Damn that explains why I was diagnosed at 20. It wasn't because women in autism is severely underdiagnosed, it was because I had only recently gotten it by diligently voting in every election since turning 18! 😫
This is the correct perspective. As it turns out, a huge amount of people that believe Bill Gates is injecting 5G chips into people absolutely don't vote. If you recall, the first amendment nuts in the loser convoys and a bunch of the J6 defendants weren't even registered to vote and yet they screeched election interference. For an election they didn't even bother to vote in.
2020 was one of the highest blue voter turnouts in national history making record first time voters in their 30s and 40s.
So yes, it should be pointed out that everyday people turning out to vote against this brain rot is just as important whether or not magats and human vegetables are voting too.
Also, cancer isn’t one disease but a whole class of diseases. And we actually do have vaccines that prevent certain forms of cancer, like the HPV vaccine.
The thing that bothers me the most about (mostly right-wing) anti-covid propaganda is that they use the argument that it was rushed to market. The vaccines were rushed to market thanks to an FDA emergency provision that removed a lot of the "red tape" that companies normally have to go through to get any medical item into the hands and/or bodies of consumers.
So many right-wing politicians campaign on the promise of removing red tape and getting rid of these things that protect all of us. This is literally what they say they want.
Chalk another one up for right wing hypocrisy, I suppose...
Chalk another one up for right wing hypocrisy, I suppose...
The only right wing value is the acquisition of power and influence, that's why they don't hold to any position, they will just stand wherever benefits them the most in that moment.
And by they, you mean the right wind politicians in power.
The people who vote for them are constantly voting against their immediate interests.
If we had some sort of ranked choice, a lot of these one-issue voters might actually have a choice in their representation. Which would be good for all of us.
Also, these vaccines were not developed in under a year. There was literally several DECADES of research and testing on coronavirus vaccines (anyone remember SARS), and mRNA / adenovirus vaccine tech.
They were rushed in that they did rush to accelerate the development- largely through increased funding. However, that does not make them unsafe. Of course investing more into research can generally speed it up.
Generally right-wingers oppose efficacy requirements not long term safety trials- the COVID vaccine simply did not have enough time for that. Or they oppose the FDA entirely- which is a different thing because then you could hold drug companies liable rather than them being able to lean on the FDA for protection.
Vaccines against coronavirus have been in development for decades. The urgency for them really ticked up with in the early 2000's with SARS coronavirus floating around. Also the tech for quickly developing mRNA vaccines has been in the works since the 80's.
HIV is a very different virus and we do have pretty good treatments to prevent infection (prep) and stop HIV from becoming AIDS. I have someone in my family that has had HIV for decades and he is going to die from old age, not AIDS.
Cancer, like a broken leg, is not a virus. It's an entirely different medical problem.
Also significant parts of mRNA vaccine research were built on HIV research! Fighting HIV/AIDS directly led to the technologies that let us make the Covid vaccine possible. We really do "stand on the shoulders of giants" - we build new knowledge based off the work of those who came before us!
I guess you could say the same thing about hepatitis vaccines.
HPV and hepatitis are not cancer, but they can increase the risk of certain cancers. Often times the best way to beat cancer is to limit exposure to the things that can increase the risk of getting it.
There were also early coronavirus vaccines being developed with mRNA tech to fight SARS and MERS. I have a friend who got the MERS vaccine as part of a test group.
And it came together with new rapid prototyping technologies for vaccines, and far better computer modeling than anything anyone has ever had before. Like, there were a bunch of technologies that just happened to be coming into maturity at almost the same time, and between those technologies and the combined powers of most of the major vaccine labs on the face of the planet, and the near-infinite money to tie all of that in a nice package, a vaccine was developed in 10 months
It's really a story of humanity actually pulling their shit together and deciding to throw all their chips in a pile, as it were.
They scream about it, but MRNA tech & the other advancements involved enabled us to get from zero-to-vaccine in record time, and I'm convinced that because of that, my 84yo mother with COPD is still here!
His foundation is heavily invested in vaccinating populations in the global south. On paper at least – I don't trust billionaires or their foundations, most of it is tax evasion anyway.
Say what you want about bill gates, but that guy is the second highest donor to the world health organization, only behind the USA (yes, the country). Beats even all the other countries
I'd rather tax the rich and let the people decide what to do with their money than trust all billionaires to do the right things.
This particular person is on a mission to do to malaria what science and governments did to smallpox, eliminate it from existence forever. You don't spend 80 billion dollars to save on your taxes. He's no perfect saint, but there are rich people who are more selfish.
