Current Events > Anti-vaxxers are now officially lagging behind the Taliban in progress.

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20211108_25/

The World Health Organization and the United Nations Children's Fund have launched a nationwide polio vaccination drive in Afghanistan with the backing of the Taliban.
Polio can cause paralysis of the limbs and death.

The four-day vaccination campaign began on Monday in Afghanistan.
In Kabul, health workers were seen visiting homes of children to give them the vaccine.

The Taliban in the past have claimed vaccinations were part of a Western plot.
But on this occasion, the Taliban leadership expressed support for the resumption of the program. It has pledged to have its fighters accompany workers in some areas to ensure safety.

The Taliban-run health ministry says 68,000 workers are going door-to-door with the aim of carrying out the vaccination of 3.3 million children.

---

Anti-polio vaxxers, yeah.

---

joe40001 posted...

Anti-polio vaxxers, yeah.

I mean, that's most anti-vaxxers though...

---

LostForest posted...

I mean, that's most anti-vaxxers though...

Sadly not anymore. Now we have these"Covid is different" anti-vaxxers.

---

LostForest posted...

I mean, that's most anti-vaxxers though...

Many people these days are using "anti-vaxxer" to mean "anti-covid vaxxer".

Yes, most traditional anti-vaxxers are anti-polio vaxxers.

But if we are including people who don't yet want the COVID vaccine, then that is a very different group/demographic.

It would be nice to have different terms to distinguish between the two, but it seems like that ship has sailed, as those strongly in favor of everybody getting to COVID vaccine have strongly pushed society to conflate the two groups.

---

creativerealms posted...

Sadly not anymore. Now we have these"Covid is different" anti-vaxxers.

Sadly?

---

creativerealms posted...

Sadly not anymore. Now we have these"Covid is different" anti-vaxxers.

You get how it is different, though, right?

I think it's safe and effective, but it is different in meaningful ways. Saying all vaccines are universally equivalent is intellectually dishonest IMO.

For example, you could take a person who says "I won't get any vaccine that hasn't yet got 5 years of safety data". You may argue that person is taking a stupid stance, but if that is their stance, the COVID vaccine would be different.

That combined with the mRNA mechanism of action between it and most vaccines make them different.

IMO we do a lot better acknowledging the difference than pretending it's identical. When we lie and say 2 different things are identical, people can tell, and they instantly become more distrusting of us for lying.

IMO the best bet is the truth, "It's new, it's different in some ways, but it's consistently shown to be safe and effective" and then point to the relevant data.

---

joe40001 posted...

You get how it is different, though, right?

I think it's safe and effective, but it is different in meaningful ways. Saying all vaccines are universally equivalent is intellectually dishonest IMO.

For example, you could take a person who says "I won't get any vaccine that hasn't yet got 5 years of safety data". You may argue that person is taking a stupid stance, but if that is their stance, the COVID vaccine would be different.

That combined with the mechanism of action between it and most vaccines make them different.

IMO we do a lot better acknowledging the difference than pretending it's identical. When we lie and say 2 different things are identical, people can tell, and they instantly become more distrusting of those who are lying.

IMO the best bet is the truth, "It's new, it's different in some ways, but it's consistently shown to be safe and effective" and then point to the relevant data.

Yes I get it. People made the Covid a political issue when they shouldn't have. That is the difference. That alone. We should have all came together to end this pandemic as quickly as possible but instead people would saw taking the virus seriously as an attack on their political idology.

So yes it is different. But it shouldn't be.

---

Do we also need different words for people who are racist against different groups of people for different reasons, rather than just label them "racist"?

---

joe40001 posted...

You get how it is different, though, right?

Both are distinctly terrible stances by all remotely reasonable metrics, so there's not much point is differentiating them. Nobody that takes either stance should be respected

---

hockeybub89 posted...

Do we also need different words for people who are racist against different groups of people for different reasons, rather than just label them "racist"?

Yes, it's useful to make distinctions between things that have meaningful distinctions.

Conflation of everything into the same macro terms has hindered society.

If we are talking about racism, we should have a different term for "racist" when we are talking about somebody assaulting somebody just because of their race, vs Community having an episode where Chang wears black makeup to play a dark elf.

Or at the very least we should be able to distinguish between the two.

Maybe it's falling out of fashion, but I believe nuance matters a lot. Viewing the world too reductively IMO makes society much dumber/worse.

---

DarkChozoGhost posted...

Both are distinctly terrible stances by all remotely reasonable metrics, so there's not much point is differentiating them. Nobody that takes either stance should be respected

Personally I disagree with both groups, but am less understanding of one than the other.

I think differentiating them is helpful/appropriate, but I can understand the logic of those who would be against it.

---

Bump

---

Republicans: well if the taliban is doing it then it must be bad!!!

---

Were_Wyrm posted...

