What a misleading headline (probably). What I'm reading is that a specific social media advertising campaign was ended. The article doesn't say that getting a vaccine is harder or more expensive than before, but given the context it's strongly implied.
they could have used ad campaign. Regardless this is extremely concerning. It sounded like the ad campaign was effective and supposed to run to the end of the flu season.
Are there sort of nuanced or structural reasons why the right seems more antivax especially recently? Or is it more just that’s the way the politics has sort of played out.
I believe it’s due to the way the COVID vaccine was handled. As an overly-broad rule of thumb, the right values freedom more than safety. The COVID vaccine was an example of very heavy-handed enforcement and I think whether for right or wrong the backlash has affected all vaccines.
My personal take, unrelated to politics, is that getting a vaccine for a virus from last year while the current strain has mutated isn’t a particularly stellar strategy, especially when I get the effects of the flu from the vaccine anyway.
I just roll the dice most years and I haven’t had the flu in over 10 years so it’s not worth it to me.
Wow. This comment showcases everything that's wrong with America today.
Trying to keep Americans alive is somehow political. The party of "pro life" was so against trying to save lives that we ended up with the highest COVID death rate in the world, and overall had between 4 and 5 million deaths above the normal rates (see CDC excess deaths between 2020 and 2022).
Also, the vaccine IS NOT ABOUT YOU. Vaccinations are about protecting the people who cannot get vaccinated. When you have 97%+ of the populace vaccinated then you are also protecting the most vulnerable from the same. This is why Measles is showing up again, because the people decrying vaccines have caused the coverage to drop below the critical threshold.
Until Americans, and even more importantly the "Christian Right" can wake up and actually start acting like Christ tells us to (feed the hungry, heal the sick, give to the poor, love your enemy, give away your wealth), the cruelty America is inflicting on ourselves and the world will only get worse.
The way you're writing is the actual reason why western society is taking such a nosedive. You're trying to shame someone deciding to do something optional because you, personally, believe it to be worthwhile.
The fact of the matter is that the virus being discussed here (the flu) isn't remotely deadly enough to warrant such an escalation my you.
And wherever the flu vaccine is actually worth it is way more disputed then you seem to think. Almost every doctor I've personally visited told me that its a waste of money for a healthy person, because it merely reduces the likelihood and potentially strength of the infection - at the cost of feeling bad for a few days after getting the shot. But I don't live in America, which is kinda the only place that ritually goes through flu vaccinations, yearly.
The only reference to Corona (before your escalation) was merely the acknowledgement that the ultimately questionable messaging during the pandemic likely caused the current push back against all vaccines. That's completely unrelated to wherever the first strain of Corona was deadly enough to warrant using untested vaccines at large.
Where do you get "a couple months of partial protection" from? The numbers I saw are very different, take for instance:
> COVID-19 vaccine efficacy or effectiveness against severe disease remained high, although it did decrease somewhat by 6 months after full vaccination. By contrast, vaccine efficacy or effectiveness against infection and symptomatic disease decreased approximately 20–30 percentage points by 6 months.
> In most studies, the vaccine efficacy or effectiveness against severe disease remained high (≥70%) for up to 6 months after vaccination for all four vaccines that we evaluated (and mostly ≥80% for the two mRNA vaccines).
This is the only place I could find in your source that mentions the efficacy numbers (not the drop in efficacy, which is what this is focused on), and it is only against severe disease.
The first one that came up for my search was this:
The findings section shows that by the time omicron was around, you were at around 43% against infection by 112 days.
That was then. What is it today? How many people do you need to jab to prevent one transmission? And how many people are doing that? Uptake is very low today.
There was a time when "the VAX is not about you!" was plausible. That time has passed.
The effect on mortality is what mattered, and that effect was very significant in the risk groups.
Would have been even better if the effect on transmission had remained with the later variants, but unfortunately it didn't as the virus changed. Preventing transmission would be ideal, but that was just not possible with this particular virus and regular vaccines. But it still saved a lot of lives because of the very strong effect on mortality.
Employers were induced into requiring vaccination based on an impermissible OSHA rule that made vaccination mandatory. Acting as if the federal mandates eventually being stopped by the legal process means they did not shape private action is disingenuous.
The federal government’s response to Covid is one of the primary reasons we have seen such a huge backlash to the administrative state, culminating in Donald Trump’s purported current quest to dismantle it, ironically by using its own power to destabilize and destroy it. I say purported because whether Trump’s goal is to dismantle the administrative state or to reform it as a tool for himself, his friends, and his donors remains to be seen. It’s probably the latter.
I would phrase it more as "the right doesn't like to be told what to do". The left generally values "freedom" more in my experience, but they like telling people what to do.
I've always said that if Covid had been a little more deadly, or affected young people more, than the role would have been reversed and the Right would've been screaming to have the military force people to be indoors.
This makes no sense because Trump did all the covid stuff. It was corrected when Biden took office. I agree that covid enabled this transition away from reality, but because of people becoming segregated and always online.
Your personal take is wrong and you should get vaxxed for flu as doctors recommend.
> The COVID vaccine was an example of very heavy-handed enforcement
Do you have some concrete examples of this? I recall a lot of hyperventilating about the possibility of "vaccine passports" (complete with "mark of the beast" references), and a handful of instances where people got angry about COVID vaccination being folded into (decades-old) policies covering mandatory vaccinations for school/work, but not much beyond that. I carried a mask in case places had mask policies, but it never even occurred to me that I might need to prove that I was vaccinated.
Hawaii required vaccinations to visit from the mainland.
At one point, Hawaii State had one set of rules, and the Big Island another, which was ridiculous. But worse, when preparing for the former according to all the official instructions and forms there was no mention of the latter.
A multi-island visit of myself and two loved ones turned into quite a disaster as a result of the confusing redundant duplicative restrictions. Despite great pre-trip efforts to have all documentation (vaccines taken, State acknowledgment forms completed and returned as accepted, etc.)
We were not informed of the Big Islands special requirements until we arrived on the Big Island. If we left the airport for any reason we would immediately have gone into a two week quarantine - despite having all our vaccines.
