What’s more interesting is that most of these people will survive this episode (given the known mortality data) and thus will “win” the debate (from their point of view) and will never ever trust the government (or health authorities) again. That’s the biggest downside in reality, and regaining the trust is going to be extremely complicated.
I'm not trying to be flippant when I say that it's good that they will not trust government again, as long as that leads to greater public vigilance against government's creeping excesses and self-serving propaganda. If it prevents the next Iraq war and the next Japanese internment, I'm all for it.
> If it prevents the next Iraq war and the next Japanese internment, I'm all for it.
How would it do that? Government didn't asked people about either of those. And if anything the people responsible for Iraq war will benefit from antivaxers votes.
Seriously. The vendiagram of people who would be for interment of a minority they distrust or a war for retribution, and the people currently rallying against mask/vaccine's would almost be a perfect circle.
> people who would be for interment of a minority they distrust
If the government announced tomorrow that they would be putting all unvaccinated people in internment camps for everyone's safety, how many people do you think would be in favor? I've certainly seen plenty of comments on the internet that would suggest it's not zero.
> If the government announced tomorrow that they would be putting all unvaccinated people in internment camps for everyone's safety, how many people do you think would be in favor?
If messaged properly (eg: getting “the experts” to hint at it, getting NYT to push for it, etc) I bet a shockingly high amount of people in blue regions would cheer it on.
I’m convinced that all that kept this from escalating to violence is the fact that the media and “the experts” haven’t given permission. If they said to “take matters in into your own hands when around somebody who isn’t masked” I bet there would be lot of violence…
I think Tucker Carlson saying that if you see a child with a mask, the parents should be arrested for child abuse, and that you should go up and rip the mask off is along the lines of the media giving permission for violence over masks... but to a different side than you're thinking.
There's already been violence over vaccination and masks. Mostly from the usual side (alt-right): [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]
It's one thing to try to be objective and look at both sides. It's another to purposefully present a political issue as independent from political views. Anti-vax and anti-mask attitudes, conspiracy theories and tendency to violence are positively correlated with right-wing political views. That's just how it is.
> I’m convinced that all that kept this from escalating to violence is the fact that the media and “the experts” haven’t given permission.
Well, duh, if mainstream goes crazy then everything goes crazy. We know that since at least WW2.
The problem with alt-right is exactly that - their media and their experts give permission for violence, because anything that doesn't go their way is "treason" and "conspiracy". Compare what happened after Trump won with what happened after Biden did. One side did an investigation and protested. The other occupied the Congress.
> Anti-vax and anti-mask attitudes, conspiracy theories and tendency to violence are positively correlated with right-wing political views. That's just how it is.
Sounds like a decent reason to maybe keep these people separate from the rest of the population, just for a little while until everything is back to normal. How would you feel about that? Would you cheer? Would you miss a paycheck to protest in the streets?
No, it's just the question I originally came into this thread with. Someone brought up "internment of a minority that they distrust" framing it as something that was specific to one side.
It occurred to me that people who are unvaccinated fit that classifier, and that I've seen plenty of dehumanization of these people in comments on the internet. I saw your comment as not quite to that level, but along the same lines (lumping unvaccinated people in with alt right violence).
So I thought you might be a good test case. If they rounded up the unvaccinated, would you stand up for them? Or would you do what most people do in most situations, and keep your head to the grindstone, focus on feeding your family and paying your mortgage?
I would like to think that is something that would be acceptable to a fringe minority. Mandates are one thing; forced detention is like multiple steps further in the wrong direction.
You are on hacker news. Left is good. Right is bad.
Facts and reality will not change this formula.
You are absolutely right. Just read the comments, not even "on the internet" but right here on HN. Some even seem in favour of a... "more extreme" solution yet than internment, and have not a shred of self-reflection when they talk a mad game about others being bad people.
I think that Venn diagram may have shifted a fair amount lately, partly because of increasing skepticism towards the government on the political right. When the government begins to portray you as the enemy, it makes you think twice about its depiction of others.
