You’d think someone who preaches via “just my opinion” type posts wouldn’t feel the need to use “v@ccine” and “v1rus” to hide their posts from content moderators... It’s almost as if she knows she’s doing something wrong... 🤔
Idiot. There is a reason she is writing "v1rus." I actually loathe anti vaccers. They are the most selfish people. They bang on about their choice but its other people who they get sick. They should be made to watch videos of babies with whooping cough.
I went in to anaphylactic shock four years ago after getting a flu jab so they haven't let me get it since. I count on others to get it on my behalf. I have no idea if they'll let me get COVID vaccine or not, hopefully it's completely different. Ours is being rolled out on a phased basis and likely to get to my demographic during the summer.
It's incredibly selfish. And also - and I don't really know how to form these ideas yet - usually coming from an insanely privileged, white space. People who have healthcare around them and have no experienced a lot of issues. It's a big, big white thing. It really is. White saviour complex has a lot to do with these gurus.
I’ve had the vaccine, I had a little arm ache but I was tended when I got it because I’d stupidly put a long sleeved t shirt on and had to pop my arm out of the head hole! I feel totally fine and so do the majority of my friends who’ve had it, some feel a little icky but they all feel a LOT better than the people we know who’ve had covid! The way these influencers work is ridiculous, the vaccine doesn’t affect fertility or anything else, it’s so valuable to regaining normality in society if like me you’re unfortunate to live somewhere where covid is killing thousands a day
I haaate these Gwynethy wellness broads. They do so much damage. Here is the bottom line about vaccines (and really any medical procedure): risk vs. benefit! The risk of getting the vaccine is negligible, but the benefit of literally lifesaving for you AND anyone you come in contact with. It's pretty simple.
I don't think it's just selfishness. I think science education is sorely lacking. I know it is in this country. If you understand the scientific method, you can understand any science. That's really it.
Unfortunately, humans are terrible at risk assessment. Add in confirmation bias, and some people conclude they'd rather risk getting the disease with 0.1% risk of dying than taking a vaccine that has unknown long-term effects. (Yes, I know that number is wrong, there are other issues, etc, but it is one of the arguments I've seen.)
She's a covidiot. Full stop. I wish more people could see through the dangerous bullshit these people spout. In another vein, I'd love to see you write a little bit about how much vitriol we returning overseas kiwis are facing from a seemingly large group of home-based kiwis, mainly based on fear and misinformation. And I suspect a splash of Tall Poppy. It's really upsetting, especially after all that we have been/are going through 10 months later compared to NZ's 3 or 4 week lockdown. Quite desperate and often heartbreaking times. 💔
Yeah, I have friends coming back and it's... not nice. I have been thinking about this a little, and would like some first person input, but they are all a bit shellshocked to write. But it's in mind. It really sucks.
Re: vitriol faced by returning kiwis, I noticed this the most (on FB at least) last August during the first community outbreak since NZ declared itself "virus-free" in June. Even before that, it felt like in the comments of every covid update, there was at least one person screaming for borders to be closed, even to citizens and residents. There are usually others that would reply "we can't, because Bill of Rights", or "what if it was you or your loved one", but you know how these "discussions" in FB comments often go - no one's mind is changed.
So my own personal theory on the vitriol, based on what I had read in those comments: these people think "we did the hard yards, now you're coming here to share in the fruits of our labour, plus by coming here, you'll probably undo all our hard work". (As I tried to write a generic version, i.e. no mention of the virus, I realised this might be how anti-immigrants or people who don't want poorer people moving into their neighbourhood think of their own predicament. But those are other big topics I'm even less qualified to comment on.) The lockdowns were hard on a lot of people, and while none of us want to go back into lockdown, some have made the conclusion that "lockdowns are caused by covid in the community, covid only comes from overseas, therefore if no one from overseas is allowed back in, we don't get lockdowns again." In August (and I suppose later, I just stopped reading comments as much), there were also some saying "well why didn't they come back sooner? They're only coming back now because it's worse where they are and they can't take it anymore". Again, thankfully, there were replies of "airlines shut down and people's tickets were cancelled repeatedly", "not everyone can uproot their lives and move countries just like that", "tickets are so much more expensive now", and "there are only so many spaces in MIQ". Also again, sadly, no minds were changed.
