My opinion is that a lot of Americans are uneasy about government, pharmaceutical, and the media, all pushing the same narrative over a virus that has a 99% survival rate. After decades of pushing drugs on us, and using the government to mandate vaccines like HPV, regardless of effectiveness, and the media manipulating us at every turn, trust in these institutions is less than rock bottom. If Americans are not getting vaccinated it’s not the citizens fault, its these institutions that suddenly want us to trust them. Personally I’m waiting as long as possible, let everyone else do the beta testing.
Edit: I have had Covid as-well as everyone in my family.
> using the government to mandate vaccines like HPV, regardless of effectiveness
What concern do you have about HPV vaccine effectiveness? As far as I can tell this is a non sequitur — vaccination for HPV is effective and a positive health intervention:
> The HPV vaccine works extremely well. In the 10 years after the vaccine was recommended in 2006 in the United States, quadrivalent type HPV infections decreased by 86% in female teens aged 14 to 19 years and 71% in women in their early 20s.
Oh boy, what do you dispute? That covid is real? Do you dispute that over 600,000 Americans have died from covid? Those are only the ones we know about. And that's with our incredible luck to have lived in a time where we can develop a vaccine with incredible speed and effectiveness. And that's with all the measures we've taken to hold back the virus, with people like you kicking and screaming the entire way. Maybe you're hearing the same "narrative" because it's reality.
We know what would happen if we did nothing - see New York, Iran, Italy last year. I don't know what people like you want. Apparently you want to sit back and pout with your conspiracy theories while the rest of us do our part.
It doesn't. The case-fatality ratio is 2.15%. And this is with preventative actions being taken which allow higher percentages of people to obtain healthcare. If treatment was even more scarce than it has been, the death rate would climb even more.
That's definitely true for my father. Over the past year he's seen media and government officials go from "masks are useless if you aren't sick" to "if you don't wear a mask you're risking the lives of everyone around you", and "Trump rushing vaccine production could be worse than COVID" to "if you don't get a vaccine, you're going to kill people that can't get vaccinated".
He's got no faith in the government any more, and would rather risk getting sick than try to keep up with whatever narrative is being pushed on any given week.
I think part of the reluctance to get vaccinated also stems from the age-old "Americans have freedom" ideal, freedom to bear arms, freedom to refuse masks and the vaccine, etc.
Personally, I don't believe I would die from any of the variants. However, I got the vaccine because I don't want to become one of the infected with longer-term problems, including permanently reduced lung capacity.
> One in five Americans believes the US government is using the COVID-19 vaccine to microchip the population
I think people should get vaccinated, but admittedly there is a profound lack of trust in institutions these days. misconceptions like this microchip theory would be 100x less likely if the government wasn’t literally surveilling your every movement and communicated word with the help of big tech
The institutions behave in a profoundly untrustworthy way for generations, then people stop trusting them. Society breaks down. It’s that simple. In 30 years this will be amazingly worse unless things change
Having spoken with older generations, I can tell you their concrete concerns of seeing others die or become disabled from polio is 1 or 2 magnitudes more relevant than vague concerns of government or pharmaceutical industry.
Problem is, people today haven't seen the tough stuff. If every third person had Ebola you wouldn't have the luxury of opining on government unease, because your lived reality would look far different. We've had it good. Maybe people complaining about these things is a concrete sign of how much progress we've made.
eropple nailed it with a comment the other day [1], that it's a breakdown of trust in societal fabric. Reading that comment was my "ah ha" root cause revelation moment. Everything else flows from that: vaccine hesitancy, refusal to wear masks, distrust in government, etc. And that distrust is being weaponized.
The reason the survival rate across all ages is so high is because the elderly are bearing the brunt of this. If I knew grandma and grandpa had basically a dice-roll's chance of dying from COVID I wouldn't be putting too much stock into that 99% number.
99% survival rate is not comforting given the high transmissibility of the virus. For example India had almost 5 million excess deaths during the pandemic
> all pushing the same narrative over a virus that has a 99% survival rate.
You talk like a 99% survival rate is pretty good and means it's not something to worry about. One percent of the US population is 3.28 million people. Which is oddly enough about the population of the entire metro area I live in.
So Russia could nuke my city and kill everyone, and the US would still have a 99% survival rate.
