In fairness, there wasn’t a big loss of the vaccinated either (seems to be smaller, but still a lot of people)… but there was a successful looting of the poor and enrichment of elites

  • Dasus@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    A lot of people were severely ill, a lot of people died and the hospitals were overwhelmed.

    I honestly don’t have the words to express my sincere disgust with antiscience antivaxx nuts who still always pretend they actually understand any of the science, because they don’t understand how ridiculous it is when they claim that despite their utter lack of understanding on even the basics of the science.

    • airrow@hilariouschaos.comOP
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      2 months ago

      hospitals overwhelmed

      can we come to agreement that the artificially reduced supply of medical resources via regulation combined with the artificially induced panic, is more to blame here than actual covid risk?

      • AFK BRB Chocolate@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        No, we for sure cannot. The number one cause was lack of staff - we ended up having nurses tend to several patients each instead of two or three. There were people who were really sick and the were simply not enough beds for them.

        • airrow@hilariouschaos.comOP
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          2 months ago

          point is you can have more beds and staff and nurses… if you aren’t impoverishing the population with taxes and regulations (economics 101). It was an artificially created crisis on top of another

          • AFK BRB Chocolate@lemmy.world
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            2 months ago

            That’s simply bullshit. You can’t snap your fingers and get medical staff. Nurses were getting giant pay increases because there weren’t enough of them. Doctor’s and nurses were also getting COVID at an alarming rate, which was taking many of them out.

            I didn’t know where you’re getting your information, but you’ve been misinformed.

            • airrow@hilariouschaos.comOP
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              2 months ago

              The doctor shortage is part of a trend, look up “doctor shortage” on a search engine, for example here is a random article: “Facing a severe physician shortage, feds offer loan forgiveness for some doctors, nurses” https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ottawa-student-loan-forgiveness-doctors-nurses-1.7113468

              What I’m saying is: what causes this? The cause is pretty clear: regulations of the industry. It takes too much licensing and costs to become a doctor or nurse, so people don’t choose to do it. This is artificially created with all kinds of government regulations. Then, governments also regulated what people could do during the time of “covid” with mandated lockdowns, leading to further shortages. None of these shortages needed to exist but were created through artificial government regulation. So the “shortages” really had nothing to do with “covid”, we could have and should have had more than capacity to deal with a “pandemic”, and this talking point should have not existed (it was artificially created).

              The motive for some of these measures is financial, as the working class lost money during the lockdowns while the richest gained: “The billionaire boom: how the super-rich soaked up Covid cash” https://www.ft.com/content/747a76dd-f018-4d0d-a9f3-4069bf2f5a93

              • ExperiencedWinter@lemmy.world
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                2 months ago

                Yeah we should really get rid of those pesky regulations. There would have been plenty of doctors if we just let anyone who decides to call themselves a doctor start practicing medicine.

                • airrow@hilariouschaos.comOP
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                  2 months ago

                  unironically yes! it’s done with programming and many things! What happens is… you, personally, won’t go to any doctor unless they have gone through rigorous training at top schools and you’ll pay top dollar for it. other people, like poor people who may be dying with less options, can get more economical options that may work for them. It’s actually sad more people don’t question things and complain about how expensive things are and how bad of care they get while ignoring the elephant in the room…

                  edit: of course naturally many other scenarios apply, where more nonprofits can be freely formed for those in need and competition can bring down the price of many medical needs

            • airrow@hilariouschaos.comOP
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              2 months ago

              you make that sound like liking freedom is a bad thing, while I’m sure at the same time would oppose things like chattel slavery

                • airrow@hilariouschaos.comOP
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                  2 months ago

                  well, what position do you like in contrast? I could try to mention some of the problems with such positions. Today the fruits of over-regulation of healthcare should be obvious with the doctor shortages and unaffordability and medical bankruptcy and such that exist.

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            2 months ago

            No, it’s not. You’re clearly looking for one, probably trolling on purpose, thinking it fun, but misinformation like this is actually dangerous.

            I’m not American, and our government had a sensible reaction without antivax reactionaries and that’s probably a reason I still have my grandma.

            Your reasons for doing this don’t matter to me. I reiterate what I said in my first comment; sealioning antivaxers disgust me.