Because if you notice, the conspiracy theories tell them to hate anyone that's mildly helpful to humanity and celebrate sociopaths like Trump. Gates isn't perfect but as far as philanthropy related work, he did some decent things sometimes.
There are two reasons for no AIDS vaccine: 1) it’s very hard to make a vaccine for a virus that targets the immune system and 2) it’s very hard to make a vaccine for a virus that is primarily associated with a group that one political party has a contingent that wants that group dead
More on 2: even though it's also transmitted via blood transfusions and other "innocent" ways, the main transmission risks are unprotected sex and shared needles when using drugs.
No way conservative, religious countries are putting up a grand effort to find a vaccine for promiscuous young people and drug users either, even if they aren't gay.
Oh absolutely. Ending a needle exchange program in the 21st century gave Indiana a massive aids problem. Currently due to different cultural perceptions straight people are more at risk of hiv than gay people in some places.
And also yeah, what actually made the US government take aids seriously was a young boy getting it from a blood transfusion. He was young enough that it was obvious he wasn’t having gay sex or doing drugs.
There’s an idea with HIV much like HPV that you got it due to life choices and so you deserve it. But it’s important to understand here that AIDS is an absolutely fucking horrific death and nobody deserves it. It’s a death where you’re so weak you may die from a common cold. And for the worst of it in the 80s, it was alone with doctors afraid to touch you as holy men screamed how you deserved it.
I’ve come to think that stupidity is the default condition of humans. And I don’t mean in the sense of “you start off not possessing much knowledge.” I mean stupidity, not ignorance.
If you study some evolution and anthropology, you learn that the brain is an incredibly expensive organ. Most life forms opt for a lower level of intelligence that’s good enough to get some food in their face and their genitals where they need to go. The brain is a massive risk and it’s miraculous how it’s managed to pay off in our case.
Still, thinking is hard work. I think most people would rather do hard physical labor than actually think hard about something difficult. The brain itself functions like a shortcut machine, too. It doesn’t do hard calculations on where that tennis ball is going to bounce. It makes a “good enough” guess, and that’s it. People instinctively look at what other people are doing because it’s so much easier to let your neighbor figure it out and then copy them. And, yes, people love to subscribe to a worldview, political position, or belief set that someone else is selling and just let them do all the big thinking for them.
You could look at it as willful self deprivation, and it is, but I think it’s also just the basic gravity of pure resource management constantly pulling people down into lower levels of mental activity. Thinking takes a tremendous amount of energy.
Rings pretty true in the face of trans advocacy. In our case it's really hard to fight a very simple take on something that seems like an easy "fact" because to do so depends on an understanding of a pretty specific psychological condition that dovetails into some complex social and philosophical principles and a history of how we got medically to the place we are in regarding treatment that really weren't mainstream knowledge... And still kind of aren't because people are more easily sold 90's mad scientist logic over the structures that exist.
Like trans folls and their loved ones often become versed in psychology, phillosophy, history and sometimes endocrinology as a matter of survival. It's way more efficient for most people who don't need to constantly defend their quality of life to just shut it all down and repeat the thought terminating cliches, feel like they are the arbiters of truth while leaving damn near everything on the table untouched.
I relate very hard to it being like fighting the gravity of low mental resource allocation. It can feel like being crushed.
I think it's arrogance that is the default condition. Specially if you are educated, because now you feel confident your opinions are correct, and others are wrong and must be stupid.
This is mostly why people don't get along very well. Everyone thinks they are right and they have this need to fight people who says something differently.
Massive downvotes with no comments is a sign of this behavior.
And tribalism is really strong. For many it doesn’t matter if what they’re fighting against is actually logical, as long as they’re doing it together and they have a common enemy like some nonexistent deep state that was made up by the Russians to sow dissent in the United States
In fact, there are vaccines against some cancer types. There's a virus, which is responsible for almost all womb cancer cases. Here in Germany, the vaccine is free, if you're under 20 iirc.
AIDS treatment has changed a lot though. It’s not the wasting death sentence it used to be.
Cancer is a trickier beast, because it’s so essential to what we are. Very closely tied to aging. But cancer treatment has changed a lot too. There are actually some cancers which are highly treatable and in some cases eliminated with a single shot. Look up Rituxan.
Yeah there are living people who contracted aids in the 80s. Like it’s kinda night and day culturally and you can get whiplash reading accounts of the time. Huge name powerful people were completely helpless and then suddenly it was an unpleasant treatment but you’d live. And now we have prep and pep. Literally there’s plan b for hiv available in every emergency room in the developed world
Both my parents didn't want the vaccine because they were scared of side effects. Both of them have multiple chronic diseases . My dad lungs are basically dead from chaine smoking for 50+ years.