Cut the number of deaths in half, for a 99.5% survival rate, and you're still taking out a city like Milwaukee.
> and the media manipulating us at every turn, trust in these institutions is less than rock bottom
The media may be manipulating you, but the people who sell the media manipulation narrative are usually do so to manipulate you even more. It's like deciding to eat dogshit because there was a fly in your food. Yeah, there's a problem with the food, but it's still better than dogshit.
Exactly. I am not anti-vax at all, but I am not eager to take a new class of vaccine developed in less than a year. The state government here has been paying for TV and radio ads nonstop with various doctors talking about how the vaccine is “safe and effective”. Even though it has been beta tested on millions of people I don’t think we can draw any conclusions about long term safety at this point. I also think the effectiveness is highly questionable given the number of high profile people that have been vaccinated and still tested positive.
It's interesting when people say "wait and see" about a tested (in tens of thousands of people), reviewed pharmaceutical product and prefer to take their chances with a random quantity of inhaled bat-poop virus.
I got the vaccine and a lot of my coworkers have not.
I made the mistake of telling them the results. It was 2x 3-days of me bitching and moaning about a sore arm and just feeling aches while the innoculation worked its magic. Since TFG convinced a lot of Americans the virus is no worse than a light flu somehow my achy arm is way worse than any flu. So now the vaccine is not worth taking because those 6 total days of achiness are worse than being in ICU.
It's that fucking dumb.
In hindsight I should have kept my mouth shut and said everything was fine.
Besides a sore arm for about 24 hours I really had no other side effects from Pfizer. After the second shot my arm got sore a bit closer to the time of injection, but overall pain was lower.
I felt worse the day after my yearly flu shot in 2020.
As I got my first shot, the nurse told me the 2nd one was worse. But like you, I found the cost-benefit analysis compelling, and they likely assumed if I got the first one, I'd probably be a repeat customer.
If someone is TFG (had to look up that abbreviation), talking about the side effects was nowhere near table stakes for their degree of concern and FUD. Had you said nothing, I strongly believe they still wouldn't have anyways.
This is a good question and deserves serious thought, including real empirical data on what people believe, and TFA provides that. I also recommend more perspective from Ed Yong[1], which is empathetic towards the unvaccinated.
But I don't think it's super mysterious. The US is one of the few countries that has a major news network constantly pushing the antivax message (Russia being the other that comes to mind, and that strengthens my point). We also have an erosion of trust in institutions, the media, and authority that goes deeper than in most other places.
We also see evidence here on HN: every Covid thread has a significant number of antivax comments. They are also aggressive on Twitter, and even in the chat of TWiV livestreams.
There is some reason for optimism though. Very recently, there has been something of a turnaround in right-leaning news sources, where they are now advocating the vaccine. I'm not sure if that will hold up, but in any case I expect it will boost vax numbers considerably, and in the process save many thousands of lives.
A deeper question remains: what can we do toward having an information ecosystem that is not so terribly dysfunctional that antivax messages thrive in it?
No, in Russia pro-vaccine propaganda is very high, everyone, absolutely everyone, even Navalny's officers are doing it. For the last half a year around 10 minutes in every evening news programme on major channels is about Sputnik V, shaming not vaccinated and so on. There are wonderful documentaries made by RT about hospitals, talking to lead doctors. There are vaccination centers in malls.
Russia's low rate of vaccination comes from three things:
1) Lack of incentive. Life was going as usual throughout Winter and Spring - everything was open, no one was enforcing masks. Moscow had the requirement to be vaccinated in order to enter restaurants for a few weeks in June-July, that forced people to go get vaccines.
2) Not many people were dying before Delta, so everyone thought it was fading away. And combined with the iron curtain situation between vaccines (Sputnik V not approved in EU and P/M/J&J/AZ not approved in Russia), people thought there was going to be some development, maybe new vaccines, and that it's worth waiting a bit.
3) Many people didn't trust some dying corrupt company to be able to make millions of doses out of nowhere and for it to be effective. It was just too suspicious to be true. But eventually Sputnik proved to work, so this went away.
There are a lot of factors that you need to take in account when talking about vaccine hesitant people. Some big ones:
* Risk: people that don't think they are at risk of catching covid are less likely to get the vaccine. Many people in rural areas don't interact with people as much, and likely feel like they are less likely to catch it. You can also see risk evaluation playing out in other countries that didn't have large early cases of Covid (like Japan), where the fall 2020 wave wasn't too bad, so people weren't as worried.
