I've been offered the COVID vaccine

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I think that a lot more people would comply if there weren't all this scaremongering and conspiracy theories going on that you're not sure what to believe. I blame the internet. And before you say ''there was scaremongering before the internet'', there can't have been, because I don't think there was all this when the polio vaccine first came out, everyone just had the vaccine and that was that. But now everybody's forced to do everything online, so they're more exposed to different articles and theories online and so will inevitably be more dubious. I don't know why or who writes these fake news that look so genuine.

I mean, one person coincidentally dies after having the vaccine and it has to get reported and plastered all over the news, even if the person didn't die due to the vaccine. No deaths that happened after having the vaccine should be reported. A lot more people, if not everybody, will be more willing to get vaccinated if they weren't held back by these negative stories and news reports.

Have you made an appointment yet?

I wish you lived in NYC. You don’t need an appointment here.

I believe in transparency.....but I don’t believe in sensationalism.

Last edited by kraftiekortie on 31 May 2021, 6:37 am, edited 1 time in total.

Scaremongering is a political tool for destabilization.
It's a standard tool used by Russia - I once saw it very obviously, when Maidan revolution was happening, on my news site - one day lots and lots of anti-Ukrainian comments written in poor Polish emerged overnight.
Over time, they learned to do it more subtly. As the goal is destabilization, maintaining an atmosphere of distrust and conflicting information is what these trolls aim to feed.

Pre-internet, we had serious investigative journalism in both the press and on television who would hold governments to account. There would be proper adult discussions. Now, the press are just partisan campaign rags who exaggerate news stories in a desperate attempt to stall dwindling sales whilst the BBC are just doing what they are told (news wise) to keep their licence fee, whilst the rest of the organisation is left to get on with producing the dross that's seeing audience figures drop through the floor.

I get most of my information from podcasts and long interviews or discussions in which people who are qualified are given time to explain their position and pass on their knowledge without being rudely interrupted, side-tracked and pushed into delivering sound bites that tell us nothing we don't already know.

Well plenty of not fully vaccinated people are taking advantage of the reducing of mask mandates, so it's also not impossible that those people are spreading it around. Because yeah it is said that now it is safe to go maskless if you have been fully vaccinated but there isn't really a good way to ensure everyone going maskless has actually been fully vaccinated.

The same plauge rats who refused masks in the thick of the pandemic, never put their masks on and now they can just claim they got vaccinated when they never even had the first dose. How the hell is the store employee going to know if they are not wearing a mask because they are fully vaccinated or just because they're an as*hole.

Plus I like the mask, Idk will it be weird if I keep wearing one even when they say the pandimic is over, if anything may be worth wearing one just to block some of the pollen and inevitable forest fire smoke that will be coming again this summer. I would be absolutely surprised if there is not another round of massive smoke from forest fires.

I've worn a mask at the food stores since being asked to do so and that's still a requirement, but to be honest - from all of the information I've gathered - I believe they are about as effective as a wire mesh fence would be against preventing sand being blown through it. I also believe governments know they have very little if any effect, but recognise the psychological benefits.

Playing hide and seek games with a virus over months on end won't work either. I think the only solution to the problem is a proper hard short lockdown (nobody allowed out, even to buy food) whilst you identify those infected. If you can't do that, then there's going to come a point where you have to accept that however many deaths there may be, it isn't worth destroying your own civilisation over.

I would immediately blacklist any source spreading such BS about masks. Any decent mask does a great job at catching droplets.

Polio was a whole different beast. We got the vaccine for polio in 1935. What happened was that there were two main researchers on polio, Kolmer and Brodie. Kolmer didn’t bother with a control group, and several of his test subjects developed polio or suffered paralysis at the injection site. Even then there were safety standards in the medical community, and Kolmer’s attempt at a vaccine was considered a disaster. Kolmer was also born in the USA and spent his entire career in Philadelphia.

Brodie was a good bit younger, born in the UK, studied at McGill, and ended up in NY. He was also Jewish, I believe. His vaccine was shown to be safer. But largely because of anti-vax bias after Kolmer, Brodie’s perceived lack of status compared with Kolmer (younger, less prestige, not as well established, etc.), and probably a degree of anti-semitism, Brodie’s work was dismissed and his funding was cancelled.

It would be another 20 years before there would be another serious attempt at a vaccine, and Salk’s work built on discoveries that Brodie already knew. What changed in the 1950s was fear of the virus outweighed fear of the vaccine, and even then there was a lot of misinformation about the expense of the vaccine that drove people way from getting it.

