LogFAQs > #958928913

I read all of that and its very interesting - actually I also have something to get off my chest:

No more of this "I'm not anti-vax I just think we shouldn't enforce a mandate" s***. This is a line in the sand with no room for enlightened centrism.

I'm going to be frank, I put off getting the vaccine for a number of reasons. I was sick when AstraZeneca came to Australia and I wanted to give myself some time to feel better before I got the shot and potentially got a fever or whatever. Something happened in my life that tanked my mental health and made 2021 the worst year of my adult life. I'm squeamish about needles. My reasoning got flimsier and flimsier, and I just sort of coasted along. That was wrong of me to do.

What finally motivated me to get the shot is that my town finally got its first confirmed case of COVID. Which is ridiculous on my part. I could have gotten the virus from a close contact site and suffered the full brunt of the virus, and I only committed to the vaccine in the wake of that close call - fully accept that it was the wrong thing for me to do. Now is absolutely the time to be responsible.

The problem is that not everyone is going to heed that same line of logic. COVID isn't deadly, but when it is for certain people, other people won't die by getting it and shouldn't be forced to get the vaccine, but when they might pass it onto other people, masks and vaccines are infringing on their individual civil rights and you'll have to pry their decision not to get vaccinated from their cold, dead hands.

You could be in the most virus-ridden city in America and there'll be people protesting for their right to dodge vaccination and to avoid wearing masks. And then these f***ing rallies become super spreader events, and a bunch of doorknob-licking morons and any innocent victims they came into contact with catch the virus, die or obtain permanent health issues.

If you're an essential worker like a doctor or nurse - if you work in a field in which you work with vulnerable people such as children, the elderly or immunocompromised people - you don't have a f***ing choice in the matter. Your sense of duty and ethics should win out in favour of the vaccine, and if it isn't, f***ing retire before you hurt someone.

If you're a retail worker or a frontline worker of any stripe, you should get the vaccine for the sake of the public as well as your own health, because when everything opens up in December in time for Christmas shopping, you're basically a sacrificial lamb for your company to make as much profit as they can at the expense of everyone's health, including yours.

And if you're a private citizen, employed or not, whether your job is affected by lockdown or not - you almost certainly have older folks like parents and grandparents. You almost certainly have family members with children. You might even know a few immunocompromised people in your life, I know a woman who has to suppress her immune system due to a condition she has. There is no reason not to take every precaution to protect yourself and others.

But you want to sit on a message board and post biased research about how people with strong immune systems don't need the vaccine, and a strong immune system makes the vaccine redundant.

A couple of thoughts:

• Not everyone has your chad immune system, and you can still spread the virus to people who will be more affected by the virus
• COVID weakens your immune system
• You can get COVID multiple times
• Ergo, the less careful you are about COVID, the more likely you are to put a lethal amount of strain on your body that the virus will get the better of. And you're still objectively more likely to harm others by not using masks or vaccinating.

Here's the thing about denialism as a concept. It starts off with the seed of the idea. "All these COVID deaths are actually caused by pre-existing conditions, not COVID itself, therefore the death figures are inflated". Then that ramps up into calling the concept itself into question: "COVID is dangerous for some, but not everyone, ergo not everyone has to be responsible".

Then you have scaremongering - "the vaccine hasn't been properly tested, it could cause any number of critical side effects". If you're especially bought into it - "enforcing mask mandates makes it easier to kidnap children". This is where people say that the vaccine is what actually makes you sick. Then you have outright rejection - "I believe it infringes upon my civil liberties to become vaccinated, [all of the other denialism bulls***] are valid reasons as to not put this into my body, any body who enforces this policy is committing crimes against humanity".

And to support that outright rejection - legitimization and assimilation. "There's this study that says that vaccines lower the immune system and a strong unvaccinated immune system will always prevail over a compromised vaccinated immune system". Nevermind the millions of people around the globe who died in agony, who went from the peak physical condition of their life to being brain-dead with a machine breathing for them because their lungs collapsed. Nevermind the research we've gotten about the effect COVID has on the human body from these people who've died. Our focus is now on this flawed experiment that says that vaccines hurt people.

Look at any conspiracy movement looking to discredit something they don't agree with. They plant the seed, they feed the idea with weighted, biased inquiry based in bad faith, then they build up the thing as a boogeyman - a bad thing their campaign is trying to combat for the good of everyone. Then based on that characterisation, they outright reject it - at which point it becomes denialism. And to support their viewpoint, they take whatever they can get to legitimize the idea to as many people as they can - including flawed science that is later scrutinized, but which get people off the fence because "it's science", and they strike while the iron is hot.

This isn't a rational scientific debate we're having. COVID will kill you and your loved ones at worst, and at best it does untold amounts of damage to your lungs, your immune system as a whole and maybe even your nervous system. If you want to play softball with COVID-19, don't complain when people aren't as civil as you'd like. You have a choice to downplay this global pandemic that has killed millions and affected the lifespans of countless others - but everyone else has the choice to call you out for that, because whatever your angle is - the vaccine is bad, or the virus isn't that bad, or the virus doesn't matter because we're all gonna get it - spits in the face of the people who've died, whose death could have been prevented and whose condition could have been managed if their immune system had some sort of way for preparing itself for their brush with the pandemic.

This isn't a civil debate. This is you getting the vaccine or shutting the f*** up about it if you're that upset about it, because whatever alternative you want to push will harm more people than it will ever save.

The real question is, though - how moddable is that statement? Because it sure doesn't seem to be moddable to downplay the effectiveness of the vaccine.


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It's-a-me! Green Mario!