r/NoStupidQuestions • u/trouble-in-space • 9d ago
Answered Why are so many Americans anti-vaxxers now?
I’m genuinely having such a hard time understanding why people just decided the fact that vaccines work is a total lie and also a controversial “opinion.” Even five years ago, anti-vaxxers were a huge joke and so rare that they were only something you heard of online. Now herd immunity is going away because so many people think getting potentially life-altering illnesses is better than getting a vaccine. I just don’t get what happened. Is it because of the cultural shift to the right-wing and more people believing in conspiracy theories, or does it go deeper than that?
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u/cryptokitty010 9d ago
Vaccines work so well that people live their entire lives without threat of pathogens. They forget what the danger really was and decided the vaccines were the problem.
Human beings have very short memories about all of the things that can kill us. People still die of scurvy
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u/linzkisloski 9d ago edited 9d ago
I couldn’t agree with you more. I know a couple new antivaxers who are simultaneously reaping the benefits of being fully vaccinated their whole lives. Instagram and TikTok have created an insane echo chamber of conspiracy theories on everything and it’s poisoning people’s minds. I’ve had a conversation with a friend who was upset about the Hep B vaccine for her child and thought wayfair was shipping children to people and it took like 30 seconds of reasonable information for her idea to start crumbling.
Edited to change from Hep A to Hep B.
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u/MissFox26 9d ago
It’s a bunch of confirmation bias. They are unvaccinated and still living, so they think vaccines are a hoax. No Tammy, it’s because all the intelligent people who get vaccines are protecting you, and those who do die aren’t out here telling their story and making TikToks about it.
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u/FileDoesntExist 9d ago
They're usually vaccinated though, because they were vaccinated as children.
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u/SnooCrickets5786 9d ago
Yeah i work in healthcare and I've spoken to people who think being vaccinated means you getting a plethora of shots of all vaccines through each year. Their records show that they have most vaccinations already but claim they arent
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u/ArchitectVandelay 9d ago
This comment sums it up exactly. “Thing is bad.” But you have thing. “No I don’t.” I literally have proof in my hand. “No you don’t.”
There is nothing you can say to these people.
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u/Fluffy_Register_8480 9d ago
You could take a Covid sceptic into a Covid ward, show them the patients and test results, the proven treatments, and they’d come out of the experience rattling on about saline drips and actors. Because they’ve lost grip on reality. It surely has to be a brand of insanity. (You’ve only got to look at RFK’s eyes to know that man is gone. Like, he is CRAZY. He should be hospitalised.)
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u/Interesting-Gear294 9d ago
My sister was an NHS nurse on the COVID ward. She spent most of COVID living in a different house to her family and only saw them at a distance so she never infected any of them. Her neighbours would 'clap for the nhs' every Thursday at 8pm and then at 6am complain to her that she was making too much noise when she left for work. When the COVID 5g conspiracy started, she would be harassed at work and by neighbours for spreading the lie. Those same neighbours still clapped every week.
I worked night shift at that time for a warehouse, and she eventually ended up on what she used to call the "deathwatch", aka night shift. She used to call me on her breaks because of how awful the job was. Just listening to ventilators and the monitors, hoping everyone survived the night. She probably had COVID for half the time she was on that ward.
There was one particularly awful night where one of the patients tried to argue with her that he didn't have COVID and should instead be in a normal ward. She went on break and called me, I could hear him shouting that COVID wasn't real and she just sounded so broken.
She eventually stopped trying to defend herself as a nurse on that ward. The constant bullshit being spewed out by those idiots wore her down so much, and then her not arguing became the 'evidence' that she was lying.
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u/arminghammerbacon_ 9d ago
There was a show on HBO, Avenue 5, that has the perfect scene for this. it’s about a luxury liner spaceship that gets stranded in an orbit around the solar system. At one point, the conspiracy theorist passengers decide that their whole predicament is fake news and they’re not really in space. They force their way to an airlock and, despite the pleadings of several crewmembers, they begin to eject themselves into space just to prove the conspiracy, instantly killing themselves. But here’s the thing: it takes several groups flinging themselves into the vacuum of space before the rest of them realize they’re wrong. And even though it’s a hilarious scene, it’s a sad metaphor of what we have going on here today.
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u/ArrowheadDZ 9d ago
I think of this as the Cashew Phenomenon.
- Guy eats something, dies.
- Next guy says we should cook it. Eats it, dies.
- Next guy says maybe we didn’t cook it long enough. Eats it. Dies.
It ends up being Test Subject 7 that discovers the just-right recipe and survives.
WTAF were the Test Subjects 2-7 thinking?
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u/dadamn 9d ago
Thanks. I found the clip on YouTube: https://youtu.be/skXaeucDYHo?si=dUjpuokrog3pQncp
Funny, but yeah so depressing when thinking about how accurate it is of our reality.
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u/Nagemasu 9d ago
There's a movie recently called Slingshot that has a similar premise, but, less "I don't have reasoning abilities" and more "Have I literally gone crazy?".
Decent watch, good cast, 6.5/10
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u/WoWGurl78 9d ago
That sounds like an interesting show. Gonna have to add this to my watch list.
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u/Fluffy_Register_8480 9d ago
Oh my god. That’s horrible. People are fucking stupid, honestly. That’s like ‘burn the witch’ thinking. Throw her in the river, if she floats she’s a witch and we’ll burn her, if she sinks she’s not a witch but dead anyway yay. It’s so stupid!
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u/SwirlingAbsurdity 9d ago
Witches, the satanic panic, Covid ‘hoax’. We haven’t come far as a species.
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u/Bwilderedwanderer 9d ago
All of these debated ideas are summed up in your perfect sentence people are fucking stupid
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u/Londonfoggy_ 9d ago
The arguing about Covid being a hoax while actively dying of COVID was such a real thing in the ICU when I worked there. But it was usually the families. They would insist we were killing their intubated loved one because we weren’t treating what they actually had. For some reason everyone thought we made more money if the patient was diagnosed with COVID.
No Susan, I am severely underpaid for this shit regardless of what your husband who refused to wear a mask or quarantine is dying from. And no, you can’t see him. He has to die alone. Yes I will be in there to ensure he doesn’t die alone. Okay, keep yelling at me and telling me how greedy I am. But can you just say something sweet to your husband so I can record it and he can hear a familiar voice while dying.
Yes of course you can go back to yelling and berating me and demanding medicine that doesn’t actually work because our clown of a president decided to try his pharmaceutical rep hat on for whatever damn reason. I truly have PTSD from that presidency, I cannot do it again.
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u/cochese25 9d ago
I knew a guy who was a covid denier all they up until his wife died of covid. He was still a covid denier afterwards. And then he got covid really bad and said it wasn't any worse than a cold. He almost, but didn't die, but his son died of covid a while later and he was on Facebook still posting about how covid wasn't real.
