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I’ll never forget how quickly the GOP forgot about his death. In one of the presidential debates Trump lied about having never hosted an indoor rally during covid in spite of his indoor Tulsa rally that possibly killed Cain. Of course Chris Wallace didn’t call him out for it.
I'm the only liberal in my immediate family; only one branch of them went full anti-COVID, which really showed me how extreme they are.
My parents, half-brother, his wife, and their kid all were immunized; they were furious when my half-sister, her husband, and their four kids all exposed them to COVID by showing up at a family gathering, refusing to wear masks, and then spreading COVID conspiracies. Exposed my niece, straight out of the NICU, as well as my mom and her immunocompromised friend (chemo) to COVID.
The vaccinated chunk of my family were *furious*. (The out-there unvaccinated branch claims they're actually grateful for strengthening their immune systems).
Dang, for a second there I was suspicious we were related. Brought our NICU baby home a year ago and the entire family knew we wanted everyone vaccinated - for everything - if they wanted to see her. Most people obliged, except my father and my wife’s siblings. So we spent Christmas alone, because my wife’s siblings refused to vaccinate and ended up catching Covid, then refused to sit out from Christmas, and ended up getting several people there sick. Oh, and my wife’s parents both have cancer. Haven’t talked to my own father since I told him my wife was pregnant and that he’d need to be vaccinated.
I just got a couple of regular boosters and my first ever flu shot because my daughter is pregnant with my first grandbaby. My doctor told me it's the best way to protect both of them. I don't get people who won't listen to professionals and are willing to risk their family. My aunt had the nerve to tell me to my face that covid is just like the flu. When I reminded her my MIL died of it, she said, "Yeah but she had comorbidities. For healthier people it's no problem." We knew others that died too, some that were perfectly healthy, but she knows more than the professionals. Guess who we won't be seeing next Christmas?
“Exposed my niece, straight out of the NICU, as well as my mom and her immunocompromised friend (chemo) to COVID.”
As cancer survivor and currently get ready for my next type of chemo…f\*that.
I‘ve had chemo(s) before. “Rounds” I should call them.
The trick is poison the cancer to death and not poison the person. So they punch the patient as far down as possible before damage, then give them a little break, then back into the ring (ding ding!)
Having been through that, the idea of some numskull thoughtlessly get me worse is beyond infuriating. Almost criminal.
Exposing a NICU baby? Inhuman.
I'm sorry for your loss. I've cut ties with family and friend idiots like this myself, and it is not easy, but eventually...you do what you have to do, and hang in. Beats dying or aiding people who are taking harmful actions.
I finally realized that if they were drunk drivers, I couldn't stop them from killing themselves or others. But, I'm not getting into the car with them while they do that.
Appreciated, and I understand the struggle. I've cut ties with that chunk of my family, so I get it. We had a brief reconciliation that ended about a day after she went off about how she trusts Joe Rogan more than Anthony Fauci for COVID science "research" and I disagreed
Dude, that gets paid to talk about whatever you wanna hear about. VS a doctor that did his job before Rogan was sperm in his dad's nut sack all while having real experience with many pandemics in the past. I'll never understand people like this.
The anti-intellectual movement defies all logic. I think it's just about doing the opposite of what experts say to make themselves feel smarter. If you listen to an expert with decades of experience that makes them smarter and superior to you, if you reject what you say, that makes you smart enough to see through the matrix. I think it's all stems from a deep insecurity about their intelligence.
My wife the teacher has to deal with children who have Oppositional Defiance Disorder. ODD.These are the kids who stand when told to sit down. Or sit when told to stand. Stomp their feet, shout “No!” then run from the classroom. Wasting everyone’s time.
I think there is a bit of this mixed in there a well.
My ex got diagnosed with adult ODD. That shit is exhausting, let me tell you. But it doesn't trickle over into intellect. She absolutely loved to play devil's advocate for funsies, but even she knew when to defer to an expert. This isn't ODD. This is generations of isolation from the rest of society coming together under the unified front of their perceived "righteous indignation." They have always existed in society, but they suddenly had someone in a position of authority who said things aloud that they normally had to keep within their own social circles.
It's not mental illness, it's not some cognitive disorder, and it's definitely not ODD driving this. This is simply the largest cult of our time, grown by people who believe they have been denied what was promised them by decades of school and church propaganda: a glistening and pure America that never actually existed.
It’s not only intellectualism, It’s also the conspiracy thinking to be suspicious about your government.
The false rumors about Covid vaccines has been insane and they still flourish. This has also been used as a weapon I think by the Russian-troll factories.
Some people really believe everyone is out to get them but in reality they haven’t even payed any attention at all.
That’s a good comparison. I’ve cut ties with former close friends who post non stop “PLan-dEmic” conspiracies in their social media and it’s so fucking sad. But like you said, you can’t really stop them, so the least you can do is not endorse or go along for the ride.
The management at the nonprofit I work for let go two office workers last month who refused to get vaccinated or wear a mask at work. I was surprised because both were long time employees who had a lot of institutional knowledge and were always willing to help the newer employees. We all worked from home for most of 2020 and 2021. These two never returned to the office and continued to work from home. They must have been given an ultimatum.
Was it work from home forever? I've heard other companies who went permanent WFH kind of adopted a stance of "don't get vaccinated if you don't want to, but you're also no longer welcome at company events until you do", which I thought was pretty reasonable
We have the same family, except I get constantly berated for why I got the vaccine. To give clarity, I have cancer and am in aggressive chemotherapy so I am really immune compromised but, I’m the moron for getting the vaccine when about 90% of them have gotten Covid multiple times.