It required a lot of pushing and pressing to let us get our luggage and buy and take last minute flights to Oahu (also gettting last minute accommodations) without being forced to leave the airport and go straight into quarantine. Because our luggage, as is usual when you arrive at what you believe to be your destination, was now outside departure security.
I was angry beyond all reason by the time we got out of there alive. Complete incompetent mess.
You’re complaining that you wanted to go to someone else’s home for your own personal enjoyment during a deadly pandemic and they made you take precautions so you didn’t end up killing or severely harming people?
Why do you value your fun time over people’s safety?
Wow. I don’t make assumptions often, but either you didn’t read what I wrote, or found it difficult to understand.
We carefully followed all State rules and regulations.
We got vaccinated.
We got vaccinated specifically by providers they limited us to. Which was not geographically easy for all of us.
We waited for provider approvals.
We filled in all State forms, provided all evidence and information.
We waited and eventually got State notifications that we were each validated to go.
That was on a challenging short schedule, because they wanted new vaccinations within a short window before the departure date. And twice we had to wait for delays by providers and the State we had no control over.
But we scrambled through their timeline and completely complied.
We brought printed copies ov everything. We had the site links to everything saved too, in case of any confusion.
We entered Hawaii going through a long line, cooperating with everyone and were then allowed to leave and enjoy Maui.
Then… well read what I wrote above again, if you need to.
And for reference, this was my second post-COVID trip to Hawaii, with the same itinerary, but I carefully checked all the same information and rules, made all the same preparations and we were all validated by the State in exactly the same way.
One island subsequently decided to handle things differently. A fact that was not reflected or mentioned in all the State’s information or forms that we encountered, and competed.
They introduced novel requirement that also needed to be made days in advance.
But they did not get any information about the islands break with the rest of the state, or the nature of those changes, posted anywhere State travelers got and submitted their information from the state. Nor did the States approvals mention any provisional aspects.
We were cleared by the State. As far as the State was concerned, we could go anywhere.
The result of one islands decision not to accept State approvals wasn’t just a disaster for us but many other travelers and the beleaguered staff at the arrivals of one airport, on the one rogue island, who had no idea what they were supposed to do while they held unhappy people in an airport, and only had ridiculously bad official options for them.
When we flew to Hawaii from the mainland, the airline verified ouur preparation for landing before giving us boarding passes to depart. Completely professionally handled by the State.
When just going from island to island, as I had recently done before, no mention of any second set of new one-island regulations were mentioned, until we and other unhappy people arrived after a 30 minute in-state island hop.
Where the heck did you read any lack of appreciation for “hospitality”?
I certainly attended IT industry events that required showing your vaccination card. To say nothing of my company requiring proof at one point. So, yes, there were times you needed to prove you were vaccinated.
ADDED: Add to this the fact that at least at one point, vaccines were seen as much more of a magical talisman to prevent population spread than they turned out to really be in spite of having at least a degree of effectiveness in mitigating individual severity.
Private individuals made private decisions about who they may associate with. If anything people should be protesting the existence of the first amendment.
Companies required the, because they were federal contractors and Biden signed an EO that lasted for a few months before being overturned. Not anti-vax myself, but the requirement for big IT companies (all do a bit federal work) was definitely driven by the federal government.
Pretending that the federal government played no role in guiding the actions of private entities is disingenuous at best. I actually have no problems with such actions given what was known at the time. But the fact that the federal government didn't directly put these sorts of requirements in place is largely beside the point.
There were also travel restrictions at the state level. As I recall, at one point I could only travel from MA to NH for medical-related reasons (probably some other exceptions too and it's not like your papers were being checked at the border.) ADDED: As someone else noted, there were lots of restrictions traveling to Hawaii.
Lots of people were feeling their way in the dark. I attended an event at the beginning of March before everything went crazy in the US. (An event right after was canceled. Seemed like an overreaction; it wasn't.) We were all washing our hands and elbow-bumping but nothing else.
> Pretending that the federal government played no role in guiding the actions of private entities is disingenuous at best.
And what would conflating State & Private action with Federal actions be?
This is literally what this thread is about. People are having backlash against the federal government for actions the federal government did not do. Even Republican lead states like Florida had travel restrictions [1] (keep in mind, Trump was president in 2020 when these restrictions were enacted).
Most people don't seem to know about it because it never officially went into effect, but to get there it had to be struck down in courts twice and Biden was telling employers to voluntarily do it because of the appeal. Plenty were in preparation for it going into effect.
The state of Minnesota, under Tim Walz, had all sorts of heavy handed, government mandated rules about things. According to the decree, people couldn't visit relatives, couldn't go to funerals, in reality, could not go out at all. It was ridiculous and over zealous.
If you actually knew about the military, you’d understand that they make you get vaccinated for everything. Combat readiness of the forces is paramount. It probably seems foreign to you, but the military is an organization that eschews selfish individualism for the good of the collective and their mission.
Yup, run the numbers and do what seems best for the collective even if some individuals don't agree. To me, that is clearly on one side of the bright line.
Sorry, but it also depends on individual risk. Though that probably won't be clear. And probably has some guardrails based on government authorization.
Much of the US right was also making loud noises about non-vaccine miracle cures and expressing scepticism about the vaccine before it was even approved...
And yeah, the irony is that throwing money at vaccine rollouts was one of the few good things the last Trump administration did, but trying to talk about it was about the only thing that could get him booed by his own fanbase
As someone else said, generally the requirements in Washington that state government imposed on non-government entities was masking. Vaccination was encouraged but not required. It was required for various government employees.
Washington ended up being one of the 10 states with the least COVID deaths per capita.
Many private functions/companies required both. It's simply counterfactual to say there were no vaccination mandates--and they weren't limited to healthcare settings.
To pretend that those private mandates were independent of what government at various levels was saying is counterfactual. It's not like individual companies were just making up policies in a vacuum. If governments were saying (almost certainly incorrectly) "Hey, business as usual" companies would have acted differently.