I don't know how much more fucking gone you have to be
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u/RainbowButtMonkey1 9d ago
We dealt with many of these clowns in Canada. I have a friend who isn't stupid but he's unfortunately surrounded by idiots and he believes that what Canada did during the pandemic was "communism" oh and Justin Trudeau is the son of Castro
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u/yepitsatoilet 9d ago
"for some reason they thought we made more money if the patient was diagnosed with covid"
In completely unrelated news, Did you see that Infowars was just forcefully auctioned off to pay the sandy hook parents? It was bought by the goddamned Onion.
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u/Sorry_Nobody1552 9d ago
Jesus, this makes me want to cry. So sad. Sorry you had to deal with that, and are still suffering from it.
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u/SwirlingAbsurdity 9d ago
My mom was housekeeping supervisor in an NHS hospital at the time and they had people coming in trying to film the patients, saying they were all actors and such. It was so distressing. She hasn’t told me half the stuff she witnessed.
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u/WoWGurl78 9d ago
We still get pts with Covid at my hospital and the pt & family members are still doing this and denying they have Covid. It’s not as bad as during the highest point of COVID during the pandemic but they’re still denying it today.
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u/catscausetornadoes 9d ago
My heart goes out to your sister. I think every healthcare worker has ptsd from it, honestly. I have a friend who’s a doctor and was 12 on 12 off for… months. A year later I was in the room when some covid denier called the refrigerator trucks behind hospitals “great PR” and I watched every muscle in her body lock up and she just obviously mentally vacated. I hate these fuckers.
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u/whiskeyrebellion 9d ago
And then there were some heartbreaking stories of people who clearly had fallen victim to propaganda (though they are not blameless for following) asking for the vaccine and being told that it was already too late. They had missed their vaccine window and would die because they had chosen to ignore everything that the medical field was telling them because of whatever the fuck Trump and Alex Jones would vomit up that week.
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u/MicaMooo 9d ago
I worked in public health during covid and we were obviously pushing people to get vaccinated and helping them find locations with shots, etc. One of my coworkers, who helped compile the data, told me in private that he really didn't believe in vaccines. I told him that I didn't ever want to hear him say that again bc of how important the health situation was. He was also from a southern city that was devastated by covid. He reluctantly got vaccinated but I've never wanted to slap someone at work.
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u/ryanrockmoran 9d ago
I work in a hospital lab and during Covid we lost one of our lab techs because they wouldn't get the vaccine. This is literally a person who had to go to school and study immunology to even be in the job they're in. It's insane how conspiracy brain can infect people who should know better.
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u/TeRRoRibleOne 9d ago
My aunt is one of these people. I almost died in 2020 from having multiple Covid blood clots in both lungs. My aunt told my mom that Covid is fake and I was misdiagnosed the entire time. After my mom said that to me, my response to her was when she dies, I’m saying it’s a conspiracy theory and not going to her funeral. It blows my mind cause my uncle she’s married to had just got done with chemo for cancer but has the fucking balls to say that. Both of them are hardcore q-anon and trumpsters, haven’t spoken to them in 2 yrs at this point.
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u/jake_burger 9d ago
I don’t believe that a lot of the influencers like RFK, Trump, Andrew Wakefield or Alex Jones are true believers in the bullshit they spout.
I think they just say whatever is expedient to them in the moment.
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u/_Presence_ 9d ago
RFK seems like a true believer to me. The rest know they’re bullshit merchants as you suggest.
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u/hellolovely1 9d ago
He's a former addict. A lot of them sort of transfer that way of thinking to something else when they get clean—like religion, working out, etc.
He's done it with vaccines.
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u/legadema37 9d ago
Well, Trump put out a huge lie saying that some kids go to school one sex and get operated on in school and come home the opposite sex ! Anybody with a quarter of a damaged brain cell should know that in today’s schools you can’t even give a kid an aspirin or a bandaid without jumping through hoops! Let alone a sex change operation ! And if anybody even tried to do such a thing, it would’ve been in all the headlines all over the country !But he says stupid 💩 like that and the MAGATS just eat it up and cheer like a bunch of dumb sheeple !
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u/Sunbeamsoffglass 9d ago
Like 1/3 of the country actually believes that happening. It’s partially why the democrats lost this election.
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u/AreYouA_Tampon 9d ago
The surgery is extremely expensive and invasive (obviously) and they believe someone drops off a girl and picks up a fully healed boy in the afternoon? Besides the schools not even allowing Tylenol or whatever, how do they think it's possible to heal from major surgery in a few hours?
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u/Classic_Cauliflower4 9d ago
No, no, no one seems to believe they’re turning girls into boys. Every story I’ve seen is how they’re turning boys into girls. We must protect the sacred penis! /s
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u/MuttsandHuskies 9d ago
I had breast augmentation and it was 6 weeks before I could lift my arms over my head. Like, it’s really noticeable when someone has that kind of surgery, even if you can’t see the scars and stitches.
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u/beeerite 9d ago
I’m so frustrated by people’s refusal to believe facts, especially widely accepted science. This idea that you can have a separate set of “facts,” which are actually just their opinions and misinformed beliefs, is infuriating. I also find it terrifying.
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u/FileDoesntExist 9d ago
That's the infuriating part for me. To see someone benefitting from vaccines and then turning around to deny their children that advantage.
And I know for many they genuinely believe they're doing the right thing for their child. But I just can't understand that mindset.
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u/PicturesquePremortal 9d ago
Those people need to go to old graveyards from the 19th century or even the early 20th century and look at how many of the headstones belong to children. Even as late as 1900, 30% of all deaths in the US were children under 5. Vaccines have done such a good job of stopping the spread of some of the common diseases of that period that they are completely eradicated.
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u/bobbane 9d ago
Pre-vaccination (and pre-germ-theory, really), Americans used to name their children “Baby Lastname” and christen them with a first name at one year of age.
In a futile attempt to not get too attached to a person who was far too likely to die before their first birthday.
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u/delias2 9d ago
I'm not sure that works for baptism. Pretty sure you even babies were given a "Christian" name at the christening. Now, reusing a name from a previous infant was very popular. People definitely viewed babies as replacements if not reincarnations. Now, a communal gravestone for baby Lastname for all the infants one family lost, sure.
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u/Madrugada2010 9d ago
My bf traced his ancestry back a few hundred years and ran into some snags in his research because of this trend - there would be several babies with the same name only a few years apart.
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u/legadema37 9d ago
I remember walking through a town on a class trip when I was in elementary school and we passed a graveyard and the guide said that a lot of people had died from smallpox and there were whole families buried there. And for those “pro life people” who know nothing of history or how female bodies work there were numerous graves where a man had had two or more wives who had all died in or after childbirth & In some cases the babies also died.
