TIL american public support for requiring vaccines against infectious diseases dropped from 81% in 1991 to 51% last year

This generation has never seen the ravegaes that these preventable diseases can reek.

These vaccines are the pinnacle of health care research and most were given away for free by those who discovered them.... They gave away millions in potential licensing fees for the greater good of humanity.... Now that gift is being spit up on by people who have no idea what they are talking about.

What a disgrace.

that's one of the side effects of the poor education in the USA... test oriented education focuses on scoring high on tests and general knowledge items such as the history of public health and vaccines are neglected, or if they are discussed, they are discussed in kindergarten terms
- I'm pretty sure the people that did well in school are not the ones who don't support vaccines though
- I mean if you know about the Tuskegee experiments you might understand why a certain group of people are skeptical about ANY kind of government "vaccine".
  The TL:DR is that the US CDC injected people with syphilis but told them it was a vaccine, just so they could see what the long term effects of syphilis were when you didn't get treatment. 100 people died as guinea pigs.
I used to agree with that. But then Covid happened and I listened to people on the radio call in saying “we gotta let a few old people go to save the exonomy.” As though human life was an acceptable cost.
I genuinely thought people at least were ignorant to the death tole to then but I was mistaken. It got so bad the host cut off calls.
The vaccine then came out and I watched millions shun it, despite being shown to be safe and effective. Sure, some folks thought they were dangerous (disinformation and all) but that radio show told me, some people want the world to burn.
There are people who saw devastation and don’t get vaccinated because it’s an acceptable loss.
The fact that you changed “spit on” to “spit up on” was perfect. These are emotional toddlers flailing their arms and kicking their feet and accidentally spitting up on all of us and everything sane. Kudos

America won’t stop until absolutly everything is a partisan issue

Subjectivism enables propaganda and propaganda enables polarization.
And currently there is no solution and owners love it this way.
While slaves fight culture wars, they are dominating the class war.
No, the news conglomerates won't stop.
No one I know actually thinks like this, but it's easy to run made up problems 24 hrs a day, than point out actual corruption like every career politician insider trading.
- People do think like this. News and media have issues but what you picture here is just over the top. Also not every x does y.
Great, now you just made having partisan issues a partisan issue.
- That is so like your type to point out their making partisan issues partisan issues. We certainly don’t think like that.
Which part of America.
- I will give you two guesses:-)

The power of disinformation...

The true constant throughout history. Propoganda works.

I remember that teaching about evolution was controversial back in 1991. But that was after getting my vaccines. But if all science is bad... I'm bringing back the evolution debate!

Please support quality education. We are constantly surrounded by propaganda. If you don't see it, it's probably already affecting your decisions. This whole "vaccines cause autism" rumor was started by a Playboy model with a potty mouth. Not a credible doctor.

And you know what's worse than the fear of giving your kid autism? A dead kid!

I'm so, so sick of stupid people ruining the world because they have a constant need to feel morally superior to other people by being terrible human beings.

Andrew Wakefield was a porn star and started vaccine denial?
- In the US. It was Jenny McCarthy, she really gained a lot of popular and supporting attention around her wrong views, supported by the fraudulent research of Andrew Wakefield.
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenny_McCarthy#Activism
  Though its interesting this section of her bio is labeled under "Activism" and not "Controversy".
But if all science is bad... I'm bringing back the evolution debate!
Oh please don’t. We still have stickers on our textbooks.
Teaching about evolution controversial in 1991?! Where did you grow up? This wasn't controversial in the 80s in central Europe.
- The Midwest. This is the huge red spot in the middle of the country where people would prefer to experience polio for themselves (their children at least) rather than take some libruls' word for it.

Some things can only be learned the hard way

Sadly, we'll be learning it right alongside them.

Funny how with technology people are getting dumber and tricked even easier

It's not "with technology", it's despite technology.
It's a decades long attack on education, public acceptance of low skill low wage unqualified teachers, and a complete lack of critical thinking in most of the population.
They don't understand how vaccines work, they don't understand statistics, they don't understand chemistry, they don't know how to research despite having the total sum of human knowledge at their fingertips. You tell them vaccines are made from fetuses and harms your children and they stop processing beyond that.
- It's also that the dumbest among us have massive reach and we haven't culturally adapted to it. Similar shit happened with radio.

