between measles and covid, there are a lot of people walking around who are immuno-compromised now & don’t even know it yet, beyond a vague idea that they don’t remember being sick so often before a few years ago.
i really hope that the us swings away from fascism & eugenics and moves towards things like free healthcare asap, because it really doesn’t have to be like this.
the huge cheers from all sides for the death of a healthcare ceo really shows that there are basic needs like healthcare & housing & UBI that have broad support, far beyond what culture war BS would have people believe, imo.
free healthcare asap,
Treason!
Could you imagine a wacky world where our tax dollars go toward making a better community!? Yikes!!!
Sick for the second time in less than a month, and I got my flu and covid vaccines a couple months ago… these guys are ruining flu season for everyone, not just themselves. Admittedly, I could be better about wearing my mask regularly, but I try to whenever I’m in a really congested train or spot.
even occasionally masking is better than nothing, it’s breaking those chains of transmission! 💪
unfortunately, the covid vaccine only really prevents the worst outcomes (hospitalisation & death) for about 4-6 months, it doesn’t prevent transmission or long covid.
i’ve got my fingers crossed for a vaccine that does prevent transmission or long covid, but in the meantime, wearing a well-fitted mask really does work!
Yeah I think it’s my second time with covid, or at least symptomatically. Part of me feels like I may already have long covid, but the other part hopes I’m just imagining things…
i’m sorry to hear that ❤️🩹
i hope you can get your hands on some paxlovid, and that you can rest as much as possible. if you think you’re resting enough, rest some more for good measure!
I’ve been sleeping through pretty much most of my free time, so perhaps not ideal.
This is part of a larger anti intellectual issue that has been plaguing the U.S. for decades.
I have always related to this Isaac Asimov quote from 1980:
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
my favorite part of lemmy is when i cite a government source and get told that it’s wrong or doesn’t apply or is fake.
because feelings are all that matters, apparently.
If it’s a source like the trump FDA, it probably is wrong, though…
For example, Tylenol does not cause autism.
And like that Trump made government documents less trustworthy and thus useless as a source… great job, trump-voters! You have made your life worse.
Did we ever find out if Iraq had WMDs, like the State Department and the CIA claimed?
democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
I’ve heard this used as an argument against democracy more times than I can count. Nevermind that vaccination is overwhelmingly popular or that the anti-vax policies have to be jammed down the public’s throat.
I know it’s easy to shit on the US, but the per capita measles infection rate is higher in many EU countries than it is in the US right now. France, for example, had 744 cases from Jan-Jul of this year, Spain had 339, and the Netherlands had 474.
US: 5.6 cases per million
France: 11.2 cases per million
Spain: 6.9 cases per million
Netherlands: 25.6 cases per millionAnd this includes several more months of data for the US than the other countries
Source: European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control
Very interesting. I had a look at Ireland. Here’s the historical graph
Our lowest was 2015 where it was 0.4 cases per million or just two cases for the whole year. Generally it’s hovering around 10x to 15x that with most of the cases among adult men.
I’ve never actually heard of anyone with measles here. The health agency does follow up rigourously if your kid misses the vaccine in school because they were out that day or whatever.
Ireland had 49 cases over Jan-Jul of '25, for a rate of 9.6 per million, 50% higher than the US
Yeah that’s my point. I was agreeing with your premise. :)
Yeah sorry, was just stating the rate. I’ve also never known anyone who’s gotten measles. While there may be hundreds to thousands of cases each year in a given country, it’s still only a few out of every million people
Y’all do your vaccines at school? I’m so jealous.
I’m in the states and my kids had the option to get their flu shots at the school this year. Somehow one of my kids was skipped despite us immediately signing and returning the consent forms.
It does feel like it’s very hit or miss whether or not flu shots are offered at the schools though. I remember getting the flu vaccine at the school just once and I never remember seeing lines or anything at any of my schools for flu vaccines the years I didn’t get it at the school. I imagine they only do it when either there’s special funding for it or the data says they especially need a lot more vaccination this year
Doctor or health centre for the early ones but the later ones (boosters and HPV vaccines for girls) are all done in school yeah.
They did flu vaccines this year in the school which I think is the first time.
Wouldn’t want for profit healthcare to lose out on middlemanning childhood vaccines. America Freedumb.
Wonder why it dropped so low before the 1980s, then spiked again.
Narrowly missed that.
Old enough to have gotten immunised to it from the old fashioned way. In that spike in the middle of the graph. And glad for it.