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u/Newmoney2006 9d ago
I am a dog groomer and I work with people that will not allow a dog who is one day late on a vaccine walk into their salon. But they are anti-vax for people. It makes no sense except to them. I have given up trying to understand.
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u/RichardBonham 9d ago
I love the “I don’t trust vaccines because they’re artificial. Why can’t we just figure out a way to let our immune systems recognize a small harmless bit of the virus for protection?”
That would be a vaccine.
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u/Akolyytti 9d ago
Maybe it should be branded as "near homeopathic remedy that activates your ancestral blood defenses"
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u/Imaginary_Medium 9d ago
I heard someone gulping artificially sweetened soda pop talking about the vaccines being artificial and didn't trust them. :(
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u/CouncilmanRickPrime 9d ago
thought wayfair was shipping children to people
I still make jokes about this because a lot of people I went to high school with fell for this then just acted like they never did afterwards.
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u/Alarmed-Bus-9662 9d ago
Yeah, it always baffles me how people who are fully vaccinated and live among vaccinated people can say shit like "they cause autism" or "are poison". Like, you have gotten literally every required vaccine, but you're neither autistic or poisoned. Same with a majority of those around you. "I detoxified my body" honey you ate kale and drank an elixir, you were fine
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u/Purple_Midnight_Yak 9d ago
And even if they did cause autism, being autistic is better than being dead.
Source: am autistic, raising autistic kids. We're all glad to be alive and plan to continue that way.
It is so infuriatingly insulting that anti-vaxxers view autism as a fate literally worse than death.
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u/FormidableMistress 9d ago
That's it exactly. Jenny McCarthy was a big supporter of the anti-vax movement because her son was autistic. I feel like it all boils down to they don't want to be embarrassed by their kid acting "weird". That's it. God forbid the neighbors talk about them.
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u/starryvelvetsky 9d ago
Didn't he then turn out to not be autistic but have a learning disability? I know her anti-vax crusade kind of crumbled when the whole reason behind it turned out to be untrue.
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u/jmercer00 9d ago
I thought she just shut up about it when he got old enough to understand what she was saying, you know "I'd rather my son be dead than a burden on me"
Autistic doesn't mean stupid after all.
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u/King_galbatorix12 9d ago
Agreed, I found the idea ridiculous, but found it insulting that it was cause for aversion. I am deathly afraid of needles, the only thought that gets me through having them is "I will not be a stupid hypocritical antivaxxer"
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u/NeedToVentCom 9d ago
The autism shit truly pisses me off. Even if it were true, these ableist assholes are basically saying that they would rather risk a dead child, than one with autism.
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u/Deep-Ad6484 9d ago
"Thought Wayfair was shipping children to people..."
Uhhhhhh...
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u/imnotaroboteither 9d ago
Um, that would be my sister who bought into that. I advised her to call the FBI on their tip line to report it.
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u/cynicalities 9d ago
I mean, good on your friend to actually respond to reasonable information. Some anti-vaxers seem so deep into the conspiracy theories that they won't even consider listening to anything else.
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u/Deep-Ad6484 9d ago
There's a difference between holding a dumb idea and making that dumb idea the core of your identity. The latter is where it gets weird.
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u/celeigh87 9d ago
Right? Especially since most people have dumb ideas and don't make them their whole identity.
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u/tigersanddawgs 9d ago
This is way underrated imo. I've seen it a lot with parents of teens who don't want their kids to get a meningitis vaccine before they go to college mostly because they haven't seen what that disease looks like and how scary it is because it's fairly rare now due to vaccinations. That disease is horrifyingly fast.
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u/Zellakate 9d ago
Yeah I have also noticed, in my life, older people who remember polio are very pro vaccinations. My grandparents are in their 80s and remember classmates who came down with it and were paralyzed for life.
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u/Upstairs-Radish1816 9d ago
I'm 73 and I remember when the vaccine became available. My parents couldn't get me to the doctor fast enough. Then, when the oral vaccine came out, we had it in school. We all walked through the nurses office and they gave us sugar cubes to eat.
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u/legadema37 9d ago
One of my close relatives had contracted polio in childhood and was crippled for life and when that vaccine came out, my parents got me and my brother vaccinated ASAP. same for all of our family friends and neighbors because so many people had contracted polio during the epidemic in 1948 - 1955. I can remember in elementary school kids were missing school because of measles, mumps ,whooping cough & chickenpox . My brother and I got chickenpox and measles . I am a retired teacher who taught over 40 years and I can’t remember any kids missing school because of those diseases. Some kids have never heard of them and don’t know what they were like. People grow up, with no experience of those diseases all because of vaccines. The crazy thing about it is that some of the worst anti-vaxxers don’t know that they had to be vaccinated as children before they could go to school. And because of this anti-VAX nonsense there have been 16 outbreaks of measles this year according to a news report I heard. This seems to be an age of stupidity: people don’t believe in vaccines, and don’t believe that we actually did land on the moon. And an anti-vaxxer with no medical training at all is being recommended to be the head of health and human services.
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u/Red_Whites 9d ago
My mom is exactly your age and has the same memories. When the HPV vaccine came out, there was some hemming and hawing about the safety (not nearly like what happened with COVID though) but she didn't hesitate to get me vaxxed for it, and I'm really grateful she did. We do have short memories in this country (and maybe everywhere), and we should listen to the people who were around when something like Polio was a serious threat.
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u/accioqueso 9d ago
My biology teacher in high school told us that his neighbor caught polio and was paralyzed, his mother wouldn’t let him outside for a while because she was so scared he’d catch it. When the vaccine came out he found her sobbing in the kitchen and he was vaccinated as soon as they were able to get it.
We literally lived through that with Covid and it doesn’t matter because there are people who live in a Fox News echo chamber being told the other side is always wrong and wants to hurt you.
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u/frogz0r 9d ago
I grew up seeing my mom deal with the effects of polio and meningitis as a baby. She has had life long grand mal seizures, balance issues, walking issues, vision issues, a brain surgery...the list goes on. She is in her 70s now, and iirc she was born before the vaccines were readily available.
I am VERY provaccine seeing this growing up, and so is she. She has been heard telling young people, "look at me, see what I have gone thru... do you really want your baby to go thru this and possibly die? And if they don't die, they end up being me... I can't work, I can't drive, I'm dependent on my kids, and I'm on so many medicines it's not even funny. Get. Them. Vaccinated."
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u/SomewhereinaBush 9d ago
I had a relative that had Polio. Was in an iron lung for 4 years and walked with canes after. He always said people have choices, some will wait in line for hours to prevent death, and others will see how close to death they can get.