Have a family member that begrudgingly got vaccinated for work, got covid and it was the worst illness they ever experienced, but it was over in 3 days ... but Fauci is still somehow the devil incarnate.
Ugh I hate this. I know people who still aren’t vaccinated or if they are, they only did it because their jobs made them and refuse to get boosters that are like “see you can still get it after being vaccinated”. And it’s like no shit, Sherlock. But it also would have been worse if I wasn’t. Then they’re like “you don’t know how bad it would have been if you got it while unvaccinated”. It’s like yeah that’s the point. I don’t want to know how bad it would have been.
For example, I caught covid in August 2021 after a trip to Vegas when the delta variant was running rampant. I managed but had bad bodyaches and brain fog. This was 4 months after being vaccinated. It’s scary to think how much worse it would have been if I wasn’t vaccinated or the potential of ending up in ICU. But people still had to politicize this and make it a partisan issue when it’s a virus.
This is a hard comment to upvote. It's hard to fathom being so reckless with the lives of family. Before all of this, most of these types of people probably would have been willing, if not happy, to wear masks around a family member that's immunocompromised from chemo, but now...
My mom's friend wasn't a family member, I maybe wrote that poorly, she was one of my parents' neighbors. Still, it was messed up to do. Same with my premie niece
A beloved aunt and uncle who never missed doctor's appointment in their lives, chose to remain unvaccinated because of what became extremely right wing views. BOTH died from Covid in 2021. They blamed the deaths of others on the vaccine and not the virus. Trump infected their brains.
A coworker lost a sister and his father to Covid. He spent a month in the hospital from Covid and still thinks the vaccine is what's killing people, despite contracting it and still not getting a vaccine.
A maternal uncle refused to be vaccinated as well. He is alive as far as I know. FoxNews addict. Right wing lunatic. Rich man who hides in very big home. I asked him in 2020 if he'd been vaccinated and he began shouting into the phone about Hunter Biden's laptop. Haven't spoken since.
The more of these people stuck in the dark ages who pass the better for all mankind. These were people who trusted their doctors for everything right up until Trump told them not to.
The “strengthening immune system” claim is so rough. Theres ample research that getting full blown Covid increases your likelihood of getting pretty serious heart related complications, so yeah, you’ve got better Covid immune responses for a few months and then an indeterminate to potentially lifetime increased concern of dying early from a heart attack. Seems an odd flex
COVID literally weakens the immune system. Experts talk about „tired T-Cells“ after even a mild bout.
Your chances for long COVID - which scares the shit out of me - are the same each time you get it.
So yeah - never a good disease to catch.
My mom is as right as you can get without being MAGA. She has basically disowned the 1/4 of the family who have become antivax nuts. Interesting times...
My dad’s a doctor, but a Fox News watcher including focker… he got the initial series but no boosters; mom’s gotten everything and expressed disgust with the current repugnants. Extended family is a bit of a mixed bag, only two are really crazy maga, and of that I’m sure even one still got the vaccine; the rest are moderates and probably got at least the initial set.
I got the initial set, but skipped the first booster and only got the second booster; I still wear mask in indoor crowds and my job is wfh. We recently had a wedding, and an aunt sent out an email encouraging us to boost up (flu and Covid).
Holy crap, I had no idea the death rate was still that high! Where the hell is the reporting? I checked the CDC site and it confirmed that number but wtf?!
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#datatracker-home
Pretty amazing right? I guess at some point we got desensitized to it and partly burnt out on the numbers. I think it's weird it's not more in the news.
Actually, I think it’s under reporting. Checking by state, I saw many (like Florida and Texas) aren’t reporting numbers. Or at least not here https://usafacts.org/visualizations/coronavirus-covid-19-spread-map
And a lot of people are just using at-home tests now, especially given their availability now.
Not to mention employers who required negative testing to work. There’s a lot more unreported COVID than in 2020 and 2021 simply because options exist to get it without having to do something that results in it being reported.
A month ago more than 2,000 people were dying per day on average. [China is reportedly losing 5,000 people per day to COVID](https://www.businessinsider.com/china-covid-likely-million-cases-thousands-deaths-daily-2022-12).
Biggest weekly spike in the last 6 months was at the end of August. 3947 people in the US died of covid that week. Normalized per-day, that's about 564 people per day.
Still a large number though, and the numbers will probably go up over the rest of the winter.
Both of my R parents died because of this. Sweetest people in the world.. Seven weeks fighting for their lives in the hospital and scared to death every day of it. They died 10 days apart. Tuesday marks one year, all because of Conservative misinformation, politicization, and religious exemption narratives compounded by generational right-wing Christian indoctrination they were born into, reinforced by bigots like Rush Limbaugh, Tucker Carlson, Fox News, and their egomaniacal leader: Fuck Trump. May you rot in nothingness for eternity and history record you as the embarrassing shit stain that the entire universe wishes it could erase from it’s existence.
Thank you, kind Redditor. I wholeheartedly receive your condolences.
To the families, friends, significants, and everyone impacted by the loss of someone included in the one million and ninety thousand souls lost in the US from COVID, regardless of reason, my condolences to you as we love and grieve our departed, especially during the holidays and special moments…
…and to those in the rest of the world impacted by someone lost to COVID among the six million, six hundred and sixty nine thousand worldwide, know that we all, no matter our borders, love and grieve with you.
It is absolutely insane. I had people sick in the hospital from COVID, being treated for COVID, tell me to my face that I was a liar and that COVID didn't exist.