I guess it's a long-winded way of saying people tend to react more emotionally to perceived threats, and it may take a while before they can see the nuances of their situation, let alone those of others.
P.S. I hope I haven't written anything blatantly wrong above, as I have zero qualifications on covid or psychology (individual or social), so everything I've said are from a layman's point of view, a layman who also spends way too much time on FB 😅
P.P.S. I hope I conveyed my thoughts clearly, as I had a lot of trouble articulating this last August, when a friend of a friend in Europe asked about the vitriol.
Cecile you have summed it up exactly, thanks for replying. The other positive I take from your comments is that it's an opportunity for me to widen my perspective and empathy net too x
Also Angela Hitler has to be some weird warping together of Angela Merkel and Adolf Hitlers sister (actual name Angela Hitler) in the minds of Q idiots.
‘Straight’ chiropractors (I.e. the orthodox ones who reject evidence based medicine) are like the OG of antivaxers, been against them since the 1890s. Back then chiropractic ‘theory’ (I’m using that term very loosely) had a lot of overlap with germ theory denialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germ_theory_denialism which was all the rage in Pasteur’s time. Pretty much all human progress in medicine has been rejected by these types.
First of all, “sisterhood of the traveling pandemic exploiters”...priceless!!! 🤣
Second, this has been a thorny issue for me personally as I am a physician and my brother has been, with waxing and waning levels of enthusiasm, into various conspiracies ranging from Bilderberg Group and Bohemian Grove to fake moon landing. He has never been too hot on vaccines even prior to COVID which has, at times, led to heated discussions between us. With COVID, he was pretty intolerable on FB and would recklessly post to register his distaste for various mandates. Sometimes, he will point out something truly in conflict and ridiculous (as some of the early guidance here in the states was muddled and unscientific and mixed with a lot of political identity). He responds to reason... sometimes. And it would be wrong, I think to throw out his concern as just being stupid or uninformed as he was not able to work for quite awhile and was worried for months if he might lose his house. So...I get it when people are upset and I think we sound really elitist when we on the left or in the “scientific community” say “just shut up and sacrifice” when people really are hurting. But I digress.
I love my brother and he is intelligent. But for whatever reason he can’t accept that 1) the medical community is made up of people that generally want to try to help people and are not of one mind on much of anything let alone coordinated enough to all pull the wool over everyone’s eyes and pull off some massive forced vaccine plot designed to... microchip everyone? infect everyone?... god only knows what? 2) vaccines as a technology are pretty well understood as far as how they accomplish what they do inside of the body in order to establish immunity, 3) vaccination as a whole is probably the single greatest medical innovation in history and has SO MANY real world examples of MASSIVE MASSIVE success for VERY LOW risk.
Take a closer look at #3...remember smallpox? It’s ok if you don’t. That’s because it doesn’t exist anymore. That’s right, the smallpox vaccine, initially developed in 1796!!! by British physician Edward Jenner, was the first vaccine in history and the disease was declared ELIMINATED by the WHO in 1980. That is truly incredible. Or take polio...surely you’ve seen the photos of all the little kids lined up in ventilators (at that time called “Iron Lungs” because we didn’t have the medical tech yet to deliver positive pressure to the lungs to blow them up like a balloon as we do today so we supported breathing by making the pressure inside of the tank less than atmospheric pressure thus pulling air into the lungs the same way you do when you pry apart the handle of a bellows for your fireplace). FDR was in a goddamn wheelchair his whole life from the neurological sequelae. We don’t see any of this now because of effective vaccination campaigns and we are close to eradicating polio worldwide as well. But now with the emergence of this anti-vaccination movement we are seeing resurgence of things like polio, whooping cough, and measles which, again, are more than just acute illnesses because they can cause terrible long term effects in some people.