> I'm not trying to be flippant when I say that it's good that they will not trust government again, as long as that leads to greater public vigilance against government's creeping excesses and self-serving propaganda.
These same people are hyper-credulous of extremist wingnuts who manipulate them, just not centrist/progressive politicians and news media. They're only "skeptical" of the mainstream.
When it's climate-change on the table instead of COVID, they will behave the same, actively sabotaging necessary measures to protect the habitability of the Earth.
When your grandkids ask you why your generation doomed them, what will you tell them?
But the upside is that hopefully the govt/health authorities will learn a lesson and be better in the future. Id say in these situations any fallout is always the govt's fault since it is there to serve the people- a case of the customer is always right.
> But the upside is that hopefully the govt/health authorities will learn a lesson and be better in the future.
But there's only so much they can do. Sowing distrust has proven to provide short-term self-benefit to many powerful interests (e.g. political factions, partisan media). Even if the health authorities have a perfect strategy, those interests will find an opening to subvert it (e.g. portraying initial confusion as lying).
In a multi party system sowing distrust in an opposing party doesn't help your party, it mostly helps parties adjacent to that party. So then the goal becomes to be as trustworthy as possible to the public rather than make the public hate the enemy. It really solves many of these issues.
> In a multi party system sowing distrust in an opposing party doesn't help your party, it mostly helps parties adjacent to that party. So then the goal becomes to be as trustworthy as possible to the public rather than make the public hate the enemy. It really solves many of these issues.
Does it through? I suppose what I had in mind wasn't so much narrowly-focused electioneering, but broader and somewhat sloppy gesticulations towards an ideological tendency. For instance, if there were two left-wing parties, a Rush Limbaugh could get both of them by encouraging his listeners to distrust the "left."
The voters of those left-wing parties identify as "left" so if a Rush Limbaugh encourages people to distrust the "left" then those voters simply distrust Rush Limbaugh instead of altering their vote. Otherwise, if he covers Left-1 party with shit, Left-2 gains voters; if he points out a scandal in Left-2, Left-1 gains voters; if he points out that both Left-1 and Left-2 have a horrible foreign policy, there's likely Left-3 that opposes Left-1 and Left-2 on that policy, but he won't convince them to vote for a Right party if there are reasonable Left options. Unlike the two-party scenario where you might disagree with your "main" party on a single key issue and thus feel forced to vote for "the other" party, in a multi-party environment you generally choose an alternative that's quite close in other aspects as well.
> The voters of those left-wing parties identify as "left" so if a Rush Limbaugh encourages people to distrust the "left" then those voters simply distrust Rush Limbaugh instead of altering their vote.
But what about the center?
> if he points out that both Left-1 and Left-2 have a horrible foreign policy, there's likely Left-3 that opposes Left-1 and Left-2 on that policy
That seems to assume there's a party for every combination of views, but is that realistic? How frequently is there a party that's say, hard right on social policy but very left on economic policy? I get the impression that it usually plays out that you get a few parties that are different "degrees" of left or right (say hard left, left, and center left).
I don't think it is that unrealistic (not every combination, but popular ones). The results from parts of Europe that have many political parties, eg. Germany, show voters being relatively fluid over just a few years [1]. The US, on the other hand, has been consistently split in roughly two for ages. The combination of right on social/left on economics may be somewhat strange in the US now (and perhaps the west in general?), but in China it's the norm.
Such pandemics don't start every other year. Last great one was 100 years ago. So i wouldn't worry at all for the "winners", there's plenty of time for generations to refresh.
Worry about government's inability to learn and improve based on past mistakes, also complacency. It's not hard to imagine 100 years from now, popular presidential guy spearheading the next great pandemic, calming the subjects down with the great medical advancements they had since today and how well prepared they are. Until nature, as it always does, disregards everything and does its own thing unchallenged.
> vaccine hesitancy will impact vaccines for HPV, measles, HEP B, etc. etc. for generations
This will be geographically--and, over time, economically--isolated.
Nearly 80% of American adults and over ¾ of eligible Americans have taken at least one dose of a Covid vaccine [1]. In the 65+ population, the figure is 95%. This simply isn't a big group of people, noisy as they may be. (Caveat: the group of people who are philosophically against vaccine mandates, but will get vaccinated anyway, is larger.)