Every fucking day some Americans are allowing their enemies to win by defeating themselves with lies.

Failed state is collapsing. Here's Tom with the weather.

That's actually hilarious, tell me you've never been to the United States without actually telling me.
- It's a shithole. You're probably just living on top of the pile (of shit).
- I live in the US which is why I know for sure it's a failing empire. We already lost most of our respect on the world stage. Dollar losing value. Allies realize we are too unstable. The only thing we still have is a military that will fuck anyone who we want to. But give it time, we're a few decades from instead of being below most of the other first world nations in any given metric, being far below all of them. This vaccination shit alone will kill millions. We are fucked. What are you smoking to not see it?
- Username is accurate

Big Pharma setting up for the next big cash cow of preventable things that will expand some stock market pocket books...

Can we start requiring proof of vaccination for Americans to leave their country please?

All sane states and provinces should require vaccine records in order to cross state/provincial lines from fucked up states.

I don't want people with filthy biblical diseases coming and getting us sick when herd immunity collapses.

Pretty sure this would violate the constitution which guarantees our rights to travel freely between states unimpeded. I'm sure there's ways to make it where people who decide to stay have to prove they're safe to work with, but that's just by increasing standards across the state rather than profiling outsiders.
- Yeah the US is somewhere between the EU/EEZ/Shengen area and any constituent nation. Putting a hard border between Illinois and Indiana is less legally feasible than one between France and Belgium, but more feasible than one between Paris and Marseilles
- The constitution needs to be changed anyway.

In semi-related news, I've become more pro-mask than I ever thought I would become. Because they fucking work and it's great to not be sick twenty times a year. Now that everyone's against them they're less than a dollar a mask.

😷

I have a coworker who wears a mask almost every day. (We work with small children, AKA sentient petri dishes. Wearing a mask by default isn't a bad idea.)
I'm not that hardcore, but I've found that they help even in non-illness situations. Like when the air is cold and dry, wearing a mask means the air I breathe is warmer. Not only is it more comfortable, but it prevents the post-nasal drip that such conditions usually trigger. Without post-nasal drip, my throat is less likely to become irritated. An irritated throat can lead to laryngitis.
Ergo, wearing a mask on cold, dry days prevents an entire chain of shitty events from taking place. The people stubbornly digging their heels in against masks have no idea what incidental benefits they're missing.
- Hey, another person who refers to children as petri dishes! Neat.

RFK Jr. Is not the disease, he's just a symptom.

Capitalism is the disease. Socialism is the cure.

We should just quarantine the whole US. No travel in or out without 2 months in a lazaret. If they wanna rot on their own, fine. But don't go spreading disease elsewhere.

We already forgot how Dutch sports fans basically infected all of Europe with omicron variant.

We ain't got no vaccine for stupidity but even if there was one half the US would be too stupid to take it

Ummmm, the "education" vaccine is pretty effective with the right ingredients.
- The problem is that the vaccine regimen is very expensive, and the government is run by people who use every single failure of the regimen to push for a less-strict regimen, which causes more failures. They do this because they actively profit from a populace infected with stupidity.
The vaccine for stupidity is dying of polio and it's about to make an appearance.
Seems like the vaccine for anti-vaxxers is anti-vaxxers.
Wouldn't THAT vaccine be a paradox though? The half that would take it don't need it, and the half that need it are.....ya know.....listening to Alex Jones conspiracy theories.

We were supposed to have flying cars, instead we have to tell half the population that plagues are bad. The future is dumb.

Gross. I hate this anti-science bullshit.

I assume, if they're a MAGAt, that they are antivax. That's thirty percent of the fucking country.

And stupid.

And amoral.

And generally just horrid people who should be shunned and made fun of.