            • airrow@hilariouschaos.comOP
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              2 months ago

              misinformation is dangerous

              Well, these are contentious issues. At present there seems to be a lack of consensus on them so discussion would be important. Both sides are often convinced the other is harmful, so it seems the only way to resolve them is to discuss them. The side opposing the one you take says the vaccines are harmful and have killed lots of people… so if wrong, your “misinformation” would be the dangerous variety, even though you think it to not be “misinformation”.

              have my grandma

              ehhh, your grandma probably would have been fine. The point was from the OP that you’re aware lots of people did not vaccinate and were fine, right? (including elderly)

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                2 months ago

                It’s not contentious at all, there is very clear consent, and you’re a troll or a moron, possibly both.

                Seriously, there aren’t words severe enough for me to express my utter contempt of people who actively endanger others because they’re too dumb and lazy to read, but have an ego so big they can’t admit that to themselves, so they read badly written simplistic conspiracy theories to make themselves feel special.

                Utter. Fucking. Disgust.

    • airrow@hilariouschaos.comOP
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      2 months ago

      there are many people who believe this was simply like the flu, since flu cases “disappeared” during this time: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/flu-has-disappeared-worldwide-during-the-covid-pandemic1/

      (flu does kill some people)

      Is there any possibility for us to bridge the gap in opinions and come to any agreement then, that yes some people died but it was not as bad as predicted? Originally I read redditors predicting hundreds of millions of deaths… nothing like that panned out. Really the “minimalist” side doubts there were many deaths at all.

      Not sure how progress on the topic can be made but anecdotally vaccinating or not seemed like a “nothingburger” and few people died either vaccinated or not

      • AFK BRB Chocolate@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        You have a lot of misunderstandings here. The things people did to combat COVID, especially the social distancing and mask wearing, were even more effective against the flu.

        And though people do die of the flu, COVID dwarfed those deaths. Here’s a chart showing flu deaths and COVID deaths for the first couple years.

        We had a chance of getting herd immunity by getting the population vaccinated and eliminating it like polio, but anti-science politics squashed that idea.

        • airrow@hilariouschaos.comOP
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          mask wearing I doubt is that effective; “social distancing” certainly.

          there’s no way to confirm those deaths are all “covid” related; I concede the stress of a “pandemic” as well as impoverishment created by artificial lockdown mandates indeed probably did create temporary worse outcomes though.

          polio was tackled more by sanitation than vaccines, it is contrarily argued: https://www.organiclifestylemagazine.com/how-plumbing-not-vaccines-eradicated-disease

          • AFK BRB Chocolate@lemmy.world
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            2 months ago

            there’s no way to confirm those deaths are all “covid” related; I

            Okay, the number of excess deaths (more deaths than usual) had a curve like that - what do you think was responsible? At the time that people were filling hospitals with respiratory issues and testing positive for COVID? Why do you think doctors were putting COVID as the cause of death?

            You seem like someone who has accepted a narrative that COVID wasn’t so bad and are willing to ignore the mounds and mounds of data that says otherwise.

          • Gamoc@lemmy.world
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            2 months ago

            Nobody cares what you doubt whatsoever because you’ve shown yourself to be deliriously stupid throughout this entire thread. “Here is a source with a not-at-all ominously bland name proving ALL OF SCIENCE AND MEDICINE WRONG” says the moron.

            Three decades ago I learnt that covering your mouth when you cough helps stop spreading germs. I was a toddler and you still haven’t reached that level of intelligence. Reading a children’s science book would blow your tiny mind.

      • distantsounds@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Yes, it is. A person doesn’t deserve to die just because they have a different viewpoint on something. Even in a leopards-ate-my-face situation

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          Even when that person is putting others at risk, both directly and indirectly?

          I mean…if some anti-vaxxer survives a bout with covid only to spread it to one of your immunocompromised loved ones, who isn’t so lucky and dies from it?

          In that hypothetical, harsh as it may sound, I’d much rather the one with agency to take preventative measures and chose not to take them be the one to suffer the consequences of their selfish inaction and poor decisions.

          I’m not saying they deserve to die, I’m just looking at it from the angle of how this person will use the life they’ve managed to hang onto and how they’ll negatively impact society and the people around them with the time they have.

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            I’d rather just call them out in a clear way and move on. Hopefully people learn from the interaction, but I doubt everyone will. It’s not worth the effort trying to play 4D chess with an infinite amount of variables. Learning to live with ‘good enough’ is sometimes all you can do.

  • sj_zero@lotide.fbxl.net
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    2 months ago

    It’s sad seeing the redditors pretending reality matches with their models.

