![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Borrowing trouble?
13 May 2020 09:15I don't think it's borrowing trouble to think about what might happen if/when a vaccine for Covid-19 is available and a segment of the population refuses to get it.
Get Ready for a Vaccine Information War.
For the record, I am not a scientist, a doctor, or a public health expert, though I am probably better educated in science than average. I have a very small circle of friends and family. In the past few days I have gotten five emails/texts from people asking me if I'd seen "Plandemic" (no, not going to waste the time) and if I thought it was possible it was true. Many of these people are college educated, even if not in STEM.
Like the Republican message of hate and racism, anti-vaccine stuff can be told in a story of absolutes, or certainties. There are not grey areas, no scientists using words like "might" and "according to all available evidence to date" and "should" and "in the overwhelming majority of cases". People listen to certainty, and are scared of conditional phrases!
So yes, I expect there to be great resistance to any potential vaccine to Covid-19, and like the article says, it needs to be deal with now, getting the weapons for our own information "war" in place. It's very hard to change people's minds. Once they're certain that Bill Gates is trying to inject us all with mind-control nanobots to counter the "cold" that he paid the Chinese to create in Wuhan... well, it's pretty close to impossible to get to them.
It may be time to truly play hardball with these people, and it sounds horrid, and if Biden is president at that time, it will ensure electoral losses to the Democratic party as a cost of not killing the country.
You don't take the vaccine? You are opted out Medicare, Medicaid. Your insurance premiums go up tenfold and if you have employer based insurance, they have the right to exclude you from their plan. Not being vaccinated becomes the pre-existing condition to trump all pre-existing conditions.
Non-vaccinated children cannot attend school. I would add that employers, including the federal government should be allowed to fire at will if someone refused to vaccinate.
Vaccine refusal puts you last in any potential triage group and that doctors/nurses/hospitals should be allowed to refuse treatment. That's a scary slippery slope, but because vaccines are only as effective as they are (nothing is 100%), they have the right not to put their lives, and the lives of their community at risk by treating someone who refuses to get vaccinated. Unlike refusing care for someone who wants to fill a prescription for RU486 or to trans people, this would be refusing care to someone who was willing to put themselves and everyone else at risk and who, despite all precautions would be putting medical professionals in some danger. I'm not totally comfortable with the ethics of this, but OTOH, why should someone else put their life on the line to mop up after someone made the risky choice to refuse to participate in a life-protecting act of social responsibility?
They need to be societal parias.
Obviously this applies to the people who could be vaccinated but choose not to be. Medical exemptions should still, of course, be a thing. However, those exemptions need to come from only a few public health doctors (yes, probably government), not the jackasses like Dr Sears or Dr Gordon.
The more this thing circulates, the more it potentially mutates. It's pretty lethal now, what happens if it gets more so, or becomes more contagious? We have a societal, global responsibility to limit spread as much as possible. Right now, the US is a vast incubator for that potentially super-killer-Covid-19, and the world will not thank us if we spawn a new more virulent strain.
Many of these same people are willing to argue that the virus only kills "the old and the weak" and seem to think that asking vulnerable people to stay home forever is a viable way for everyone to keep their freedumbs. In a counterpoint to that, I'll say they are free to not vaccinate, but they are, as a result, not free to participate in society. It is autocratic and authoritarian, and I'm not completely happy with this type of solution. But nor am I happy with someone out there deliberately not caring if they spread a deadly disease.
So, blah.
Get Ready for a Vaccine Information War.
For the record, I am not a scientist, a doctor, or a public health expert, though I am probably better educated in science than average. I have a very small circle of friends and family. In the past few days I have gotten five emails/texts from people asking me if I'd seen "Plandemic" (no, not going to waste the time) and if I thought it was possible it was true. Many of these people are college educated, even if not in STEM.
Like the Republican message of hate and racism, anti-vaccine stuff can be told in a story of absolutes, or certainties. There are not grey areas, no scientists using words like "might" and "according to all available evidence to date" and "should" and "in the overwhelming majority of cases". People listen to certainty, and are scared of conditional phrases!
So yes, I expect there to be great resistance to any potential vaccine to Covid-19, and like the article says, it needs to be deal with now, getting the weapons for our own information "war" in place. It's very hard to change people's minds. Once they're certain that Bill Gates is trying to inject us all with mind-control nanobots to counter the "cold" that he paid the Chinese to create in Wuhan... well, it's pretty close to impossible to get to them.
It may be time to truly play hardball with these people, and it sounds horrid, and if Biden is president at that time, it will ensure electoral losses to the Democratic party as a cost of not killing the country.
You don't take the vaccine? You are opted out Medicare, Medicaid. Your insurance premiums go up tenfold and if you have employer based insurance, they have the right to exclude you from their plan. Not being vaccinated becomes the pre-existing condition to trump all pre-existing conditions.
Non-vaccinated children cannot attend school. I would add that employers, including the federal government should be allowed to fire at will if someone refused to vaccinate.
Vaccine refusal puts you last in any potential triage group and that doctors/nurses/hospitals should be allowed to refuse treatment. That's a scary slippery slope, but because vaccines are only as effective as they are (nothing is 100%), they have the right not to put their lives, and the lives of their community at risk by treating someone who refuses to get vaccinated. Unlike refusing care for someone who wants to fill a prescription for RU486 or to trans people, this would be refusing care to someone who was willing to put themselves and everyone else at risk and who, despite all precautions would be putting medical professionals in some danger. I'm not totally comfortable with the ethics of this, but OTOH, why should someone else put their life on the line to mop up after someone made the risky choice to refuse to participate in a life-protecting act of social responsibility?
They need to be societal parias.
Obviously this applies to the people who could be vaccinated but choose not to be. Medical exemptions should still, of course, be a thing. However, those exemptions need to come from only a few public health doctors (yes, probably government), not the jackasses like Dr Sears or Dr Gordon.
The more this thing circulates, the more it potentially mutates. It's pretty lethal now, what happens if it gets more so, or becomes more contagious? We have a societal, global responsibility to limit spread as much as possible. Right now, the US is a vast incubator for that potentially super-killer-Covid-19, and the world will not thank us if we spawn a new more virulent strain.
Many of these same people are willing to argue that the virus only kills "the old and the weak" and seem to think that asking vulnerable people to stay home forever is a viable way for everyone to keep their freedumbs. In a counterpoint to that, I'll say they are free to not vaccinate, but they are, as a result, not free to participate in society. It is autocratic and authoritarian, and I'm not completely happy with this type of solution. But nor am I happy with someone out there deliberately not caring if they spread a deadly disease.
So, blah.
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}