People have talked about this before, but it really does seem like people have forgotten how bad some of these diseases could get and how much vaccines helped us. In 1991 plenty of folk remembered polio, maybe even had a relative who got it. Good number remembered smallpox and/or got that shot themselves. But now less and less people really understand both the scale of devastation those diseases caused and the scale of how many were helped and saved by vaccines.

It's sadly funny in a way....
Historic documents, photos, studies, documentaires telling about real diseases and how we beat them not that long ago. Fake news I sleep.
Some book tells about some bullshit magic 2000 years ago written by idiots that didn't know germs existed. Real shit!

We're doomed. If 51% of the country has decided, based on a neverending stream of lies, that we should all die rather than receive basic health care, then there's really nothing much left to argue about. America has has decided it would rather commit suicide than acknowledge that there are people who DO know what they're talking about and actually listen to them.

That's it. We're done. We're all gonna die of some easily preventable plague because we didn't fucking ostracize these idiots twenty years ago. The country is now run by the people who actually believe the comical lies the GOP used to tell to keep the idiots compliant. I don't think you can come back from that.

49%. 51% is in favor of vaccinating, at least according to the title.
It's just history man. Most of us in the first world are, for the first time, on the wrong end of it. The Expanse called it the churn.
Some part of me is laughing, "Have y'all not studied history?!" It's our time to witness the fall of the empire. But hey! The 80s and 90s were fucking sweet in America!
Although if we want a more pessimistic view
If we assume that "eligible voters" is a roughly representative sample of the country in general, well over 51 percent of the country either voted for this (directly by voting for trump, or indirectly by voting 3rd party) or didn't care enough to even show up and vote.
Because that's what happened. Something like 3/4 of eligible voters decided that this was an acceptable outcome.

Florida is like the last nail in the coffin for whether or not to stay. What's the point in staying if our country isn't even afraid of smallpox and polio.

Smallpox is probably why we have contemporary anti-vaxxers. Without a lethal, Flood-like disease, people quickly think that it's okay to just be fucking disgusting and let themselves and their kids get everyone sick.
People will learn why we vaccinate against the fucked up, biblical diseases of yestercentury.

People are dumb AF. Especially here in the US.

You know what's crazy?

I've lived in the United States for over 30 years, and I've never been asked my feelings on any major news topic like this...

It's almost like the statistics are made up or something.

If done right, they took representative samples. Many potential things that can go wrong in these processes but the way sampling works makes it totally plausible that you live somewhere and never get asked. Exit polls for elections are also not made up and I've never been polled. And if such polls makes sense is yet another topic.
- If done right
  That's a pretty large if. Haha
  No group has ever cherry picked the sample set to prove their point right?
Do you know how statistics work? They don't ask literally everybody, you know. They take a representative sample and extrapolate from that, together with calculated error margins (which are typically not shown in news reporting on it, but the study itself will have it)

I wonder how many support vaccines in dart guns?

I once was on stage doing comedy and was surprisingly killing it. I pivoted and made a joke about how being anti-vax was stupid and everyone hushed up real quick.

That’s when I knew I was surrounded by fucking morons. (Morons who loved jokes about putting your groceries into a Dolce & Gabana store bag so you can feel superior to the other shoppers.)

You can’t beat stupid.

But you can watch it kill itself.
- The problem is that one stupid tends to take many "unlucky" down with it when it kills itself.

Can someone post a news article with this, not a video?

Repubs are backward degenerates.

AKA American decline.

All we need to get those number back up to near 100% is a huge plague that kills a good percentage of us. I hope that those of us who can learn from history are given the opportunity to get vaccinated. So all those who don't, die.

We just lost a million people directly to covid and it resulted in public support for vaccines, masking, and other health prevention dropping. If 2 million died I would have expected Republicans to run around injecting people with diseases directly to speed up the rapture.
- Those of us who did our civic duty will do it again. Those that don't take a chance on a disease that doesn't spare them their ignorance.
Honestly if COVID didn't get through to people, would a higher mortaility rate matter? The next pandemic could be a grossly necrotic parasite, and we'd still have cable news comforming to whatever 'side' they're on and one side virtue signaling by skipping vaccines or safety measures or whatever. It'd trend the heck out of social media.
Who's listening to scientists, unfiltered? No one. Long objective tones are boring. The information envionment is not getting any better from here.
Reality is what people see in their feeds, now. And what fits their tribe.
- Covid is the reason for this shit in the first place. So much brain damage...
- I think you miss the point of my statement. I'm not trying to get them to see reality anymore. I just want them to go away.