As recently as a year ago, the right wing vaccine opposition was focused almost exclusively on mRNA Covid vaccines. This sudden opposition to ALL vaccines, from Polio to Flu vaccines, dates back to when RFK announced he was suspending his campaign and joining Trump or shortly thereafter.
The right doesn’t value freedom. Who convinced you of this lie? The right adores authoritarian rulers. They adore a rigid social order that dictates what privileges certain people have.
The right is the most anti-freedom a political movement can get!
Covid response was partisanized very quickly. Some people will say this was because of overly aggressive regulation from blue states, though I don't think it would have been different even if the response was significantly more tepid.
By the time the vaccine was available, we'd had a year of people screaming that Fauci was a satanist and that we just needed to accept deaths in order to keep the economy moving. The pump was primed for the vaccine to be made into an extreme partisan issue. Trump's rhetoric didn't help things.
This very naturally spread outwards, latching on to pre-existing antivaxx sentiment derived from Wakefield's criminal paper. Once you are deciding that one vaccine is actually a mind control serum, it isn't a terribly large jump to decide that they are all lowering sperm counts or whatever.
An aspect of this phenomenon (though not the entire explanation): Conservatives tend to oppose initiatives that are broadly beneficial - especially if they stand to help marginalized groups - if they require even a minor or suspected sacrifice on their part. In this case, inclusive of having to sublimate oneself to a public health campaign/the purported risk of side effects or autism, respectively.
I've also noticed that conservatives tend to have a pronounced reaction to the prospect of ills that have visited marginalized groups also becoming their problem. The US has a limited but sharp history of medical exploitation, particularly of minorities. Many conservatives think, "We're next, unless we resist forcefully."
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that pharmaceutical companies are profit driven and large swaths of the country have been impacted by pill addictions.
Trust the science- the pharmaceutical industry pushed the idea that Oxy is a less addictive than morphine. State medical boards across the country put their thumbs in their pockets.
But wait there's more! The whole concept of selling SSRIs to people based on another lie that they have a "chemical imbalance" when exercise has proven to be more beneficial.
What else? Oh, mass prescribing stimulants to children.
As a progressive, I agree that Big Pharma's profit motive is a major problem when it comes to public health campaigns like mass vaccination, and that those companies have not remotely answered adequately for many of their past misdeeds.
This is political drivel meant to superficially denounce "conservatives" by using soft words ("tend to," "broadly beneficial," "marginalized," "minor or suspected," "many conservatives") and it falls apart upon closer scrutiny.
The hardest part of modern day political discourse is saying something that is insightful while being concrete and, for insults/criticisms, not equally applicable to the "other" side. You haven't done that here. You can replace "conservative" with "liberal" in your post and have it be just as applicable because you haven't actually said anything.
A lot of comments without any mention of how our public health officials, previously respected, managed to lose the confidence of the public by ends-justifies-the-means reasoning. Also the hypocrisy of many elites regarding social distancing for the masses, an arbitrary, never-justified buffer of six feet, exceptions for essential services like bars, dearth of criticism for certain close quarters protests, etc.
Public health was MIA for most of the epidemic regarding true and actionable information. And you're asking if this is just how the politics has played out? It's not at all nuanced.
So, in response to public health officials being wrong about X, we get new public health officials who are wrong about Y? I totally understand what you’re saying, but it doesn’t sound like they tried to explain that this was a bad campaign, they just ended it.
Not sure what you're looking for. Public health officials sacrificed their hard-won trust based on empiricism and truth-telling at the altar of expediency in an "emergency". After that's done, all that's left are arguments from authority. In that environment, apparently more people are receptive to the idea of picking their own authorities regardless of their objectively harebrained notions.
Fascism mostly works by distracting people from the real issues and giving them someone or something to direct their negative feelings towards instead, a seemingly simpler solution to their problems.
What or who that is, seems kind of arbitrary to me. It just has to be something people can get riled up against comparatively easily. Conspiracy theories (e.g. around vaccinations) are a good staring point for something like that.
Put another way, if you want power, you can just listen to what issues (regardless of whether they are real or even plausible) people complain about, and tell them you agree with them and are gonna fix that. And by the way, it's also why they can't have nice things, are in danger, or whatever else you can find that riles them up more. The point is, they'll follow you.
If you "well, actually" angry or otherwise irrational people instead, you're kinda painting a target on your back. Someone following the other strategy can now use _you_ as the scapegoat.
MAGA has targeted low information voters who aren't logical or rational. They don't think critically and believe what they see even if it contradicts something they previously believed.
The structural reason is mass manipulation through omnipresent disinformation campaigns enabled by social media addiction and user trauma.
I disagree and honestly don't know what you're referencing.
Maga has created an entire disinformation space in the past 5 or so years. Trump has Truth social. Musk bought Twitter. There are new entertainment outlets like Newsmaxx. An entire disinformation industry emerged from nothing.
Trump literally just banned AP from the press pool it created for speech violation.
My perception is that many on the right bought into conspiracies about Covid and the Covid vaccines. That led to them consuming more general antivax content, as well as an overall greater distrust of science and medicine in general, who were seen as the enemy.
The left took a hard stance in support of forcing COVID-19 vaccines based on mRNA technology (i.e. Pfizer's, Moderna's, etc.) on everyone, so now coronavirus (i.e. flu) vaccines are a left/right issue. My anecdotal evidence from the last 5 years is that I haven't seen a COVID-19 vaccine affect the outcome in individuals under 70 years old. I chose not to vaccinate myself, because I had the option of staying home and not contacting anyone for long lengths of time. Other family members made the choice to vaccinate. The severity of the disease progression between us was most strongly correlated with age, vaccination status didn't seem to play a role. First time I got COVID, I had to visit the hospital. Second time, a year later, I barely got a fever and didn't even need to take time off (obviously I stayed home!). Vaccinated family members had the same experience. The mRNA COVID-19 vaccine did not offer protection anywhere close to having had previous infection among the people I know.