* Trust: There are many that seem to feel squelching discussion that dissents from the CDC guidance is the best way to convince the skeptics. Sadly, those people that are skeptical will see this as more of a reason not to trust the ruling class. Preventing discussion isn't how to fight this fight.
For starters COVID 19 is relatively benign compared to the other stuff you vaccinate against. And unlike the other vaccines which were marketed as - I don't want to get polio/my kids to get polio, this was done as moral duty which is to protect others - which not as much people buy in.
Throw in the speedy approval process, the Astra Zenecca feud with Brussels, the media being media with side effects stories and the constant annoying moralizing preaching of the very online crowd, the fact that vaccine is still no reason to ditch the masks - and it is no wonder that hesitancy is so strong.
Got jabbed with Pfizer in February - I don't think it was worth it. I am still forced to wear masks even though there is just no good evidence that vaccinated people could be infectious at any rates comparable to unvaccinated.
The step from ”I probably won’t get vaccinated because I’m worried about side effects” to “the US government is using the vaccine campaign to microchip people” is… absolutely bloody enormous. Yet a majority of those who reject vaccines think the latter statement is true??
This is what surprises me about the US (if it’s true - I’d like to see more numbers). Not that there is a chunk of sceptics but a chunk of lunatics. Even if you account for troll responses you wouldn’t expect that kind of number. If just one in ten that answered yes actually mean it - that’s still terrifying.
68% of adults is not what I would call almost all. That number has barely budged in months so it seems there is a good 30% of Americans who will not get vaccinated.
It's a bit morbid to think of but this is almost literally natural selection in action:
People with the vaccine accepting phenotype are dying at lower rates than the vaccine hesitant phenotype because they have adapted to their environment better. Whether this leads to adaptation in the broader population remains to be seen.
My guess is that it won't because most of the people who aren't getting vaccinated and dying are 1. too small in number and 2. Primarily past the age of reproduction anyway.
I have a hard time caring about unvaccinated adults dying because they chose to refuse the Covid vaccine. It's tough on the people who love them and tough on the medical personnel who care for them, but there's nothing I can do about it. I have family who won't get vaccinated and I've told them I'm not coming to their funeral because I need to walk away and set a boundary for my own sanity.
[+] [-] underseacables|4 years ago|reply
Edit: I have had Covid as-well as everyone in my family.
[+] [-] loeg|4 years ago|reply
What concern do you have about HPV vaccine effectiveness? As far as I can tell this is a non sequitur — vaccination for HPV is effective and a positive health intervention:
> The HPV vaccine works extremely well. In the 10 years after the vaccine was recommended in 2006 in the United States, quadrivalent type HPV infections decreased by 86% in female teens aged 14 to 19 years and 71% in women in their early 20s.
[+] [-] uses|4 years ago|reply
Oh boy, what do you dispute? That covid is real? Do you dispute that over 600,000 Americans have died from covid? Those are only the ones we know about. And that's with our incredible luck to have lived in a time where we can develop a vaccine with incredible speed and effectiveness. And that's with all the measures we've taken to hold back the virus, with people like you kicking and screaming the entire way. Maybe you're hearing the same "narrative" because it's reality.
We know what would happen if we did nothing - see New York, Iran, Italy last year. I don't know what people like you want. Apparently you want to sit back and pout with your conspiracy theories while the rest of us do our part.
[+] [-] pyrophane|4 years ago|reply
It is worth noting that the HPV vaccine is effective: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/hpv/hcp/safety-effectivenes...
As far as I am aware, mandates have been implemented in only a few places, at the state and local level.
[+] [-] bb88|4 years ago|reply
Technically that's what clinical testing is. Further we're long past beta testing with a large percentage of people being vaccinated.
Anti-vaxxers have done more damage to the country by scaring people from getting the vaccine without providing any serious proof.
[+] [-] kube-system|4 years ago|reply
It doesn't. The case-fatality ratio is 2.15%. And this is with preventative actions being taken which allow higher percentages of people to obtain healthcare. If treatment was even more scarce than it has been, the death rate would climb even more.
[+] [-] hn8788|4 years ago|reply
He's got no faith in the government any more, and would rather risk getting sick than try to keep up with whatever narrative is being pushed on any given week.