I am sure everyone here knows these arguments already, but I guess it makes me feel better to say them to a group of sympathetic people and maybe for some in the thread who are in my situation and have a family member that they still (probably futilely) are trying to convince, maybe they will help you erode some of the false confidence many in the anti-vaccine camp have in their convictions.
Thanks again David for the article and sharing the comic. Also, loving the Armchaired and Dangerous podcasts. You and Dax and Monica have great chemistry. 😉
Agree with this. Just to add something I learnt in the past year, another issue with not vaccinating or following treatment regimes has led to diseases like polio and tuberculosis mutating (as we are also seeing with covid), to the point that there are now strains of tuberculosis that are resistant to the standard treatment regimes.
Good point. Mutations are particularly problematic with treatment resistant diseases such as Tb and HIV which require multiple drugs targeting multiple virulence factors because if medication is taken inconsistently or incompletely the organisms that happen to be resistant to one or the other medication are then selected for (in the evolutionary sense) because organisms susceptible to to only one drug and not the others are then allowed time to replicate. Viruses and bacteria make copies of themselves at a super fast rate so evolution can play out much faster in them than in higher order organisms. When we vaccinate in a half assed and incomplete manner we allow even more time for this process to play out as mutation in viruses is an evolutionary process that can happen in days/months as we have seen with COVID (and we see with HIV and other nasty viruses). So while not vaccinating does not directly cause mutations (mutations happen randomly every time an organism be it a cell in a multi-celled organism like us (this is how we get cancer when a cell divides in us and happens to make a critical error in a particular growth related gene such that that cell no longer has any cellular brakes and can divide and copy itself in an unregulated manner) or when a virus does the same when infecting a host and hijacking it’s molecular machinery to make millions of copies of itself. If a virus makes a mistake that makes it less able to survive, game over for that viruses genetic lineage. But if, by chance, it makes a copy of itself with a mistake that makes it MORE likely to evade drugs/therapeutics/vaccines, it will become a mutant strain of virus. Sorry if this doesn’t make sense, but it’s really kinda semantics. You’re not wrong that not vaccinating can lead to mutant strains, but not in a direct way like incomplete THERAPEUTIC measures, but in this INDIRECT way by allowing more times for these natural selection processes to play out prior to enough hosts achieving immunity such that spread and thus natural selection for more virulent mutant strains to play out.
My inner grammar nazi liked the jab at Alanis' Ironic. The rest of me thinks language evolves and thus rules and definitions can change. 😅
While I applaud the shaming of influencers peddling misinformation to sell their own wares, I'd like to say 1) I don't know if influencers or their audience that see this will change their minds about their misinformation or just double down on it (I suppose they aren't the target audience, and it is for the rest of us to have a bit of a chuckle while trying to process why anyone would even do anything like that), and 2) we should recognise the difference between antivaxxers and the vaccine hesitant:
The frame about the laughing with mason jar is so perfect.
Seeing people getting angry about the fact checker popping up on their posts is equal parts horror and lolz. A big ol' I'M SICK OF FACTS BUTTING INTO MY PAGE! rage makes my day.
You’d think someone who preaches via “just my opinion” type posts wouldn’t feel the need to use “v@ccine” and “v1rus” to hide their posts from content moderators... It’s almost as if she knows she’s doing something wrong... 🤔
Also a really lame way to avoid being detected. A true internet mommy blogger type. Jesus wept.
Idiot. There is a reason she is writing "v1rus." I actually loathe anti vaccers. They are the most selfish people. They bang on about their choice but its other people who they get sick. They should be made to watch videos of babies with whooping cough.
I went in to anaphylactic shock four years ago after getting a flu jab so they haven't let me get it since. I count on others to get it on my behalf. I have no idea if they'll let me get COVID vaccine or not, hopefully it's completely different. Ours is being rolled out on a phased basis and likely to get to my demographic during the summer.
It's incredibly selfish. And also - and I don't really know how to form these ideas yet - usually coming from an insanely privileged, white space. People who have healthcare around them and have no experienced a lot of issues. It's a big, big white thing. It really is. White saviour complex has a lot to do with these gurus.