That said, THIS IS NOT A STATEMENT FOR OR AGAINST mRNA VACCINES! TRUST YOUR DOCTOR! What I want to point out, is that such anecdotal experiences exist and I expect a lot of people have had the same experience, which would lead them to thinking they were tricked or forced by the Democratic administration to get vaccinated not for their benefit, but for the monetary profit of "Big Pharma". Absent a science-based education, a lot of people do not have the tools to judge the validity of their observations.
The entire messaging from the Biden administration during COVID was an abject PR disaster. Censoring people who had misgivings for the vaccine, or wanted to discuss implications of statistics, was also not helpful[1]. It erased trust in vaccines in general, erased trust in the Democratic party, erased trust in media, etc. I expect that for decades to come this event will be studied in management classes with workshops for "How would you have handled it better?" To be fair, I have no idea how it could have been handled better given the information at the time, but the gamble they took was severely miscalculated. I don't see how it could have been handled any worse.
[1] As an aside, I see a similar censorship-led effect amongst youth who say "The Holocaust didn't happen!" simply because questioning it leads to their post getting deleted and banned. It doesn't matter whether the arguments they want to discuss are in any way valid or absolutely fucking stupid - the fact they're getting censored is a signal that gets interpreted as "they are trying to hide the truth!".
Ultimately I think we need to tolerate a certain amount of misinformation, hate speech, and so on online, so that new people can see that yes - this thing was asked, it is a valid question, but it is absolutely wrong, because so and so. Too many of the once fully integrated communities online have become quite isolationist. People end up in echo chambers and cults, leading to the above described effects.
People will tell you it has something to do with covid, but this movement has been growing since the late 90's with the rise of the dot com millionaire nouveau riche - a large class of fairly uneducated people with a lot of money to swing around.
There are a myriad of complex reasons, but one important note is that many high profile donors of the current right wing believe in early 20th century Eugenics - blind to the advantages they have received from modern medicine and civilization, they see themselves as having "superior genes" and implements like vaccines as some kind of crutch that only prop up the weak and pollute the species with lineage that doesn't deserve to be there.
It's a belief system fully rooted in undeserved ego and pure scientific ignorance.
>many high profile donors of the current right wing believe in early 20th century Eugenics - blind to the advantages they have received from modern medicine and civilization, they see themselves as having "superior genes" and implements like vaccines as some kind of crutch that only prop up the weak and pollute the species with lineage that doesn't deserve to be there.
And the Republican party used to have the nickname the Wide Awakes and were home of large elements of the Progressive movement in the mid 19th through early 20th century. Teddy Roosevelt being a famous example of a Progressive President at the time.
So what does what a movement 100 years ago have to do with modern politics?
Edit: Since the comment died:
Who is even talking about eugenics in 2025 in the United States? Does either political party have an agenda of sterilizing mentally ill children? I haven’t even seen attack ads from Republicans saying Democrats are doing that. Trump nor Harris had anything about sterilizing mentally ill children on their campaign websites or even preventing it from happening. So where is this coming from?
I apologize if that sounded like I thought you were asking for that response. I only meant to point out that there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of nuance being discussed.
Is there any data on whether the flu vaccine is working this year? The fundamental problem with the flu vaccine is that they make it ahead of time guessing at what the flu will look like in the next flu season. If the flu mutates or otherwise the vaccine isn’t a good match it doesn’t work well. If we are having a particularly strong flu season it is likely because the flu vaccine isn’t helping much and the advertisements might be setting false expectations.
Thanks you for linking to that data. Glad they got it right this year.
It would be great if we could also see the results of a placebo controlled trial every year as well to remove all doubt about whether or not it worked during the season.
Catching the flu virus also gives a high temperature and fever and results in 100s of kids dying each year from the flu[0]. Vaccines have been shown to be much safer than exposing yourself to the virus.
Pharma companies are exempt from liabilities for vaccines because juries often rule for plaintiffs who are simply scientifically wrong. If a lawyer can convince a jury that 2+2=5, then the pharma company has to pay out. That was driving pharma companies out of the vaccine market, so the government stepped in and took over liability itself.
What a misleading headline (probably). What I'm reading is that a specific social media advertising campaign was ended. The article doesn't say that getting a vaccine is harder or more expensive than before, but given the context it's strongly implied.
I didn’t find it misleading, but maybe the context on the word campaign is different for me?
Campaign to me says some combination of ads and other types of promotion/information depending on the audience. So seems accurate.
they could have used ad campaign. Regardless this is extremely concerning. It sounded like the ad campaign was effective and supposed to run to the end of the flu season.
Edited for more clarity.
Are there sort of nuanced or structural reasons why the right seems more antivax especially recently? Or is it more just that’s the way the politics has sort of played out.
I believe it’s due to the way the COVID vaccine was handled. As an overly-broad rule of thumb, the right values freedom more than safety. The COVID vaccine was an example of very heavy-handed enforcement and I think whether for right or wrong the backlash has affected all vaccines.
My personal take, unrelated to politics, is that getting a vaccine for a virus from last year while the current strain has mutated isn’t a particularly stellar strategy, especially when I get the effects of the flu from the vaccine anyway.
I just roll the dice most years and I haven’t had the flu in over 10 years so it’s not worth it to me.
Wow. This comment showcases everything that's wrong with America today.
Trying to keep Americans alive is somehow political. The party of "pro life" was so against trying to save lives that we ended up with the highest COVID death rate in the world, and overall had between 4 and 5 million deaths above the normal rates (see CDC excess deaths between 2020 and 2022).
Also, the vaccine IS NOT ABOUT YOU. Vaccinations are about protecting the people who cannot get vaccinated. When you have 97%+ of the populace vaccinated then you are also protecting the most vulnerable from the same. This is why Measles is showing up again, because the people decrying vaccines have caused the coverage to drop below the critical threshold.
Until Americans, and even more importantly the "Christian Right" can wake up and actually start acting like Christ tells us to (feed the hungry, heal the sick, give to the poor, love your enemy, give away your wealth), the cruelty America is inflicting on ourselves and the world will only get worse.
The way you're writing is the actual reason why western society is taking such a nosedive. You're trying to shame someone deciding to do something optional because you, personally, believe it to be worthwhile.