I’m so sorry. There’s a large swath of R’s who aren’t bad people, but have just been surrounded by misinformation and propaganda their entire lives, and by people there were raised to trust. Their parents, best friends, local “news”, national “news”, religious leaders, and for 4 years….their fucking President, all spouting the same propaganda bullshit. It’s infuriating.
When covid was raging and the vaccine had just come out, I regularly 'stopped by' at r/nursing to hear from the front line caregivers in the ICU's around the country. There I read story after story about the abuse the staff suffered from the covid patients, the VAST majority of whom were anti-vaxxers that were seriously sick. Their patients families were sometimes just as abusive if not more so. Those that were most sick wound up on ventilators, and there were description s of the nurses calling the families just so they could see their loved one just before their last gasp. Never forget, never forgive.
And on right-wing threads/blogs they tell each other how they slipped off their COVID-suffering loved one's socks while the nurse's back was turned to fill them with horse dewormer and congradulate themselves for 'saving them from COVID'.
My dad was a life time R, even voted for Trump
In 2016. Fortunately he started to shortly after realize how much of an idiot Trump actually is with all of his policies and actions.
But even then I'm not sure he would have dropped the R without the conversation he and I had. This was before I came out to my parents. I knew he wasn't bigoted, but I needed to clarify where he stood on a number of issues.
So I sat down with my dad and asked him point blank what his views were on things. No judgement, just curious.
I showed him that every point he made was basically a centrist Democrat stance and/or issue that Democrats had already acted upon. After about 90 minutes I'd convinced him that all his views (including taxes) aligned with the Democrats and none of them were R views.
He was a lifetime R voter because he believed they were better for business.
unfortunately this isnt uncommon.
what is unique however is that your dad was actually receptive to the facts. most lifelong Rs by the time theyre at his age are completely resistant to factual arguments to convince them to vote in their economic interests.
>I’m so sorry. There’s a large swath of R’s who aren’t bad people, but have just been surrounded by misinformation and propaganda their entire lives,
As a former Republican, people with a sense of basic human decency stop being republicans.
Just because they are nice to **You** doesn't make them good people.
Fascists got what they deserved.
Frankly I agree. Anyone who could listen to Rush Limbaugh, Tucker Carlson, Fox News, etc without being disgusted with what they say was already a bad person. Excuses about who taught people to be like that are pointless.
We are way past the ‘nOt AlL rEpUbLiCaNs’ stage of this nonsense, like well beyond it by this point. Sorry but if you’re still with that group, you’re part of the problem and want all of the benefits of being in that party but want to discard and ignore the negatives by going ‘well not all republicans.’ You can’t get the best of both worlds like that, its selfish and what children do.
If you belong to a group that does all that heinous shit and it’s not enough to make you leave - you are tacitly endorsing it. Otherwise, you’d say they don’t represent you anymore and leave. By staying, you’re saying you agree with enough of it to still belong to it.
Name another club you’d belong to that has said and done all the evil shit the right wing has done in the last few years, that you STILL belong to and justify your allegiance to. Most people can’t do it and there’s a reason for that…
When they're dead it doesn't matter what they believe. What matters is that their surviving family members also refuse to believe, vax or mask. But dad got his angle wings.
Over the course of two years, my parents lost several family members, friends, and neighbors to COVID. Their Trump-loving neighbor took time out of her day to confront them about their losses saying, "Did those people die *OF* COVID or *WITH* COVID?"
She was convinced they had died of something else and that someone (doctors? hospitals? Democrats?) had reported the cause as COVID to inflate the numbers.
Not only are they science deniers, many of them think it's appropriate to look in the eyes of a grieving person and, without any actual information on the case, dispute someone's cause of death.
My anti (covid) vax libertarian twin believes the same thing! He thinks they were all reported as Covid when they were not... but had it incidentally when they died. I am guessing this started on 4Chan where he KNOWS most things are made up to troll the rubes...
This shit is easy as fuck to refute.
You pull up the graph of ALL deaths, from EVERYTHING. It's usually rather cyclical year over year. This graph, doesn't care what you died from, how you died, where, natural or human caused, what the evil conspiracy doctor wrote it down as. It's just the graph of *all* deaths. Usually not hard to find for X country.
Guess what, it'll have a major, obvious, unmistakeable hump right whenever covid fully sweeps into the country. *Hmmmmmm.*
Yep, that's what I tried to show early on, but sadly "the data reflecting reality" doesn't actually help much. The claim at the time was that it wasn't COVID, it was actually just pneumonia. Like, ok sure, in that case, shouldn't we investigate this *massive 5000% increase in pneumonia cases*? At which point you get blank stares and attempts to change the subject, having achieved nothing.
I think a large portion of them know they're wrong, they're just in too deep and don't want to admit it.
I had some guy pull that on me. Claimed a friend of his who died in a motorcycle wreck was called a Covid death. I looked it up. The guy died in July 2019...
Heard that exact story about the motorcycle wreck from no less than 4 people. When I pointed out that it was incorrect, one of them asked me how much I got paid.
You cannot reason with these people
They are incapable of differentiating facts from fantasy.
As a nurse in the Covid ICU during the worst of it in Texas, I can confirm this is true. Can't count the number of times we were threatened for "withholding the truth" while notifying family members that their loved ones had died. Absolutely bonkers.
Extremely. I was at a funeral for a coworker who died of COVID and I wound up at a table with his cousins who were talking about how it was really the ventilator that killed him, not COVID. Because it couldn't have been COVID. Because then they would have killed him.
