired immunity to a particular infectious or malignant disease." One reference for that statement is the CDC's web page on "immunization basics".
> you might be imagining the societal consensus around it.
I don't think there's as much of a societal consensus around it now, because, as I said, flu "vaccines" have been around for quite a number of years (they were around for quite a number of years before Covid), and that has changed how people think of the word "vaccine". However, I think the word still has an unconscious connotation of something having a stronger effect than just "well, you have less chance of being hospitalized". See further comments below.
In any case, my point is that I think using the word "vaccine" for the flu and Covid shots is broken. "Vaccine" when I was growing up and got all those shots did mean "thing that prevents you from getting the disease". That was the whole point; that was what everybody talked about when you got shots as a kid so you could go to school, or when you got shots before traveling internationally so you wouldn't catch any of the endemic diseases where you were going.
When we began to encounter diseases for which we could not do that, where the best we could do was to give shots that might make them less severe but didn't keep you from getting the disease, we should have picked a different word instead of muddying the meaning of the word "vaccine".
Doing that would have made it much clearer exactly what governments were trying to do by mandating Covid "vaccines". But governments traded on the unconscious connotations of the word "vaccine" to justify the mandates. Mandating something that doesn't prevent you from getting the disease, doesn't prevent you from spreading it if you have it, but might help in keeping you out of the hospital, makes no sense from a public health perspective. But that's not what people thought was being mandated, because of the word "vaccine".
> "effective"
They might be effective at making the disease less severe. They are not effective at preventing you from getting the disease, or preventing you from spreading it if you have it.
It's easy to blame Trump/MAGA if you refuse to recognize that many of the same companies producing these vaccines also played a major role in fueling the current opioid crisis which is coincidentally disproportionately impacting these very communities. Not to mention the reproducibility crisis which makes "trust the science" claims as naive as their inverse.
The core issue isn't with "antivaxxers" but with the continual erosion of trust that created the sentiment in the first place. The foundation of being willing to inject yourself with something that you personally can't verify the effectiveness or safety of is trust. At every level our social institutions: the government, large corporations, and academia, have continually chipped away at the foundations of social trust necessary for these things.
> if you refuse to recognize that many of the same companies producing these vaccines also played a major role in fueling the current opioid crisis which is coincidentally disproportionately impacting these very communities
Moderna has no opioid division.
And while Mennonites have a multinational drug problem [1][2], I see no evidence they were “disproportionately” impacted by opioids.
This sounds like post hoc rationalisation, not causation. These folks were never going to get vaccinated.
But pull out a bit for a wider view: The establishment that said "trust us" over vaccines was the same establishment that made billions from killing millions by "fueling the current opioid crisis"
> establishment that said "trust us" over vaccines was the same establishment that made billions from killing millions by "fueling the current opioid crisis"
Conflating the "establishment" into a false monolith is rhetorically convenient. It's also wrong.
"Purdue Pharma hired Rudolph Giuliani, the former New York mayor and now Donald Trump’s lawyer, to head off a federal investigation in the mid-2000s into the company’s marketing of the powerful prescription painkiller at the" [1]. (The Sacklers disproportionately donated to the GOP [2]. I see no evidence of them continuing that under MAGA.)
To the extent the people who "kill[ed] millions by 'fueling the current opioid crisis'" had a role in the vaccine debate, it's by hitching up to the anti-vaxers.
You appear to be treating "Moderna" as "the establishment", along with lawyers, teachers, and state sanctioned violence, in order to criticise all of them at the same time.
Why, then, does "the establishment" (by your conflation of these things) sue itself?
The "erosion of trust" which you think is a natural reaction is, in fact, a constructed one created by rhetoric which holds science up to unreasonable standards of reliability and then complains about how it can't get everything right.
Its absolutely true that public health authorities didn't get everything right during the pandemic. Its also absolutely true that studies have less epistemological power than people often make them out to have (which is what the replication crisis is really about). But it is a rhetorical angle that the appropriate response to either of those states of affairs is a rejection of science or trust in authority. People should understand the limits of science and put an appropriate amount of credence in it, but the idea that scientific authority should be outright rejected is a cultural movement with very little attachment to reality and one which is astroturfed and exploited, primarily by the political right, to whip up their base.
More broadly speaking, I think its wrong to blame the institutions themselves when elements of the american political system have been working tirelessly to discredit institutions and science for decades. It isn't a spontaneous, natural thing.
People have knee-jerk reaction to arguments like yours: oh so you don't trust the government, but choose to trust random facebook and youtube posts?
Unfortunately this is the exact problem. Governments think they have an infinite amount of trust to spend because "at least it's not random facebook posts."
The reason for the reaction is that the random facebook and youtube posts aren't held to the same standard as government and scientific sources.
The moment some people see a single slip up from the latter, they distrust them forever, but you can show study after study debunking autism links, for example, and those same people either disregard the evidence or merely move the goal posts.