That's been their goal this entire time. We can call Americans stupid all day long but the fact of the matter is that there have been people at work pushing people this way all over the world since before a lot of us were even born. I remember when I was a kid in the early 2000s there were already kids in my class that were getting exemptions to vaccines before they were even using autism as an excuse to not get them.

I wonder if there are some people on the American right who actually see it as a kind of Darwinian cleansing of their society.

They want to get rid of the week, the elderly, and the stupid, and this is a way for those people to self-select for extermination.

Of course there will be some collateral damage, but those who know better can protect themselves. You think that Trump and those around him don't have every vaccination that you've ever heard of, and probably some that you haven't?

Do you want people who think they are their god's chosen? Because this is how you get people who think they are their god's chosen...
- They already think that, and it's not funny.
There are the masses who are truly dumb enough to believe the rhetoric no matter how exhaustively disproven it may be. You can take them at face value for the most part.
Then there are the people manipulating those masses. The politicians, pundits, and puppeteers who convince people to vote against their interests time and time again. They don't generally believe anything they say. They'll say anything it takes to gain more power.
Many of the second group are eugenicists. Some openly admit it, but most aren't quite to the point of saying the quiet part out loud.
None of the right-wing people in power give half a shit if poor people die. Somehow they've convinced a lot of poor people that they only hate poor minorities, and not all poor people. They've even convinced some poor minorities that they only hate poor immigrant minorities.
The reality is that they hate you, they hate me, they hate our neighbors, they hate our families, they hate our friends. They'd sell your soul for a nickel if they could. If you're not a millionaire, you're just cattle to the far right politicians and billionaires who have them in their pockets.

Soon-to-be third world country

S-soon??

Big pharma and hospitals must be loving this.

Where do you think vaccines come from?
Horse paste is not made by big pharma.

Florida, the childhood mortality state.

Florida, bury your children here.

Florida, where polio thrives

I need to get the fuck out of here.

Man I am such a child of the seventies. Favorite band jethro tull, think we are overpopulated, reduce, reuse, recycle, like scientific advancement, etc.

Can't wait for the How To Treat Polio With What You Have In Your Kitchen Cabinet videos.

Oooohh boy.... We are all fucked.

Everybody collectively thought, "hmm yes, we don't have quite enough problems."

I know ill get downvoted for this anecdotal comment but I dont know a single person who is against vaccination. At the same time I do know a couple people who are against making it mandatory despite themselves being vaccinated. Just a viewpoint I never see discussed on this topic because the talking point always seems to be either you are pro vaccines or against vaccines. I also admit I dont have any social media platforms, dont pay for cable or streaming services, and dont have kids. So my anecdotal input is based of the people I directly know and are in contact with regularly so take it with a grain of salt.