[+] [-] okprod|4 years ago|reply
Personally, I don't believe I would die from any of the variants. However, I got the vaccine because I don't want to become one of the infected with longer-term problems, including permanently reduced lung capacity.
[+] [-] gentleman11|4 years ago|reply
I think people should get vaccinated, but admittedly there is a profound lack of trust in institutions these days. misconceptions like this microchip theory would be 100x less likely if the government wasn’t literally surveilling your every movement and communicated word with the help of big tech
The institutions behave in a profoundly untrustworthy way for generations, then people stop trusting them. Society breaks down. It’s that simple. In 30 years this will be amazingly worse unless things change
[+] [-] JMTQp8lwXL|4 years ago|reply
Problem is, people today haven't seen the tough stuff. If every third person had Ebola you wouldn't have the luxury of opining on government unease, because your lived reality would look far different. We've had it good. Maybe people complaining about these things is a concrete sign of how much progress we've made.
[+] [-] toomuchtodo|4 years ago|reply
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27911793
[+] [-] DinoDad13|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Diederich|4 years ago|reply
625k deaths in the US over 35147k cases, a death rate of 1.78%
Current US population is about 328M. 1.78% death rate across 328M is close to 6M.
[+] [-] pupppet|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timeon|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrighele|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] J5892|4 years ago|reply
Personally, I don't know why anyone would take that bet when they don't have to.
[+] [-] kazinator|4 years ago|reply
E.g. the US government had a role in the opioid crisis.
[+] [-] c0nducktr|4 years ago|reply
Yeah, no surprise there lol
Thanks for beta-testing covid-19 for us though.
[+] [-] tablespoon|4 years ago|reply
You talk like a 99% survival rate is pretty good and means it's not something to worry about. One percent of the US population is 3.28 million people. Which is oddly enough about the population of the entire metro area I live in.
So Russia could nuke my city and kill everyone, and the US would still have a 99% survival rate.
Cut the number of deaths in half, for a 99.5% survival rate, and you're still taking out a city like Milwaukee.
> and the media manipulating us at every turn, trust in these institutions is less than rock bottom
The media may be manipulating you, but the people who sell the media manipulation narrative are usually do so to manipulate you even more. It's like deciding to eat dogshit because there was a fly in your food. Yeah, there's a problem with the food, but it's still better than dogshit.
[+] [-] alisonkisk|4 years ago|reply
1% death rate is pretty bad for a single disease everyone is going to get eventually. And the hospitalization rate is much higher than 1%
[+] [-] bigbillheck|4 years ago|reply
The chances of getting in a car accident in any given trip is way less than 99%, that doesn't mean I'm not going to wear seatbelts.
[+] [-] imustbeevil|4 years ago|reply
Here's a bit of a thought experiment for you. Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump are vaccinated. Why would they tell you not to get vaccinated?
[+] [-] mberning|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raverbashing|4 years ago|reply
Good luck then I guess.
relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/2397/
[+] [-] yardie|4 years ago|reply
I made the mistake of telling them the results. It was 2x 3-days of me bitching and moaning about a sore arm and just feeling aches while the innoculation worked its magic. Since TFG convinced a lot of Americans the virus is no worse than a light flu somehow my achy arm is way worse than any flu. So now the vaccine is not worth taking because those 6 total days of achiness are worse than being in ICU.
It's that fucking dumb.
In hindsight I should have kept my mouth shut and said everything was fine.
[+] [-] anthonygd|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] volker48|4 years ago|reply
I felt worse the day after my yearly flu shot in 2020.
[+] [-] JMTQp8lwXL|4 years ago|reply
If someone is TFG (had to look up that abbreviation), talking about the side effects was nowhere near table stakes for their degree of concern and FUD. Had you said nothing, I strongly believe they still wouldn't have anyways.
[+] [-] tablespoon|4 years ago|reply
TFG?
[+] [-] raphlinus|4 years ago|reply
But I don't think it's super mysterious. The US is one of the few countries that has a major news network constantly pushing the antivax message (Russia being the other that comes to mind, and that strengthens my point). We also have an erosion of trust in institutions, the media, and authority that goes deeper than in most other places.
We also see evidence here on HN: every Covid thread has a significant number of antivax comments. They are also aggressive on Twitter, and even in the chat of TWiV livestreams.