Back then you had a slower flow of information, a lot of bad information, and a lack of technology and manpower that resulted in slow development and inability to rapidly test vaccines. Over time this has led to the popular assumption that safe and effective vaccines cannot be developed any other way. Salk was a unique person during that time because he was a risk-taking individual who insisted on maintaining his independence, luxuries that Kolmer, Brodie, and even Isabel Morgan did not have. These days it’s all determined by politics, and had it not been for Trump’s efforts in easing restrictions, we’d still be waiting on development. It is more politically expedient to keep people sick and afraid. The nature of something like COVID is that it is not an especially deadly disease, and we’ve lived with it for a long time before COVID-19. This, too, shall pass, and I believe more likely would have faded before we even got a vaccine for it if we’d stayed the course. What changed was the discovery that both fear of the virus AND the vaccine could be leveraged for the sake of political power, and that’s mostly what we’re experiencing now. There is no need to wait until a virus fades to get an effective, life-saving vaccine, same as how millions of people could have been spared from death and deformity had Brodie not been shut down.

That doesn’t really bear out in reality. Most of us have been under some mandate or another, even in less restrictive areas like where I live. Projections of viral spread have been pretty low with masks, and infections with masks are so high anybody would wonder just what good they really are.

Even if you get the vaccine like I did, it’s still unknown just how long immunity is good for. I’m convinced we’re all eventually going to get this. The vaccine is the best option for keeping hospitals from being stretched too thin.

We got told by our own government that there was no evidence for masks being effective and not to bother with them, then they did a complete U-turn (after they'd changed advisors I think) and we were then told to mask up and wait for the results of a study, but when that study didn't tell the new advisors what they wanted to hear, it was brushed under the carpet and masks have been a source of tension in shops and on public transport ever since.

I've got a card to say that I'm exempt due to autism but I've yet to use it, in the never ending belief that it's only a matter of a few more weeks before I can take the damned thing off for good and the fact that I really don't want to be challenged by a security guard because I tend to go from 0-100% combative mode in a matter of seconds if somebody tries to talk to me in a parent to child fashion. If vaxxed people become exempt however and un-vaxxed have to wear them then I definitely will use the Autism card.

I think masks are effective, which is why surgeons and dentists have always worn masks.

I don't recall any legitimate source saying masks are not effective at any point. There were debates of how serious this threat is and whether mask wearing should be mandatory.

I didn't dig too deep, but pretty sure some asian countries where masks were already widely socially accepted ended up doing significantly better than countries with a lot of resistance against masks despite higher population density.

Those people are addicts, victims of cigarette company marketing & highly addictive chemical additives.

Anti-vaxxers aren't addicts. They're just ignorant of vaccine science and victims of conspiracy theory hoaxes.

The point is to create a barrier and limit physical contact with patients as much as possible. Masks are effective to a point. If you want 100% assurance you won’t get this virus, you’ll have to lock yourself in a hermetically sealed, filtered-ventilated room with UV lights on the walls, and no contact with ANYONE. I’ve personally known too many people who religiously wore masks and got the virus, anyway. You either choose to live a full, free life, or you huddle in fear of something that MIGHT, however unlikely, kill you (I’m not ignoring that people do die from this). A life bereft of freedom is not living.

I want to stress that I don’t want to tell you what to think or feel. It’s just that there are always two sides. Surgeons and dentists wear masks and those are effective. But also consider that the masks they wear aren’t the same non-sterile masks available to most of us, not to mention that the dentist’s chair and the operating room are carefully controlled environments. From time to time you do hear about disease spread by dental work, but it has become rare as standards have improved. There’s nothing to be afraid of in sterile environments, but the difference is day-to-day interactions out in the open aren’t like that. The main thing to remember is to just not stress out over it.

The point of wearing mask is not 100% protection for an individual wearing it. It's about limiting rate of virus spread in population. And it works just as expected according to all the evidence.

I have to mostly agree. I’m anti-vax when it comes to political control and weaponizing it, and I don’t believe you have to watch CNN very long to figure that out. But is the vax the mark of the beast or some Bill Gates tracking device/mind control? No, I don’t believe that it is.

Vaccine science is high school biology, so anyone at least from my age down to, say, 11th graders ought to know enough about how vaccines are made and how they work to know this is nothing to worry about. It’s not a retrovirus that’s going to completely rewrite your DNA and turn your unborn children into X-Men, though it would be pretty sweet if it did. This is a new biotechnology that gets mRNA into your muscle cells that stimulates your mitochondria into producing a boatload of viral proteins without doing actual harm. This triggers a rapid immune response that, together with a second injection, results in relatively long-term immunity. This last part is what scientists aren’t so sure about just yet, and the FDA has always dragged their butts to approve ANYTHING that might do American people any good. But, basically, as long as you have the COVID-19 mRNA in your system, your muscle tissue becomes a vaccine-manufacturing powerhouse and does the work that would take drug companies years to do. For about three days to a week, your body is overloaded with viral protein.

And that’s basically it. Yes, I’m somewhat oversimplifying AND exaggerating, but without getting too technical that’s in a nutshell what happens. It’s nothing to be afraid of. I think what’s got so many people freaking out is that it’s the government that is pushing this thing after they’ve learned, with good reason, not to trust the government. I don’t blame people for being distrustful, but in THIS case things happen to be ok.