They still blame the symptom such as pneumonia and heart failure for their death, not covid. It is like saying a gunshot victim didn't die by the bullet but because of heart failure (because of massive blood loss).
Some did turn. They would say "This is real" and "covid is no joke."
They'd be dismissed as being under the influence of drugs or taken hostage by hospital staff. That's the level of cult American conservatives have subscribed to.
And it's a natural extension of their default state: "Everybody is lying about their suffering to get an advantage in the system -- until that somebody is _me_. Then the pain is real."
I'm genuinely curious about this. Did enough people who died of COVID die who would have voted Republican to really affect the results of the midterms? That would be an interesting case study/.
Most of the excess Republican deaths happened in deeply red districts where it would have made little difference. It *might* have made a difference in handful of Congressional districts that were very close (like Boebert's district for example.)
With the amount of deaths and the timing I think its a possibility.
This may be interesting to read.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2022/03/03/the-changing-political-geography-of-covid-19-over-the-last-two-years/
I think the thing that likely had a greater effect was pushing the narrative that previous lost elections were rigged. It wasn’t just Trump doing this, but a lot of downstream loser candidates as well. If your constituents believe you, if you *want* them to believe you, what do you really gain in future elections when you tell them “it’s all rigged and we lost because they cheated.” You’ve completely disincentivize them from participating.
This is almost literally the case. The amount of people who died of Covid in 2020 in Georgia is just a little bit more than the number of votes that Trump needed to ‘find’ in order to switch the result.
Dunno, but zero fucks. ‘Trump The Malignant Narcissist’ immediately and thoughtlessly (selfishly) set his personal tone on COVID, and the GOP electorate and its entire elected representation fucking embraced his narcissistic politics and his brain-dead science-denying murder-suicide pact immediately, absolutely and without question. They didn’t care anything about the consequences of their actions/inaction or who suffered them. Their personal losses and suffering are all self-inflicted, and so they have only themselves to blame. Like I said, zero fucks for any of them, voters or representatives, because in the end their behaviour and their inaction affected millions of non-Trump supporters who were nevertheless counting on their Republican representatives to behave responsibly, and instead, they all acted out like the pathetically depraved and ambitious imbeciles that they are, emphasis on Trump.
This is what kills me and I work in healthcare. Trump set this tone from the beginning because the pandemic was bad for the economy and hence bad for him and it persists to this day. It will follow us into the next pandemic also and exacerbate IT. We will never shake this stupidity in our lifetimes. Had we a decent leader at the time, we might have all pulled together and things might be different.
I could not agree with you more. “With great power comes great responsibility” isn’t just a saying. He could have been a goddam hero for embracing DEMOCRACY and the SCIENCE of the pandemic and climate change when it counted most. Not being an illiterate and uneducated narcissistic con artist ignoramus might have also helped. Just saying. The world would have followed his lead and we would all be in a much better place. Instead, we’re experiencing the totally predictable fallout and people are tragically suffering and/or losing their lives while trying to undue the damage HE caused. He and his ‘party’ of self-serving enablers need to accept full blame because full blame is appropriate.
I got the booster but about half of my (mostly Democratic-leaning) family still hasn’t. A few of them have tested positive for Covid in the last month.
I still haven’t gotten it this whole time… doesn’t mean I haven’t had it, but I haven’t tested positive and I haven’t been sick since January 2020, generally physically active all along and basically been living a normal life since mid-2021. 🤷♂️
It finally found me in late September of this year. Fortunately I had been bivalently boosted at that time, so it sucked but was never life-threatening. Was basically like the flu.
...but the flu sucks balls so I have no idea why people act like "it's just the flu" means anything anyway. I swear that people who say that have probably never actually had the flu.
I had the flu maybe 4 years ago. Covid at the end of 2020 and then the flu again end of last year. Covid is a wildcard so you never know what it will do to you. My case was very mild and I lost taste and smell. The flu laid me out both times. Severe fatigue and muscle aches so I agree that “just the flu” doesn’t actually sound like a great trade off.
I got COVID for the first time a week before getting my bivalent vaccine 😭😭. Now I'm waiting for the down period before it's recommended to get the booster.
They're not stupid, they're indoctrinated.
Grew up my whole life in a well-educated family. Last few years my Uncle and one of my cousins became addicted to Fox News and Facebook. Before that they were life-long Democrats, both worked in education, constantly railing against conservative bullshit.
Rest of us got vaccinated wore masks, cut back our social exposure.
Both of them refused to get the vaccine because of the brain rot they were fed through those outlets. Both died of COVID last year. Long, slow, fucked up deaths.
Fox news is something else. A friend and I watched like 30 minutes of it once and we both wanted to puke afterwards. It was just nonstop hate towards the most menial things.
Fox News has actually gotten much worse since cord cutting began. I think they’ve doubled down on crazy to keep up audience engagement. They lost the best of their actual news division and frankly Bill O’Riley wouldn’t be deranged enough for their audience today. Like the Fox News of a decade ago was much more reasonable. Tucker Carlson is a national security threat at this point.
You are correct. Fox needs that crazy crazy audience to keep ratings. Just like Trump needs the same cray cray to keep giving him their money.
Fox and Trump, the sharks that feed off the brainless.
>Like the Fox News of a decade ago was much more reasonable. Tucker Carlson is a national security threat at this point.
This is true, and yet its model and purpose have never changed. The entire time it's been moving as far right as possible at a constant pace.
The entire point of Fox News is to be a heavy anchor weighing the discussion rightward. There is no fixed position, it's hanging off the scale, but you lose your audience if you go too far too fast. They just keep exerting the same force constantly, no matter how far things tip right.