In other words: these people are intellectually dishonest. They start with a conclusion and will contort or discard any facts that threaten said conclusion.
Yah... It's not as if the healthcare/pharma industry have ever ran false multi-year propaganda campaigns that later turned out to be outright harmful to people.
They'd never lie and conspire for years and years. That couldn't possibly happen.
I would point out that the anti-vaxx campaign about vaccines causing autism is a multi-decade propaganda campaign that absolutely harms people.
However, being as that is merely a to quoque fallacy, I'm rather curious: do you have any examples of said campaigns run by the healthcare/pharma industry? And, more importantly, do you have any evidence such campaigns have anything to do with vaccines?
Note: the Purdue/Sackler campaign surrounding opiods is already well-known, but AFAICT, it has no relationship with vaccines.
Purdue is one pharmaceutical company. Given their behavior, I find no fault with anyone who'd distrust products from Purdue specifically. However, it appears Purdue doesn't produce any vaccines, so it is orthogonal to the discussion.
> You think the opioid campaign is the only real wrongdoing by pharmaceutical companies??
I'm open to the possibility of there being additional wrongdoing by Purdue or other pharmaceutical companies, perhaps even related to vaccines. However, the fact that one pharmaceutical company engaged in (admittedly pretty egregious) wrongdoing with respect to opioids does not itself prove any wrongdoing regarding vaccines made by itself or other companies. Assuming otherwise is falling victim to a syllogistic fallacy.
Answering my call for evidence of wrongdoing specific to vaccines with such a conspiratorial-minded question suggests you have no such evidence. I implore you to prove me incorrect.
I'm talking about perceived industry wide reputational damage by the public as a cause for distrust.
Who cares about fallacies?
Beliefs triumph over logic. Public perception > truth.
Further reputational damages are not unwarranted. Thalidomide is an old example. There are many more recent ones outside of opioid. You're free to look up actual court cases.
That might be an arguably plausible explanation for people to be skeptical of recently developed vaccines.
But most of the vaccines that are recommended for all preschool children in the US are not recent, long predating the opioid crisis.
The MMR vaccine became recommended in 1971, replacing separate vaccines for measles, mumps, and rubella.
Pertussis, diphtheria, and tetanus vaccination become recommended in 1914, 1926, and 1938, respectively and were combined into the DTP combo vaccine in the '40s.
Polio vaccination became recommended in 1955.
There is no good reason to be skeptical of any of those or other similar ones I've left off. We've got 60-100+ years of widespread use which has generated a ton of data spanning multiple generations showing they are safe and effective.
It's also hard to trust due to alienation. Currently society has this rigid demand for conformity that is fueled by social media/internet shame culture.
We continually see people online who step outside the line and are torn down by downvotes, comments, etc. And these cultural viewpoints lack all nuance so you are forced to either shove yourself into the box wholly or be ridiculed. Even if you are 90% onboard with the popular viewpoint, you cannot let that questioning 10% show. The end result is a bunch of people wandering around with their secret "bad" thoughts being driven further against whatever populist issue they should be jumping into next.
Just absolute nonsense retconning. Purdue (OxyContin) was the primary company responsible for the epidemic, J&J to a much lesser extent, and then a bunch of PMBs and providers looked the other way. Purdue has nothing to do with vaccines. J&J licensed a covid vaccine from Janssen but otherwise none of those companies have anything to do with vaccines at all.
People have lower trust in doctors, hospitals and pharma companies because people they do trust (Trump, RFK and the parade of misfits now running US health policy) lie to them to get them to distrust doctors and pharma companies. It’s not some complicated bank shot.
How can people be so incredibly blind to the effectiveness of vaccines? Denmark is expecting to have cervical cancer eliminated in the next 10 - 15 year, because of the HPV vaccine, and some countries in the Western world now struggles with measles again?
That's the problem with effective measures -- if they're effective, you won't notice them working at all. It's only apparent they are effective when they reduce the disease, or their removal causes the disease to surge. But when the disease is eradicated, "vaccines are effective at stopping the spread of measles" is just as apparent to regular people as "vaccines don't do anything, measles just aren't a big deal to begin with, actually, they've been lying to you this whole time."
One position asks you to get jabbed with a needle, the other asks you to do nothing. So people are very happy to do nothing if they're not forced to get jabbed.
Absolutely agree. That said, I feel like COVID sits in a bit of a special place where it was evolving and changing so quickly alongside rapidly developed and deployed vaccines— to this day I don't think I've seen anything conclusive on how much of COVID going way could be attributed to:
- effective, widespread vaccine deployment
- the virus naturally evolving to a less-lethal state
- it all having been overblown from the get-go
My instinct is like 60/30/10, but it would be great to see someone make an actual case based on hard data, of which surely there is plenty.
