It's important to distinguish antivaxers (who oppose all vaccines) and covid vaccine skeptics, who have no problems with the usual vaccines but specifically oppose or mistrust the covid vaccines.
There is overlap: an antivaxer who opposes all vaccines will also oppose covid vaccines, of course. B...
"[left people hold] the belief that reason alone can produce truth. This can lead them to ignore observable results that contradict theory" - and that's just about the point where you lost all credibility as someone who can accurately represent views that oppose what you believe, and thereby also lost all credibility as someone who holds an accurate view of reality.
A correction: A right-wing person operates under the theory that COVID is harmless, and there exist no safe or effective protections against it, because that is the official narrative. In addition, they are very sensitive to the authority/subversion moral foundation, so they put a big emphasis on obeying their leader. So they do not take the vaccine and take the virus instead. When they get severely sick or die anyway, they still run on the same theory and rationalize it (same process as above) into something more palatable like "it would have been worse with the vax" or something similar.
@NotThatGuy The bit just above it where Hayek was cited as the conclusive explanation for why present-day China is a hellscape for the majority of its population already did that. I'm sure that when challenged on the point, bob would be happy to NoTrueScotsman them as fascists or WhatAbout the prison population substantially below the US level but it doesn't mean he deserves any credibility for understanding anything he's talking about. This is all pseudophrenological nonsense.
There are plenty of people on the left, centre-left or centre-right who loathe Communism and don't claim it was just "fake Communism" when it failed. In Europe, true Communist apologists used to be rather uncommon - with all the populism being thrown around these they may be more of them nowadays. Also, what do you mean by after everyone became aware that what was sold as "vaccines" didn't actually work ???
This answer contained some dangerous misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic by stating things as facts without providing sources. I corrected those parts by adding links to information.
@Philipp Should we also tone down the misrepresentation of and insults towards the other side (e.g. "lead them to ignore observable results", "they will experience intense cognitive dissonance", "a liberal would need theory explaining why it doesn't work to actually realize it doesn't work", "because that is the official narrative", "they still run on the same theory and rationalize it")?
"it doesn't seem to make ... immune, so it's not a vaccine" - this is a misconception about vaccines. Some vaccines may provide complete immunity, but others (like the Covid vaccine) reduce the chance of an infection taking hold, reduce the severity of symptoms and/or reduce how easily it spreads to others (and they're most effective when most people get vaccinated and take other precautions, because otherwise the virus spreads among the unvaccinated, and mutates along the way in ways that might get around the vaccine). That doesn't make it "not a vaccine".
@Philipp It's over in practice as countries like Denmark have now stopped their vaccination program and most countries have entirely scrapped COVID restrictions such as mask mandates. So what is supposed to be the "danger"?
@JonathanReez Just because some politicians pretend there is no danger anymore does not mean that there isn't. The situation is rather good right now because of the widespread vaccination, but new variants appear constantly and might again escape immunization and require another vaccination campaign with new vaccines.
@Philipp as a mod you need to stay neutral and not inject personal political bias into the moderation. Removing insults or rants is of course the job of a moderator but making politically-biased assertions about "danger" is not okay.
@Philipp as for because of the widespread vaccination, keep in mind that many developing countries have had very low vaccination rates and are still doing just fine. The pandemic was always going to end via herd immunity, the only question was whether said immunity will be obtained via vaccination or infections. Please avoid injecting political bias as a moderator.
@F1Krazy that's only obvious to someone experienced with how the stackexchange platform works. I suspect the vast majority of visitors to this site don't know. I didn't know, and I've been using SE for awhile. And even if they did, if they didn't read this comment thread, which may soon be moved to the invisible chat area, they'd have no idea the post was edited substantially by the mods. That little 'edited by so and so' tag often just means formatting touch ups, not a significant modification of the content. This is not a very transparent system.