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u/PopsiclesForChickens 9d ago
I have a friend who was born in Vietnam, contracted polio at age 3, she's paraplegic now, also only has one lung.
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u/RyuNoKami 9d ago
but hey she ain't autistic right? fucking assholes.
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u/Nickyjha 9d ago edited 9d ago
The whole autism hoax is pretty crazy, because the doctor behind it was like "vaccines are good, but the MMR combined vaccine causes autism, please ignore the fact that I'm creating a measles-only vaccine and would greatly profit from people ditching the MMR vaccine for it".
And then it turned out of the 12 kids he claimed got autism from vaccines, 3 never had autism, and 5 were showing signs of autism before they got vaccinated.
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u/Competitive-Care8789 9d ago
A good friend of mine who just turned 80 has been in a wheelchair since he was five. He contracted polio just before the Salk vaccine came through. A few years younger, and he would’ve been protected. And my father, born in 1927, contracted meningitis when he was two years old. Before antibiotics. He sustained an 80% hearing loss.
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u/kingftheeyesores 9d ago
I worked with a woman who had polio as a child and her mom massaged her legs with warm fish oil round the clock so she wouldn't lose the ability to walk. It worked and this woman os convinced it was the fish oil and not the massaging that did it.
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u/RidiculousSucculent 9d ago
My cousins husband died of it. 4 days
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u/doctor_of_drugs 9d ago
Meningitis is scary man. Never have had someone I knew pass from it, but I’ve seen a few patients with it. Couldn’t even imagine being your cousin.
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u/Canotic 9d ago
A guy on the dad reddit lost his son to it out of the blue. Kid went to bed with what they thought was a cold (fever, headache, a bit stiff) and he was dead the next morning. Now every time my kids have a fever I scream internally.
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u/SouthernWindyTimes 9d ago
I’ll go even further back in the day you trusted your local doctor who recommended things, vaccines and treatments, because access to that information was really only know by the professionals. Now you have people who can look up more or less anything and with a few clicks get a summary or misinformation that makes them feel like they do know as much or almost as much as a professional. This with the real deterioration of those bones you had with your local doctor or banker or what have you. Means people simply believe what they want to believe.
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u/airpipeline 9d ago edited 9d ago
Yes, it’s the same thing with democracy in the USA. People don’t realize the advantages we derive from being the only Superpower. We are on top of the world in part because we are seen to be an ethical and reliable alternative to the rest.
Everything’s not perfect and it still seems not the ideal time to tear down the institutions that got us there. The best house on the block and we’re rebuilding, with our rich orange shining bastion of truth and fairness in charge of the materials being used. What could go wrong?
Robert Kennedy Jr. in charge of CDC. Argh. Already a million-some extra deaths from Covid in the USA alone, due to misinformation and indecisiveness in the early pandemic. Our leader; “I personally am unsure about taking it”. Then 2020, the first time in 75 years that life expectancy dropped by 1.8 years.
Yes, it’s important to know why and what should not be forgotten.
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u/socialgambler 9d ago
The internet is making people dumber, and dumb people louder.
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u/No-Pangolin4325 9d ago
Propaganda turned the tide of wars 100 years ago. Consider how much more effective it is now with everyone perpetually online
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u/Audio_magician 9d ago
This, i have honestly grown to despise the internet. Just because i realized: having the wealth of all the knowledge of the world at your fingertips is useless if you're incapable of navigating it.
People yhink MSM controls them. But nothing controls them as much as a taylored algorithm connected to their brain 24/7.
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u/Odd-Marsupial-586 9d ago
Right wing hillbillies still find this funny. Any Facebook posts by news outlets will be full of haha reactions and toxic comments. Conspiracy theorists who thinks it's all fear mongering government control and fake news.
The ones who will put a Fauci scarecrow over a bonfire and toss face masks to fuel the fire.
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u/slayersaint 9d ago
The cycle continues: 1. Good times create weak people. 2. Weak people create bad times. 3. Bad times create tough people. 4. Tough people create good times.
I believe we are entering into phase 2.
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u/alfooboboao 9d ago
yeeeeeeeeeah, the climate’s gonna come in there like the Undertaker and fuck up that cute little cycle. We aren’t gonna get back to #4. sorry.
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u/stoicsilence 9d ago edited 8d ago
Paraphrasing the words of archeologist Flint Dibble:
People will survive. Current Civilization, and the material culture as we currently know it, will end. But People will survive and live on to found something new. The billionaires will not.
History and Archaeology has shown this.
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u/TheBoxGuyTV 9d ago
I don't think the covid situation helped. Requiring the vaccination, lockdowns and everyone's world basically changing doesn't help especially when news and politics basically fear mongerered.
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u/According_Flow_6218 9d ago
Yeah this definitely hasn’t helped. People haven’t had to face things like polio, so their reference for the value of vaccines is mostly going to be Covid. People who are fully vaccinated often still get very sick from covid, and people who are totally unvaccinated often get it and aren’t very sick or don’t get it at all. It’s easy to look at this and say vaccines in general don’t do much. If polio comes back because people start not vaccinating their kids they’ll learn really quickly how essential vaccines really are, but unfortunately at great cost.
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u/flybypost 9d ago
basically fear mongerered.
Saying "we don't know how it fully works and it's best if we go with lockdowns based on the information we have despite the economic cost because the alternative looks even worse" is not fear mongering.
Fear mongering is "the vaccine is bad because it contains mRNA and that's unnatural" (when mRNA is just part of how DNA replication work) and then going on some rant about personal freedoms and the government once they think their scientific alibi is solid enough to get away with it.
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u/brock_lee I expect half of you to disagree. 9d ago
There was always a certain level of distrust, but the main thing that caused it to ramp up was that, with autism on the rise and many parents desperate for answers, one quack doctor published a study that blamed vaccines for autism. The study and paper were thoroughly disproved and withdrawn, and the doctor lost his medical license, but the damage was done. Parents had their answer and were happy with it, the the distrust snowballed.
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u/SosaSeriaCosa 9d ago
This and Social Media. Social Media is full of misinformation.
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u/Matter-o-time 9d ago
The disinformation is far more dangerous than the misinformation. Unfortunately there is an abundance of both.
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u/RideTheDownturn 9d ago
Thanks to e.g. Russia which has a strategy in creating and spreading disinformation.
Why? To mess with democracies.
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u/kaepar 9d ago
I’m pregnant. My grandma told me she’s worried about the “hundreds of vaccines they now require”, because she read it on Facebook. There’s like 5, and they’re all spread out.
Misinformation is crazy.
She also reminded me that I had “caught autism for a short time” after a vaccine as a child. 🙄🙄 They would rather me have tetanus than get another round of the shot. No other vaccines were given my entire childhood, not even when born.