They miraculously survived getting coronavirus twice.....
He did have a very difficult childhood and he was so addicted he basically constantly smoked and i mean almost every second of his waking life . If you think cigarettes aren't that addictive think again. He had like 4 to 5 packs (20 cigarettes each ) daily.
One of the worst parts is that there are many valid reasons to criticize Bill Gates with regards to the COVID vaccine (mainly as it pertains to his intellectual property crusade leading to a few companies getting to dictate the rollout and screwing over the Global South in the process), but it's all drowned out by these idiots screaming about microchips.
Honestly it seems a lot of these "conspiracy theories" are just bullshit stories spoon fed to stupid people to keep them chasing their own tails and distract from the real issues.
That's because all of that is too complicated for these simpletons to understand. They think "intellectual property" is a smart guy's personal belongings.
She help fund a vaccine and no one is banging on about her vaccine causing you to get a large blonde hairdo (we all know it's a wig), and large breasts.
There is no democracy in the targeting of people who've helped fund development. I think they've missed a trick.
Think I've just had an idea about an article taking the piss out of anti -vaxers.
Yeah I was going to say the reason there hasn't been significant progress on a HIV virus isn't because it isn't possible but because for the longest time the bodies that could provide funding for the research thought HIV killing 'the gays' was a desirable outcome....
not to mention being undetectable, untransmisable, uninfectable and no symptoms even when poz on PrEP - although not technically a "cure" is still pretty damn close
Vaccines are typically meant to protect against viruses or bacteria. Cancer is neither of those. hiv is a virus but the political will to produce effective treatments was not always there. I think a lot of young people underestimate the homophobia that was pervasive not all that long ago and how it was tied to the aids epidemic.
There are some promising efforts for vaccines against cancer. It's teaching your immune system to kill cells that were supposed to die on their own. It's a relatively recent development, though.
Plus, as should always be stated with cancer treatments, there is no singular "cancer". It's a class of related problems that need to be handled individually. Vaccine against prostate cancer shouldn't be expected to work against breast cancer. Anything that claims to cure cancer in a blanket way should be treated with great suspicion.
Oh boy, that could also go horribly wrong too, what if a cell is a little bit retarded in it's growth for some reason but would develop into a useful cell but, NOPE body killed it.
How can they even compare them? Nobody even suggested that COVID is similar to the other two. Cancer isn't even a virus and left to their own devices COVID is probably the less dangerous one.
Also cancer isn't just a single disease, there are multiple conditions that can lead to cancer and they all have different chances of survival.
Actually, you're wrong on that "Nobody even suggested that COVID is similar" remark. Nobody credible, or Nobody who knows what they're talking about and not lying, then sure, you're probably right. However antivaxers and disingenuous scientists absolutely have been doing that since covid was discovered.
Despite the retraction, bad actors don't care. They got a "study" and headline to confirm their beliefs, so they just act like retraction never happened and just lie lie lie. Echo chambers allows this to run unchecked, and then you have people believing they're equal.
The best thing for my family was that we were in St Jude with our daughter while the rest of the world lost their minds. I was able to speak directly to Infectious Disease doctors that had nothing to do with anything but researching for cancer patients. They had worked with the original doctors for the Covid vaccine, and how long it had been in development as we learned more about the disease. People were just going off ignorance. Just because you don't know, doesn't mean everyone else is trying to lie to you.
Why do I suspect they don't even know what a virus is? Like they hear the word on the news but have no idea what it means, they just know virus means disease and never cared to learn about the underlying biology.
There are cancer vaccines already approved and many more in trials. There is no singular "cancer", though, so they have to work through each type individually.
I thought we were all supposed to drop dead in 2 years, the cookers were all banging on about that at one point when they weren't punching horses and thinking the government used laser weapons on them and not that they got sunburnt from spending the day in the sun "protesting"
Technically there's a vaccine for HPV, which has been shown to be one of the leading causes of cervical cancer. However, it is believed that at least 80% of women will have HPV sometime in their life and the cervical cancer rate is no where near that. Thus the vaccine only decreases the risk, it is not a vaccine for cervical cancer though.
There are some experimental cures that do seem to work at least in rats. But yeah there's no vaccine you just have to get sick and then get the cure and hope it works.
This actually gets me thinking... Is anyone actually working on an aids vaccine? Maybe mRNA could do something there, theoretically it should be able to grant pretty much any type of immunity you can have naturally
Yes, they are working diligently to ID an effective mRNA vaccine, but the same barriers exist as before. First, HIV mutates rapidly, meaning it easily escapes immunity and evades vaccines. Second, as a retrovirus, it integrates its DNA into a person's own cellular DNA, so even if your immune system destroys the virus, the DNA remains undetectable to the immune system and able to manufacture new virus at will.
