This is not new—we’ve been required to get vaccinations for a LONG time-----schools are part of government, and they require inoculations.
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Like my Facebook friend. It will be interesting to see how she posts in the near future.
Actually this would be entirely new. Never in the history of the US has a medical procedure been mandated upon 50% of the population who currently are refusing it.
Vaccines like small pox and polio were voluntarily embraced by the vast majority of Americans. At the time most citizens had experienced first hand the ravages of the illness, trusted the safety of the vaccine as reported by their government and viewed vaccination as a patriotic and societal imperative.
You impose your will on others at your own risk and at the expense of the freedoms our country is built on. Educate, enlighten or argue and unfortunately in time people will experience the reality that this illness is a killer and hopefully come around.
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If polio was scary, why isn’t COVID-19?
| Disease | Transmission | % asymptomatic | % long term effects | % death |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Polio | Not airborne | ~70% | ~1% | ~0.2% |
| COVID-19 | Airborne droplets | ~50% | ~20-30% | ~0.6% |
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We didn’t have then internet, especially social media, and other media channels that spread conspiracies faster and further than wildfires. What’s different now is that we have to deal with not only a real pandemic but also a virtual pandemic of disinfomation and misinformation. The twin pandemics feed on each other, the likes of which we’ve never seen.
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Agreed in full and actually my point. We have to change peoples perception to conform with reality. What percent of Americans do you think are aware of that side by side comparison?
This is exactly what doubters need to see and hear. Not calling them idiots or threatening to take away their privacy and freedoms would also likely help.
1NJParent agreed with your point and yes it is a daunting task!!
Checking out from this thread as I don’t think I have more to add. I respect all of your views and wish everyone health and safety.
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This group is large enough that I don’t think we’ll ever get to herd immunity.
For them, it’s looking like it will have to be the old-fashioned route, not this modern medicine business (said tongue-in-cheek, as vaccines have been around hundreds of years). With Delta, it doesn’t look like it’s going to take long for that to happen. As I’ve seen on Twitter, this is evolution happening in real time right in front of our eyes.
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Among the vaccine hesitant, there are various categories who need different communication strategies (there’s such a field as health communication 
, there are even minors in it!)
- true antivaxxers, who refused to vaccinate their children against anything, and won’t change for covid - trying to get them to vaccinate is pointless.
- the wait-and-see group, worried about secondary effects. Most of them need to be able to ask questions to their family doctor (or nurse they know well) or a trusted authority figure.
- people, sometimes single mothers, who simply haven’t had time and haven’t prioritized their needs because they’re overwhelmed. Offering to vaccinate them at their workplace, their kids’ school, or on top of their kid’s vaccination apt, works. Basically, free and convenient wins them.
- people who have been brainwashed by the media they consume – this is a tough group but typically respected community leaders can get through, especially if there’s been a case close to them.
Dr.Fauci is a red herring because he’s not in any of the categories known to be efficient with the three groups above.
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UMN just reversed itself and mandated the vaccine once fully approved by FDA. Faculty who don’t get the vax will need to test regularly. I believe most other colleges and universities in the area have already implemented a vax mandate.
Gotta love some of these fact checking sites. I wish people would actually use them. When I saw the <2000 number I knew it couldn’t be true. An app on my phone keeping track of PA data shows 754 hospitalized there alone and we’re doing relatively well right now compared to many states.
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I didn’t know pre-covid19 the details on the polio epidemic. My mother told stories about how terrified everyone was, and how the neighbor boy became paralyzed from it. My mil had a mild case of polio (and I now wonder if some of her leg issues are post-polio syndrome).
The images of people on respirators aren’t as scary as the images of people in iron lungs, I guess.
Some background on dismissing concerns about effects on the menstrual cycle. Is this misogyny?
“ Nonetheless, the outpouring of interest and concern among people who menstruate points to a blind spot in the way that clinical research on the COVID-19 vaccines was done. As with many other vaccine trials, the early COVID-19 studies did not ask much about reproductive health aside from questions around pregnancy. “It seeds doubt,” Lee says. “It makes people feel like their bodies were not considered in part of the [clinical] trial.””
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Something interesting I discovered from looking into various vaccine trials for myself is that women of child-bearing age could not participate unless they were using an approved method of birth control or had a female partner. I didn’t look far enough to see what the approved methods of birth control were. Were they methods that could affect the menstrual cycle (timing) or menstruation itself (flow)? Would those methods in some way prevent researchers from seeing what the impact would be on menstruation in women who were not using certain kinds of birth control?