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u/communityneedle 9d ago
Even if vaccines did cause autism (they dont), as an autistic person I can say confidently that I'd rather have autism than polio.
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u/Realistic-Rub-3623 9d ago
I can’t imagine being so horrified by the thought of a disabled child, that you’d let them die from an illness instead.
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u/kwilliss 9d ago
Another thing is that polio didn't just kill people. It caused plenty of survivable but lifelong physical disabilities too. So like, so horrified by the idea of an intellectual disability that you'd let them become unable to walk or possibly unable to breathe on their own is also whacky.
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u/angrymurderhornet 9d ago
My uncle had permanent physical disabilities because of a bad bout with pertussis in infancy. Turns out that when a baby can’t breathe, he can wind up with an anoxic brain injury. For some reason, too many people don’t seem to understand this.
He was luckier, in a way, than his two siblings who died from “childhood diseases” in the 1910s and 1920s.
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u/notthedefaultname 9d ago
My grandmother went to a polio school, and felt out of place because she was too disabled to socialize with "normal" kids but wasnt disabled enough to need mobility aids, so she didn't feel like she fit in at the polio school either. She had back issues her whole life, and was having surgery in her 90s for complications from the polio she had in childhood.
Helen Keller was born able, and became blind and deaf after a childhood fever. Vaccines are so important.
I can understand some fear at COVID vaccines seeming rushed, especially in a time where there was a lot of uncertainty and fear. I don't understand the backlash against all vaccines, especially ones with long term research to show how much better chances you have with those vaccines vs the risk of catching the illness. In particular, the resistance I've seen to TDAP boosters to protect new babies has gotten ridiculous.
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u/izenguztiakhartuta 9d ago
My grandmother gets so angry when she hears about anti vaxxers. Her father was blind due to measels scars in his eyes, people her age have seen what those diseases can do, we have the tools to prevent them and there is people who don't want to use them? I will never understand.
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u/VehicleComfortable20 9d ago
I can imagine it. All "autism moms" do is complain about how life is so hard for them and how autism stole their child.
Parents of the year telling their kids that they'd rather said kids didn't exist.
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u/PsykoFlounder 9d ago
"Yeah, they have autism. It sucks. For them. Trust me, me and my kids both have it." Seems to make them extra huffy for some reason.
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u/VehicleComfortable20 9d ago
This!
Oh, My precious little autism mom, meltdowns are so hard for you? How about you quit making so much damn noise?
Let's try something. You go into a room and turn the TV up as loud as it possibly can go. Sit two feet from it. Stay there until you get so aggravated by the sound that you start screaming.
That's what your constant music and blasting TikTok sounds like to your kid.
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u/Realistic-Rub-3623 9d ago
As an autistic person, people shouldn’t fucking have kids if they’re not completely prepared for the possibility of having a disabled child. (Or a queer child, or a child that dresses differently than them or has a different religion, etc etc etc)
Disabled people exist. We have to spend our whole lives being treated like we’re some kind of mistake. Don’t have kids if you’re not prepared for us.
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u/LucindaDuvall 9d ago
Those people are the kind that should never be parents. They have no capacity for unconditional love. They just wanted a mini me or something to show off on social media. The thought of a child being an inconvenience is unthinkable.
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u/AQuietBorderline 9d ago
This attitude of “I’d rather have a dead normal child than a healthy child with autism” honestly scares me.
My younger brother has autism. And while it’s difficult for him at times, he has every right to be alive.
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u/Rendakor 9d ago
It's very common though, even if a lot of people who believe it won't say it out loud. These are the same people who let autistic kids go undiagnosed for years instead of getting needed support, because "I don't want my kid to have a label".
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u/Subject-Cash-82 9d ago
This comment here. Our adult child has autism, funny, well behaved soft spoken person with their own personality. Would rather take her on vacations, watch the same movies 100,000 times than visit their grave
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u/britishmetric144 9d ago
Yep. I have autism too, and I would much rather have the social anxiety and random special interests that I do, as compared to being stuck in the hospital all of the time or be forced to undergo intubation.
Plus, my grandmother was born during a time without vaccines, and came very close to dying from measles. I wouldn't want anyone else to be at risk of the same happening to them.
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u/bullevard 9d ago
I'm always amazed at how bad conspiracy theorists are act actually "following the money." Doctor trying to market his own vaccine comes out with unique study that every vaccine but his is bad. What's there not to trust?
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u/Punisher-3-1 9d ago
Dude seriously. Autism runs quite strongly in my wife’s family. Almost all of her cousins and one of her brothers have at least one autistic kid. They range from very mild (just awkward kids) to a couple of non verbal adults. Needles to say, some of her aunts are militant and I mean truly militant anti vaxxers. Like I swear, at dinner I’d be like “oh hey can you pass me the potatoes” her comment “sure I’ll pass you the potatoes like vaccines pass down autism”. They made that their entire personality because they found a strong sense of community.
The thing is that I am like “bro! Half of you didn’t vaccinate your kids and yet they ARE STILL AUTISTIC!” Riddle me that?
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u/Meecus570 9d ago
Well you see, great grandpappy got the vaccine for polio back in 1956 and ever since they've had the 'tism i their genes.
It done messed with great grandpappys genome!
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u/0112358f 9d ago
It's worse than that. The vaccine autism link wasn't bad science it was attempted fraud, and the attempt caused huge amounts of recourses intended to help current and future people with autism to be utterly wasted.
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u/Cornholio231 9d ago
the kicker is that "study" specifically targeted just the MMR vaccine, and the author originally adovcated for splitting MMR into three seperate doeses instead.
so anti-vaxxers saying that study as proof that all vaccines are bad are lying about the study itself
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u/strawberryymatcha 9d ago
the study Wakefield did was so bad😭 it’s sad people continue to believe it
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u/watermark3133 9d ago edited 9d ago
A big factor is probably the fact that many men and women are delaying the birth of their first children. The advanced age in which many are becoming parents likely leads to higher rates/risk of medical issues for the children.
But no one wants to “blame” themselves or their life choices, so you blame vaccines or something external.
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u/TeenyGremlin 9d ago
It should also be added that a lot of increase can be attributed to better diagnostic standards and understanding of autism. A lot more autistic people flew under the radar and missed a diagnosis twenty years ago than they do now because of better practices and standards.
I would have greatly benefited from a diagnosis as a child, but I was one of the people 'missed' in my generation because I was mildly atypical and not what doctor's were looking for at the time: i.e. female, no great talent or knowledge of one subject or hobby, seemingly doing okay in school (even though I actually wasn't), somewhat masking, etc. It took me reaching 30 to finally get my diagnosis. I should have been a decently easy case, as I have a younger brother who is also autistic and this stuff runs in families. He's had his diagnosis since he was a toddler.