>- the virus naturally evolving to a less-lethal state
This "effect" is massively overblown. Covid still attacks the same receptors with are all over the body and still causes damaging inflammation. Grandma getting COVID is still terrifying, just like it's always been terrifying when they get the flu. Meanwhile my mom has permanent heart damage from Covid. Not the early strain either.
The vaccines have been a huge help but more generally, everyone developed some amount of immunity, even people who are anti-vaxxers. It's just around now, and our body's have had to adapt to fighting it off all the time. It's endemic. "There's a second version of virulent seasonal respiratory (but not just that) infection now" isn't exactly a great outcome.
Primarily what happened is we learned better treatment, so it isn't so deadly even when you have it bad. Ventilation is much rarer for example.
Covid hasn't gone away. How can you possibly think that? I know like ten people who seem to catch covid (tested, not just random diseases) multiple times a year now.
Instead a lot of people with strong ideological reasons to believe it's not a big deal insist on ignoring it's everpresent negative effects. Including our current presidential administration.
Not quite, because cancer can spontaneously develop in basically any tissue, and given the wrong conditions/immune response, spread, but practically speaking, just about all, >99%.
As the article dances around, the problem is not typically random individuals falling for social media misinformation about vaccines, but communities where the importance of getting vaccinated doesn't spread. It's hard for officials to message straightforwardly, because you're not going to get a community to listen to you if you're simultaneously running around telling the rest of the country that the outbreak is their fault.
I don't really understand the question. They eliminated measles in the first place by convincing more of those communities to have higher vaccination rates than they have today.
The rabies vaccine is not usually used unless the person is at risk. This vaccine can be administered after a bite if the animal is suspected to be infected.
Vaccines made of inactivated (killed) or attenuated (alive, but defective) pathogens are usually more dangerous. Inactivation may not be effective and a virulent pathogen may survive and attenuated pathogens may pick up virulence factors and become fully functional from a different (related) patogen that happes to infect the patient at the same time. Also, when vaccines are prepared from infected animals, manufacturing accidents may happen, such as contamination with something else infectious.
These types of vaccines were mostly replaced by fully synthetic vaccines.
> Vaccines are incredibly effective, and we're wasting all that again and children will needlessly suffer and die
I’ve sort of accepted society will bifurcate into diseased and undiseased branches. As long as the latter don’t have to pay for the former’s stupidity, I’m over it.
(By analogy: “the ‘stupid motorist law’ is a law in the U.S. state of Arizona that states that any motorist who becomes stranded after driving around barricades to enter a flooded stretch of roadway may be charged for the cost of their rescue” [1].)
Generally agree, but I also don't like how dogmatic people are about this. It feels like a cult where there is no room for nuance on either side.
Are we too dumb to believe some vaccines are life saving miracles and that others may not be necessary? Why is it so all or none?
Especially given things like most European nations not vaccinating against RSV, Hep A or Varicella. Are they all psycho anti-vax nutjobs? It seems much better to go through them one by one, and say: "Measles is universally recommended, has saved countless lives, lets do that one. Covid-19 vaccine for a 6 month old, USA is the only country still recommending it, skip it."
COVID flipped the script on who was anti-vax. It was primarily well-educated upper-class white liberal "granolas" - now it's poorly educated MAGA Wal-Mart folks.
By the numbers, the upper-class white people were a very small fraction of the anti-vaxxers in the US. The majority were (and still are) Mennonites, Amish, and ultra-conservative Jewish communities.
You should consider thinking of people as precious, rather than these odd fine tuned segregated negative groups seemingly based on skin color, political leanings or social status.
When authorities continually lie, eventually there will be an erosion in trust. It is both unsurprising, and likely irreversible. MBA thinking, where the value of institutions and brands are their good names, and spending that value lies in how long you can be dishonest and still have loyal customers and defenders destroys institutions and brands.
The Lancet started it with that stupid Wakefield "study" that it refused to retract for a decade, which launched something that was associated with crystal healing into the mainstream; the destruction of the reputation of the integrity of medical research through bribery of scientists and doctors continued it; and covid lies made it permanent. It's over. Not vaccines, but any trust in medicine. We've gone from trusting the "consensus" far too much, to realizing how the "consensus" is constructed and not trusting anything any more. Just drifting with no moorings.
It's no different than when the US used fake vaccination programs in order to find Osama bin Laden, which led to local vaccination volunteers being murdered, and many people in the Middle East deciding that vaccination was a Western plot. You may not know about this because people in the West don't care when other people die unless it is socially useful for them; don't care unless it affects us and our lifestyles. Even during covid, the US launched a multimillion dollar antivax propaganda program in the Philippines in order to convince people that Sinovax would kill them just to get one up on China. Harris explained in a speech (and she wasn't alone) how she would be wary to take any vaccine from any Trump administration-directed program.
This fanatical chauvinism is only important in the West in order to get one up on other people. To display that you're more supportive of institutions than your stupid, evil populist neighbor. To show that there's nothing that they can do to kill your loyalty, because you understand subtlety. You're pragmatic, you know that the dummies need to be lied to to be herded into the right direction.