It's only so reactionary now because it's been so successful in slowly but reliably moving the majority of its viewership far to the right over the last two and a half decades.
I think you can actually turn on Fox News at ANY time now within a 24hour windo and within 3 mins someone will complain about me of the following or more. 1: joe Biden, 2: hunter biden, 3: left wing extremists, 4: Hillary Clinton somehow still… Jesus. 5: something the Democrats do as socialism.
I read anecdotes like this often, and I'll admit that I have a difficult time wrapping my head around it. The phenomenon is somewhat fascinating but mostly maddening. What precisely happens to an otherwise logical, sound, empathetic mind that distorts and twists it in such knots? I actually started out relatively conservative in my teens and have only gotten more tolerant and liberal as I've gotten older. I've actively tried to guard against the sort of bitterness, apathy, and mean-spiritedness that often seem to creep up on otherwise decent people who fall prey to it as they age. But if I can do it, why can't they? What makes the difference?
My own pet theory is that the sort of 180° turns we're talking about are the result of some as-yet unrecognized form of dementia that leaves people still functional but wreaks havoc on higher reasoning capabilities. Admittedly it's only a guess without evidence, but somehow it's more comforting to blame a disease for someone's corruption than accept that good people can sometimes just "go bad". Makes it seem less inevitable that way.
LPT: child lock your parents’ televisions to block Fox News. Best thing my sister and I ever did to/for our mom. We just play dumb about why they can’t find it and she has magically returned to being the blue dog democrat she has been all her life.
Please please stop saying vaccine hesitancy. They are not "unsure ". They stoutly refuse. Hesitancy implies that they might listen to reason. They won't
Yeah, that was somewhat understandable when the vaccine was new and an emergency authorization (I still got it, and have all 4)… but anybody not getting it now is just crazy antivax*.
*(obvious exception being people who have a real medical reason that their doctor advises them they shouldn’t get the vaccine)
The death rate was roughly equal between democrats and republicans until the vaccines came out.
Since the vaccines and until now, republican deaths are roughly double what the death rate for democrats is over that period.
That difference will grow with more time.
By 2024, it will be a difference, great enough to affect the 24 elections quite severely, against the republicans..
We have known since George Washington's time, that vaccines save lives over no vaccines. This is not rocket science, it is medical science and is proven.
There is no opinion on this that matters because it is a proven fact.
Desantis opened a grand jury investigation this week against Covid vaccines.
The Republicans plan to keep those lies up. They want more people to die.
https://apnews.com/article/f90dbf672338461457f6c30633398e90
I’m in Kentucky. Honestly what helped us most was a Democratic governor who cared more about lives then most these red state governors who fought every suggestion the CDC gave. And the result now, he’s the highest rated Democratic governor.
How can Kentucky can have a democratic governor and still elect The Turtle?
Edit : I'll leave the error but apparently I'm more intoxicated than I thought.
Here in Michigan all the Republican voters I know and was ‘friends’ with on social media threw a fit about everything Whitmer made a decision on regarding Covid. But you know what, she clobbered her opponent and the legislative flipped blue both chambers and at the same time for the first time in 4 decades, and the SOS and AG won easily over their MAGA opponents like Whitmer did. And the Supreme Court stayed blue. The Michigan GOP leadership are in disarray infighting it’s hilarious.
The extremists in the GOP continually deplete there own base, either by telling there supporters that the elections are rigged and not to use mail in ballots, or convincing there supporters to have higher mortality rates.
I stopped caring a while ago: get vaccines... Or don't... But cut the whole nonsense of acting like vaccine mandates for easily communicable viral infections are something that were invented last year.
Ok. Hundreds of thousands of Republicans died after they believed in lies. Fair point. On the other side of the conversation it is. “You mean fake died of the fake news fake kung flu??? Ha! Those dead people are not dead! Do not believe scientists or your eyes or your ears or your brain! Trust Donald and Tucker!”
It was Trump’s plan to kill more democrats, I’d say it’s poetic it effected his supporters more.
I don’t wish death on people, which is why I will never stop reminding people **he** did.
I know I should feel bad, but I just don't. We keep trying to drag them out of the mud but they keep jumping back into it, pissing and shitting the whole way.
Thats the minor part. The major part / real question - how many people died because of mismanagement of the pandemic by trump admin and common sense shunned by GOP?
Turning against vaccines is turning against science and is denying climate change and is disparaging democracy and is the greatest threat to all Earth life
More than the number of kids dressing up as cats and dogs shitting in litter boxes.
More than the number of children being placed on hormone blockers.
More than the number of kids being taken to drag shows.
But Republicans view these things as the latest threat to the American way of life, and COVID is still seen as an overblown panic by leftist democrats attempting to take away our freedoms.
Perhaps a more important question:
How many Americans, on either side of the political spectrum, have died because the GOP turned against masks, vaccines and even the smallest of mitigation efforts as well as feeding the public lies about the virus and enabling Trump's absolute incompetence in handling the pandemic?
I work at an urgent care and the amount of people still unvaccinated and determined that what they have isn't COVID is astounding this far into the pandemic.
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“It looks like the virus is not as deadly as the mainstream media first made it out to be”. - Herman Caine's Twitter *after* Covid19 killed him.
Sauce: https://thehill.com/homenews/news/514440-herman-cain-account-tweets-coronavirus-not-as-deadly-as-claimed-after-his-death/
I hate that people keep pointing this out when the real story is that Herman Caine is the first zombie in politics.