Anecdotally, I know many people who are anti-vax (mostly family). When I went to college, I found out my parents didn't get me a lot of the vaccines I was supposed to have, so had to get a bunch of vaccines before starting.
- Would you say you have a stronger opinion towards vaccinations having made the decision yourself? As opposed to a hypothetical reality where you still dont remember getting the vaccinations but found out your parents did vaccinate you, would you still hold it in as high of regard as you do now? I think one of my relatives tried explaining it like leading a horse to water but not being able to make it drink.
  Before cops started installing plate readers, people could drive without a license all the time as long as they weren't pulled over. Despite there always existing legislation in every star that made it maditory to get a license in order to drive. Its not manditory for ever citizen to posses a photo id but they have made it a requirement for people to have an id if they choose to buy beer or cigs or spray paint or lighters or whipped cream etc. The result has been every person I know having some form of photo id while cops had to spend millions more installing plate reader to have the ability to enforce the law that every driver must have a valid license.
  The generalized argument im relaying isnt that they dont want to be forced to get vaccines, their argument is that forcing people to do anything is an extremely ineffective means for getting conformity when there are more tried and proven means to accomplish better results without adding more legislative bandaids.
  I also admit if this discussion was happening 10-15 years ago I dont think I would even be relaying these opinions because I did know antivaxers back then and all the way up to the pandemic. But once people realized the path for least resistance went thru the nurse administering covid vaccines in order to resume daily activities i can honestly say I haven't heard of a single person still clutching to their antivax convictions.
I would fire back at you and say that I do not count among friends, anybody who thinks in an antivax mindset.
But that doesn't mean I haven't met them every single day for years.
I've had Uber drivers tell me there are microchips in vaccines.
Literally last week a thrift store worker was making snide comments to myself and other customers, suggesting we should have masks because she has an autoimmune disorder. She was not wearing a mask. I tried to explain to her that's not how any of it works, and she said oh yes, I've read about it. I ended the conversation abruptly when I said that I almost married a doctor and you might want to actually go speak to one yourself.
They're everywhere.
That's definitely a weird point of view imo. Sees the value of vaccines, ignores that they work best with high vaccination rates.
- How do people keep finding that conclusion??? Did you miss the part where I said theyre all vaccinated? The argument is that governments have banned and mandated shit since the beginning of time with almost zero success. Its the Streisand effect, I think if im using that correctly. The surgeon general for every country of every modern generation has preached for people to quit smoking with little to no affect. What did work, tho? Making it so expensive and inconvenient to smoke that its a natural no brainer to quit. These arent people arguing that smoking is healthy, these were people aware of the risks, who were also all addicted to nicotine, who also, almost unanimously, decided to quit smoking in less than 5 years from the price of cigs going up and smoking in public restricted to designated areas.
  The same thing happened with covid vaccines. I saw trumper after trumper proclaim they'll never get a covid vaccine circa 2020ish. That same fuckin year they started making events require people to show their vaccine card in order to attend events of all sizes. You dont tell people they have to do something, you make it a requirement for them to participate in activities they normally would participate in. Swear to god for every Bills fan I knew preaching they'd never get a vaccine before the NFL required you to show proof of vaccine to attend games, by the time the season opener came around, every single person was vaccinated.
So, these people are vaccinated, get their kids vaccinated, but don't want it to be mandatory for other kids parents are too stupid to get them vaccinated and put the life of their own kids in danger. Basically, they are too selfish to care about other kids than their own.
- So Ive already been asked this in this thread if you care to read my other replies. Or just lmk if you have but didnt see where this was addressed and ill find it to give you a tldr.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_immunity
Sacrificing the "freedom" (as some like to call it, I say selfishness) to not get a little boo boo from a needle and having the sniffles for 6 hours keeps everyone in society safe from horrible fucked up diseases, including those who legit can't get vaccines because of weakened or deficient immune systems.
The reason many of these diseases seem like a myth or "just the flu bro" to antivax morons is because of herd immunity and society spending decades eradicating these diseases so no one has to experience them.
The vaccines are not going to harm the vast majority of people, and will instead help millions have increased quality of life. There is no reason for them to not be mandatory.
I'll ride the ship down with you...
Lemmy likes to be an echo chamber for "America Bad".
I don't know a single person that actually is anti-vax, I know some who think you should be allowed to choose (aka freedom).
But that would require nuance, and the average lemming chooses not to have that.
- America is bad for many legitimate reasons. Yes some people on here are assholes about it but very few of them came to the conclusion that America is shit for the wrong reasons.