The fact of the matter is that the virus being discussed here (the flu) isn't remotely deadly enough to warrant such an escalation my you.
And wherever the flu vaccine is actually worth it is way more disputed then you seem to think. Almost every doctor I've personally visited told me that its a waste of money for a healthy person, because it merely reduces the likelihood and potentially strength of the infection - at the cost of feeling bad for a few days after getting the shot. But I don't live in America, which is kinda the only place that ritually goes through flu vaccinations, yearly.
The only reference to Corona (before your escalation) was merely the acknowledgement that the ultimately questionable messaging during the pandemic likely caused the current push back against all vaccines. That's completely unrelated to wherever the first strain of Corona was deadly enough to warrant using untested vaccines at large.
I noticed this the other day on a mountain bike safety video. Americans tend to believe safety is a personal matter.
Look at trucks and SUVs. If you aren't driving a giant death machine that's on you.
Look at guns. It's your responsibility to protect yourself and your family from criminals with guns by owning a gun.
Etc etc.
[dead]
The covid vaccine is mostly about you. A couple months of partial protection against infection is not saving the world.
Where do you get "a couple months of partial protection" from? The numbers I saw are very different, take for instance:
> COVID-19 vaccine efficacy or effectiveness against severe disease remained high, although it did decrease somewhat by 6 months after full vaccination. By contrast, vaccine efficacy or effectiveness against infection and symptomatic disease decreased approximately 20–30 percentage points by 6 months.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8863502/
> In most studies, the vaccine efficacy or effectiveness against severe disease remained high (≥70%) for up to 6 months after vaccination for all four vaccines that we evaluated (and mostly ≥80% for the two mRNA vaccines).
This is the only place I could find in your source that mentions the efficacy numbers (not the drop in efficacy, which is what this is focused on), and it is only against severe disease.
The first one that came up for my search was this:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2...
The findings section shows that by the time omicron was around, you were at around 43% against infection by 112 days.
That was then. What is it today? How many people do you need to jab to prevent one transmission? And how many people are doing that? Uptake is very low today.
There was a time when "the VAX is not about you!" was plausible. That time has passed.
Thanks for the link. Yeah that's reasonable for 2025, it's perhaps comparable to the yearly flu vaccination now.
The effect on mortality is what mattered, and that effect was very significant in the risk groups.
Would have been even better if the effect on transmission had remained with the later variants, but unfortunately it didn't as the virus changed. Preventing transmission would be ideal, but that was just not possible with this particular virus and regular vaccines. But it still saved a lot of lives because of the very strong effect on mortality.
Yes. In other words, the covid vaccine is mostly for the benefit of the person taking it. In some risks groups that benefit was significant.
> The COVID vaccine was an example of very heavy-handed enforcement
In what country? Certainly not the US.
The only federal vaccine mandate that actually survived contact with the judiciary was for healthcare workers in medicare-funded hospitals.
There were obvious a variety of employers requiring their employees to be vaccinated, but that's not the government in any shape or form.
Employers were induced into requiring vaccination based on an impermissible OSHA rule that made vaccination mandatory. Acting as if the federal mandates eventually being stopped by the legal process means they did not shape private action is disingenuous.
The federal government’s response to Covid is one of the primary reasons we have seen such a huge backlash to the administrative state, culminating in Donald Trump’s purported current quest to dismantle it, ironically by using its own power to destabilize and destroy it. I say purported because whether Trump’s goal is to dismantle the administrative state or to reform it as a tool for himself, his friends, and his donors remains to be seen. It’s probably the latter.
One of the things I've picked up on over the years, very few people have even heard of the OSHA mandate.
It was: Every employer with 100+ employees would be required to have all employees get a COVID vaccination.
From memory, the series of events was:
* The initial mandate was issued
* It got challenged in courts and blocked
* Biden went on record speaking to the public, telling employers to do it anyway while they appealed
* The appeal failed and it was blocked again
* Only then did that administration drop it
During that interim where it was being appealed my at-the-time-fully-remote company was hinting they might be following it.
Yep I remember this quite vividly, and my brother even quit his job because they said get the jab or hit the road.
There were numerous state level policies at the advice of federal agencies such as the CDC, that prohibited participation in public events.
You'd think conservatives would be happy with states exercising their rights
> the right values freedom more than safety
I would phrase it more as "the right doesn't like to be told what to do". The left generally values "freedom" more in my experience, but they like telling people what to do.
I've always said that if Covid had been a little more deadly, or affected young people more, than the role would have been reversed and the Right would've been screaming to have the military force people to be indoors.
This makes no sense because Trump did all the covid stuff. It was corrected when Biden took office. I agree that covid enabled this transition away from reality, but because of people becoming segregated and always online.
Your personal take is wrong and you should get vaxxed for flu as doctors recommend.
> The COVID vaccine was an example of very heavy-handed enforcement
Do you have some concrete examples of this? I recall a lot of hyperventilating about the possibility of "vaccine passports" (complete with "mark of the beast" references), and a handful of instances where people got angry about COVID vaccination being folded into (decades-old) policies covering mandatory vaccinations for school/work, but not much beyond that. I carried a mask in case places had mask policies, but it never even occurred to me that I might need to prove that I was vaccinated.
Hawaii required vaccinations to visit from the mainland.
At one point, Hawaii State had one set of rules, and the Big Island another, which was ridiculous. But worse, when preparing for the former according to all the official instructions and forms there was no mention of the latter.
A multi-island visit of myself and two loved ones turned into quite a disaster as a result of the confusing redundant duplicative restrictions. Despite great pre-trip efforts to have all documentation (vaccines taken, State acknowledgment forms completed and returned as accepted, etc.)
We were not informed of the Big Islands special requirements until we arrived on the Big Island. If we left the airport for any reason we would immediately have gone into a two week quarantine - despite having all our vaccines.
It required a lot of pushing and pressing to let us get our luggage and buy and take last minute flights to Oahu (also gettting last minute accommodations) without being forced to leave the airport and go straight into quarantine. Because our luggage, as is usual when you arrive at what you believe to be your destination, was now outside departure security.
