USA things

I don't understand how antivaxxers manage to be so incredibly stupid, vaccines are like one of the easier medical concepts to grasp. You introduce your immune system to a danger in a safe way so it knows how to react when that danger arises naturally. Are they also anti fire drill because it's basically the same concept?
- Fuck, are there microchips in fire drills, too? This insanity has to stop!
  
  The alarm sound vibrate on such a frequency, it is altering your brain patterns and harming your chakra so you are unable to go Super Sayan and fight back.
  
  Every now and then I find a comment that makes me full on belly laugh and I really appreciate it 😄
- Are they also anti fire drill because it’s basically the same concept?
  Wake up babe, new conspiracy theory just dropped!
- Thank you for inducing me to the concept that fire drills inoculate me against fire. I love it ❤️
- but someone in facebook said their grandma died after taking the vaccine!
- I've never met anybody who enjoyed doing a fire drill, so.. probably.
  Then again I'm up in Canada and for whatever reason they like doing annual drills in January 🥶
  
  I never minded fire drills during school, it got us outside during class and killed a good hour of the day
  
  Fire never sleeps, so you must always be prepared!
  Constant vigilance!
  
  I love fire drills at work. Beats actually working for sure
- Obviously vaccines are safe and the conspiracy theorists are dumb dumbs.
  Now fire drills on the other hand...
- Remember when they came up with the concept of mRNA-vaccines and they thought it would change their DNA permanently? What we actually got was the most effective vaccines ever. Why is it that with actually good inventions like this we get skeptics, but when we get "AI" nonsense then everybody is just on board?
  
  I'm still waiting for me to just liquify. I'm disappointed, they said it'd happen within a year! Then 2 years. Now 5 years! Just happen already, it's the waiting that's the worst part
  
  "They thought," I work with people who still think my DNA has been changed by Big Pharma.
- Please don't say that. People who Do Their Own Research will think you're being seriously and do absolutely no more Research before concluding Fire Drills are sending harmful Vibrations into our Children. They'd rather send BULLETS into our Children!
- Are they also anti fire drill because it’s basically the same concept?
  Honestly, probably lmao
- They don't trust that medical companies have their best interests at heart, and are motivated by profits. Making people sick is profit.
  It really isn't so strange.
  And if you google on vaccine side effects, you will find a lot of them. They are rare, but they happen, and when they do, there is no help to be had.
  So why is it stupid to be careful? I think it makes sense.
  
  It’s stupid because they don’t understand probability and risk assessment. Yeah there are side effects but they are exceedingly rare and even if you get them the outcomes are usually far less severe than the disease you’re trying to prevent. It’s like saying “I refuse to wear a seat belt because it might wrinkle my suit jacket.”
  
  Have you ever heard the phrase "penny wise and pound foolish"? Avoiding vaccines is the opposite of being careful.
  You said below it's up to each person to decide and that's true in the sense that people can decide what to put in their bodies, but the relative risk of taking a vaccine vs not is simply a fact. You can have your own opinions but you can't have your own facts.
  
  A lot of medicines have side effect. And a lot of side effects. But you still take them because The thing you're taking them for fucking sucks
  There's being careful and there's forgetting the whole point of it all: to not get a life-debilitating sickness. Which a lot of vaccines eliminate.
  
  It's only being careful if you're immunocompromised in some way that would make the vaccine actually dangerous, which is even rarer than side effects being more than soreness.
  COVID isn't a well known virus. The fact that it destroys the nerves between your nose and tongue and your brain is a HUGE red flag that should be terrifying to everyone. Nerves are very similar throughout the body, and we don't know the full extent of damage caused by it yet. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, which may or may not be the same thing as long COVID considering it is generally caused by various viral infections, is incredibly not well known, but affects far less people supposedly. Maybe the fact that 25% estimated last I checked of people get at a minimum mild long COVID symptoms, and 10% of those never really recover, with most people reporting lowered energy levels permanently (not like enough to be a disability for most) will help drive more research, as there's a lot of cases of COVID permanently screwing over perfectly healthy people.
  I mention here one of the least devastating aspects of ME/CFS and similarly long COVID which share a lot of symptoms. There are people who cannot stand up without assistance because of them. People have lost jobs due to them. And in America, not having a job means not having decent healthcare or any sort of benefits.
  Being careful means getting the damn vaccine if you can, when you can, as soon as your doctor tells you that you are healthy enough to do so, every single time. If not for you, then for anyone you care about. Care about human life, get the vaccine.
  
  Then why the fuck do vaccines exist?
  They can sell me a single shot against tetanus, pertussis and diphtheria for about 50 bucks.
  OR, I can get tetanus, a disease that quotes 3 or 4 weeks of muscle relaxants, painkillers, and a shitload of immunoglobulin costing thousands. That's followed by possibly months of therapy.
  Treating unvaccinated tetanus costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. Getting a vaccine is 50 bucks.
  Nobody here benefits, except for me, of course.

Also Bill Gates, though: let's prevent countries that can't afford enough doses of the brand name vaccine from making generics!
Not a correction, just a reminder that he's still a billionaire who probably owns a shitload of shares in pharmaceutical companies.
- Every single time Bill Gates gets mentioned in public conversation this needs to be the first thing said about him for the rest of his life. Given the power Bill Gates has he could have easily pushed for Covid vaccines to be made generic and saved tens of thousands? of lives.
  This isn’t some pipe dream or unrealistic 20-20 hindsight no one could have had. All he had to was decide it was important to advocate for it and use his power to make it happen. It was no guarantee, but more than anyone else on the planet he has the public, private and monetary unilateral leverage to make something like that happen.
  Given the complete lack of desperation or forced choices in Bill Gates life, the choice not to push for generics (and be a talking head on tv actively against them) can and should be seen as indiscriminate mass murder on a societal scale. In terms of world impact it obliterates everything Bill Gates built with windows, computers, all his philanthropy and involvement in medical science… ALL of it in one tidal wave of violence and brutal lack of compassion.
  Makes me angry when I hear dumb conspiracies about Bill Gates when this is aspect is sitting there right in the open and it is so much more evil than most of the conspiracies (you know what is worse than having a chip in your head?Your loved one dying from Covid).
- Generics were a mistake! Templates are way better.
  