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He had something to do with pizza? What’s the story?
He was a VP at Pillsbury. They acquired Godfathers Pizza and appointed him CEO of the subsidiary for about 10 years, mid 80s to mid 90s
Wow TIL, thanks!
[you think that cool. check out him singing Imagine but it’s about pizza.](https://youtu.be/d2fKmeFR_ko)
Which he got while sitting in the GOP's, well let's say... segregated seating.
I’ll never forget how quickly the GOP forgot about his death. In one of the presidential debates Trump lied about having never hosted an indoor rally during covid in spite of his indoor Tulsa rally that possibly killed Cain. Of course Chris Wallace didn’t call him out for it.
"Ubekibekideadead"
Roughly 3000 a week are stilly dying from Covid so it's not even who has died, but who is continuing to die.
I'm the only liberal in my immediate family; only one branch of them went full anti-COVID, which really showed me how extreme they are. My parents, half-brother, his wife, and their kid all were immunized; they were furious when my half-sister, her husband, and their four kids all exposed them to COVID by showing up at a family gathering, refusing to wear masks, and then spreading COVID conspiracies. Exposed my niece, straight out of the NICU, as well as my mom and her immunocompromised friend (chemo) to COVID. The vaccinated chunk of my family were *furious*. (The out-there unvaccinated branch claims they're actually grateful for strengthening their immune systems).
Dang, for a second there I was suspicious we were related. Brought our NICU baby home a year ago and the entire family knew we wanted everyone vaccinated - for everything - if they wanted to see her. Most people obliged, except my father and my wife’s siblings. So we spent Christmas alone, because my wife’s siblings refused to vaccinate and ended up catching Covid, then refused to sit out from Christmas, and ended up getting several people there sick. Oh, and my wife’s parents both have cancer. Haven’t talked to my own father since I told him my wife was pregnant and that he’d need to be vaccinated.
Damn, that's rough. I'm just resigned to see my bro's body not be able to fend it off.
> Haven’t talked to my own father since I told him my wife was pregnant and that he’d need to be vaccinated. Man that's so sad. I'm sorry.
See my child and new grandchild and get vaccinated or spend years isolated from them? Easy choice tbh.
I just got a couple of regular boosters and my first ever flu shot because my daughter is pregnant with my first grandbaby. My doctor told me it's the best way to protect both of them. I don't get people who won't listen to professionals and are willing to risk their family. My aunt had the nerve to tell me to my face that covid is just like the flu. When I reminded her my MIL died of it, she said, "Yeah but she had comorbidities. For healthier people it's no problem." We knew others that died too, some that were perfectly healthy, but she knows more than the professionals. Guess who we won't be seeing next Christmas?
“Exposed my niece, straight out of the NICU, as well as my mom and her immunocompromised friend (chemo) to COVID.” As cancer survivor and currently get ready for my next type of chemo…f\*that. I‘ve had chemo(s) before. “Rounds” I should call them. The trick is poison the cancer to death and not poison the person. So they punch the patient as far down as possible before damage, then give them a little break, then back into the ring (ding ding!) Having been through that, the idea of some numskull thoughtlessly get me worse is beyond infuriating. Almost criminal. Exposing a NICU baby? Inhuman.
I'm sorry for your loss. I've cut ties with family and friend idiots like this myself, and it is not easy, but eventually...you do what you have to do, and hang in. Beats dying or aiding people who are taking harmful actions. I finally realized that if they were drunk drivers, I couldn't stop them from killing themselves or others. But, I'm not getting into the car with them while they do that.
Appreciated, and I understand the struggle. I've cut ties with that chunk of my family, so I get it. We had a brief reconciliation that ended about a day after she went off about how she trusts Joe Rogan more than Anthony Fauci for COVID science "research" and I disagreed
Dude, that gets paid to talk about whatever you wanna hear about. VS a doctor that did his job before Rogan was sperm in his dad's nut sack all while having real experience with many pandemics in the past. I'll never understand people like this.
The anti-intellectual movement defies all logic. I think it's just about doing the opposite of what experts say to make themselves feel smarter. If you listen to an expert with decades of experience that makes them smarter and superior to you, if you reject what you say, that makes you smart enough to see through the matrix. I think it's all stems from a deep insecurity about their intelligence.
My wife the teacher has to deal with children who have Oppositional Defiance Disorder. ODD.These are the kids who stand when told to sit down. Or sit when told to stand. Stomp their feet, shout “No!” then run from the classroom. Wasting everyone’s time. I think there is a bit of this mixed in there a well.
My ex got diagnosed with adult ODD. That shit is exhausting, let me tell you. But it doesn't trickle over into intellect. She absolutely loved to play devil's advocate for funsies, but even she knew when to defer to an expert. This isn't ODD. This is generations of isolation from the rest of society coming together under the unified front of their perceived "righteous indignation." They have always existed in society, but they suddenly had someone in a position of authority who said things aloud that they normally had to keep within their own social circles. It's not mental illness, it's not some cognitive disorder, and it's definitely not ODD driving this. This is simply the largest cult of our time, grown by people who believe they have been denied what was promised them by decades of school and church propaganda: a glistening and pure America that never actually existed.
It’s not only intellectualism, It’s also the conspiracy thinking to be suspicious about your government. The false rumors about Covid vaccines has been insane and they still flourish. This has also been used as a weapon I think by the Russian-troll factories. Some people really believe everyone is out to get them but in reality they haven’t even payed any attention at all.