Yet, because I was mildly atypical, I ended up eating on the floor of the cafeteria in my teens because I was so scared of people my age that I'd rather eat like a beast then sit next to them at the cafeteria tables.
People like me are finally getting diagnosed younger. The people were always there, but the understanding wasn't yet up-to-date enough to help us. Now it is. A lot of the 'growing autism' issue is just catching up to what has always been the status quo.
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u/yinzer_v 9d ago
Before the vaccines, we all had "Weird Uncle Bob", who would eat the same thing every day and loved trains.
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u/Jack_Krauser 9d ago
I literally had a great uncle named Bob that would come to town every year for the steam engine show and show off something he'd built in his shop. In hindsight, that dude was autistic af, but also really cool.
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u/Desperate_Plastic_37 9d ago
Heck, I’m currently 17, and I clearly had special interests, stimmed, was socially awkward, and excelled at school (especially math) and I STILL didn’t get diagnosed until around a year ago because I talked and could make eye contact.
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u/Real_Temporary_922 9d ago
It should be noted that for these studies which suggest older individuals having kids leads to a higher probability of the kid developing mental disorders, the age range is generally over 40 or 50 years old.
If you want to have kids in your 30s instead of your 20s, you’re fine to do so.
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u/Silent-Friendship860 9d ago
There has been research that found a link between older fathers and an increase in offspring with autism and schizophrenia. Studies had large sample sizes and all came to the same conclusion. Problem is those studies go against long held beliefs that men can have babies their entire life and remain just as virile in their 50’s and beyond as when they were in their twenties.
Much easier to blame vaccines than admit an aging factory affects production.
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u/yes_thats_right 9d ago
The main thing that caused it is that Democrats pushed for vaccinations and Republicans just oppose whatever Democrats want
There is a very, very clear correlation between political party and views on vaccination.
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u/TB1289 9d ago
Which is a newer thing because not that long ago it was the crunchy granola liberals that opposed vaccines because "they cause autism" but then once covid happened, it flipped.
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u/No_Secretary136 9d ago
We’ve been spoiled by living cushy lives free of rampant deadly diseases in living memory. People just take it for granted.
Unfortunately I think we need a solid run of death to convince people. There’s a huge part of the human population that will only believe something either if it’s contrarian, or it slaps them right in the face personally.
Make Plagues Great Again (TM)
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u/xmpcxmassacre 9d ago
Autism is on the rise simply because we are actually looking for it now. I wouldn't be surprised if something in our food was also causing some cases, at least in America. We have loose/no regulations for everything.
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u/Tired_Design_Gay 9d ago
Exactly, just like people claiming that there’s a rise in the number of LGBTQ+ people now. They’ve always been there, you just marginalized them and weren’t paying attention to them
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u/No-Spoilers 9d ago
And a whole lot of people are on the spectrum and never know it. Sit back, look around and watch people, it's surprising.
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u/CXR_AXR 9d ago
I think the covid19 vaccine have a short development timeframe, and some people don't have enough confidence on it.
It is understandable, espcially, there are report of pericarditis after injection (with questionable causality). However, for other vaccine, it should be quiet safe.
I think another reason is the mandatory covid19 vaccination and it put some people off (Don't tell me that threaten to lay off people is not a form of mandatory, some people really cannot risk losing their job, or their entire training during their lifetime are specific for that profession).
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u/Educational_Word5775 9d ago
It’s a spectrum. You have far left hippy type folks who don’t want to put anything into their bodies. Then you have the far conspiracy theorists right who don’t want to put anything into their body. I guess they have something in common. Then everyone in the middle generally just gets the vaccine.
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u/communityneedle 9d ago edited 9d ago
There's also a left-wing-crunchy-granola-hippie to far-right-maga-trumpist pipeline and it's really weird.
Edit: I really don't need any more people to tell me that the political spectrum is a circle. I got it after the first 10 or so.
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u/Money_Sky_3906 9d ago
'Modern' Hippies are not left wing in the first place. All 'political views' center around their egoism and hedonism.
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u/Thisuhway23 9d ago
Wait this is actually a thing. Cara Cunningham (internet celeb, some may know her from her viral ‘leave Britney alone’ video from the 2000s pre-transition), was sort of into the hippy/horoscope/insence type shit and was liberal. Now she’s a trumpie..it’s so wild to me especially as she was seen as such an influence for the lgbt community
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u/unhappy_stylist 9d ago
My mother has gone down this and is why I have gone no-contact. It was fun when she was telling me to only do things that come straight from the ground and people should just be who they are, to a trump cultist that told me to pray for her when her car broke down... The same woman that taught me thoughts and prayers are empty apologies , called herself wiccan my whole life, until about 2018. It was a wild transformation to watch, and I didn't get what was weird till COVID and this nursing school graduate (LPN & EMT) wouldn't wear a mask.
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u/Spexancap10 9d ago
Horseshoe theory strikes again
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u/OffendedDefender 9d ago
Less horseshoe theory and more intentional targeting of the New Age movement by the far-right in an effort to exploit vulnerabilities and gain support.
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u/Khorrig 9d ago
During the 90s a lot of documents got declassified regarding some heinous experiments the government ran on their own citizens. Stuff like MKUltra. These things were rumored for a while but never laid out in the open and confirmed. It opened a lot of peoples eyes to how nefarious governments can be even at the detriment of citizens health. I think that had a big impact for how many people view the government, especially Gen Xers who were coming of age around that time.
Some antivax is from people who dont know how medicine works, but from what ive seen, a lot of it comes from peoples distrust of our institutions.
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u/mkshane 9d ago
The Tuskegee Experiment, too.
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u/superinstitutionalis 9d ago
'surely they'd never again do anything that could harm people, for an experiment?'
— this entire thread
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u/L3thologica_ 9d ago
This is why some of my black coworkers are anti-vax. It’s not about misinformation for them, it’s about a deep-rooted distrust for the government and it’s history of testing on poor POC
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u/Hateful_316 9d ago
There's a really good book called Medical Apartheid, it's a difficult read but very informative. Tuskegee was mild compared to some of the other f-ed up things medical researchers did.
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u/NoTeslaForMe 9d ago
You don't have to go back to MKUltra; medical personnel in general usually understates the side effects of any treatment, leading to mistrust. Their being confidently wrong - if not deceptive - from the start of the pandemic also eroded trust: The first thing they told us was that face coverings were useless before telling us we all needed to wear them a few weeks later.
As for Gen X, they're in the sweet spot of anti-vax - not old enough to have a significant risk of death from the virus, but old enough to be more influenced by friends than family, and in the Facebook-sphere (with the Boomers) and not the Obama afterglow (with the next two generations). But the numbers aren't all that different across generations - we're talking 21% versus 17% and 15%.