We have experience containing outbreaks in small, isolated groups of high-risk populations. Even in densely populated places, e.g. measles in Williamsburg. The advantage is you know ex ante where the risk is, versus having the possibility of it popping up at random anywhere in the country.
I personally think we should stop labeling a whole diverse group under the most stupid categorization we can think of. Media is also guilty of this, for example when some outlet posted something like “anti-vaxxers are now drinking betadine” despite being an isolated act of stupidity. This type of confrontation will only yield more division and therefore enhance distrust.
I wonder, do we expect the rate of pandemics to increase or decrease over time?
On the one hand, you might assume the rate of pandemics is proportional to the size of the human population; more people, more hosts for mutating viruses, greater odds of one mutating to a pandemic-causing disease. There have been roughly 400 billion person-years lived since the last pandemic, but given the larger populations, we'd expect to accumulate another 400 billion person-years by around 2070.
On the other hand, you might assume the rate of pandemics is proportional to the size of the animal populations humans interact with. More animals to breed the viruses, more interactions to pass along the next candidate pandemic. In this case, we might expect more than a century for the next pandemic, since the next century isn't expected to be nearly as kind to animal populations.
(Obviously the situation is more complicated than an either-or, and has many contributing factors, and is stochastic in any case.)
Whether you believe SARS-CoV-2 came from a lab or not, the fact is the technology for engineering pandemic-causing viruses exists and hostile regimes have given no assurances that they won't continue to develop that technology, so we're well beyond any limits imposed by mutation and natural selection.
Tinkering with virus genetics is arguably high school level, garage lab science at this point, advantaged by mass production of almost everything you need, rna editing and crispr methodologies are well beyond published and into the "follow this tutorial to make a glowing frog/beer/bunny"and "here's how to add arbitrary sequences to rna."
It's almost certain that bad actors will make use of the available tech. We'll likely see many synthetic plagues before regulation and international controls catch up.
...are you not counting HIV as a recent major pandemic? SARS? MERS?
It is also worth remembering that for decades we have been carefully monitoring the spread of infectious diseases to prevent major pandemics from forming. There was no political controversy surrounding those efforts prior to COVID19, not in the US or anywhere else.
Major - yes. "Great" - far from it. COVID is basically unstoppable despite the draconian measures lots of countries took. Post SMS if you're going out, yet your hospitals remain overloaded - HIV, SARS, MERS don't even come close to that.
Compared to COVID-19, HIV/AIDS has killed far more people worldwide and has an untreated fatality rate orders of magnitude higher. But it spreads and progresses more slowly so it seems less dramatic.
HIV was discovered in the 80s of a past century. COVID rocked the world since month 1 of its inception and to this day keeps on rocking, despite the radical measures to contain it and the unseen global vaccination campaign.
Yes, lying governments don't deserve to be trusted. It is still unfortunate that the damage done may be so severe that for some people it will be irreparable. This isn't an absolution of the establishment, or a condemnation of those who lost trust.
Increased barriers to developing better establishments in the future are still regrettable.
You can't really win the debate anyway: if everybody had followed strict isolation from the get go there wouldn't have been a pandemic and people would have said the restrictions were completely uncalled for.
This is one of the greatest falsehoods out there. A stricter lockdown wouldn't have changed much. Australia and New Zealand couldn't keep cases from popping up despite incredibly strict border control and lockdown procedures. There are also animal hosts that can incubate this virus, sure you can cull a mink farm, but you can't really do that to a wild deer herd.
Australia and New Zealand actually did quite well until delta came along.
Speaking from Melbourne, Australia here, it certainly preserved life and (in the long run) the economy until vaccines came along (the rollout of which has been terribly bungled, but that's a different story.)
And the minute the restrictions were lifted the virus would be back again. Sorry. The idea that if we did lockdowns “right” this would be over is a lie. And to date I’ve yet to hear any “expert” tell the public that a strict lockdown wouldn’t work… all the more reason to not trust them.