How are the changes in the rates over time? I’m much more comfortable with a location that’s higher steadily dropping than one rapidly increasing.
I do wonder if a lot more measles cases go unreported in rural America where these outbreaks are prevalent. There are no doctors in rural America.
There are no doctors in rural America
Yeah this is false far more often than it’s true. I live in a small town (the kind where ambulance and fire services are all volunteers) with nothing but farming communities and farm/hunting land surrounding me. I have 4 hospitals in a 30 mile radius, and more clinics than I care to count
Yes there are some very poor rural regions of states where access to healthcare is a struggle, but they are the exception rather than the norm
There are no doctors in rural America.
False. I doubt that anyone in America is more than 30 miles from a medical facility.
I…don’t even know where to begin when refuting your statement. Do you have an example location or lived experience in mind when you say this?
There are no doctors in rural America… I…don’t even know where to begin when refuting your statement.
Why not start by proving that there are no doctors in rural America?
You thought US had a monopoly on oligarchs-controlled medias and conspiracy lunatics? Same causes, same consequences! Canada’s cases are on the rise too.
Centuries, probably.
Conservatives have been actively suppressing the teaching of Critical Thinking Skills for decades:
The 2012 Texas Republican Party Platform, adopted June 9 at the state convention in Forth Worth, seems to take a stand against, well, the teaching of critical thinking skills. Read it for yourself:
We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.
https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/texas-gop-no-more-critical-thinking-in-schools/2012/06
Critical Thinking Skills undermine parental authority. Can’t have your kids getting smarter than you, right?
I can’t believe Biden personally injected these people with measles.
I’m Canadian even, and I’ve often spotted Joe Biden lurking around my home, hiding behind the bushes. He often carries a syringe full of what I can only assume is some deadly disease or another, and a large burlap sack with a question mark on it.
I’ve noticed Joe Biden stealing jobs from my neighbours, which he places into the burlap sack, as well as money, babies, and other various items.
I try to avoid him, and have thus far been successful, but I fear that one day he’ll either steal my job or infect me with some deadly disease.
He took them behind the barn. The rest he infected by using FEMA to poison the water supply.
Thanks Obama!
My sister in law has a neighbor who flooded his home and immediately blamed the Democrats…I wish I was joking…
I have to know more
So that’s all I know about that specific instance, but this individual is a retired guy living in low income housing, and his wife left him specifically because of his political views (and he loves to complain about it) so he’s clearly winning at life
Dang, sounds like a stand up guy
While this is awful, it’s also cherry-picked data. There were 1,274 cases in 2019, and 667 cases in 2014, for example. Last year in 2024 there were only 285.
I suspect 2020, which had the lowest measles infection rate in the US in all of recorded history, was so low only due to covid and people isolating much of the year.
1912 / 285 = ~6.7
So yes it’s cherry picked data but totals are at 670+% of last year and the year isn’t finished yet
RFK is going to end up causing a pandemic of something eventually and will go down in history for it
When you look at the variability in cases per year over the past 20 years, it’s clear you can’t tie this back to one person. He’s a total idiot who is going to make things worse, for sure, but the anti-vaccination movement on both the left and right predates his involvement in politics by many years
Anti-vax on “the left”?
[X] to doubt.
The modern anti-vax movement started on the left. The first notable measles outbreak in modern US history was in Marin, California which is full of crunchy hippies. You just didn’t hear about it as much because the left shuns their idiots instead of platforming them like the right does.
Dude. The New Age crowd started all this, with their “all natural” remedies. California was at the center of the anti-vaccine movement prior to the right losing their mind about vaccines during Covid
So sick of living on clown planet.
Clown planet invented the measles vaccine, so… good luck off-world
clown country
Also Fox News: “We did this!”
Look at Fox News bragging.
Idiots! Percent only goes up to one hundred, dummies. Big pharma isn’t even hiding it anymore…
- antivaxxers right now, probably
I know you’re clowning, but don’t forget that the actual fucking President of the United States tried to claim that drug prices were down 700% just earlier this month and that gullible swamp of sycophants just gobbled it up.
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He’s been doing that for months already.
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Ivermectin? Bleach? Sulpheric Acid? C’mon you gotta get creative! /s
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It washes out all the tylenol!
Light… I hear we’re looking at ways of putting that into the body.
Because the U.S. is now the country where the surgeon general of the Louisiana Department of Health can cause a whooping cough outbreak in Louisiana, get caught by local journalists trying to cover up the deaths of infants that occured, and then instead of being fired in disgrace from his state level job, he’s promoted to number 2 at the CDC.