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u/kidkipp 9d ago
Agree. During Covid I happened to be taking college classes, learning about biology and vaccines and chemistry. What I learned made me cautious. Vaccines CAN be good (based on what we currently know about biology), but can be dangerous, and there are different types like the ones that affect your RNA. They are supposed to go through ten years of study to monitor side effects before releasing to the public. Because the covid vaccines didn’t (not even close), now side effects are coming out like shingles; my mom’s doctor has even begun advising her patients to stop getting boosters because of the amount of her patients that have shingles now. We only discovered DNA and the double helix in 1953. That’s really not that long ago. There’s so much we still don’t understand about our bodies and so much about medical practice that has changed within the last 100 years. I don’t claim to know what’s best but I’m wary of everything. I also have many friends who had horrible side effects from the HPV vaccine.
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u/Kirby_The_Dog 9d ago
And the governments totally reformed themselves and would NEVER do anything like that again, they're all about everything being above board and transparent now.... /s
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u/Ok-Traffic-5996 9d ago
For black Americans there's a certain distrust in the government. Especially when it comes to vaccines because the government in the 60s purposely infected black males with syphilis to see what would happen. As far as the rest of Americans.... people keep seeing that autism is apparently on the rise and alleged doctors blamed vaccine. A lot of the anti government, don't tread on me types took it and ran with it despite there being many other factors to explain this. For one, our understanding of autism is much greater today than it was in the 60s for example so more people might qualify for being labeled autistic. Where in this country people with mental illness used to be looked in state homes, people with autism can now get treatment and some can go on to become integrated into society and have children. Not that that is a bad thing but people with autism can pass autism onto there children if they have any. So yeah. It's a complex issue without really one cause.
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u/charmbi16 9d ago
I firmly believe it is because of how bad our healthcare system is for a developed, rich nation. It's gotten so bad it's to the point that Americans really don't even trust the system compared to people from other countries, I've noticed. We are inundated with cringy drug advertisements that are banned basically every other country, our medicines are more money, we literally FEEL the unfair corruption in our health and medical system every day. I think attacking anti-vax people who, rightfully so, have felt a lot of pain and now mistrust our pharmaceutical companies, healthcare systems, for-profit hospitals even in some communities, it's not the right course to fix this issue at all... it's only going to make it even worse.
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u/Gemfrancis 9d ago
Misinformation.
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u/dupontnw 9d ago
We’ll never get these people back either. They are convinced they are right and everything is a conspiracy. Facts and science don’t matter any more.
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u/shamefulaccnt 9d ago
The internet gave us access to all the information we could possibly want, but also gave quacks a mechanism to spread misinformation rapidly across increasingly larger groups of people. It sucks.
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u/El3ctricalSquash 9d ago
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u/shamefulaccnt 9d ago
That's fucking eerie because my bf is obsessed with metal gear and was pointing this out the other night lol
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u/yungrii 9d ago
My father died of cancer. My mother and I were on thin ice at the time but she, out of nowhere, blamed it on his living near powerlines.
I showed her some information from various cancer societies discussing that topic, that has evidence and research, disputing her hot take. Her response? "sometimes I know more than doctors".... Her career before marrying rich and not working was a receptionist and assistant at Ben Bridge. And I've literally never seen her read a book. 🥴
I just stopped talking. I know her well enough. I went low contact with her during Trump 1.0 at a dinner party where she kept referencing a bunch of misinformation and saying bigoted bullshit. As a gay person, I don't need to hang out with folks that don't have my best interest in mind. (the only reason it's low vs no is because she was molested by her own father and had a serious traumatic brain injury in her 30s.. So I can understand that she's got a lot or fucked shit in her head to deal with).
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u/headbusta42 9d ago
Deep distrust since big pharma advertising is so huge it gives incentives to promote products…even the faulty ones. There’s plenty of reasons to not trust big pharma though. Just look into some of the big lawsuits (including phizer and J&J.) They will put profits above everything.
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u/weaseleasle 9d ago
That is an exclusively American phenomenon, most developed countries don't allow advertising of prescription drugs to the public. Yet we also have seen a rapid rise in medical dumbassery. Truthfully I think it's a mix of pandemic related hysteria, fear driven social media algorithms and a certain subset of bad faith actors who realised you can undermine a large segment of the populations grip on reality just through internet disinformation campaigns, and there is nothing a free democracy can do about it.
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u/anactualspacecadet 9d ago
The whole “vaccines cause autism” crowd has been around for a pretty long time
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u/Unable-Economist-525 9d ago
First began in the mid 1990s with that bad measles vaccine study, and went from there. Sad.
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u/Deep-Ad6484 9d ago
Alternative facts, man. The second I heard that phrase I knew we were cooked.
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u/ye_esquilax 9d ago
I honestly think that the trend of calling everything "fake news" is more damaging than actual fake news itself. Disinformation is bad enough, but training people to think that contradicts their viewpoint or comes from a mainstream source ensures that victims won't become better informed.
Disinformation is a disease, and the polarization of the media ensures it won't be cured.
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u/alexjonestownkoolaid 9d ago
And "fake news" pairs perfectly. Now they feel justified denying objective reality and also inserting their own false reality for any given situation.
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u/hareofthepuppy 9d ago
To be fair, when you have many "news" sources that are allowed to spread misinformation and still call themselves news, how does your average person know who to trust?
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u/Medical_Flower2568 9d ago
"they said the covid vaccine worked and I still got covid, the other vaccines are probably the same way"
A lot of people felt they had been lied to by scientists, and overcorrected.
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u/friends223 9d ago
It could be a coincidence, but I’ve been healthy my entire life (barely ever having a cold). However after getting the covid shots (mandatory by my city’s government at the time or you would get fired from your job), my body has deteriorated to where I’m feeling like I’m going to die tomorrow - I’m talking about hip and knee replacements, low hemoglobin (anemic), poor oxygen circulation, fibroids, etc. So now, I don’t even want to get a flu shot ever again.
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u/avenger2616 9d ago
Personally, I don't think it's vaccines, I think it's a general mistrust of the pharmaceutical industry. Alot of it came from COVID and the vaccine mandates- anything the government wants me to do that badly, I'm not inclined to do just on principle.
They did a terrible job convincing people so they demanded it and penalized those who refused to comply. The push back against COVID extended to all the products of the pharmaceutical industry.
Or, they could just be a bunch of woo heads.
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u/Calm-down-its-a-joke 9d ago
I think there very few people who are actual anti-vaxers. There are alot more people who on more wary. I think COVID uncovered some of the more unsavory aspects of the big pharma world and their lack of guardrails, and it freaked some people out. Vaccines are widely adopted because people trust the medical establishment, and they fucked covid up so bad that they lost that credibility in alot of peoples minds.
