Vaccine refusal is in part responsible for a resurgence in Measles and in some place Polio.
Anti-Vaxxers have gone down the rabbit hole. Want to know the difference between someone down a rabbit hole and someone with their head up their ass? Nothing at all.
Anti-Vaxxers (like Bill Maher) blithely parrot absurd misstatements to cater to the wingnuts. It's a waste of time trying to educate people who have CHOSEN to delude themselves.
I have a long-time friend who is trained in medical technology, but Trump and the pandemic compelled him to exclude MSM and embrace most of the BS Fox put out. My friend has repeatedly betrayed his scientific discipline and I've found his behavior to be stunning in it's hypocrisy. At one point, he predicted a mass outbreak of autoimmune disease from the vaccines. I checked it out and found zero basis. I valued my friend's intelligence and expertise, but he has totally fallen down on this subject. His obsession with censorship of Covid disinformation demonstrates the Cult aspect. The timing reflected how Fox stokes support for the House hearings with lies. I can't believe how he gives credence to these lies. Even he doesn't believe all of them. I get that he's been brainwashed by Fox and Conservative media. It is too sad. I wish it weren't so, but that's the world we live in. (That is why ridiculous religions persist. It is exactly the same thing.
We have got to find a way to penalize those who obstruct public health (by gun, covid or abortion BS) with the financial consequences of those policies.
@barjoe On his shows, Bill Maher repeats several false memes espoused by the anti-vaxxer cult: 1. Denouncing those who will wear a mask for the safety of others; 2. Claiming that the vaccination did not save many lives; 3. Claiming that shutting down schools to protect teachers and kids should not have been done; 4. Inferring the virus came from a Chinese lab with Fauci's help; etc. (with zero expertise to make these comments, and just lifting them directly from Fox BS to score points with the wingnuts).
I really don't care. If you choose not to get vaccinated, that's fine. If you die, that's fine too. I say that with the knowledge that my son and his family are not vaccinated too. The number of people dying is on a percentage basis negligible. With the most common factor for dying being pre existing conditions, if you don't get a vaccine with that hanging over your head, again, I feel little empathy. I think the same should apply to those who don't choose to wear seatbelts, motorcyclists who choose not to wear helmets, and gun owners who shoot themselves while cleaning their guns. We all die, when you have the choice to possibly extend your life by doing some minimum action and don't, too bad, so sad. Saying, like so many during the peak of COVID, that they wish they had gotten vaccinated after they spent a month or so on a ventilator, was annoying!
The only problem with your analogy is that compliance can help eradicate the pandemic. If someone goes through a windshield, sustains a traumatic brain injury, injures or kills themselves in a gun accident, it doesn't affect an entire population.
You guys still seem to think the 'vaccines' confer some sort of benefit.
They do not. They do not prevent infection. They do not prevent transmission.
They come with a chance of over 700 possible adverse reactions.
Too many have died misinformed or worse yet disinformed. Such deaths could have been easily prevented but it became, like masking, a matter of political identity, though I personally know many Trumpsters who got vaccinated though some still got COVID, but perhaps far milder than if unvaccinated.
Joe above also points to the downtick in measles and polio vaccination as a related issue. Not too many generations ago people had a somewhat harder time making it through childhood unscathed from diseases less preventable then. If only more appreciated that history. Now parents can get their kids vaccinated from HPV and reduce chances of cancers later in life. Would vaccine skeptics opt to prevent RSV whenever that vaccination becomes available?
'Better living through chemistry' is a lie.
They must be using Neil Ferguson's computer model.
They are just making things up. There has been no threat from Covid for two years.
Garbage in garbage out.
"Methods We use a validated mathematical model to evaluate the reduction of incident cases, hospitalized cases, and deaths in the United States through 2033 under various levels of vaccination and treatment coverage. We assume that future seasonal transmission patterns for COVID-19 will be similar to those of influenza virus. We account for the waning of infection-induced immunity and vaccine-induced immunity in a future with stable COVID-19 dynamics. Due to uncertainty in the duration of immunity following vaccination or infection, we consider two exponentially-distributed waning rates, with means of 365 days (one year) and 548 days (1.5 years). We also consider treatment failure, including rebound frequency, as a possible treatment outcome."