I’ve had the vaccine, I had a little arm ache but I was tended when I got it because I’d stupidly put a long sleeved t shirt on and had to pop my arm out of the head hole! I feel totally fine and so do the majority of my friends who’ve had it, some feel a little icky but they all feel a LOT better than the people we know who’ve had covid! The way these influencers work is ridiculous, the vaccine doesn’t affect fertility or anything else, it’s so valuable to regaining normality in society if like me you’re unfortunate to live somewhere where covid is killing thousands a day
I haaate these Gwynethy wellness broads. They do so much damage. Here is the bottom line about vaccines (and really any medical procedure): risk vs. benefit! The risk of getting the vaccine is negligible, but the benefit of literally lifesaving for you AND anyone you come in contact with. It's pretty simple.
So, so simple. And yet human selfishness gets in the way every time.
I don't think it's just selfishness. I think science education is sorely lacking. I know it is in this country. If you understand the scientific method, you can understand any science. That's really it.
Unfortunately, humans are terrible at risk assessment. Add in confirmation bias, and some people conclude they'd rather risk getting the disease with 0.1% risk of dying than taking a vaccine that has unknown long-term effects. (Yes, I know that number is wrong, there are other issues, etc, but it is one of the arguments I've seen.)
She's a covidiot. Full stop. I wish more people could see through the dangerous bullshit these people spout. In another vein, I'd love to see you write a little bit about how much vitriol we returning overseas kiwis are facing from a seemingly large group of home-based kiwis, mainly based on fear and misinformation. And I suspect a splash of Tall Poppy. It's really upsetting, especially after all that we have been/are going through 10 months later compared to NZ's 3 or 4 week lockdown. Quite desperate and often heartbreaking times. 💔
I'm seeing the same stuff from Australians. As an Australian who lives overseas and one day wants to return, it has really given me a lot of pause.
I’ve been noticing a lot of that too
Yeah, I have friends coming back and it's... not nice. I have been thinking about this a little, and would like some first person input, but they are all a bit shellshocked to write. But it's in mind. It really sucks.
Thanks for understanding x
Re: vitriol faced by returning kiwis, I noticed this the most (on FB at least) last August during the first community outbreak since NZ declared itself "virus-free" in June. Even before that, it felt like in the comments of every covid update, there was at least one person screaming for borders to be closed, even to citizens and residents. There are usually others that would reply "we can't, because Bill of Rights", or "what if it was you or your loved one", but you know how these "discussions" in FB comments often go - no one's mind is changed.
So my own personal theory on the vitriol, based on what I had read in those comments: these people think "we did the hard yards, now you're coming here to share in the fruits of our labour, plus by coming here, you'll probably undo all our hard work". (As I tried to write a generic version, i.e. no mention of the virus, I realised this might be how anti-immigrants or people who don't want poorer people moving into their neighbourhood think of their own predicament. But those are other big topics I'm even less qualified to comment on.) The lockdowns were hard on a lot of people, and while none of us want to go back into lockdown, some have made the conclusion that "lockdowns are caused by covid in the community, covid only comes from overseas, therefore if no one from overseas is allowed back in, we don't get lockdowns again." In August (and I suppose later, I just stopped reading comments as much), there were also some saying "well why didn't they come back sooner? They're only coming back now because it's worse where they are and they can't take it anymore". Again, thankfully, there were replies of "airlines shut down and people's tickets were cancelled repeatedly", "not everyone can uproot their lives and move countries just like that", "tickets are so much more expensive now", and "there are only so many spaces in MIQ". Also again, sadly, no minds were changed.
I guess it's a long-winded way of saying people tend to react more emotionally to perceived threats, and it may take a while before they can see the nuances of their situation, let alone those of others.
P.S. I hope I haven't written anything blatantly wrong above, as I have zero qualifications on covid or psychology (individual or social), so everything I've said are from a layman's point of view, a layman who also spends way too much time on FB 😅
P.P.S. I hope I conveyed my thoughts clearly, as I had a lot of trouble articulating this last August, when a friend of a friend in Europe asked about the vitriol.
