Quote Originally Posted by Hot Rock View Post
There have been vaccine mandates for generations in order to attend public school. Why is everyone so pissed off over this one?

I think it is because of the internet and social media. There is misinformation ranging from bold faced lies to partial truths that has created a divide between groups.

If you have a stance, there is a place you can go to reinforce your beliefs on the internet. We aren't living in the information age but the misinformation age.

Among the major news sources the worst offenders are FOX, CNN and MSNBC. I find ABC & CBS are much less biased and I prefer BBC. I find BBC the least biased. I see them reporting US News from an outsiders view point which I find refreshing.

Oh well, this pandemic surely is coming to a close. We should be getting closer to that herd immunity thingy at some point. At least that's my story and I am sticking to it.
1) It's new. It seems pretty safe, but people don't like being mandated to take something when they don't know what, if any, long term impacts there are.
2) If you're youngish and healthy, Covid is still pretty low risk to you. The vaccine is leaky. Combine that with the fact that the vaccine is new, and it's not the type of disease that warrants trampling on people's liberty.
3) The mandates are a little bit about public health, but it's a lot about putting the thumb down on people. That's why there isn't the obvious exception for prior infection. They want people to get the vaccine, but they'll gladly sacrifice some willing compliance in exchange for being able to get the satisfaction of forcing people to get it with the threat of their livelihood. People see that it's more about putting the thumb down on people so that makes them distrust any statements about its safety or efficacy.
4) Pretty much every institution associated with the government has shown itself to be a combination of partisan and incompetent. Some of the incompetence is because they are partisan, but some of the dumb partisanship is because they are staffed with the type of mediocrities that have the intelligence that leads to being partisan and incompetent independently. That doesn't inspire a lot of confidence. This is compounded by them saying stupid things like "the vaccine is proven safe", when obviously it's not proven safe for the things people are largely worried about.
5) A lot of medical associations have shown themselves to place more emphasis on wokeness than competency and science. People don't pay attention enough to know which ones are still focused on science and which ones aren't, so they don't have a trusted source to look to.
6) There's no credible news institution that people can rely on. We have "infotainment" like the news stations and hopelessly compromised places like Reuters, the AP, the NYT, etc., so they can't point people to credible sources, or at least can't be trusted when they say a source is credible.

If in five years you don't see any negative impacts from the mRNA vaccines, there won't be nearly as much trouble getting people to take the annual ones that are presumably coming like the flu shot. And hopefully we'll get some mRNA vaccines for other existing viruses.