But if you're loyal no matter what and avoid talking about public failures when they are most relevant, even beatifying the architects of those failures, who has been herded? Take your vaccines and ask people if they're vaccinated before you let them around your infants. Don't pretend that your lording it over others is out of concern for them, though. It's just snotty, ultra-partisan ego inflation.
Medical science has lost the trust of the Western public because it has become completely overwhelmed by bribery and cronyism just like every other Western institution. Complete recycling of those institutions is the only way to get that trust back, and it's what the institutionalists spend all their time fighting against. Generally this is because they draw their middle-class salaries from these institutions and were active participants in these frauds - at the least dutifully shunning their families, friends and strangers for questioning them.
Agreed; vaccinations save lives, lots of them. But the but we also should blame the establishment for making people suspicious by being quasi-scientific and at times authoritarian about things. For example fining and threatening arrest of people alone at a beach with no one nearby during Covid, etc., as well as the obviously stupidity of six feet of separation. If something is contagious via aerosol six feet is not going to impact spread very much.
Sweden took a much more pragmatic approach and didn’t suffer for it. They’ve got a lesson we can learn.
This sort of argument is reductio ad absurdum. At the start of COVID there was no 99.999% sure scientific evidence about anything. Policy was drawn up on the basis of first principles, both on the knowledge of the virus and on behavioural norms among the public, and especially key groups who needed to follow the rules to save lives.
Enforcing public safety rules is hard. Knowing where to draw the line is hard for individual enforcement officers. That's what, in times of public crisis, it's important to overlook edge cases like these because they serve the larger purpose.
> Policy was drawn up on the basis of first principles
I played a small role in this that allowed me to see how these decisions were made. I think we should be honest at this point about how much of the policy was driven by vibes and politics. We had better data than people assume and it had almost no bearing on the decisions that were made.
Multiple governments had high-quality models that suggested a much lower IFR than what was widely reported, and in hindsight were proven correct. The news cycle was captured by people pushing doomsday scenarios and many people decided it was politically inconvenient to contradict that prevailing narrative. There weren't any complex motives, it was cowardice mixed with a bit of opportunism. I got to see this from the inside and I have no doubt that it would happen again, which gives me little confidence in the institutions.
There was an enormous amount of pressure to be seen to be doing something from the top in most countries, which led to a lot of the pointless theater that happened.
It is unfortunate but the poor reputation of public health officials due to COVID is well-deserved.
Not only that. If the line is way too far on one side or the other, everyone agrees that it is, and then it's shifted. If the line is approximately at the optimum, some agree it is, and those that disagree are about half convinced that it's too far this way, half it's too far that way.
So, having maximum disagreement is in itself arguably an indicator that you got it approximately right.
How was avoiding open areas in small groups and washing your groceries first principles? They also claimed that you shouldn’t wear a mask but instead focus on washing your hands. It’s unfortunate how many don’t want to learn from the mistakes made during the epidemic.
Sorry, science only gets one single shot to be 100% correct on everything. Otherwise it’s lies and misinformation to advance the science on a specific topic. Heliocentrism is a MSM misinformation propaganda campaign.
Six feet of separation is a reasonable defense against the larger droplets produced by talking or singing. If you're somewhere with good ventilation then these are the biggest threat.
The more obvious stupidity was around face masks, first by denying they worked at all, and then by acting like coarse weave cloth was as good as N95 or FFP3.
Agree with all you say but would add that those large droplets from sneezing etc are not the greatest vehicle for the virus so it’s like fighting a house fire with Solo cups of water.
Right, but if memory serves me correctly droplet based transmission was the prevailing theory for the first few months while the WHO was oscillating like a pendulum on its masking recommendations.
> droplet based transmission was the prevailing theory for the first few months
iirc that was the prevailing theory until after the vaccines came out. I don't recall it ever being in the news when it was determined to be airborne. By that time, COVID wasn't even newsworthy.
Definitely, I don't think official channels recognized aerosolized transmission until way too late, and even when they did it was very low key and non-committal.
I'm on team "ball was dropped badly re pandemic policy and communication", though I personally don't extend that to blind distrust in institutions in general. It was a tough (arguably unprecedented) situation in a media landscape primed for misinformation.
People collectively are sufficiently manipulable that society only functions when certain manipulations are forbidden.
This is true even though, as you say, mindlessly doing the opposite of what the government says is as dogmatic as blindly following it (a lesson I learned as a toddler, from my sister doing the "yes no yes no yes no no yes oops" trick on me).
Public communications is hard at the best of times let alone during a novel pandemic with high uncertainty on correct actions, but it's what the government needs to be good at to function, so them messing communications up is… well, I was going to say "blame worthy", but then I remember that air travel got good by avoiding blame culture, so shall we say "a learning opportunity"?
