Regarding the polio vaccine comment you made, maybe it was meant as a joke, I dunno. I took a stab at finding the post, and I did find it. It was a Mayberry thread with a poll about the 3 most significant 20th century inventions.
—It doesn’t really read like a joke to me and while looking at that thread, I noticed you did not vote for the polio vaccine as one of your 3 but
did vote for the TV remote, so there’s that, I guess.
There is absolutely a difference between a person who believes in the basic safety and efficacy of these vaccines choosing to get *some* boosters and mot others, and basing that decision on actual probabilities of contracting or spreading the virus based on their current living, working, and travel situations; and a person who won take the vaccine because they think it’s a bioweapon, or part of some bullshit microchip tracking CT, or has no effect whatsoever on the spread or severity of COVID despite mountains of data showing that it does….
I think to equate those two groups as being the same because they both have “reasons,” is quite dishonest, and a very bad and flimsy argument to try and make.
So it’s not the mere act of choosing not to get a particular vaccine that I look down on, and I also think it’s wildly inaccurate to try and portray most of the right wing posters ITT as reasonable people who evaluated data honestly and then made a particular health care choice.
—This thread is an absolute cesspool of CT bullshit. The bioweapon silliness, blaming it for Kate Middleton’s cancer, and the posting of all manner of trash sources (the Daily Mail FFS??) spewing nonsense.
I sincerely do sympathize with the hoops you had to jump through for your wedding. But it was a
pandemic, we
all had hoops to jump through. I spent almost all of 2022 caring for my terminally ill father. He had cancer and had chosen to undergo chemo in the hopes that it would help him live long enough to see my niece (his granddaughter) get married. I dunno if chemo helped, but it’s what he wanted to do…. and I can’t tell you how many times unmasked assholes were all up in my personal space as I ran errands, did grocery shopping, or what have you. Sometimes they just seemed oblivious, but sometimes it clearly seemed to be intentional, out of spite.
I am sure for those douchebags, getting COVID might not have been a huge deal—but they didn’t know me, or my medical scene, or my family’s medical scene,
and they didn’t care. God forbid they suffer the minor inconvenience of having to wear a mask and keep their distance in shared public spaces during a pandemic. And it’s
that, which I look down on:
people who spew bullshit conspiracy theories that hindered our ability to deal with the pandemic and it’s aftermath, and people who have such a blatant disregard for other people in their communities that they value their own desire to not suffer a minor inconvenience over other people’s health and safety.
Every. Single. Thing we went through in that pandemic was made longer and more difficult by selfish, tribalist conservatives who only care about themselves and their in-groups, and don’t give a shit about anyone else.
If my explanation didn’t cover exactly what you had in mind, could you be more specific? What “reversal” of the liberal perspective are you referring to?
My post wasn’t meant to explain a “reversal” in liberal perspectives, I really don’t think there was a reversal.
There’s always been a contingent of anti-vaxxers amongst the far left, super hippie dippie tree hugger types, but they are fringe, and I don’t think that’s changed. In fact, it seems to me that far more right wingers adopted anti-vax views during COVID, and
surveys back that up. And it isn’t strictly related to their views on the COVID vax either (although that is where the largest disparity is), but vaccines in general.
I don’t have (and have never had) any social media accounts, so I can’t really speak to that. Would you mind elaborating on what you mean when you say, “you could see a shift in perspective as the baton changed hands from Trump to Biden”? What shift in perspective? For years, stats show that both conservatives and liberals have been largely supportive of vaccines, but that certainly doesn’t seem to be the case now.