Republicans: well if the taliban is doing it then it must be bad!!!

I meeean... Lol.

---

Were_Wyrm posted...

Republicans: well if the taliban is doing it then it must be bad!!!

Idk why but this made me lol pretty hard

---

joe40001 posted...

But if we are including people who don't yet want the COVID vaccine, then that is a very different group/demographic.

No. If more than a billion points of data isn't enough for them, then the data they claim they are waiting for to convince them will never come. They are closeted anti-vaxxers, but they're still anti-vaxxers.

---

I mean, let's be honest, you always hated Republicans more than the Taliban.

FortuneCookie posted...

I mean, let's be honest, you always hated Republicans more than the Taliban.

Wait, who, me?

---

EmbraceOfDeath posted...

No. If more than a billion points of data isn't enough for them, then the data they claim they are waiting for to convince them will never come. They are closeted anti-vaxxers, but they're still anti-vaxxers.

I don't think they accept the data points and reject the conclusion. I believe they reject the data points because they don't trust the institutions that are providing them.

And I don't entirely blame them. I won't take most mainstream news at face value. I just check the source instead. I think the mistake most of them make though, is the same mistake people made about Trump.

Trump isn't smart enough to be wrong about everything. You have to know what the right answer is to be wrong about everything, as other people have described it, his stances on issues are so uninformed that they effectively contained no data as to what is the appropriate stance.

So just like putting a minus sign in front of every Trump opinion was a mistake, so too is it true that it is a mistake for these vaccines skeptics to put a minus sign in front of every claim made by mainstream corporate media.

---

joe40001 posted...

I don't think they accept the data points and reject the conclusion. I believe they reject the data points because they don't trust the institutions that are providing them.

And they're very stupid for this.

joe40001 posted...

And I don't entirely blame them.

You should, it is a serious character fault and they do not deserve to have their viewpoints respected at all.



---

DarkChozoGhost posted...

And they're very stupid for this.

You should, it is a serious character fault and they do not deserve to have their viewpoints respected at all.

I guess we'd have to get into more specifics about what it means to "respect" an opinion, and which institutions it makes sense to have doubts about.

---

Face it, America is as shitty as the image of middle-eastern insurgents the Bush government painted during the Iraq War.

"We will never give into terrorists", the War on Terror - you guys lost.

---

joe40001 posted...

I don't think they accept the data points and reject the conclusion. I believe they reject the data points because they don't trust the institutions that are providing them.

And I don't entirely blame them. I won't take most mainstream news at face value. I just check the source instead. I think the mistake most of them make though, is the same mistake people made about Trump.

Trump isn't smart enough to be wrong about everything. You have to know what the right answer is to be wrong about everything, as other people have described it, his stances on issues are so uninformed that they effectively contained no data as to what is the appropriate stance.

So just like putting a minus sign in front of every Trump opinion was a mistake, so too is it true that it is a mistake for these vaccines skeptics to put a minus sign in front of every claim made by mainstream corporate media.

A) When you say most mainstream news, are you saying immediately disbelieve more than 50% of say NYT headlines?
B) While skepticism can be healthy, doesn't the magnitude of the issue and your reaction play into the equation?

Ruvan22 posted...

A) When you say most mainstream news, are you saying immediately disbelieve more than 50% of say NYT headlines?

A) It's a nuanced point that some people don't have the patience/temperament for, but I believe you do:
When we talk about believing/disbelieving and true/false, many people have different working definitions.

I tend to go by programming/elemental logic standards and say something is false if it's not true. This means that and statements that contain one part falseness are "false" (or at the very least "not true" for the purposes of human communication).

Example:
"Trump is an 80 year old narcissist without empathy" is false because he's not 80. Many might say "that's not the point", and sure you can make that argument, but it's still false.

More subtle example:
"Trump is an anti-american narcissist without empathy" Again, I'd say that evaluates to false. His policies and actions certainly have hurt America, but he genuinely seems to identify and even take pride in his sense of being an American. It's hard to be xenophobic without any national pride, and thus he is not "anti-american".

The point I'm making here is about what we mean when we talk about truth. In courtrooms (or at least courtrooms in movies) they say "do you swear to tell the truth, the whole-truth, and nothing but the truth". This level of truth is something yes I don't expect out of mainstream media.

When Pfizer does a press release about their latest drug, do you take that at face value as "the truth, the whole-truth, and nothing but the truth"? I don't. I'm not saying it's for sure false, or that it necessarily contains anything misleading, but I have enough sense to know that their incentives aren't altruism but profit, and so they will be as honest as they need to be but no more honest than that.

So can you see how it's not a big leap from that sensible conclusion to also being skeptical of things said on "Good Morning America, brought to you by Pfizer"?

