• The fact that freedom in the US is conflated with not getting the vaccine is incomprehensible. Something like vaccination should be mandatory with very limited exceptions for truly legitimate cases.

    • BonesOfTheMoon@lemmy.worldOPM
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      9 months ago

      I’m old and I remember you just got your little shot card filled up before you went to school and that was that.

      I love vaccines. I get any one I can.

      • BlueMagma@sh.itjust.works
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        9 months ago

        As much as I like to make fun of the US, in this particular case I have to point out that a lot of other countries have antivaxxers.

        Here in France we have an epidemic of them, and the numbers shows they really made covid worse. My own dad is one of them, and he told me dead serious he’d rather get sick than get any vaccine and that’s his choice and nobody should force him. He, and I guess most other antivax too, either does not understand the concept of herd immmunity or doesn’t care about other people.

        • horseloaf@sh.itjust.works
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          9 months ago

          Also in France… I have new neighbours since 2022 because the old people next door refused to get vaxxed. They both died from covid.

      • dnick@sh.itjust.works
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        9 months ago

        As an American it is horrifying to not be able to argue with this directly, because for every outward appearance it might as well be true.

        But the argument I would make is that Americans are not the dumbest people in the world, Americans are simply allowed to survive and visibly prosper in spite of, and sometimes because of, their obvious stupidity. And combining this with the entitlement inherent in ‘just happening to be born here’ and the relative complete lack of suffering most of them experience, makes it easy for them to publicly hold opinions that people in most countries would either have to keep to themselves for their own personal safety, or just because few others are willing to join arms with them.

        Basically it’s a constantly building bubble that could happen anywhere, and to smaller degrees probably happens all over the world in small communities, but here it’s a bubble that for some reason has been resistant to popping, to the point where any attempts to pop it are easily avoided due to it’s mass and ridiculously protective userbase.

        Look at the UK and Brexit, or Russia and the mass of people outwardly supporting Putin, or the Middle East and apparent support of honor killings. Even if the majority of the people living in these areas don’t agree with this outward support, fear or resignation or something stops them from being the loud voice in the space. In the US it might be closer to resignation or hopelessness, but across the world we’re all really the same when you sit down and talk normally…there are stupid people everywhere you look, here we just don’t have a good way to embarrass them into shutting up.

      • Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        To be fair, America has a health system that gains from keeping people ill and medicated, and after Tuskegee there is little trust in the government either.

      • execia@lemmy.today
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        9 months ago

        Fuck off. You think tik tok and social media is reality? The reality is that there have always been willfully ignorant people and there always will be. In every population. Your generalizations really reflect yourself huh?

    • Katana314@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      There’s a saying I want to make famous: “One man’s freedom ends where another’s begins.” Your freedom not to take a vaccine only lasts as long as it does not affect your neighbor’s rights to live and breathe.

      • Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works
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        9 months ago

        They’ve become very anti freedom in fact. Unless it has something to do with a major lobby like guns, or letting corporations pollute air and water, they pretty much are pro restrictions on most things.

        • AbsentBird@lemm.ee
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          9 months ago

          They also want to ban them from public libraries now. If successful, do you think they will stop there? I think it’s likely that they will keep pushing for more restrictions.

      • chetradley@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        “I wanna make a medical choice about my own body…”

        The Right: “Ummm…hold on now…”

        “And skip my vaccinations!”

        The Right: “Oh! You scared me for a second! Carry on then.”

    • DillyDaily@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Heck, I had to fight to get the vaccine in my country.

      I was working at a food bank during covid. I was coming face to face with 200 different people every day. Many of whom were covid positive but because they were homeless they had no where else to go.

      I have a genetic condition that effects my sympathetic nervous system. I have sinus bradycardia, and chronic pulmonary congestion due to having over 10 bouts of aspiration pneumonia. On top of this I have an autoimmune condition. I was taking immunosuppression therapy in March 2020, I stopped taking because I couldn’t risk my immune system being suppressed in my line of work. I was so sick because of my untreated autoimmune condition, but I just had to deal with it.

      In October we started rolling out the vaccine to our most vulnerable populous. I was eligible because of my autoimmune condition and I was first in line at my local vaccination centre.

      But my genetic condition was on the list of contraindications. They were just going to send me away until I broke down crying explaining my job and my risk and my fear of catching covid. So I had to get two doctors to sign off on me getting the vaccine, and I had to make a special vaccine booking because they needed an NP to do a pre-screening and then I had to wait around for 3 hours afterwards and then get a post-vaccination check up and the NP had to sign off.

      My booster shots were easier, because I just took my proof of vaccination certificate to the pharmacy and I didn’t even mention my underlying conditions. (I didn’t have that luxury the first time. I had to hand over my medical records to prove I was eligible for the first round of vaccinations. But after my first jab, the fact I had gotten my first dose was proof enough that I was previously approved to be part of the first round, so I didn’t need to present my records to get my boosters)

      Trying to get an appointment with two separate doctors during a global pandemic for some red tape paperwork was like pulling teeth.

      It should not have been that hard for someone to get a vaccine when they want one. I understood the risks. I’d rather die of a vaccine interaction that helps provide information that makea the vaccine safer for others, than just be another statistic of covid 19.

    • rab@lemmy.ca
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      9 months ago

      I’m honestly surprised the US isn’t like this just given how powerful big pharma is there

      • Dullahaut@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        In this study, vaccinated Omicron index case-patients seemed to have the same transmission capacity as nonvaccinated persons. We did not find this increased transmission capacity for the Delta variant, where significant differences in SAR were observed in global, household, and occupational settings (Table 1) within groups.

        How one variant interacts with vaccination does not describe how every variant does; your own study is, at best, documenting an exeception to the rule that vaccines work.

          • Dullahaut@lemmy.world
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            9 months ago

            https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10505422/#ref19

            They have shown high efficacy against these endpoints in experimental and observational studies (1–13). Evidence suggests that these vaccines also prevent infection (5, 14–18) and potentially reduce transmission (19–23), albeit with smaller effects against the highly transmissible Omicron variant compared with wildtype severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and earlier variants (24–26).

            The exception is Omicron, and evidently isn’t a complete exception anyway.

            In addition, as this was a conversation originally about vaccine mandates, one of the first mandates in the US was put into effect ~2 months before Omicron was reported in Nov. 2021. So even if no vaccine or booster did anything to stop transmission of Omicron, the mandates were fully justified given the vaccines definitely did reduce transmission and severity of variants prior to that.

      • areyouevenreal@lemm.ee
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        9 months ago

        Yeah it makes more sense for vaccines that are, well, better at being vaccines. Something like MMR that actually is effective enough to create hurd immunity. Small pox vaccine was so good it eradicated the disease completely. Covid vaccines are more like flu vaccines - sometimes they work sometimes they don’t. It’s still better than nothing for >95% of people. There are those who respond badly to the covid vaccine too, so it’s technically a gamble either way. While the science says it’s better odds to have the vaccine than not, I can’t force people to take that risk with me.

    • Veraxus@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Americans are generally not taught what freedom means… or the careful dance between “freedom to” and “freedom from”. The “golden rule of liberty” - that “your rights end where mine begin, and vice versa” - is utterly alien to most of us. Anything that could limit someone’s “freedom to” is demonized, even when that limit is because the “to” in question brazenly violates everyone else’s “from”.

      E.G.
      Rational Person: “I have a right to not be harmed by your actions.”
      Average Murican: “fAsCiSt!”