Cecile you have summed it up exactly, thanks for replying. The other positive I take from your comments is that it's an opportunity for me to widen my perspective and empathy net too x
I really hope it’s not the majority of Kiwis. Sometimes the negative voices get the most airplay 🙁
Yeah Jacqui I am really trying to keep that hope alive 💚
This speaks to my very soul 😂 I adore you both.
Thanks Emily. I know this is a topic close to your heart (readers, Emily has a great newsletter too - https://emilywrites.substack.com/ x
She’s so awful, just so smug in her stupidity. I have reported every Instagram post of hers containing false info.
It's really damaging stuff, especially with her loyal following.
(stands up) I ... am Angela Hitler!
There she is!
No, I'm Angela Hitler!
And in case the reference is too obscure, I'm referencing Spartacus.
No, I'm referencing Spartacus!
She also sells DIY enema kits on her webstore alongside her self published books. She once called for Australia to resign from the UN/WHO.
It's like peeling back the layers of an onion and the inside is rotten as
Also Angela Hitler has to be some weird warping together of Angela Merkel and Adolf Hitlers sister (actual name Angela Hitler) in the minds of Q idiots.
‘Straight’ chiropractors (I.e. the orthodox ones who reject evidence based medicine) are like the OG of antivaxers, been against them since the 1890s. Back then chiropractic ‘theory’ (I’m using that term very loosely) had a lot of overlap with germ theory denialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germ_theory_denialism which was all the rage in Pasteur’s time. Pretty much all human progress in medicine has been rejected by these types.
This is one sad result of mental illness mixing with the destructive new-age self-help talked about in the comic 😥 https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/sf-murder-suicide-vaccines-pierce-oloughlin-15877891.php
Oh this is so, so sad. Ugh.
Love the Alanis Morrisette t-shirt.
First of all, “sisterhood of the traveling pandemic exploiters”...priceless!!! 🤣
Second, this has been a thorny issue for me personally as I am a physician and my brother has been, with waxing and waning levels of enthusiasm, into various conspiracies ranging from Bilderberg Group and Bohemian Grove to fake moon landing. He has never been too hot on vaccines even prior to COVID which has, at times, led to heated discussions between us. With COVID, he was pretty intolerable on FB and would recklessly post to register his distaste for various mandates. Sometimes, he will point out something truly in conflict and ridiculous (as some of the early guidance here in the states was muddled and unscientific and mixed with a lot of political identity). He responds to reason... sometimes. And it would be wrong, I think to throw out his concern as just being stupid or uninformed as he was not able to work for quite awhile and was worried for months if he might lose his house. So...I get it when people are upset and I think we sound really elitist when we on the left or in the “scientific community” say “just shut up and sacrifice” when people really are hurting. But I digress.
I love my brother and he is intelligent. But for whatever reason he can’t accept that 1) the medical community is made up of people that generally want to try to help people and are not of one mind on much of anything let alone coordinated enough to all pull the wool over everyone’s eyes and pull off some massive forced vaccine plot designed to... microchip everyone? infect everyone?... god only knows what? 2) vaccines as a technology are pretty well understood as far as how they accomplish what they do inside of the body in order to establish immunity, 3) vaccination as a whole is probably the single greatest medical innovation in history and has SO MANY real world examples of MASSIVE MASSIVE success for VERY LOW risk.
Take a closer look at #3...remember smallpox? It’s ok if you don’t. That’s because it doesn’t exist anymore. That’s right, the smallpox vaccine, initially developed in 1796!!! by British physician Edward Jenner, was the first vaccine in history and the disease was declared ELIMINATED by the WHO in 1980. That is truly incredible. Or take polio...surely you’ve seen the photos of all the little kids lined up in ventilators (at that time called “Iron Lungs” because we didn’t have the medical tech yet to deliver positive pressure to the lungs to blow them up like a balloon as we do today so we supported breathing by making the pressure inside of the tank less than atmospheric pressure thus pulling air into the lungs the same way you do when you pry apart the handle of a bellows for your fireplace). FDR was in a goddamn wheelchair his whole life from the neurological sequelae. We don’t see any of this now because of effective vaccination campaigns and we are close to eradicating polio worldwide as well. But now with the emergence of this anti-vaccination movement we are seeing resurgence of things like polio, whooping cough, and measles which, again, are more than just acute illnesses because they can cause terrible long term effects in some people.