No, it doesn’t. Your comment is one that is politically motivated and so you can’t participate in an honest discussion on the subject. What do you disagree with specifically?
> This sounds like the type of dismissive response that reinforces distrustful sentiments.
Notably, Mary Mallon (Typhoid Mary) was never convinced either. This didn't make her less dangerous. The big difference is the average lethality. If we were talking about Polio, people's paranoia is a lot less important.
When someone comes up with a clever reason why drunk driving might be OK, I don't get in an evidence-based debate with them. It may very well be the case that they've found a scientific error in official guidelines! But if I carefully explain why the error doesn't change the baseline conclusion, they'll just find something else to fixate on. They're not looking for an increased understanding of pharmacology; they've decided that they want to drive drunk, and they're shopping for a reason why it's not shameful to inflict pointless risk on themselves and their community.
If your argument can’t hold up to scrutiny, then I think you may not know the position well enough or you need to adjust it. We can explain and show evidence why driving drunk is dangerous. We can show that vaccines are safe and effective. I don’t like wasting time with bad faith people, but to assume anyone who disagrees is wrong and not worthy of discussion is bad.
I don't agree. I think that shame is an important social technology for things like vaccines and drunk driving, where there's really no rational basis for disagreement. I don't know any vaccine hesitant parents who encountered some clever argument that proved to them they need to vaccinate their kids, but I know multiple who overcame their hesitation because they understood that it was expected of them and they would be judged harshly otherwise.
If you want to have a good faith version of this conversation, I've seen many people have voiced rational concerns and be shouted down because people simply don't want to hear it.
Primary example - Many parents, including myself, made sure our kids got every single one of their vaccines...but we wanted to avoided giving more than 2 per month so we altered the schedule slightly.
Fully vaccinated, just took a simple precaution that put our minds at ease.
The number of people who will call you "antivax" for that, for simply questioning the dosing schedule and taking a minor precaution is shocking. And that's what really made all of this so much worse.
Nobody that I saw, prior to the Covid vax at least, questioned whether or not vaccines did what they said they do. People just question whether sometimes there can be side effects. The answer to that is obviously yes. There are vaccine courts and people have been awarded lots of money from them. So the next rational question that anyone would ask is..."If there can sometimes be side effects, in what circumstances are they likely? Are there any precautions that can be taken if we can identify what those circumstances may be?"
It's no different than if somebody is lactose intolerant, has a gluten allergy or a peanut allergy. Some people are predisposed not to respond well to conditions that many of us have no issue with.
That's not a rational basis for disagreeing on the efficacy of vaccines themselves. It is a rational basis to ask about the conditions that can create unintended side effects; we already know they are happening. Denying that is irrational on its own...so why not have the conversation?
> but we wanted to avoided giving more than 2 per month so we altered the schedule slightly.
Why do you consider this a rational concern/precaution? What evidence lead you to believe the vaccination schedule, which is generally-accepted in the medical community, should be spread out?
I can give you a reason it's likely not rational: babies are protected by their mother's immunity for approximately 6 months after birth. The current vaccination schedule[1] is largely built with this in mind. Delaying vaccines for no other reason than "it's too many too fast" concerns does nothing but increase the chance your child ultimately gets infected with one of the pathogens vaccinated against.
Sure. The number 1 thing to understand is that without a clearly defined cause or even a hint of contributory factors for autism (think everything caused cancer or X may increase your risk of heart disease), there is an information vacuum.
Based on that people are left to speculate as to what influences appear to be probable on their own. One of the simplest correlations to make is of course, the sheer volume of vaccines on the schedule and whether the combined effect is creating any impact.
My wife and I went far beyond that and did speak to a retired OB who shared his own career observations with us. His explanation was that people naturally filter heavy metals, like aluminum, out of their systems but some people do it slower than others. Since aluminum is used in many vaccines, he recommended spreading them out to reduce the stress on the body to filter it out.
He went on to explain that he eventually started testing pregnant mothers and identified that when the high levels were often present in the mother, then many children ended up with the same issue. He started recommending a specific prenatal regiment to the expecting mothers to help correct it. Would even go as far as testing couples who were planning to try to have a baby before they were even pregnant.
>The number of people who will call you "antivax" for that, for simply questioning the dosing schedule and taking a minor precaution is shocking. And that's what really made all of this so much worse.
Okay, but why does it matter what morons say? A doctor or immunologist would usually say "Eh, whatever" to this request. Did a doctor call you an anti-vaxxer?
>it's no different than if somebody is lactose intolerant, has a gluten allergy or a peanut allergy.
Guess what! A bunch of doctors 15 years ago were scared of peanut allergies and suggested without evidence "a simple precaution", of "don't give young kids peanuts", and now something like 8 million people have peanut allergies that could have been maybe prevented.
That's what this is all about. "Smart" humans don't exist. Tons of times what we expected is not what science finds. That 15 year advice that lead to millions of peanut allergies was overturned not by random people getting uncomfortable about not understanding things, but by doctors studying the actual question and coming to a conclusion that fit the data.
