Pandemic Revisionist History.
I don’t know how these things got memory holed other than there’s been just a continuous firehose of covid minimization, pandemic disinformation, and lockdown revisionism, that everyone’s senses became overloaded with the mere exposure effect of repeated nonsense and it’s created informational learned helplessness.
The nature of coronaviruses.
We always knew that coronaviruses don’t tend toward long-lasting immunity, and that making vaccines for them has been elusive. This was a known thing. This wasn’t unexpected. So anyone who claimed that there would be herd immunity of any type in 2020 was ignoring everything that was known about coronaviruses. Many of course knew this hopium for natural immunity was bullshit. And there were people pushing back on it in 2020. But nobody wanted to hear that, of course, and people telling people what they wanted to hear of course has always been popular. And so we have All The Variants now - and this shouldn’t have been unexpected, and was not unexpected.
Vaccination is a public health measure.
You always need high uptake for vaccines to be successful public health. This has always been the case. This à la carte mindset, and restricting of safe vaccines for a widespread disease, where anti-vax is left to stand mostly unchallenged, is antithetical to previous vaccination campaigns. The polio campaign in the U.S. was successful because of a concerted effort to do a door to door campaign that started before the vaccine was even available. But for some reason since this covid pandemic started it’s been “if you wanna” and so uptake isn’t even barely mentioned even in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) October 23, 2024 meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). The only person who mentioned the need for messaging and uptake and overcoming distrust was Robert H. Hopkins, Jr., MD, the NFID medical director, (National Foundation for Infectious Diseases). Vaccine uptake is important and it’s always been that way.
Funerals are important to most people, but big crowded funerals are not essential.
Back in the 1990s there were things said about the ebola outbreaks in Africa that I now realize were horribly racist. Professionals in the news were quoted as saying that the African citizens were uncooperative and wouldn’t follow simple rules. An example is the LA Times article from 1995 which reported: “one microbiologist said he was terrified that the virus would spread like wildfire because people were sneaking into the hospital to visit their dying loved ones, possibly carrying the virus with them when they leave.” People often remarked it was because of backward superstitions that they wouldn’t give up their funeral rites, even to save themselves from ebola. I remember this well. When this covid pandemic swept in, I heard about so many people who were going to funerals, insisting that they had to go to indoor wakes and funeral breakfasts, and doing all sorts of other unnecessary things. People are people and make decisions based on impulses, and that’s why societal rules exist, to give people guidelines based on collectively known information. On Conspirituality Podcast and in an LA Times op-ed about the Stanford covid contrarian right-wing symposium, it was reported there was outrage about how people were kept from big funerals in the early pandemic, as if not having funerals was uncivilized and backward.