    But I guess they need to keep thinking that or the way they’ve treated people who disagree with them will have turned out to be absolutely terrible and they might have to apologize for how they acted instead of just apologizing for what other people did.

    • airrow@hilariouschaos.comOP
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      it’s ok, most people seem to have gone “back to normal” and de facto deny their models; in fairness I dunno if I can “disprove” their models, but they don’t extend the same fairness in realizing they fail to prove their models as well

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        Ironically, I’ve also come around to the idea that the worst predictions about the vax turned out to be wrong too.

        We know it was by definition an untested experimental vaccine (since that was the point of project warp speed) and while there’s strong circumstantial evidence that some fatalities and injuries occurred due to the vaccine, it isn’t the apocalyptic worst case scenario many people feared, much in the same way covid turned out not to be the apocalyptic worst case scenario most people feared either.

        Now that doesn’t mean that there were no measurable consequences to anything – for example the stagflation I warned about in early 2020 ended up coming exactly as I said and everyone can see that – it actually is a “bring out yer dead” scenario with tent cities popping up around the world in cities that typically never had them. We also saw many apocalypse scenarios with respect to childhood development and education.

        • airrow@hilariouschaos.comOP
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          2 months ago

          it was just a money grab, the pharma companies made lots of money off the “vaccines”. they could have injected saline, it doesn’t really matter, they got paid for the “vaccines”: https://www.somo.nl/big-pharma-raked-in-usd-90-billion-in-profits-with-covid-19-vaccines/

          and elites profited off mandated lockdowns (by shutting down competition): https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/oct/07/covid-19-crisis-boosts-the-fortunes-of-worlds-billionaires

          (hence why few deaths on either side maybe; their goal was just profit, and maybe taking away some freedoms, but people pushed back on a lot of mandates)

          yes the “vaccine” was experimental so it would seem dangerous to take it; basically had unknown dangers associated with it, and also most people recovered without a “vaccine”

          Yeah the inflation going on I remember people calling for, from “covid” policies. I didn’t make that connection until just now you saying it though… is some of the “inflation” going on that is attributed to Biden, kind of remnants of “covid” policies?

          don’t know how to get through to the other commenters here or in other posts about the above points; most frustratingly, they are unable to consider them as possibilities and seem to regard asking any questions as “dangerous misinformation” or “hateful trolling” or things like that, when they’re not really intended to be (and as you know are accepted as “unquestioned fact” elsewhere online)

          • sj_zero@lotide.fbxl.net
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            2 months ago

            If you think about it, there have been poorly thought out inflationary policies for a long time. Between bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden, theyve increased the money supply massively and also massively increased the federal debt that was only 4 trillion around 1999. Anyone who is alive and uses money knows that things have gotten massively more expensive, but the calculation for consumer prices has been fiddled with enough to make the claim that inflation has barely broken 2%. It’s marking your own homework at that point, but they could find enough half marks to pass. The result of all this monetary policy for 20 years it’s been two make the economy and the aggregate look better by creating some of the richest people in the history of the world. Elon Musk wouldn’t be the richest man on earth in a sane world – his car company isn’t that good and people are finally starting to realize that, but people bought it because it went up, and it went up because people bought it, and all the extra money sloshing around helped.

            Covid lockdowns did 3 things:

            1. Shut down a lot of productive capacity by fiat. Inflation is often a self-limiting process because higher prices cause companies to spin up new productive capacity, but where the capacity is not allowed due to government, prices can go up an unlimited amount.

            2. Hand out money to everyone. People who get money often spend it, leading to that product being accounted for. The rich invest, driving up assets, but the poor consume, driving up goods prices.

            3. They funded the money that they gave to everyone with monetized debt. QE works by the central bank going to banks and buying their government debt from them for printed money. It replaces bonds on A bank’s balance sheet with cash, which can then be used to buy more bonds (because the banks need a certain amount of debt which is an asset for them since they lend the money). This means that of the trillions of dollars spent, many of them are effectively new dollars that were magiced into existence by the central bank. Compared to typical bond buying where somebody with money has to spend that money to lend the money to the government, meaning that the net amount of money in the system hasn’t really changed, here the money just comes to exist.

            So while the inflationary policies before covid didn’t help, and I definitely would agree they helped set up a pile of wood to burn, and policies after covid haven’t helped, trying to make people’s lives more expensive when they need the opposite, it was the policies during covid that led to the inflation we are in right now.