Is there any data any which way on your belief that a delayed vaccination schedule like that is "Safer"? Safer than what? Safer how? What theory is it done under? But your doctor didn't care. Tons of parents do that. Some researcher will pull those stats someday and say clearly "Eh, it doesn't do anything good or bad" or "it's clearly better/worse" and then we can make an educated decision.
Until then, it is unscientific by definition. Does that make you feel bad? It shouldn't, most of what humans do is unscientific. But that won't make it wrong.
There is zero "safe" things you can do to a human body. Giving someone a sandwich is not safe and in rigorous study would result in a "side effect" list a mile long, and maybe even a death. 1.7 out of 100k deaths are from choking.
>Nobody that I saw, prior to the Covid vax at least, questioned whether or not vaccines did what they said they do
There is tons of public information to the contrary. Jenny McCarthy for example was anti-vax two decades ago and shouting it from the rooftops.
>"If there can sometimes be side effects, in what circumstances are they likely? Are there any precautions that can be taken if we can identify what those circumstances may be?"
And we did that with the Covid vaccine and every vaccine ever made before it and it has always been clear that the vaccine is just as safe as any other. Anti-vaxxers are people who don't understand the statistics of that studying.
The conversation was had, anti-vaxxers don't like the outcome of the conversation.
> Okay, but why does it matter what morons say? A doctor or immunologist would usually say "Eh, whatever" to this request. Did a doctor call you an anti-vaxxer?
The doctor did act like it was a hassle and their office now has a sign refusing service to any parents who wish to deviate from the official schedule.
> There is tons of public information to the contrary. Jenny McCarthy for example was anti-vax two decades ago and shouting it from the rooftops.
Did she ever challenge whether or not vaccines worked to prevent what they were supposed to prevent? Pretty sure she was just talking about total volume.
Thanks for explaining your reasoning. I can see shame working for some, but I don’t think that is effective for a large group. It also has the adverse effect of making those who are shaming others look wrong and scared of discussing the subject. Also, there is a point where you can be wrong or need to adjust your perspective. Shaming others is not a good way to go about that. The enlightenment wasn’t built on shame but instead it used reason and open inquiry. It was a rejection of using shame which was a prevalent part of forced rules.
Yeah, how dare we use non-attacking language to describe objectively accurate states and conditions.
It's a small step from there to the people who chided -me- because I said I was no longer willing to discuss in good faith with people who argued about "post birth abortions" (that they knew to be a lie) or adrenachrome farming from babies in pizza parlor basements. That it was my fault for these views propagating for not being willing to "understand" their perspective.
Their perspectives are a lie They know they're a lie. They just don't. fucking. care.
And then they whine about people being "dismissive" of them.
Thank you, fixed. And yes, and some cases absurdly, ridiculously so. I think the worst I heard was something like:
> And in several Demoncrat [sic] states, abortion is legal up until one month post-delivery! That is evil!
What do these morons (the ones who might actually believe what they say) think that looks like? Have birth, go home with your child, a few weeks later you're just not feeling it, and you go back to the hospital and hand over your infant and say "I'd like my post-birth abortion, please?"?!?
heh our county judge (Dallas County, TX) drove around my neighborhood and yelled at people walking their dog to get back inside. I met him at a fundraiser toward the end of the pandemic and asked him why he wasn't wearing a mask, he just turned around and walked away. Lots of people who wished they were powerful delighted in finely having their little hobby authoritarian regime to play in. The most depressing part of the COVID discussion was seeing HN jump on anyone daring to even discuss what Sweden was doing. I lost a lot of respect for HN then but I don't know why i ever assumed this community was immune to toxic group think behavior.
Aerosols diffuse and often (not always depending on airstream) become less dense 6 feet away. Yes if the wind is blowing the density won't be impacted much, but on the other hand the stream will move past you on its own instead of lingering unless there is a dense crowd generating a constant amount.
There were also scary studies coming out of China (though this was later) showing a single positive guy going for a run in a park infecting loads of people. The dynamics have only changed because people have partial immunity now, but it was like wildfire and it is still going up and down in terms of transmission.
To be honest, I think it's fine there was some over-reaction. Millions of people died. I think it's ok to be slightly uncomfortable for a little bit under such extreme circumstances. To be quite honest, there was an under-reaction. We had an opportunity to shut it down and decided not to follow the science like China did because of American exceptionalism. Now we are living with it forever until there is a better vaccine.
China protected their entire population until a vaccine was made available. This means their death rate was likely a third of ours. Their official statistics paint too rosy a picture (they claim only ~60k died), but a simple back of the napkin calculation 0.1% vaccinated die, 1% unvaccinated die, means they did 10x better than let-it-rip. We did something like 3x better than let-it-rip.