I was angry beyond all reason by the time we got out of there alive. Complete incompetent mess.
You’re complaining that you wanted to go to someone else’s home for your own personal enjoyment during a deadly pandemic and they made you take precautions so you didn’t end up killing or severely harming people?
Why do you value your fun time over people’s safety?
Wow. I don’t make assumptions often, but either you didn’t read what I wrote, or found it difficult to understand.
We carefully followed all State rules and regulations.
We got vaccinated.
We got vaccinated specifically by providers they limited us to. Which was not geographically easy for all of us.
We waited for provider approvals.
We filled in all State forms, provided all evidence and information.
We waited and eventually got State notifications that we were each validated to go.
That was on a challenging short schedule, because they wanted new vaccinations within a short window before the departure date. And twice we had to wait for delays by providers and the State we had no control over.
But we scrambled through their timeline and completely complied.
We brought printed copies ov everything. We had the site links to everything saved too, in case of any confusion.
We entered Hawaii going through a long line, cooperating with everyone and were then allowed to leave and enjoy Maui.
Then… well read what I wrote above again, if you need to.
And for reference, this was my second post-COVID trip to Hawaii, with the same itinerary, but I carefully checked all the same information and rules, made all the same preparations and we were all validated by the State in exactly the same way.
One island subsequently decided to handle things differently. A fact that was not reflected or mentioned in all the State’s information or forms that we encountered, and competed.
They introduced novel requirement that also needed to be made days in advance.
But they did not get any information about the islands break with the rest of the state, or the nature of those changes, posted anywhere State travelers got and submitted their information from the state. Nor did the States approvals mention any provisional aspects.
We were cleared by the State. As far as the State was concerned, we could go anywhere.
The result of one islands decision not to accept State approvals wasn’t just a disaster for us but many other travelers and the beleaguered staff at the arrivals of one airport, on the one rogue island, who had no idea what they were supposed to do while they held unhappy people in an airport, and only had ridiculously bad official options for them.
When we flew to Hawaii from the mainland, the airline verified ouur preparation for landing before giving us boarding passes to depart. Completely professionally handled by the State.
When just going from island to island, as I had recently done before, no mention of any second set of new one-island regulations were mentioned, until we and other unhappy people arrived after a 30 minute in-state island hop.
Where the heck did you read any lack of appreciation for “hospitality”?
I certainly attended IT industry events that required showing your vaccination card. To say nothing of my company requiring proof at one point. So, yes, there were times you needed to prove you were vaccinated.
ADDED: Add to this the fact that at least at one point, vaccines were seen as much more of a magical talisman to prevent population spread than they turned out to really be in spite of having at least a degree of effectiveness in mitigating individual severity.
> industry events ... my company
Neither of them are the government.
Private individuals made private decisions about who they may associate with. If anything people should be protesting the existence of the first amendment.
Companies required the, because they were federal contractors and Biden signed an EO that lasted for a few months before being overturned. Not anti-vax myself, but the requirement for big IT companies (all do a bit federal work) was definitely driven by the federal government.
Pretending that the federal government played no role in guiding the actions of private entities is disingenuous at best. I actually have no problems with such actions given what was known at the time. But the fact that the federal government didn't directly put these sorts of requirements in place is largely beside the point.
There were also travel restrictions at the state level. As I recall, at one point I could only travel from MA to NH for medical-related reasons (probably some other exceptions too and it's not like your papers were being checked at the border.) ADDED: As someone else noted, there were lots of restrictions traveling to Hawaii.
Lots of people were feeling their way in the dark. I attended an event at the beginning of March before everything went crazy in the US. (An event right after was canceled. Seemed like an overreaction; it wasn't.) We were all washing our hands and elbow-bumping but nothing else.
> Pretending that the federal government played no role in guiding the actions of private entities is disingenuous at best.
And what would conflating State & Private action with Federal actions be?
This is literally what this thread is about. People are having backlash against the federal government for actions the federal government did not do. Even Republican lead states like Florida had travel restrictions [1] (keep in mind, Trump was president in 2020 when these restrictions were enacted).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Florida
The OSHA mandate was federal level: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/25/covid-vaccine-mandate-osha-w...
Most people don't seem to know about it because it never officially went into effect, but to get there it had to be struck down in courts twice and Biden was telling employers to voluntarily do it because of the appeal. Plenty were in preparation for it going into effect.
The state of Minnesota, under Tim Walz, had all sorts of heavy handed, government mandated rules about things. According to the decree, people couldn't visit relatives, couldn't go to funerals, in reality, could not go out at all. It was ridiculous and over zealous.
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2020/03/25/minnesotas-covid19-...
8,000 Troops got kicked out of the military for not getting the vaccine and are going to be invited back now. https://www.army.mil/article/283143/dod_prepares_invitation_...
If you actually knew about the military, you’d understand that they make you get vaccinated for everything. Combat readiness of the forces is paramount. It probably seems foreign to you, but the military is an organization that eschews selfish individualism for the good of the collective and their mission.
This administration just pardoned a whole pile of traitors and war criminals. 8000 anti-vaxxers is small potatoes.
>> hyperventilating about the possibility of "vaccine passports"
There is a very bright line between people who think such measures are fine and those that do not.
It's not that bright. I'd want to know the specifics/relative risks/effectiveness/etc. to know how I felt.
Yup, run the numbers and do what seems best for the collective even if some individuals don't agree. To me, that is clearly on one side of the bright line.
Sorry, but it also depends on individual risk. Though that probably won't be clear. And probably has some guardrails based on government authorization.
Much of the US right was also making loud noises about non-vaccine miracle cures and expressing scepticism about the vaccine before it was even approved...
And yeah, the irony is that throwing money at vaccine rollouts was one of the few good things the last Trump administration did, but trying to talk about it was about the only thing that could get him booed by his own fanbase
States, eg WA, had policies that prevented activities unless you were vaccinated.
As someone else said, generally the requirements in Washington that state government imposed on non-government entities was masking. Vaccination was encouraged but not required. It was required for various government employees.
