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.
I don’t think the stance that COVID is “over” is unique to the US or the current US president. Is there any major government still requiring (or even recommending) a COVID-specific seasonal booster shot?
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.