- Ok so this feels like justification for my experiences on lemmy arent exclusive to me and are actually evident to users other than me; in regards to how different my experiences on lemmy discussing most shit are compared to discussing shit with people in real life are?
  Im not talking shit, its just something Ive noticed for a while and have put a ton of thought into. I mean Im fully aware this js very niche platform that appeals to anyone knowledgeable enough to program an application's interface. While at the same time is very unappealing for everyone else in the world who hears API and their first thought is about one single private investigator.
  Its been fascinating to observe as someone close to 40y/o who never sent or rcvd an email outside of schools/college homework until I was in my early 30s and got my first job as a desk jockey.
  That domino fell, then buying a PC fell, followed by building a PC falling which happened a cunt hair before the current AMD sockets hit the market, which obviously forced my hand to immediately build my second PC in the same calender year, and all the remaining dominos fell that were standing between me being the last person to give up their flip phone and me consumed with learning everything there is to know about anything remotely related to technology.
  So for me Lemmy has been my introduction to the same industry sized community all the computer nerds have buried their heads in their whole life. Which makes everything all the more interesting to me cuz I get to simultaneasly experience a very intimate sized community evolve while also being able to people watch 40,000 users interact almost daily and feel like im peering thru the looking glass observing it all feeling almost like an outsider or alien observing an isolated environment.
  I feel like there are so many people here who have grown up surrounded by IT focused friends and groups that they dont even really notice how like minded a gathering of people with shared interests, shared industry employment, and shared educational fields actually are.
  Totally not bitching about hivemind this or that but I've jumped industries enough to know the saying birds of a feather flock together is wild for how accurate it is.
  I love everything about Lemmy but it does concern me how contagious sentiments can be here. Like I came following the reddit api scandal when shit was all bright eyed and bushy tailed. Then I started noticing it like a slow landslide consuming everything accross communities & instances, this unsettling mentality that everything sucks, the world is doomed, anyone who finds the silver lining in something is just wrong and/or stupid/nieve. Its not everyone obviously but its fuckin consuming and wildly contagious.
  Again anecdotal to me but... as someone whose only source of news is lemmy, hasn't had any social media accounts in over a decade, and has every other social interaction with other humans in person, in real life, in real time, with friends family buissness relations from accross all walks of life, tax brackets, industries from living everywhere from rural bum fuck nowhere to every block of my beautiful queen city Metropolitan neighborhoods... I feel like my adhd tendencies havedriven allowed me a clarity most people don't have for avoiding getting consumed by the herd.
  This being one of those exact situations and the first time anyone else has brought it up. I prefaced my comment saying im aware my input will be unpopular and I prefaced my comment in hopes the discussion wouldn't get twisted into the only 2 black and white options discussed on the topic of vaccines. Either you want everyone to live or you are actively trying to kill everyone. I even gave real world examples that are unanimously regarded as being hugely successful as to why I understand where the unpopular penguin people are coming from. Those being the massively reduced number of nicotine addicted cig smokers and drastically increasing covid vaccinations in my area. Both without legislative mandates or prohibition. Taking every precaution to preserve the purpose of opening discussions by providing a preface that specifies the comment is anecdotal and that the people who hold these opinions are also ALL VACCINATED. Maybe I should've made it a bolder font or something cuz every other comment responding to mine is focused on not understanding how someone can decide to be willing to kill everyone, or about how they can justify hating america because they got there thru all the correct reasons.
  The only complaint i have on this topic tho, is that I know there are users who agree with some of the shit I spew by means of the up and down votes but, and im only assuming, they vote without commenting because every comment that 100% conforms with Lemmy's unified opinion gets all upvotes, no downvotes creating an atmosphere that makes it so difficult to discuss topics that might have the name Musk, or Trump, or Windows 11, or sports, or billionaires. -last tangent i swear- im sorry but I will die on the hill that Warren Buffet is a goddamn hero amongst men. I agree fuck the rest of the lot but dont shit on the only billionaire who has put money where his mouth is by using every cent he has every used towards political lobbying, or charitable contributions in support of raising taxes for the rich, strengthening resources for women and underprivileged groups, improving education, plus a list of other programs lemmy is in full support of. Plus he made every penny he is worth by investing according the operating integrity of a company and the current valuation of said company. He has been autisticly cool since before autism was being diagnosed.
  Tldr: I wish more users discussed more topics in ways that are less black and white. There are no karma points, you wont lose a nut for discussing something you prolly will get ignored for or at worst downvoted over.

Fuck, I’ve gotta get out of here.

I wonder which dumb half of the nation that would be? /s