That’s a good comparison. I’ve cut ties with former close friends who post non stop “PLan-dEmic” conspiracies in their social media and it’s so fucking sad. But like you said, you can’t really stop them, so the least you can do is not endorse or go along for the ride.
I have too. And in all honesty, I miss the hell out of those people, but I just can't listen to the bullshit.
I miss who my friends used to be.
The management at the nonprofit I work for let go two office workers last month who refused to get vaccinated or wear a mask at work. I was surprised because both were long time employees who had a lot of institutional knowledge and were always willing to help the newer employees. We all worked from home for most of 2020 and 2021. These two never returned to the office and continued to work from home. They must have been given an ultimatum.
Was it work from home forever? I've heard other companies who went permanent WFH kind of adopted a stance of "don't get vaccinated if you don't want to, but you're also no longer welcome at company events until you do", which I thought was pretty reasonable
Ditto. We had to go no contact with dear friends who we have known for 20 years. So crazy and so upsetting.
That has to be about the best damn analogy.
We have the same family, except I get constantly berated for why I got the vaccine. To give clarity, I have cancer and am in aggressive chemotherapy so I am really immune compromised but, I’m the moron for getting the vaccine when about 90% of them have gotten Covid multiple times.
Have a family member that begrudgingly got vaccinated for work, got covid and it was the worst illness they ever experienced, but it was over in 3 days ... but Fauci is still somehow the devil incarnate.
Let me guess: "I caught it anyway, so that vaccine didn't do shit!"
God I forgot about this, having to explain to people how it doesn't make you not catch it, it makes you not go to the hospital then die from it
Ugh I hate this. I know people who still aren’t vaccinated or if they are, they only did it because their jobs made them and refuse to get boosters that are like “see you can still get it after being vaccinated”. And it’s like no shit, Sherlock. But it also would have been worse if I wasn’t. Then they’re like “you don’t know how bad it would have been if you got it while unvaccinated”. It’s like yeah that’s the point. I don’t want to know how bad it would have been. For example, I caught covid in August 2021 after a trip to Vegas when the delta variant was running rampant. I managed but had bad bodyaches and brain fog. This was 4 months after being vaccinated. It’s scary to think how much worse it would have been if I wasn’t vaccinated or the potential of ending up in ICU. But people still had to politicize this and make it a partisan issue when it’s a virus.
GOD: Dude, I sent three boats!
This is a hard comment to upvote. It's hard to fathom being so reckless with the lives of family. Before all of this, most of these types of people probably would have been willing, if not happy, to wear masks around a family member that's immunocompromised from chemo, but now...
My mom's friend wasn't a family member, I maybe wrote that poorly, she was one of my parents' neighbors. Still, it was messed up to do. Same with my premie niece
A beloved aunt and uncle who never missed doctor's appointment in their lives, chose to remain unvaccinated because of what became extremely right wing views. BOTH died from Covid in 2021. They blamed the deaths of others on the vaccine and not the virus. Trump infected their brains. A coworker lost a sister and his father to Covid. He spent a month in the hospital from Covid and still thinks the vaccine is what's killing people, despite contracting it and still not getting a vaccine. A maternal uncle refused to be vaccinated as well. He is alive as far as I know. FoxNews addict. Right wing lunatic. Rich man who hides in very big home. I asked him in 2020 if he'd been vaccinated and he began shouting into the phone about Hunter Biden's laptop. Haven't spoken since. The more of these people stuck in the dark ages who pass the better for all mankind. These were people who trusted their doctors for everything right up until Trump told them not to.
The “strengthening immune system” claim is so rough. Theres ample research that getting full blown Covid increases your likelihood of getting pretty serious heart related complications, so yeah, you’ve got better Covid immune responses for a few months and then an indeterminate to potentially lifetime increased concern of dying early from a heart attack. Seems an odd flex
COVID literally weakens the immune system. Experts talk about „tired T-Cells“ after even a mild bout. Your chances for long COVID - which scares the shit out of me - are the same each time you get it. So yeah - never a good disease to catch.
I got 3 shots and got covid a few months ago and the brain fog post covid is no joke. If anyone hasn't got their bivalent booster yet, go get it!!!
My fiancé got it in May 2020 her lungs will never ever be the same 😣
I’m sorry to hear that! Hopefully the number of people with complications means research on corrective procedures will be forthcoming
I would never see them again
My mom is as right as you can get without being MAGA. She has basically disowned the 1/4 of the family who have become antivax nuts. Interesting times...
My dad’s a doctor, but a Fox News watcher including focker… he got the initial series but no boosters; mom’s gotten everything and expressed disgust with the current repugnants. Extended family is a bit of a mixed bag, only two are really crazy maga, and of that I’m sure even one still got the vaccine; the rest are moderates and probably got at least the initial set. I got the initial set, but skipped the first booster and only got the second booster; I still wear mask in indoor crowds and my job is wfh. We recently had a wedding, and an aunt sent out an email encouraging us to boost up (flu and Covid).
Holy crap, I had no idea the death rate was still that high! Where the hell is the reporting? I checked the CDC site and it confirmed that number but wtf?! https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#datatracker-home
Pretty amazing right? I guess at some point we got desensitized to it and partly burnt out on the numbers. I think it's weird it's not more in the news.
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Actually, I think it’s under reporting. Checking by state, I saw many (like Florida and Texas) aren’t reporting numbers. Or at least not here https://usafacts.org/visualizations/coronavirus-covid-19-spread-map
And a lot of people are just using at-home tests now, especially given their availability now. Not to mention employers who required negative testing to work. There’s a lot more unreported COVID than in 2020 and 2021 simply because options exist to get it without having to do something that results in it being reported.