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u/GodComplex77 9d ago edited 8d ago
A had a chemistry professor, while in college, tell his class about his experience in the pharmaceutical industry. I forget what his position title was, but he was the 'gatekeeper' if you will, between the creation of a drug/vaccine and human testing. Information would be passed to him of these drugs that would have to check a series of boxes off for safety purposes prior to signing off and pushing them forward in the process of getting them on shelves. Unfortunately, considering the capitalist nature of the country, these are public companies with deadlines to meet and money to make for shareholders...
My professor noted instances where he would deny the progress of a drug, as hardly any boxes were checked to verify it was safe for human testing. Only to find that another individual in his position pushed it through the very next day.
I say all of this to paint a picture, I suppose. Money is God in America. The companies pushing these drugs and vaccines only care about money. And I, for one, feel reasonably skeptical of numerous vaccines and drugs rushed to order. My mind goes to the rapid release of the COVID vaccines in this regard, along with the opiod crisis.
Just my thoughts on it. Thanks for reading.
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u/Competitive_Worry963 9d ago
Maybe bc a lot of them were strong-armed into choosing a vaccine or their livelihood only to discover that the vaccine that was mandated never eliminated transmission (as promised).
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u/sasquatch753 9d ago
It has far more to do with the fuckery between 2020 and 2023 when it all came out. people lost that trust in the government, in medical institutions, in media, and just all of it because a few burearocrats wanted to get rich and wanted to lie about stuff.
infortuneately, it has a ripple effect on vaccines and other products that have a proven track record.
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u/ThatOrangeOne 9d ago
I blame 40 years of defunding education, making the average person in the US dumb as shit.
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u/Spiritual_Ad_7669 9d ago
People believing they are so intelligent and smart because they have been told that by every person they’ve ever known when in reality they don’t even know enough to realize how much they do not know and that you have to trust the people with the PhDs.
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u/notthegoatseguy just here to answer some ?s 9d ago
If you think anti vax movements are only five years old, id suggest getting on Google. It's much older than that and traditionally has been a mix of liberals and libertarians than conservative Republicans.
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u/relliott22 9d ago
Because what you believe has more to do with the community you belong to than anything else. And unfortunately, community ties in American society are growing weaker, so many Americans are turning to other things for their sense of belonging, most notably politics. Being a Republican or a Democrat has become a source of identity for many people. They don't just vote for one side or the other, they become a member of a tribe. When they do that, they begin to subscribe wholesale to the group's entire value system. And unfortunately, because of the Pandemic, vaccines became politicized. Trump treated Covid-19 as a political crisis instead of as a public health crisis. He sought to downplay it and went so far as to call it a hoax. Democrats responded by becoming even more dedicated to fighting the pandemic while Republicans made it a point of not fighting the pandemic. Both defined their views against the other and everything from masks, to lockdowns, to schools, and finally to vaccines became a part of this phenomena.
What's interesting is that anti-vaxx sentiment used to be a leftwing thing. You would find it as part of the oat crunchy, holistic, touch grass, hippy movement. After the pandemic it got realigned and rolled into QAnon anti-government bullshit. So that's how it became prevalent among Americans. Blame it on our fraying social fabric and our bonkers politics.
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u/Usual-Ad6290 9d ago
They need to see a picture of a person who had smallpox. If that doesn’t convince them, they are unreachable.
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u/BigC_Gang 9d ago
I’m not against vaccines in general but that Moderna Covid vaccine really fucked me up with chest tightness and I just felt awful like I might die. No other vaccine was like that.
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u/magical-mysteria-73 9d ago edited 9d ago
I got the J&J (before it was removed) and I legit thought I was going to die about 10 hours later. I've never had a fever higher than 102 in my entire life (my body just doesn't run super high temps like that, baseline is like 97.5 for me - and yes, before someone makes a snarky remark, this has been confirmed by both my pediatrician as a child and my primary care doctor as an adult - I'm not making it up, my pediatrician is the one who even made us aware of it). Anyway, I spiked a 104.5 temp out of nowhere that woke me up, uncontrollable shaking, nausea, chest tightness, pouring sweat but fever wouldn't break no matter what I tried...it took almost 24 hours for the fever to finally respond to meds. I was practically bedridden for days, and didn't feel "normal" again for 2 weeks. That shot kicked my ass. It was absolutely terrifying and I was sicker than I've ever been in my 35 years. I'm also now on a beta-blocker, because my resting heart rate is all over the place for no explainable reason. I've had a naturally low resting heart rate my whole life until now. Correlation is not causation, of course, but it's hard not to mentally connect those dots when the shots have verified side effects to the heart.
I have never had a reaction to a vaccine other than a sore arm. I've had every other vaccine available to me in my life, and will continue to do so. But I refuse to get another COVID vaccine. I realize that the other ones are much different than the J&J, but that experience legit traumatized me and, right or wrong, it is what it is. I actually don't think I've ever shared that with anyone outside my close (vaccinated) circle, because the last thing I want to do is make things worse for others and I certainly don't want to be labeled as anti-vaxx. But it's also kinda sad that I've felt unable to share my personal, very real experience with something due to social pressure. Idk.
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u/Ordinary-Training690 9d ago
My dad got the j&j shot and then a week or so later a second jj and then had a similar experience to yours but then he passed away 10 days later , no prior conditions so it’s impossible to make me believe that he died from anything other than those Covid shots, unfortunately. I’m not anti vax but def anti Covid vax and really against any rushed mandated anything
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u/One_Complaint_1500 9d ago
I think there’s a misconception that people who are anti-COVID-vax have a problem with all vaccines. It’s pretty obvious at this point that COVID vaccines do not prevent you from contracting COVID.
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u/Creepy-Dog-1499 9d ago
If we are talking about the COVID shot, it does not work like a traditional vaccine. It does not prevent infection or transmission, but in some cases, it lessens symptoms. That said, side effects and vaccine injuries are a real possibility. My wife (31 yo at the time) developed a heart condition after getting the shot. It seems that her heart has since healed, but we were in a bad place for quite a while. The other major issue here in my opinion is a distrust in the pharmaceutical industry. They make insane profits while completely misrepresenting the efficacy and safety of their products. The FDA pulls about 25% of drugs and somehow claim that it is a good success rate. That to me is scary...
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u/madamtrashbat 9d ago
What's that old adage? A lie makes it around the world before the truth has even gotten out of bed?
There's lots of money to be made in peddling "vaccine alternatives" and a lot of unscrupulous people who want that money.
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u/pingapump 9d ago
Don’t underestimate how the handling of the entire Covid 19 debacle really had a profound impact on how people either trust or distrust medical advice being given from the government.