@JonathanReez: Even with the low death rates after the summer surge, COVID continues to kill at a rate that, over a year, would kill roughly twice as many people as the worst flu seasons from last decade. Implying that thoughts like "it would have been worse without the vax" are rationalizations, rather than consistent with objective reality, discourages vaccination implicitly. The vaccinated are roughly half as likely to get sick, and roughly 1/6-1/5 as likely to die; discouraging vaccination by implying it's not useful is spreading misinformation that (if believed) leads to more death.
@ShadowRanger almost no one is getting vaccinated at this point. Only 10% of kids between the ages of 0.5 got the vaccine in the 4 months since it was approved. The bivalent booster is likewise not particularly popular. As for death rates - lookup “with” vs. “for” Covid.
@NotThatGuy can you give another example of a vaccine that didn't claim to provide immunity (before the Covid vaccine)? Because I remember hearing that the CDC website changed its explanation of what vaccines do from "providing immunity" to "providing protection" when the Covid vaccine came out
@ShadowRanger what is important is not how many people died while testing positive for Covid, but rather how many people died per year overall. Because many people died while positive with Covid that would otherwise have died anyways, and it is not exactly fair to count those as "Covid deaths"
@JonathanReez: Also, your own link on the Denmark program ending points out that: 1) They ended it because the country was already highly vaccinated (at present, 82% fully vaccinated and 63% boosted vs. U.S. 68% & 34%), and 2) They intended to revive it for the Fall. I'll also note that the program ending means they're just not pushing people anymore; the vaccine remains available to any who want it. That's hardly saying they're calling the pandemic over, just that there wasn't much more to be done right now.
@ShadowRanger for the fall season Denmark is only recommending boosters for those over the age of 50 and particularly vulnerable individuals: sst.dk/en/English/Corona-eng/Vaccination-against-covid-19/…. It’s not any different from the recommendations that existed for the flu in 2019. Covid started off 10x deadlier than the flu but thanks to Omicron being milder and ~99% immunity rates it’s now about as deadly.
@Esther: The flu vaccine never provided complete immunity. Many of the vaccines in the normal childhood schedule aren't 100%, but they're good enough to produce herd immunity. But not all of them are that good; pneumococcal pneumonia, Hep A, Hep B, and rotavirus all have many cases each year and (aside from Hep A, which doesn't kill direclty) non-trivial deaths. The pertussis (aka whooping cough) vaccine doesn't last nearly as long as we'd like (protection is fading a lot as soon as five years after each dose).
@ShadowRanger true, but also "incomplete immunity" is not the same as "we never claimed it provides any kind of immunity, just that symptoms will be reduced on average." Meaning for other vaccines, if it "worked," you wouldn't get sick at all, vs for Covid vaccines, "it worked" might not even be noticeable (vaccinated people get sick anyways, there is no way to know if the symptoms would have been worse for you specifically if you didn't have the vaccine).
@Esther: Sure, sure. It's just an amazing coincidence how the excess deaths continue to correlate so well with the COVID death rate, despite the end of basically all COVID mitigations (so you can't blame deaths of despair for the excess deaths). And how mysteriously, those people who would have died anyway are disproportionately the unvaccinated with COVID, rather than the vaccinated with COVID.
@ShadowRanger I'm not trying to disagree with the effectiveness, and a reduction in symptoms/deaths on average is, IMO, a valid reason to take the vaccine. But it is harder to see the benefit (without the official statistics, which some people will always doubt) when many people get sick anyways, which is what this answer states. People were taught "vaccine = you won't get sick" and now people with vaccine are getting sick -> you can see why they think the vaccine doesn't work.
@Esther: They did actually claim ~95% immunity for the original mRNA COVID vaccines, and they did in fact provide roughly that level of protection. Pretty similar to other vaccines we've used to stamp out disease. The things they didn't anticipate were how quickly COVID would evolve, and how rapidly immunity would wane. But a 95% efficacy vaccine is in fact a perfectly useful vaccine (about half of our existing vaccines are only 90% effective, and a smaller minority are as little as 75% effective; 95% meets the gold standard). Even now, original mRNA vaccines are around 50-70% effective.