It's obviously dumb to assume they are saying things that are the opposite of the truth, but it's sensible to assume that they aren't giving you "the truth, the whole-truth, and nothing but the truth", because that's not where their incentives lie.

So when we go to the NYT, do I "disbelieve more than 50% of say NYT headlines"? It goes to a question of incentives. I just went to NYT now, and these are the headlines:

White House Says Its Plans Will Slow Inflation. The Question Is: When?
Not really a claim, reporting a claim by others. So it's fine.

The Bolsonaro-Trump Connection Threatening Brazils Elections
The incentives of the NYT are to dunk on Trump, so I would not be shocked if this is spun in an anti-Trump way that might not be merited by the facts. To be put another way, I would expect somebody with complete and utter indifference to Trump to frame this story differently, so if I want the full truth I'd have to check the sources.

Migrants in Peril, and Raw Emotions, in European Border Standoff
Because the NYT doesn't have a huge incentive about Poland (that I know of), I'd expect this to be close to just regular true journalism.

Germanys Fourth Covid Wave: A Pandemic of the Unvaccinated
I would not trust this to be straight truth. When it comes to the vaccine, many organizations believe that "in the interest of the greater good we cannot report on anything that would be seen as negative, even if in context any reasonable person would understand it's no big deal." There are places like Israel with quite high vaccination rates that have had issues, there are other places with low rates and other approaches that haven't. It is simply a more nuanced discussion than NYT generally seems either willing or able to make. I would trust they aren't fabricating anything, they will provide reasonably accurate details of an event, but they will do so in a way aligned with their incentives. And their incentives are:

1. Don't alienate left leaning customer base or any affiliated institutions with a too far "off-narrative" story.
2. Don't add fuel to any anti-vaxx sentiment by reporting negative things about the vaccine, or reporting positive or empathetic things about the unvaccinated.
3. Don't destroy your credibility.

Having credibility is important to them, so yeah if they regularly fabricated stuff that wouldn't work. But if they tell a story that's "close enough" or even "misleading but not technically lying", their credibility really won't take a hit. And if their incentives push them enough in that direction, I would expect that certainly to be possible.

And like, I don't hate NYT, aside from Reuters, NPR, CSPAN, and a couple others it's relatively good. They seem to care about their reputation and thus by extension kinda care about the actual truth. Like they are willing to run these counter-narrative stories:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/us/politics/igor-danchenko-arrested-steele-dossier.html
(Acknowledging Russiagate was kinda made up BS)

Igor Danchenko, a Russia analyst who worked with Christopher Steele, the author of a dossier of rumors and unproven assertions about Donald J. Trump, was indicted as part of the Durham investigation.

WASHINGTON An analyst who was a key contributor to Democratic-funded opposition research into possible links between Donald J. Trump and Russia was arrested on Thursday and charged with lying to the F.B.I. about his sources.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/27/briefing/lab-leak-theory-covid-origins.html
(Defending the argument/evidence for lab leak, while it was still unpopular to do so)

Why all the dismissals?
It appears to be a classic example of groupthink, exacerbated by partisan polarization.
Global health officials seemed unwilling to confront Chinese officials, who insist the virus jumped from an animal to a person.
In the U.S., one of the theorys earliest advocates was Tom Cotton, the Republican senator from Arkansas who often criticizes China and who has a history of promoting falsehoods (like election fraud that didnt happen). In this case, though, Cotton was making an argument with plausible supporting evidence.
The medias coverage of his argument was flawed, Substacks Matthew Yglesias has written. Some coverage exaggerated Cottons comments to suggest he was claiming that China had deliberately released the virus as a biological weapon. (Cotton called that very unlikely.) And some scientists and others also seem to have decided that if Cotton believed something and Fox News and Donald Trump echoed it the idea had to be wrong.
The result, as Yglesias called it, was a bubble of fake consensus. Scientists who thought a lab leak was plausible, like Chan, received little attention. Scientists who thought the theory was wacky received widespread attention. Its a good reminder: The world is a complicated place, where almost nobody is always right or always wrong.

So I've rambled a bit, but that's a good place to end. Like NYT says, the world is a complicated place where almost nobody is always right or always wrong. I'm skeptical of people and places that don't acknowledge that nuance, and I like to filter my understanding news reporting through an awareness of the incentives driving those giving it to me. And thus, I don't take what they say "at face value".

---

Ruvan22 posted...

B) While skepticism can be healthy, doesn't the magnitude of the issue and your reaction play into the equation?

B) You'll have to clarify this question further, I don't know that I understand what you are asking.

---

What the sweet Christ is this
---

I remembered when the whole taliban shit was going on i was pointing out why we dont just let covid take care of them since they dont seem to care for wearing masks and other covid precautions.

a lot of the responses were that they were generally young men so it wont affect them as much....so if thats the case why are people freakin out now that some people dont want the vaccine even if they arent in the risk groups