If you saw some of the videos from India of their hospitals being overwhelmed and of people being given welding gas for oxygen because they couldn’t produce pure gas fast enough you might not have considered it an overreaction. They were cremating so many people at once it was a major contributor to air pollution during one major outbreak.
The real danger for most people wasn’t the virus, it was the hospitals being so overwhelmed by the virus that they would no longer be able to provide care for other stuff.
Excellent point. Some of this happened in America too, though not to the same horrific extent as India. Iirc hospitals in Florida nearly ran out of oxygen and in some cases patients died for lack of oxygen.
To be fair, in that particular instance they were only welding the back door. They left the front door alone so that people could go out (at their assigned days and times). They got rid of the back door to make it so that community enforcement of these restrictions was possible.
At the level the epidemic reached in some area of China that may have been necessary to slow the flood, no different than rationing during famine.
I have some issues with China (corruption, nepotism, pervasive tracking), but this is not really one of them.
I don't blame anyone for not trusting the government. Anyone who's read (or lived) history and with a rational mind would scrutinize every single thing coming from them, particularly if their health is involved.
Another thing that doesn't help, but this is almost exclusively a memerican problem, is that people enjoy polarizing these issues to their absolute extremes. Things are either vantablack or HDR-white. And if you happen to be on the other end "you should die or go to prison".
You don't have to trust the government. There are plenty of institutions that can explain the value of vaccinations. If you only distrust your own government, just look at the recommendations in other countries.
That's the problem, though. It is those other countries that the pro-nationalist movement, where a lot of this stems from, don't trust. Things like worldwide consensus on the need for vaccinations are seen as an attempt to subvert their own nation.
So after all this scrutinizing, they come to the conclusion vaccines don't work? Like, we the vaccine experts doing web searches and trusting social media posts from unknowns? Not the people that actually do work with it like scientists? Super interesting conclusion.
Of course, we're not talking about experimental vaccines in labs. I think it's pretty clear everyone here is talking about FDA-approved vaccines that reach the population. The fact you want to argue this shows a severe lack of reading comprehension.
None of those bullet points are contradictory though?
They are all completely aligned with a policy reducing non-essential public exposure, with a tiered approach for transport that limits public exposure where better alternatives exist.
> tiered approach for transport that limits public exposure where better alternatives exist.
Travelling to a testing center almost certainly puts me within proximity of COVID patients at one point, particularly in the waiting room. Sitting in waiting rooms is how I got the case the city notified me of in the first place.
Cycling and exercise is not only a solitary activity, it is also conducted outdoors where we were told risk of airborne transmission was de minimis. It in fact limits public exposure more than travelling to a public place full of probable COVID patients.
> All of this while people were out contravening quarantine mandates anyway. Getting haircuts kills grandma - so how come everybody out on the streets was proudly posting pictures of themselves on social media wearing rainbow-colored masks, with perfectly manicured buzz cuts?
I think if COVID times taught us anything, it's that you can make all the "mandates" you want, but if you don't enforce them, they're just suggestions, and the public will mock and ignore them. It was infuriating watching people ignore stay-at-home, deliberately endangering everyone and prolonging the pandemic, and then laughing it up on social media, consequence-free. Absolutely shameful. But because the mandates were never really enforced, people freely acted like assholes.
All of this is true. Not just true, but verifiably true. We all lived through it as well.
Let me say that again, you (the reader) saw these things with your own eyes, you heard these things with your own ears, not just for a couple days but for more than a year.
You know this is true.
And yet, why would some people choose to ignore that it happened?
To me, this is/was an even greater eye-opener than the disease or the vaccine itself.
As someone who travels a fair amount, having seen this emerging trend I made a point of getting the measles booster I was due for earlier this year. Measles is an awful disease and the last thing I want to do is have to suffer through it or worse, be responsible for spreading it around.
The link states most of the outbreaks are linked to a gathering in New Brunswick, and then Southern Ontario, before eventually making its way to Alberta.
the gathering location means nothing; AB has two very large cities with lots of international ties. eventually it was going to hit AB, in the same way that someone with measles was going to arrive in Toronto or Vancouver.
the measles kept happening, constantly, again and again because AB is full of anti-vax communities.
the mennonites got hit hard, but they're not located in huge numbers around the province. dumb-ass anti-vaxers sure are all over the province tho.
Thank you for doing your part in collective immunity and for additional context! Also I see you are from Fort Mac - I know you have been through tough times and I hope all is well with you and the family. Alberta is responsible for a disproportionate amount of measles cases, but I would not put it on anyone else other than unvaccinated people, in Alberta or elsewhere.
This is awful. I work on epidemiological simulation software for a living, and while we've been running tons of simulations on a national/statewide scale, I had no idea it was that bad in Canada.
We can't let Canada beat us. We need to step up our disease spreading game. I propose we look into the feasibility of developing reverse vaccines to overfit the immune system to specific measles variants that it's unlikely to encounter, thus reducing immunity to real infections in people who are already vaccinated.