  C++ templates are the worst implementation of generics. Fight me.
  
  Personally, I prefer Platonic Ideals.

Quite impressive how William Henry Gates III managed to PR himself from infamous ruthless capitalist to everyone’s favorite philanthropist. Especially considering he somehow got richer after promising to give away his money.
- He could solve more of our problems by paying his fair share of taxes. He's still a dickhead, just with a PR team. He is trying to do what Carnegie did

It needs to be a happy soyboy on the bottom
- People who say stupid things like "soyboy" have never experienced chronic heartburn/acid reflux. I love a good steak. But if I did red meat regularly I'd burn through my esophagus. Soy is a perfectly good substitute that doesn't agitate me and in most things you can't tell it's there.
  Substitute half of ground beef in any Midwestern casserole with soy crumbles and I'm 95% sure none of these meat babies would be able to tell.

Literally have this discussion with the conservatives of the family every holiday 😂

Even having under my belt multiple biology classes, (general, human, micro, genetics, a&p) several animal sciences, and a firm understanding of vaccine science; I still couldn't convince a guy that it's not some conspiracy and that the risks (mainly allergic) are negligible compared the dangers and possible life-long complications of unmitigated COVID. There is just no reasoning with these people, their understanding is just borked.
- Even wearing a mask was a controversy. I always get blank stares though when I ask them why a surgeon wears a mask and to be sure to tell their surgeon not to wear one if they have surgery.
  
  I wish masks weren’t controversial. N95 kept my dust mite allergy at bay.

Look I'm not a antivaxxer or conspiracy theorist but we need to kill the neurallink before it ever archives social acceptance.
- Depends on the intended use.
  Human/brain interfaces have tons of potential for helping people with injuries to their central nervous system. Someone could eventually regain the ability to walk with just a few chips and electrodes.
  However if it's like "fuck yeah I wanna mainline the Internet" then yeah, that shit sucks.
  Of course Elon owns the company, so it's bound to be the stupid thing.
  
  Yes, helping people in a medical sense that is totally acceptable. But I really don't want them to become something like smartphone. Yeah you can live without a smartphone but realistically it is not possible.
- Cybernetic enhancement is fine in principle, but closed-source shit from Elon Musk? Oh Hell naw!
  
  I'm also against cybernetic implants which are 100% FOSS. Because once it is socially accepted there will always be megacorps trying to profit off of it and governments trying to control and surveil their citizens with it.
- I tried to get into BCI for both personal reasons and for prosthetic reasons. I admit being able to control my computer faster, and draw/play things faster and more accurately was the goal for myself, but the greater good of improved prosthetics was always on my mind and so fascinating to follow progress on.
  When I got called for an initial interview with Neurolink, I turned it down, an entry-ish position for what was at the time my dream job, just because I heard the name Elon and would never work for a two bit hack that thinks 80 hours a week is the minimum time you should spend if you want to make any difference (paraphrased direct quote from the man who "works" 120 hours a week according to himself, and sleeps at his desk a solid chunk of that according to his employees).
  If we do ever get transhumanism, it will be too expensive to be for the greater good. Only the rich, who have proven themselves incapable of initiating positive change without financial incentive, will be able to afford it for many generations.

You may be surprised that there are actually many different groups of people who hold a wide variety of opinions on various issues.
- Oh it certainly has, just not in all areas. The effectiveness of masks is proven, but the right therapy for for example my AC joint sprain is still debated frequently. Cybernetic implants like Elons chip will also lead to a massive amount of opinions from experts without a clear answer.

Bill Gates: I own big pharma companies that make vaccines.
Bill Gates: I use my charity to buy vaccines from my pharma companies
Bill Gates: I will sue people that infringe on any vaccine patent so the vaccines stay expensive
Bill Gates: I bankroll more than half the money that goes into the WHO and that's definitely not suspicious. I make sure to tell them how important vaccines are!
- You had such a good start trying to show that he isn't a great person even though he's done some good things and then you had to go and be all antivaxxer.
  
  All conspiracy theories start with a small truth, that's what makes conspiracy theories feel justified and right.
  Nail on the head. Bill Gates is not a super good person and has done bad things. A logical response is to see that humans are fickle and are capable of doing good things and bad things. An illogical response to that is spiraling to say he's injecting us with microchips and involved with some medical cabal.
  Which leans to the other truth about conspiracy theorists. They are afraid, and realizing that humans even as high up as Gates are fallible means that no one really knows what they are doing and the world is chaotic. It feels safer to say they're all in cahoots because even if it's really bad, at least there is someone in control.
  It's completely normal to search for answers in the chaos, and it's okay to feel afraid that we're all just hurtling through space on this rock with no one in the drivers seat - but we need to be self reflective to see those are our actual emotions, and not try to cover up our emotions with theories that make us feel better.
- All of which would still apply to Elon Musk. No way the guys open sourcing his microchips.

One has consent. The other was mandatory for many facets of life.
- Thanks for recycling yesteryear's talking points. Average life expectancy is going to reduce because of anti-vax idiots like you thanks again.
- Polio is also mandatory for life if you get it.
- I didn't realize the government was strapping people down and forcing them