(Responding to the picture here) As for cancer, it's not a virus or bacteria, which is what vaccines have typically worked against. Cancer is your immune system failing to kill a cell from your own body that has mutated to grow out of control. They're rapidly developing mRNA techniques for cancer, too.
COVID was a fucking walk in the park immunologically compared to cancer and HIV
Yeah, retroviruses are a hard nut to crack. Either you try to target the virus and leave the cells alone, which is the hard route, or you target the specific DNA sequence of the virus, which forces the body to start murdering itself.
PreP is a really effective tool for now while research continues. Your chances of getting HIV while taking the medication correctly reduces your chances to a very very small percentage. Of course, nothing is perfect, but it's been great for the gay amab community.
it's not that they are stupid, they are attention hungry losers that will believe manufactured drivel like this because it makes them feel special, because they have "knowledge" that unenlightened masses don't, and they prefer it over reality
I have an aunt who at the beginning of the pandemic noticed that an old can of Lysol or something said it was effective against coronaviruses.
This was proof to her that the government engineered COVID and knew of the pandemic in advance (and I guess told Lysol about it). I linked her the Wikipedia page for coronaviruses and that shut her up.
This is the most believable vaccine conspiracy I have seen yet. Everything else is stupidly far fetched, but replacing with saline and getting everyone to get on with their lives is a lot more believable then anything else I have seem. I wouldn't be surprised if that happened in some places in the world.
China and Russia both rolled out domestic pride vaccines that were far less effective than either mRNA kind, so, while not quite saline, something along those lines.
If I am playing Devils Advocate and pretending I supported this conspiracy theory, then my response would simply be "because they caught covid".
Now if you were to follow up with "how come the test was negative"? my response would be "I believe that the government is lying about the vaccines being real, do you really think I believe the tests work accurately"?
*I don't actually believe this. I just think it would have been the easiest conspiracy theory for anti-vaxxers to run with.
The part of the poster that says, "Time to install your update", as in, "inject you with microchips from Microsoft and here's a picture of Bill Gates in case what I'm saying isn't clear"? Is that the believable one?
I wonder what the motivation would be to inject people with salt water. We'll go to the expense of getting needles, people trained on how to use them, rent sites, sanitation, and I guess all of that so people can feel like their governments are doing good jobs and hope nobody involved tells anyone.
I actually didn't even notice that part of the poster. It doesn't necessarily have to be saline, it could also be a vaccine that was proven ineffective, or had very low efficacy.
The motivation is simple, get people back to work. The people who write the laws are in the same circle as the people who own the businesses. Covid was generally very bad for business, hence why the government juiced the market with stimulus.
I am not saying that happened in developed countries, just that it would be a somewhat believable conspiracy theory if that's what they went with. Instead of focusing on supposed illnesses, Bill gates, magnetism, microchips and lizard people.
People really like to throw their opinions at everyone else even if they don't understand anything on the subject. I remember seeing a post on Facebook saying something along the lines of:
a virus that dies with soap and water and they haven't found a cure yet?
my MIL watches a pastor chris from the loveworld megachurch. over the years i’ve listened in on tirades about covid and depopulation eugenics, it’s all very wild and very “we are always under attack” and positively crazy.
Its funny because the only reason cancer vaccines are even becoming a thing is because of mRNA technology. then of course the stupid of grouping cancer as all one thing like hey, there is no virus vaccine.
The cleaning lady at my building thinks she's smarter and knows better than doctors, teachers, scientists, professors and researchers.
How did we get to this point where people can't accept that they don't know everything, and narcissism has reached cleaning ladies who now think they're geniuses?
It's fascinating. These people can easily accept that they are physically worse then celebrity sports people. They can admit to running slower than Usain Bolt, but they can't admit to themselves that they are dumber than someone who has studied in their field for years and years?
That's apples, oranges, and ...passion fruits. They're simply not the same. Besides, it's quite pessimistic to imagine that the effort scientists have put into vaccine development, and all knowledge acquired, haven't taught us a trick or two.
He's not. No Jewish ancestry and his current practice is a sort of casual Catholic thing, but he also thinks Dawkins is cool, so about what you'd expect. That's from a quick Wiki check, but still.
Exactly, Covid is a variant of a pretty well known class of virusses. The research on mRNA vaccines was pretty advanced as far as I gathered but testing them in trials isn't something you can easily do. There's a lot of hoops to jump through to justify trials with human subjects. When the burden of disease isn't very impactful it's hard to justify trials. Once covid came screeching around the corner suddenly the justification was easy to argue.