A lot of the people fighting against these things are not feeling the pain. Many people in my family are some degree of anti-vaccine / masking mandates. I can guarantee you that if a single close family member ended up hospitalized due to covid, their tune would do a fast 180.

All of their beliefs are based on whether someone they care about had something happen to them.

People died from COVID and them or their families denied it was from Corona.

A family member died from Covid-19, and another family member stayed against vaccine and social distancing. We aren’t all very bright on every topic.

That's funny, the people who are dumb and emotional in my entourage are those who are still completely afraid of COVID even after like, 5 boosters, even if they are in their thirties, no immune condition, etc. They don't go out, don't see anyone, only order stuff online, and actually think that they are smarter than everyone else who just... lives their lives. (r/zerocovidcommunity is a good example of that, just to give you more than a personal anecdote)

To me that's a much more emotional take on life than anti Vax lunatics because they at least "live their life" as it has always been. Which might be a bad thing in this case, but to me it is much less insane than becoming a hermit over something that is objectively not an actual danger to them anymore, unless they believe their 5 boosters don't help. So I'm not sure that reducing it to caring or not is actually helpful. You can care about something but disagree about the method.

I guess my point is that I don't think antivaxxers don't believe in vaccines because they just want people to die, they don't believe in vaccines because they think it doesn't help people from dying. They actually believe vaccines don't work, it's not just pretend play. It's very very dumb, but I don't think that framing as is just not caring until stuff happens to them is helpful.

If you didn't believe that for example, homeopathy works, you won't suddenly think that it should be used if someone close to you dies. Maybe in desperation, but that's different from believing it. Obviously the difference is that homeopathy doesn't work, and vaccines absolutely do. But remember, that's literally what antivaxxers disagree with!

> That's funny, the people who are dumb and emotional in my entourage are those who are still completely afraid of COVID even after like, 5 boosters, even if they are in their thirties

I have a few friends like this, though to a lesser degree as their worries have disappeared by now.

> I guess my point is that I don't think antivaxxers don't believe in vaccines because they just want people to die, they don't believe in vaccines because they think it doesn't help people from dying. They actually believe vaccines don't work, it's not just pretend play. It's very very dumb, but I don't think that framing as is just not caring until stuff happens to them is helpful.

I wasn't trying to frame it as "all covid deniers just don't care unless it impacts their family" or something similar. It more subtle than that. And what I said was not supposed to be a generalization at all. It was specifically about my family members.

I do think some portion of all people fall into this group though. Yes, they might truly believe the covid vaccines do more harm than good. But also yes, they would immediately line-up for a covid vaccine if a close family member became hospitalized and visually looked bad. Nothing about the dangers of the vaccine changes in this scenario, and covid didn't suddenly become more dangerous to them. It just became more emotionally visceral. That's not desperation. It's straightforward emotional persuasion, and is the "feeling the pain" as originally commented about.

I do think there is many more social dynamics at play, but I don't feel confident in articulating my scattered thoughts on them well. How people adjust how they act based on social groups, or with very little information people form very strong opinions, how information bubbles impact what topics you see or how they're presented, etc.

That sounds like a stereotype — “people who disagree with me are just dumb and emotional!”

I didn’t see it that way - I think they have a valid point. I know people personally affected by deaths in their family due to the virus and I know people who caught and fought it like it was nothing, so I know exactly what the poster is getting at.

When it hits your loved ones, you start to take it more seriously. Wearing a mask and socially distancing doesn’t matter if it means not losing another family member. Conversely, if you experience just a minor cold, you start questioning all the media you’ve seen about the death rates and this and that which can definitely lead you to thinking everyone’s exaggerating the whole thing for a reason unknown to you.

I’m not anti vax at all (studied biomedical science) but I do see how people can be pushed towards having those views, even subconsciously, through highly manipulated algorithms that can use emotions to extract content in the form of comments, reaction videos, memes etc from real people. Come to think of it, AI has been milking humans for content for years.

>now admits those people were right the whole time

Those people for sure aren't the anti-vaxers and anti maskers.

It's about the consequences of the lockdown, school closings and operation postponings and it's pretty easy to point at that consequences if you can't compare them to the consequences without these measures.

In Sweden they had similar admissions that their initial measures were wrong and they didn't have lockdowns.

Yes — obviously Francis Collins, former director of NIH, just did the comparison wrong.

And obviously the people you’re stereotyping were just “anti-vax” and “anti-mask”, not people who objected based on principle and were right.

You’re a crank who can’t admit he was wrong.

If you fight vaccines and masks you are anti-vax and anti mask that's not a stereotype but just a description of their behavior.

An despite claiming otherwise, masks work as long as you and the people around wear them. The Cochrane study only showed that you can't escape the virus if it's everywhere because as soon you ket your guards down you get infected

And guess what helped to spread it everywhere.

Masks aren't dangerous and the benefit of the vaccines outweighs the risks compared to a corona infection.

There's no stereotype there. I'm explicitly talking about people I know. If what I said happened, their tunes would change. It's happened before, and it'll happen again.

And yes, the loudest ones about it in the family are dumb and emotional. That tends to be the case for most people who do less thinking and more repeating their point louder and louder.

Some people aren't afraid of dying even after they lose loved ones. Not everyone lives in fear.

Avoiding an unnecessary death isn't living in fear, it's living by common sense.

Francis Collins has already admitted the policies were myopic and didn’t account for QALY — they were malpractice that focused on a particular disease while ignoring the holistic situation.

Hindsight is 20/20.

Look what happened in Sweden, they say the same about their intial measures and lost more people in the first year of the pandemic than any other scandinavian country.

What’s their total mortality by comparison, now?

You mean after they got one of the highest vaccination rates in Europe?

Less excess mortality than countries with lower vaccination rates.

Running from death out of fear is the very definition of cowardice. There are higher goods that call one to put away their own fear and serve, no matter the cost.

That's interesting because I remember lots of people fear masks and vaccines and refuse to use any of them even despite the mention of the higher goods.

The ones vaccinated and masked didn't run, they stayed especially in the health sector.

Different set of "higher goods". I'm not a humanist. I'm a Christian. So going to church to worship God is more important than staying home to stay alive.

You can also praise God at home and I am pretty sure that He prefers it if you do not deliberately jeopardise His creation so that you may no longer be able to support your family and do His work.

Also what happened to "Love your neighbor as yourself.’ No other commandment is greater than these.”?

I can't participate in the Eucharist at home. Also, you are still assuming that sickness and suffering are inherently bad. There are worse things for your soul than sickness and death. Sickness and suffering in general heal your soul, and death means you have repented as much as you can and you are returning to your Lord. There is nothing to fear. Suffering and sickness shouldn't be avoided out of fear.

And I should have clarified sooner: "it's living by common sense" is true if you are a humanist, which I am not. I am a Christian, so going to church to worship God is more important than staying home to stay alive.

The problem here is we need solutions that work, not magical thinking. Otherwise credibility goes in the toilet. It’s self-evident in the face of an aerosol-generating respiratory pandemic that social distancing, surgical face masks, and immunizations that don’t produce a muscosal response do not constitute a complete solution. At best, they’re good things to do that may help a bit. Likewise, ending our own reliance on fossil fuels by decree won’t work—energy transitions are driven by economic viability.