There is some reason for optimism though. Very recently, there has been something of a turnaround in right-leaning news sources, where they are now advocating the vaccine. I'm not sure if that will hold up, but in any case I expect it will boost vax numbers considerably, and in the process save many thousands of lives.
A deeper question remains: what can we do toward having an information ecosystem that is not so terribly dysfunctional that antivax messages thrive in it?
[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/07/unvaccina...
[+] [-] orloffm|4 years ago|reply
Russia's low rate of vaccination comes from three things:
1) Lack of incentive. Life was going as usual throughout Winter and Spring - everything was open, no one was enforcing masks. Moscow had the requirement to be vaccinated in order to enter restaurants for a few weeks in June-July, that forced people to go get vaccines.
2) Not many people were dying before Delta, so everyone thought it was fading away. And combined with the iron curtain situation between vaccines (Sputnik V not approved in EU and P/M/J&J/AZ not approved in Russia), people thought there was going to be some development, maybe new vaccines, and that it's worth waiting a bit.
3) Many people didn't trust some dying corrupt company to be able to make millions of doses out of nowhere and for it to be effective. It was just too suspicious to be true. But eventually Sputnik proved to work, so this went away.
[+] [-] kyrra|4 years ago|reply
There are a lot of factors that you need to take in account when talking about vaccine hesitant people. Some big ones:
* Risk: people that don't think they are at risk of catching covid are less likely to get the vaccine. Many people in rural areas don't interact with people as much, and likely feel like they are less likely to catch it. You can also see risk evaluation playing out in other countries that didn't have large early cases of Covid (like Japan), where the fall 2020 wave wasn't too bad, so people weren't as worried.
* Trust: There are many that seem to feel squelching discussion that dissents from the CDC guidance is the best way to convince the skeptics. Sadly, those people that are skeptical will see this as more of a reason not to trust the ruling class. Preventing discussion isn't how to fight this fight.
[+] [-] boulos|4 years ago|reply
[1] https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/w2zmwpzsq0/econTabReport.pdf
[+] [-] TigeriusKirk|4 years ago|reply
How many lives would it save?
Would we be willing to do that?
[+] [-] ReptileMan|4 years ago|reply
For starters COVID 19 is relatively benign compared to the other stuff you vaccinate against. And unlike the other vaccines which were marketed as - I don't want to get polio/my kids to get polio, this was done as moral duty which is to protect others - which not as much people buy in.
Throw in the speedy approval process, the Astra Zenecca feud with Brussels, the media being media with side effects stories and the constant annoying moralizing preaching of the very online crowd, the fact that vaccine is still no reason to ditch the masks - and it is no wonder that hesitancy is so strong.
Got jabbed with Pfizer in February - I don't think it was worth it. I am still forced to wear masks even though there is just no good evidence that vaccinated people could be infectious at any rates comparable to unvaccinated.
[+] [-] alea_iacta_est|4 years ago|reply
Lie: > Vaccine rejection is higher among whites than it is among black and Hispanic Americans
The data: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccination-demogr...
[+] [-] alkonaut|4 years ago|reply
This is what surprises me about the US (if it’s true - I’d like to see more numbers). Not that there is a chunk of sceptics but a chunk of lunatics. Even if you account for troll responses you wouldn’t expect that kind of number. If just one in ten that answered yes actually mean it - that’s still terrifying.
[+] [-] RickJWagner|4 years ago|reply
The same argument isn't used to excuse people who won't vaccinate.
Don't get me wrong-- I am completely in favor of vaccination, and completely in favor of government ids for all vital functions.
[+] [-] Rd6n6|4 years ago|reply
Edit: “almost all” changed to “most”
[+] [-] colinmhayes|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AndrewKemendo|4 years ago|reply
People with the vaccine accepting phenotype are dying at lower rates than the vaccine hesitant phenotype because they have adapted to their environment better. Whether this leads to adaptation in the broader population remains to be seen.
My guess is that it won't because most of the people who aren't getting vaccinated and dying are 1. too small in number and 2. Primarily past the age of reproduction anyway.
[+] [-] djkivi|4 years ago|reply
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/biden-trump-coronavi...
[+] [-] dot1x|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] peanut_worm|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] GaryTang|4 years ago|reply