It doesn’t seem like there’s an easy way around this in clinical trials. For that reason, following women who are not on birth control after getting the shot seems like worthwhile research.
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@splash1, the analogy is deeply offensive. People can choose to be vaccinated or not. In Nazi Germany, people could not choose whether or not to be Jewish. If you had more than x% of your genetics from a Jew, the government deemed that you were a Jew.
Moreover, the consequences that might come from not getting vaccinated (other than getting the Delta Variant) are not quite the same as those faced by the Jews. As far as I know, no one has proposed sending the unvaccinated to be murdered in concentration camps or to be shot by firing squads and dumped in mass graves or killed by starvation or disease after being crowded in ghettos, which is what happened to 6 million Jews. According to the Holocaust Museum, the entire Jewish population in Europe was 9.5 MM in 1933, when Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany (and Europe was home to a majority of the world’s Jewish population).
The politicians who have used the analogy have been anti-Semites like Marjory Taylor Greene (recall the California wildfires she said were caused by Jewish laser weapons in space). I’m pretty sure she chose the analogy to inflame. It did and the blowback was significant. Even she apologized for the analogy. Food for thought.
If your apparent confusion is sincere, consider learning a bit about the Holocaust and the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany and Nazi occupied countries.
If it is not, then your posts deserve to be flagged.
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I’m Jewish, 100%, on both sides of my family, all originally from Eastern Europe. I don’t need a history lesson about how my ancestors and relatives were treated, but your post is here for those who might not know.
My comment was criticizing those who would say vaccine requirements are like slavery and likening it to those who compare the unvaccinated with Jews during the Holocaust, including Marjory Greene (who apologized for her comment and then doubled down on it).
To be extra clear in case my earlier comment wasn’t (and because everyone is on edge given how many people are publicly making these vile comparisons - but not on CC), vaccine requirements are not like slavery and the unvaccinated are not like Jews during the Holocaust and such comparisons are deeply offensive.
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Thanks and my apologies for only reading the post in which you appeared confused about why that analogy was considered offensive. I posted earlier that the Boston Mayor’s analogy was flawed for some of the same reasons. We are in complete agreement.
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Bcos your gross numbers hide the fact that kids under 5 have highest risk for polio, whereas COVID has near zero risk for kids under 5. (And needless to say, parents are highly protective of their kid’s health…)
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This article is empathetic as well as informative.
Aren’t Clancy and Lee the same two researchers who were included in a similar article upthread a few weeks ago that generated a strong negative response to “posting anecdotes?” Glad to see this subject is getting some traction.
New research does suggest there’s at least a plausible route by which vaccines could alter menstruation. Yale’s Lu-Culligan says that recent studies show immune cells play a role in both building up and breaking down the uterine lining during a cycle. . . . “When you’re altering your immunological state with a vaccine, it’s certainly possible that you could be altering a bit of the normal dynamics you could have,” she says.
On the subject of mysogeny, people (both men and women) might have an unconscious bias about certain subjects for a variety of reasons. There could be systemic bias going on here combined with both a strong push to get the vaccine in as many arms as possible and a lack of attention to the issue in clinical trials.
"Both researchers describe themselves as “pro-vaccine,” especially given the dangers of COVID-19. Still they’re troubled by the reports they’ve collected that some people are having their concerns dismissed out of hand by doctors. That’s the sort of dismissiveness that can seed mistrust, Lee and Clancy note, and it’s happening in part, they believe, because changes to menstruation are not officially listed as a possible side effect."
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They probably declined anyone who could get pregnant. The clinical trials didn’t include pregnant women, for obvious reasons.
It appears that at least one of the irregularities is breakthrough bleeding for women who are on “approved methods” of BC and/or had other therapies that prevent periods, or were post-menopausal. Breakthrough bleeding can be quite frightening to a post-menopausal woman because it can signal cancer, so of course it would need to be checked out regardless. However, many women might feel a lot more at ease going into that appointment if they were more informed about potential menstrual side effects from the vaccine.
Since women on BC were part of the clinical trial, I wonder if breakthrough bleeding appeared in the data but was overlooked?
That NPR story regarding menstrual changes (and possible post-menopausal bleeding) is about an anthropologist who is collecting unverified anecdotes. It is not medical research and although they are attempting to verify that these events actually happened and are not created by anonymous reporters that work has not been done yet. There is only one mention, her own, of postmenopausal bleeding. As you note, this is a serious symptom and should be assessed by a physician. It is the kind of symptom that should be reported to doctors and trial researchers. Until such a time as there are verified reports that this is a side effect of the vaccine it is irresponsible to post on any kind of media that it is and only feeds vaccine resistance.
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