wtf? you love top democrats now? oh wait, it's just a bunch of selectively edited material of people who publicly endorsed the vaccines once they were developed, got vaccinated on camera, and encouraged everyone to get vaccinated. a transparent attempt to deflect blame away from the former president, who was - unsurprisingly to anyone really - the biggest single source of covid disinformation in the world. empirical evidence, science > anecdotes, propaganda

there you go: https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/evanega-et-al-coronavirus-misinformation-submitted-07-23-20-1/080839ac0c22bca8/full.pdf

This post was edited by fender on May 3 2022 06:33pm

LMFAO Cope

DNC darling #212: "I think its going to be a VERY SKEPTICAL AMERICAN PUBLIC about TAKING THE VACCINE - and THEY SHOULD BE"

DNC darling #324: "We CANT TAKE THE VACCINE THAT MIGHT CAUSE HARM TO US!"

DNC darling #612: "I think (getting the vaccine) is going to be AN ISSUE FOR ALL OF US"

oi oi oi you got a loycense for that disinformation, chum?

The political gain for Democrats doesn't necessarily lie in a big majority being on their side when it comes to abortion (it's really split pretty much down the middle). No, the political gain for Democrats is that the fight over abortion rights will suck up the political oxygen and become one of the dominant issues of the midterms, if not THE dominant one.

The issue of the hour shifting from one on which Dems are getting slaughtered (inflation) to one which is a wash (abortion) improves their outlook.

- Cancelling mass events like nightclubs or indoor stadiums definitely slowed spread, as did voluntary distancing or people being very alert to flu-like symptoms and isolating if tested positive. Even the (much scrutinized) study suggesting that curfews, general business closures and masks had no effect did show a significant effect of closing nightclubs and contact restrictions.

- KN95 masks offer proper self-protection if worn right. tons of studies showing that. Mandating people to wear crappy cloth masks was of course completely ineffective, as was wearing KN95s the wrong way (like most people did). these types of mask mandates were of course symbolic politics/virtue signalling. An information campaign urging the risk groups to voluntarily wear KN95s the proper way to protect themselves would have been good policy though and made a difference.

- The vaccines did have a very notable effect on slowing transmission of the early variants (wild type through delta). Just look at the size of the alpha-fueled wave in the spring of 2021 in the US (already high vax rates at the time) and the EU (which had fucked up procurement and lagged by several months). Yes, the vaccines don't reduce transmission of omicron all that much anymore, but by that point, the virus had already mutated into being less (sic!) deadly than the flu, so that we could let it rip.

- Deaths per capita vary significantly even between comparable countries. According to worldometers, the US have 3054 deaths per 1m, Spain (which did horribly in the first wave) has 2237, Germany as 1616, South Korea has 448, Japan has 236, Australia has 281. Japan is older than the U.S. and Germany//Australia are not so muss less obese that it could explain mortality rates differeing by a factor of 2//10. It's preposterious to claim that policy choices on covid had no impact on mortality at all.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on May 3 2022 07:19pm

Inflation is a very tangible problem for many poor and middle class families in the US. Every time I go to the store i'm like since when is broccoli this much or why did ground beef go up by 3 dollars for 2 pounds. That's in your face all day everyday. Abortion rights are really not though. Some democrats will for sure get out to vote because of it but it doesn't impact the masses in the same way like having to say no to food. Got to remember people are selfish and what impacts them personally is way more important.

This post was edited by ofthevoid on May 3 2022 07:15pm

Americans have very nuanced views on abortion so I'd refrain from saying things like "it's split down the middle." I've also read some data indicating that many people don't even realize the restrictions (or lack thereof) on abortion in their own STATE. You could be right that this will be the number 1 issue but it might not be on people's minds given the economic situation we're in, the war in Ukraine, etc.

I also saw some polling data showing Warnock up 5 points against Walker and Hassan only up 1 against one of her opponents. The Senate races are going to be pretty weird I think.

You are of course right that inflation will still be on most voters' minds come election day. But even if a voter has inflation and abortion on her mind, that's still a win for Democrats compared to if it was just inflation. And inflation is a difficult issue for the media, so the media focus will definitely shift to the fight over Roe.

Another factor to keep in mind is that suburban women are one of the most important groups of swing voters. They tend to be privileged, so that inflation is not that much of an issue for a lot of them, while female reproductive rights will be. The Supreme Court overturning Roe might well stop a good chunk of them from coming back home to the GOP after Trump drove them away.



Iirc, most polls showed Walker with a small lead on Warnock, so the one which had Warnock up 5 might be an outlier. But yeah, candidate quality and profile plays a huge role in Senate races. Abortion gaining in salience might be bad for the GOP in a place like Georgia. The black vote there is completely inelastic and exclusively about turnout, which Warnock is very good at. The other pillar of his coalition are the educated, upscale Atlanta suburbs, and that's the exact type of voter who will be galvanized by the fight over abortion.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on May 3 2022 07:32pm

And yet the lockdowns coincided with unregulated mass gatherings in george floyd's summer of love, and whatever minor slowdown accomplished didn't stop the infections spreading eventually. The original train of thought was we needed to flatten the curve, not stop the spread, but that quickly got debunked when the initial outbreak wasn't the overwhelming mass event in NYC we anticipated and instead of one curve, it was a series of multiple curves. Would it have made much of any difference in death rates in the end?



And its like you say, nobody wears proper protection. And even in the tiny fraction of people who do, there's questions of waning protection over long periods of use and methods of maintaining the masks. How many people are out there wearing a properly secured and airtight KN95 with a cloth mask over it to prolong its lifespan, and switching it out frequently enough and avoiding overexposure, like we'd see in laboratory settings? I'd round it to 0%. I pay attention to how many cloth-only masks or loosely fitting M95 / KN95 masks I see in public, and its virtually everyone masked at all. So yes, symbolic virtue signalling. And that's how we wound up with those absurdist confrontations between Rand Paul and Anthony Fauci, with Paul trying to get Fauci to admit what they both know is true about the ineffectiveness of mask mandates, while Fauci can't say that because its about signalling people to take the pandemic seriously



Vaccines easily reduced the death rate in the grand scheme of things, but can we really say the pathogenesis of the virus was within our control enough with or without the vaccines that our non-vaccine policies would have made a difference? If the virus didn't burn out right away, we'd still have multiple variants. And there was no chance of that given the geographic progression and waves of infection bouncing around the world staggered from one another, so whatever lockdown and mask mandates and travel bans we put in place didn't really affect that progression and wouldn't preclude the variants that got around vaccines.



Those countries aren't loaded with a population of morbidly obese elderly people like America. Its abundantly clear that the pandemic's death toll was wildly disproportionately one affecting the comorbidities of preexisting obesity, lung issues and being a fossil. Japan might be disproportionately old, but they weren't eating cheeseburgers for 80 years of their life. Mortality was just a result of Covid knocking off the most vulnerable people, and its also why we're likely to see very depressed mortality rates for the next 10+ years in America after the pandemic ends. And the same folks who spent their lives flushing mountain dew down their gullet, are the ones who weren't going to obey mask mandates or lockdown orders anyway