I am sure everyone here knows these arguments already, but I guess it makes me feel better to say them to a group of sympathetic people and maybe for some in the thread who are in my situation and have a family member that they still (probably futilely) are trying to convince, maybe they will help you erode some of the false confidence many in the anti-vaccine camp have in their convictions.
Thanks again David for the article and sharing the comic. Also, loving the Armchaired and Dangerous podcasts. You and Dax and Monica have great chemistry. 😉
Agree with this. Just to add something I learnt in the past year, another issue with not vaccinating or following treatment regimes has led to diseases like polio and tuberculosis mutating (as we are also seeing with covid), to the point that there are now strains of tuberculosis that are resistant to the standard treatment regimes.
Good point. Mutations are particularly problematic with treatment resistant diseases such as Tb and HIV which require multiple drugs targeting multiple virulence factors because if medication is taken inconsistently or incompletely the organisms that happen to be resistant to one or the other medication are then selected for (in the evolutionary sense) because organisms susceptible to to only one drug and not the others are then allowed time to replicate. Viruses and bacteria make copies of themselves at a super fast rate so evolution can play out much faster in them than in higher order organisms. When we vaccinate in a half assed and incomplete manner we allow even more time for this process to play out as mutation in viruses is an evolutionary process that can happen in days/months as we have seen with COVID (and we see with HIV and other nasty viruses). So while not vaccinating does not directly cause mutations (mutations happen randomly every time an organism be it a cell in a multi-celled organism like us (this is how we get cancer when a cell divides in us and happens to make a critical error in a particular growth related gene such that that cell no longer has any cellular brakes and can divide and copy itself in an unregulated manner) or when a virus does the same when infecting a host and hijacking it’s molecular machinery to make millions of copies of itself. If a virus makes a mistake that makes it less able to survive, game over for that viruses genetic lineage. But if, by chance, it makes a copy of itself with a mistake that makes it MORE likely to evade drugs/therapeutics/vaccines, it will become a mutant strain of virus. Sorry if this doesn’t make sense, but it’s really kinda semantics. You’re not wrong that not vaccinating can lead to mutant strains, but not in a direct way like incomplete THERAPEUTIC measures, but in this INDIRECT way by allowing more times for these natural selection processes to play out prior to enough hosts achieving immunity such that spread and thus natural selection for more virulent mutant strains to play out.
Sounds like the people ‘just asking questions’ don’t want you asking questions... (thoughtful emoji)
My inner grammar nazi liked the jab at Alanis' Ironic. The rest of me thinks language evolves and thus rules and definitions can change. 😅
While I applaud the shaming of influencers peddling misinformation to sell their own wares, I'd like to say 1) I don't know if influencers or their audience that see this will change their minds about their misinformation or just double down on it (I suppose they aren't the target audience, and it is for the rest of us to have a bit of a chuckle while trying to process why anyone would even do anything like that), and 2) we should recognise the difference between antivaxxers and the vaccine hesitant:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/16/vaccine-hesitant-anti-vaxxers-public-health-experts-covid
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/10/coronavirus-covid-19-vaccine-hesitancy-us-health-workers
The frame about the laughing with mason jar is so perfect.
Seeing people getting angry about the fact checker popping up on their posts is equal parts horror and lolz. A big ol' I'M SICK OF FACTS BUTTING INTO MY PAGE! rage makes my day.
I wish there was some way to direct the fact checker to 'anti v@x' using posters. Hoping they're adding all the varients of words to the code list.
..thought really I guess it doesn't matter, they use it as a badge of honour.