Washington ended up being one of the 10 states with the least COVID deaths per capita.
They consistently had "or wear a mask" options.
Many private functions/companies required both. It's simply counterfactual to say there were no vaccination mandates--and they weren't limited to healthcare settings.
Quite different from state policies at this point.
To pretend that those private mandates were independent of what government at various levels was saying is counterfactual. It's not like individual companies were just making up policies in a vacuum. If governments were saying (almost certainly incorrectly) "Hey, business as usual" companies would have acted differently.
As recently as a year ago, the right wing vaccine opposition was focused almost exclusively on mRNA Covid vaccines. This sudden opposition to ALL vaccines, from Polio to Flu vaccines, dates back to when RFK announced he was suspending his campaign and joining Trump or shortly thereafter.
The right doesn’t value freedom. Who convinced you of this lie? The right adores authoritarian rulers. They adore a rigid social order that dictates what privileges certain people have.
The right is the most anti-freedom a political movement can get!
Yes, but this doesn't explain the safety-related fear-mongering that is also popular on the right (it gives you autism, etc).
Covid.
Covid response was partisanized very quickly. Some people will say this was because of overly aggressive regulation from blue states, though I don't think it would have been different even if the response was significantly more tepid.
By the time the vaccine was available, we'd had a year of people screaming that Fauci was a satanist and that we just needed to accept deaths in order to keep the economy moving. The pump was primed for the vaccine to be made into an extreme partisan issue. Trump's rhetoric didn't help things.
This very naturally spread outwards, latching on to pre-existing antivaxx sentiment derived from Wakefield's criminal paper. Once you are deciding that one vaccine is actually a mind control serum, it isn't a terribly large jump to decide that they are all lowering sperm counts or whatever.
An aspect of this phenomenon (though not the entire explanation): Conservatives tend to oppose initiatives that are broadly beneficial - especially if they stand to help marginalized groups - if they require even a minor or suspected sacrifice on their part. In this case, inclusive of having to sublimate oneself to a public health campaign/the purported risk of side effects or autism, respectively.
I've also noticed that conservatives tend to have a pronounced reaction to the prospect of ills that have visited marginalized groups also becoming their problem. The US has a limited but sharp history of medical exploitation, particularly of minorities. Many conservatives think, "We're next, unless we resist forcefully."
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that pharmaceutical companies are profit driven and large swaths of the country have been impacted by pill addictions.
Trust the science- the pharmaceutical industry pushed the idea that Oxy is a less addictive than morphine. State medical boards across the country put their thumbs in their pockets.
But wait there's more! The whole concept of selling SSRIs to people based on another lie that they have a "chemical imbalance" when exercise has proven to be more beneficial.
What else? Oh, mass prescribing stimulants to children.
As a progressive, I agree that Big Pharma's profit motive is a major problem when it comes to public health campaigns like mass vaccination, and that those companies have not remotely answered adequately for many of their past misdeeds.
This is political drivel meant to superficially denounce "conservatives" by using soft words ("tend to," "broadly beneficial," "marginalized," "minor or suspected," "many conservatives") and it falls apart upon closer scrutiny.
The hardest part of modern day political discourse is saying something that is insightful while being concrete and, for insults/criticisms, not equally applicable to the "other" side. You haven't done that here. You can replace "conservative" with "liberal" in your post and have it be just as applicable because you haven't actually said anything.
Ironic reply. Feel free to scrutinize.
A lot of comments without any mention of how our public health officials, previously respected, managed to lose the confidence of the public by ends-justifies-the-means reasoning. Also the hypocrisy of many elites regarding social distancing for the masses, an arbitrary, never-justified buffer of six feet, exceptions for essential services like bars, dearth of criticism for certain close quarters protests, etc.
Public health was MIA for most of the epidemic regarding true and actionable information. And you're asking if this is just how the politics has played out? It's not at all nuanced.
So, in response to public health officials being wrong about X, we get new public health officials who are wrong about Y? I totally understand what you’re saying, but it doesn’t sound like they tried to explain that this was a bad campaign, they just ended it.
Not sure what you're looking for. Public health officials sacrificed their hard-won trust based on empiricism and truth-telling at the altar of expediency in an "emergency". After that's done, all that's left are arguments from authority. In that environment, apparently more people are receptive to the idea of picking their own authorities regardless of their objectively harebrained notions.
If the "libs" are for it, they are against it.
The "libs" are not for it. Some libs are, but anti-vax has been a mainstay of liberal "soccer-moms" for decades before somehow the right got involved.
Look to Marin County--the well-known Trump hotbed. /s
Especially if certain "libs" are. It was easy with Bill Gates, Soros, AOC all getting vaccine around the same time.
This is literally all it is. Funny thing is that the Covid vaccine was developed and rolled out under Trump.
Fascism mostly works by distracting people from the real issues and giving them someone or something to direct their negative feelings towards instead, a seemingly simpler solution to their problems.
What or who that is, seems kind of arbitrary to me. It just has to be something people can get riled up against comparatively easily. Conspiracy theories (e.g. around vaccinations) are a good staring point for something like that.
Put another way, if you want power, you can just listen to what issues (regardless of whether they are real or even plausible) people complain about, and tell them you agree with them and are gonna fix that. And by the way, it's also why they can't have nice things, are in danger, or whatever else you can find that riles them up more. The point is, they'll follow you.
If you "well, actually" angry or otherwise irrational people instead, you're kinda painting a target on your back. Someone following the other strategy can now use _you_ as the scapegoat.
MAGA has targeted low information voters who aren't logical or rational. They don't think critically and believe what they see even if it contradicts something they previously believed.
The structural reason is mass manipulation through omnipresent disinformation campaigns enabled by social media addiction and user trauma.
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I disagree and honestly don't know what you're referencing.
Maga has created an entire disinformation space in the past 5 or so years. Trump has Truth social. Musk bought Twitter. There are new entertainment outlets like Newsmaxx. An entire disinformation industry emerged from nothing.
Trump literally just banned AP from the press pool it created for speech violation.