@ShadowRanger the initial 95% figure was correct but it rapidly went down with Alpha and was lower than 30% for Delta. However many vaccine mandates were introduced after Delta has arrived and refused to recognize natural immunity certificates, which boosted the anti-vax movement
@JonathanReez: Your numbers for Delta are very off. Efficacy vs. infection in the real world remained around 80% (meaning per capita case rates among the unvaccinated were 5x that of the vaccinated) for most of Delta (dropping to ~75% in Delta's last days in November, 4x unvax to vax case ratio). It wasn't until Omicron moved in that you saw the numbers dip to the 33-67% range (ratio of 1.5x to 3x unvax to vax case load), and for all but two weeks (at a low point in the Spring), it was a 2x ratio (50% efficacy or better). The numbers are less trustworthy by the time Omicron rolled...
...around unfortunately, because by that point, enough people were not testing anymore or using home rapid tests that they didn't report positives on to local health authorities, so all the case rates at that point are likely a tiny (10%-20%) fraction of the real case numbers. And that could go either way; the unvaccinated are more likely to have severe cases (that get reported), but (since they're likely to think COVID is not worth worrying about) they're also less likely to test or report a positive in the first place when the case isn't severe.
Point is, at the time the mandates were rolling out, the vaccine was still about 80% effective (roughly on par with the rotavirus and Hep A vaccines). Admittedly, by that point we knew herd immunity would never happen (80% efficacy is good for diseases with an R₀ below 5 if everyone gets vaccinated, but Delta's R₀ was around 6-7, too high to achieve herd immunity with an undervaxxed populace taking fewer precautions with just 80% efficacy), but universal vaccination would likely have been able to drop Delta to a typical flu season (mid-five figures) vs. the 150Kish deaths it actually caused.
@ShadowRanger even if the Delta numbers you post are correct… 1) Mandates weren’t dropped as soon as Omicron numbers came out in December 2) Antibody certificates weren’t accepted as alternative to getting vaccinated, despite us knowing that natural immunity is better than vaccination alone. Both of these factors contributed to massive protests and discontent. We would’ve had a much healthier society if vaccines were never mandated for any purpose whatsoever.
@JonathanReez: We still don't know that natural immunity is better than vaccination. Natural immunity is pretty similar to mRNA vaccination on average in most studies I've seen, but it's more variable (larger contingent of folks who don't produce a strong immune reaction, and therefore can be reinfected in short order). It's also much harder to verify (antibody tests to verify practical immunity equivalent to vaccination are far more expensive than vaccinating). And again, even with Omicron, the vaccine still reduced case loads by 2x-3x and deaths 5x-12x, taking a lot of load off hospitals.
@ShadowRanger nothing stopped governments from allowing people to pay out of pocket for an antibody test proving that they have a sufficiently strong immunity response. They cost less than $30 in most labs in the West. But no such option was provided, making the case stronger for vaccine mandates being done out of spite rather than for the sake of public safety. One could also mention how young, healthy adults were the most common target of such mandates rather than Social Security recipients where the vaccine had a much bigger impact.
@NotThatGuy - It sounds as if they confuse liberalism with physicalism, and physicalism with rationalism. If they had said that most people on the political left are empiricists, they would maybe have had a point.
@Obie2.0 "ignoring observable results that contradict theory" still wouldn't apply to any of those groups. If you use "reason alone", you still need data to base that reason on. They're probably confusing irrational wishful thinking with iterative improvement of strategies, the application of similar but different strategies, and/or imperfect models of reality that we incrementally improve upon, in addition to treating all of the left as a monolith.
Discussion on answer by bobflux: Is o…
Discussion on answer by bobflux: Is o…