Alternatively, we could ban the sale or posession of contraceptive devices, because condoms are murder. And then watch the HIV infection rate spike, weakening immune responses and paving the way for measles to flourish.
You should check around, bunch of groups / counties provide them for free or low cost. Also Costco was at least a few years ago dirt cheap without a prescription.
For some reason CVS refuses to take my UnitedHealth insurance for flu (but will no problem for covid). They said it would have been 200 bucks and I laughed at them and went to Costco.
I'm an EMT w/ a fire dept, we run a local flu shot drive for our community for free. Check for other resources like this for example in your community, or perhaps at the county level.
That seems extremely high. You can pop into any Walmart in Minnesota and get it for about $45 uninsured. At Hy-Vee (the grocery store chain), I want to say it's $25.
I think you're seeing how the ACA mandated free vaccines, so the $300 gets billed to your health insurance, then your insurance negotiates it down to $30. If you don't have insurance, it's the sticker price.
No, this is a loss leader / community benefit these corporations participate in. They'll attempt to be reimbursed through insurance, but also offer it to the uninsured.
> *FOR FREE FLU SHOTS & 14 NO-COST VACCINES: Select vaccines at no cost with most insurance. Eligibility varies by patient and insurance plan. Eligible patients will not pay any copayments unless otherwise required by their plan, including Medicare Part B. Availability varies by state based on regulations...
That doesn't sound like it's free if you're uninsured. Or at least that don't advertise that.
it's never the sticker for cash, if you pay cash you will get the same rate the insurance companies get. Why would a clinic turn down the sale? Just shop around and say you'll be paying cash.
In British Columbia my local health authority texts me to inform me my covid and flu vaccines are available. And both are free. Of course it is cost effective for the province as it is cheaper to give vaccines than treat sick people in hospital.
So actually had to double check this but in Brazil you can get the flu/covid vaccine for free at public hospitals or, which shocked me, at for-profit drugstores (for sure subsidized by the government).
California imposes a penalty of $900 for not having health insurance, and approximately every health insurance plan you can get covers the flu vaccine at no cost to the patient. 8% of Americans have no health insurance like GP, with states not imposing a mandate having higher uninsured rates.
Haha no clue, I was shocked as well. First time being uninsured. According to other commenters maybe there’s other stores that offer it for less.
Funny thing is, same day I didn’t get the vaccine the grocery store receipt starting offering a free shot and $10 store credit with “most insurances” so I didn’t qualify lol.
This sorta thing that keeps Everyone safe with herd immunity you’d really think they’d want to make as easy as possible
Vaccination rates in immigrant populations is lower than native born children, but not significantly. As you noted in your link, they're generally willing to get vaccines, but many didn't have access before they immigrated.
Also, the current outbreak was incubated in Mennonite communities before spreading wider. Despite living in Canada for over 100 years Mennonites are still considered immigrants by many because they are insular and different.
In other words, it's a racist talking point that has enough truth to make it non-trivial to challenge, but has no actual basis.
Canada has a mandatory immigrant medical exam for anybody applying for permanent residence or a visa of longer than 6 months. At this exam, the doctor will ask for vaccination records and prescribe missing vaccinations. It is unlikely that immigrants are contributing to this outbreak.
The Mennonites in Canada aren't actual immigrants and are not subject to this mandatory exam.
Where in the article it suggested the spread due to immigration?
If any, it is due to misinformation and reluctance of those communities (mentioned specifically Alberta rural, y’know, the province that has been burned with misinformation, public health scandal, crazy Premier that has been stoking Separatism while cozying with MAGA that has threatened Canada sovereignty)
Measles is unbelievably infectious. An unvaccinated person has a 90% chance of getting infected if exposed. The virus can survive in the air for hours. In a susceptible population, one infected person will typically infect a dozen other people or more.
Changing the rate of immigration won't make a bit of difference for a disease like this. It only takes one infection in a susceptible population, and then it's game over. Unless your controls are 100% effective (including tourists and returning citizens), the only way to prevent an outbreak is for the vast majority of your people to be uninfectable.
An insufficiently vaccinated population is like a can of food. It might take longer to spoil if there's a pinhole in the side versus if you just crack it open, but it will spoil if there's any breach whatsoever.
So unless you propose to isolate to a degree more extreme than North Korea, blaming immigrants is just bigotry.
We all know by now that immigration is going to be cited, by certain people, as the cause of any problem. It's not worth your time to draw out the charade that it's intended to start a good faith discussion. It's better for the platform to downvote and ignore.
> Public health officials say it started when an international traveller attended a wedding in New Brunswick last October. New Brunswick's outbreak ended in January, but guests at that wedding had already brought the virus to southwestern Ontario, where that province's outbreak was concentrated among closely knit Mennonite communities.
International travel + spread among low-vaccination communities.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/livestory/canada-measles-elim...
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