My perception is that many on the right bought into conspiracies about Covid and the Covid vaccines. That led to them consuming more general antivax content, as well as an overall greater distrust of science and medicine in general, who were seen as the enemy.
The left took a hard stance in support of forcing COVID-19 vaccines based on mRNA technology (i.e. Pfizer's, Moderna's, etc.) on everyone, so now coronavirus (i.e. flu) vaccines are a left/right issue. My anecdotal evidence from the last 5 years is that I haven't seen a COVID-19 vaccine affect the outcome in individuals under 70 years old. I chose not to vaccinate myself, because I had the option of staying home and not contacting anyone for long lengths of time. Other family members made the choice to vaccinate. The severity of the disease progression between us was most strongly correlated with age, vaccination status didn't seem to play a role. First time I got COVID, I had to visit the hospital. Second time, a year later, I barely got a fever and didn't even need to take time off (obviously I stayed home!). Vaccinated family members had the same experience. The mRNA COVID-19 vaccine did not offer protection anywhere close to having had previous infection among the people I know.
That said, THIS IS NOT A STATEMENT FOR OR AGAINST mRNA VACCINES! TRUST YOUR DOCTOR! What I want to point out, is that such anecdotal experiences exist and I expect a lot of people have had the same experience, which would lead them to thinking they were tricked or forced by the Democratic administration to get vaccinated not for their benefit, but for the monetary profit of "Big Pharma". Absent a science-based education, a lot of people do not have the tools to judge the validity of their observations.
The entire messaging from the Biden administration during COVID was an abject PR disaster. Censoring people who had misgivings for the vaccine, or wanted to discuss implications of statistics, was also not helpful[1]. It erased trust in vaccines in general, erased trust in the Democratic party, erased trust in media, etc. I expect that for decades to come this event will be studied in management classes with workshops for "How would you have handled it better?" To be fair, I have no idea how it could have been handled better given the information at the time, but the gamble they took was severely miscalculated. I don't see how it could have been handled any worse.
[1] As an aside, I see a similar censorship-led effect amongst youth who say "The Holocaust didn't happen!" simply because questioning it leads to their post getting deleted and banned. It doesn't matter whether the arguments they want to discuss are in any way valid or absolutely fucking stupid - the fact they're getting censored is a signal that gets interpreted as "they are trying to hide the truth!".
Ultimately I think we need to tolerate a certain amount of misinformation, hate speech, and so on online, so that new people can see that yes - this thing was asked, it is a valid question, but it is absolutely wrong, because so and so. Too many of the once fully integrated communities online have become quite isolationist. People end up in echo chambers and cults, leading to the above described effects.
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People will tell you it has something to do with covid, but this movement has been growing since the late 90's with the rise of the dot com millionaire nouveau riche - a large class of fairly uneducated people with a lot of money to swing around.
There are a myriad of complex reasons, but one important note is that many high profile donors of the current right wing believe in early 20th century Eugenics - blind to the advantages they have received from modern medicine and civilization, they see themselves as having "superior genes" and implements like vaccines as some kind of crutch that only prop up the weak and pollute the species with lineage that doesn't deserve to be there.
It's a belief system fully rooted in undeserved ego and pure scientific ignorance.
>many high profile donors of the current right wing believe in early 20th century Eugenics - blind to the advantages they have received from modern medicine and civilization, they see themselves as having "superior genes" and implements like vaccines as some kind of crutch that only prop up the weak and pollute the species with lineage that doesn't deserve to be there.
Quite a claim. Where is your evidence of this?
https://x.com/elonmusk
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And the Republican party used to have the nickname the Wide Awakes and were home of large elements of the Progressive movement in the mid 19th through early 20th century. Teddy Roosevelt being a famous example of a Progressive President at the time.
So what does what a movement 100 years ago have to do with modern politics?
Edit: Since the comment died: Who is even talking about eugenics in 2025 in the United States? Does either political party have an agenda of sterilizing mentally ill children? I haven’t even seen attack ads from Republicans saying Democrats are doing that. Trump nor Harris had anything about sterilizing mentally ill children on their campaign websites or even preventing it from happening. So where is this coming from?
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Conservatives generally focus on forces that directly affect them, progressives generally focus on forces that affect others.
Through this lens, much of political nonsense in the US can be understood.
Is it limited to the right? Have you seen the uptake numbers for covid shots this year?
Many of the replies so far seem to be focused on how dumb/evil/selfish/etc the entire right is. I wonder if thats the nuance you were looking for?
> Many of the replies so far seem to be focused on how dumb/evil/selfish/etc the entire right is. I wonder if thats the nuance you were looking for?
Decidedly not
I apologize if that sounded like I thought you were asking for that response. I only meant to point out that there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of nuance being discussed.
Is there any data on whether the flu vaccine is working this year? The fundamental problem with the flu vaccine is that they make it ahead of time guessing at what the flu will look like in the next flu season. If the flu mutates or otherwise the vaccine isn’t a good match it doesn’t work well. If we are having a particularly strong flu season it is likely because the flu vaccine isn’t helping much and the advertisements might be setting false expectations.
https://www.cdc.gov/fluview/surveillance/2025-week-06.html
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/season/2024-2025.html
It looks like the vaccine was right on the money this year. They recommended H1N1 and H3N2 for the vaccines and that's what is circulating.
Thanks you for linking to that data. Glad they got it right this year.
It would be great if we could also see the results of a placebo controlled trial every year as well to remove all doubt about whether or not it worked during the season.
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Catching the flu virus also gives a high temperature and fever and results in 100s of kids dying each year from the flu[0]. Vaccines have been shown to be much safer than exposing yourself to the virus.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/whats-new/2023-2024-pediatric-deaths...
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Children are one of the high risk populations for flu. That is why kids are a priority of flu vaccines.
Pharma companies are exempt from liabilities for vaccines because juries often rule for plaintiffs who are simply scientifically wrong. If a lawyer can convince a jury that 2+2=5, then the pharma company has to pay out. That was driving pharma companies out of the vaccine market, so the government stepped in and took over liability itself.