You know how it’s SOP in any merit based field where you really fucked up at the state level, and they send you off to do the same at a national level.
I have no doubt that since this is on Fox News that Dems are somehow to blame.
ANTIFA
It happens when you abandon the actual science that God gave us to help humanity , and think that a shaman who’s constantly gagging on cock knows better, and call this a devine religion, while inbread evangelical pedos cheering him on to keep gobbling
God didn’t give humanity science lol. It’s abandoning science for a god that put people in the bad spot.
I see myself as mostly atheistic mixed with agnostic, and I think that you are missing an important point here.
I absolutely agree that saying that God gave humanity science is incorrect.
However, consider the end goal, it should be to have more people embrace science or at a minimum embrace scientific data, right?
If that is the case, then I think we can make an argument that while God didn’t give humanity science, he did create us in his image (according to the bible), we can use that to say that not only did he create our physical appearance in his image, but also our brains, giving us reasoning, which we used to develop the sciences.
Thus embracing science could be argued means using our God given brains, and from that science is the ultimate achievement of God.
Rejecting science in this context means throwing away the gift God gave you.
This turned out way more philosophical and theological than I thought, but it is an interesting discussion.
If you’re a scientific you’ll quickly debunk that “he did create us…”. It’s up to you to prove god created us at all, which you cannot of course.
Obviously, but consider the end goal i mentioned, what should the end goal be? Is any religios belief detrimental to science?
I am an IT guy, and as stated before, I am mostly atheistic but also agnostic in some views.
The largest of my agnostic views has to do with the big bang.
I am no scientist, so I probably misunderstand it, but the way I have had it explained to me is something like this
First there was nothing, then the big bang happened.
And that is something I just can’t wrap my head around, how can “nothing” explode?
This is a point where I can absolutely insert a deity, something omnipotent could absolutely cause the big bang.
If there is no such entity, then I tend to consider the thought that we might live in a simulation.
In either case I don’t believe that we humans living on this random planet is important enough that the world was created specifically for us, I just consider the big bang as possibly involving an omnipotent entity, the rest can be explained by science.
But mostly I don’t think about it at all.
First there was nothing
That might be the cause of your agnosticism, here. The big bang certainly didn’t happen from nothing; we’re just not up to working out what it did come from, yet - and there’s a chance we may never be able to know. But that didn’t mean it came from nothing.
Good point!
I hardly ever think about it, so it doesn’t really matter to me…
There is no end goal, thete is just us all living for a short period of time on this rock in space.
Thinking that there is an end goal is what might lead you to think that then there has to be some reason behind ot all, and thus believe in god or something.
Come join us absurdists! We know what’s going on 😁!
It happens when you abandon the actual science that God gave us to help humanity ,
Fucking nonsense. Let it go man, it’s fairy tales. It’s the exact magical thinking that leads to measles outbreaks.
Hey, anything to help make the koolaid drinkers believe in science again… “Believe” because we both know they’re too stupid to understand it.
They are following the god that truly loves and cares for the plight of humanity. The great god of death and rebirth Grandfather Nurgle.
The answer to the OP’s question is “this is what happens when stupid people elect a stupid president who appoints stupid health officials.”. The cure is simple, stupid people can’t vote or at least stupid people can’t be candidates.
The biggest problem is money in politics. Money means rich people get their way.
They want people just smart enough to press buttons on the rich person’s factory floor but stupid enough to vote how rich person’s news channel tells them to vote.
There are probably enough people that aren’t so stupid that you could educate them enough to vote in their interests if you can get to them against all odds. You just have to get through the social media algorithms and mass media blockade that are completely against change that would hurt their owners profit.
Who’s going to decide who is smart and who is stupid?
AI, obviously
Drp 'em naked on isolated island for 5 days.
Will also filter too old people.
MAGA
The cure is simple, stupid people can’t vote or at least stupid people can’t be candidates.
How democratic of you.
It’s Democracy+™. Hopefully in the future we’ll realise how dangerous and barbaric giving the stupid the vote was
The cure is simple, stupid people can’t vote or at least stupid people can’t be candidates.
While I agree that in principle this would solve a lot of problems with our current setup, in practice the racists and idiots always end up getting control over who gets to vote and who doesn’t, and they end up only allowing people they approve of to vote. It’s been tried before and it failed spectacularly due to corruption, like most things.
I wish other countries would ban muricans at the airport due to them posing a health hazard…
Yes, but how is this biden’s fault?
It just is. It’s a given.