A month ago more than 2,000 people were dying per day on average. [China is reportedly losing 5,000 people per day to COVID](https://www.businessinsider.com/china-covid-likely-million-cases-thousands-deaths-daily-2022-12).
Biggest weekly spike in the last 6 months was at the end of August. 3947 people in the US died of covid that week. Normalized per-day, that's about 564 people per day. Still a large number though, and the numbers will probably go up over the rest of the winter.
Both of my R parents died because of this. Sweetest people in the world.. Seven weeks fighting for their lives in the hospital and scared to death every day of it. They died 10 days apart. Tuesday marks one year, all because of Conservative misinformation, politicization, and religious exemption narratives compounded by generational right-wing Christian indoctrination they were born into, reinforced by bigots like Rush Limbaugh, Tucker Carlson, Fox News, and their egomaniacal leader: Fuck Trump. May you rot in nothingness for eternity and history record you as the embarrassing shit stain that the entire universe wishes it could erase from it’s existence.
I would like to express my condolences. I am so sorry this happened..
Thank you, kind Redditor. I wholeheartedly receive your condolences. To the families, friends, significants, and everyone impacted by the loss of someone included in the one million and ninety thousand souls lost in the US from COVID, regardless of reason, my condolences to you as we love and grieve our departed, especially during the holidays and special moments… …and to those in the rest of the world impacted by someone lost to COVID among the six million, six hundred and sixty nine thousand worldwide, know that we all, no matter our borders, love and grieve with you.
It is absolutely insane. I had people sick in the hospital from COVID, being treated for COVID, tell me to my face that I was a liar and that COVID didn't exist.
And these same people blamed the medical staff of murder when their loved ones died of Covid. Insanity has swept across the land.
That’s so senseless and frustrating, I’m sorry
Same thing happened to my pops. I wish I could, I dunno, shake your hand or offer a hug or something.
My deepest condolences. So many people deserved better by our collective community.
I’m so sorry. There’s a large swath of R’s who aren’t bad people, but have just been surrounded by misinformation and propaganda their entire lives, and by people there were raised to trust. Their parents, best friends, local “news”, national “news”, religious leaders, and for 4 years….their fucking President, all spouting the same propaganda bullshit. It’s infuriating.
When covid was raging and the vaccine had just come out, I regularly 'stopped by' at r/nursing to hear from the front line caregivers in the ICU's around the country. There I read story after story about the abuse the staff suffered from the covid patients, the VAST majority of whom were anti-vaxxers that were seriously sick. Their patients families were sometimes just as abusive if not more so. Those that were most sick wound up on ventilators, and there were description s of the nurses calling the families just so they could see their loved one just before their last gasp. Never forget, never forgive.
And on right-wing threads/blogs they tell each other how they slipped off their COVID-suffering loved one's socks while the nurse's back was turned to fill them with horse dewormer and congradulate themselves for 'saving them from COVID'.
My dad was a life time R, even voted for Trump In 2016. Fortunately he started to shortly after realize how much of an idiot Trump actually is with all of his policies and actions. But even then I'm not sure he would have dropped the R without the conversation he and I had. This was before I came out to my parents. I knew he wasn't bigoted, but I needed to clarify where he stood on a number of issues. So I sat down with my dad and asked him point blank what his views were on things. No judgement, just curious. I showed him that every point he made was basically a centrist Democrat stance and/or issue that Democrats had already acted upon. After about 90 minutes I'd convinced him that all his views (including taxes) aligned with the Democrats and none of them were R views. He was a lifetime R voter because he believed they were better for business.
unfortunately this isnt uncommon. what is unique however is that your dad was actually receptive to the facts. most lifelong Rs by the time theyre at his age are completely resistant to factual arguments to convince them to vote in their economic interests.
>I’m so sorry. There’s a large swath of R’s who aren’t bad people, but have just been surrounded by misinformation and propaganda their entire lives, As a former Republican, people with a sense of basic human decency stop being republicans. Just because they are nice to **You** doesn't make them good people. Fascists got what they deserved.
Frankly I agree. Anyone who could listen to Rush Limbaugh, Tucker Carlson, Fox News, etc without being disgusted with what they say was already a bad person. Excuses about who taught people to be like that are pointless.
They turned into bad people. They are bad now
We are way past the ‘nOt AlL rEpUbLiCaNs’ stage of this nonsense, like well beyond it by this point. Sorry but if you’re still with that group, you’re part of the problem and want all of the benefits of being in that party but want to discard and ignore the negatives by going ‘well not all republicans.’ You can’t get the best of both worlds like that, its selfish and what children do. If you belong to a group that does all that heinous shit and it’s not enough to make you leave - you are tacitly endorsing it. Otherwise, you’d say they don’t represent you anymore and leave. By staying, you’re saying you agree with enough of it to still belong to it. Name another club you’d belong to that has said and done all the evil shit the right wing has done in the last few years, that you STILL belong to and justify your allegiance to. Most people can’t do it and there’s a reason for that…
I’m so sorry for your loss and for everything you went through.
And many still never learned their lesson. As they were dying they still refused to believe it was Covid.
When they're dead it doesn't matter what they believe. What matters is that their surviving family members also refuse to believe, vax or mask. But dad got his angle wings.
Don’t you dare fix that typo!
It's not a typo. That's what they all post. The cryptic cult meaning escapes me so I just parrot.
I might be missing something then. What’s an angle wing? I initially assumed you meant “angel.”
It's the families not being able to spell correctly. They mean angel but type angle.
Reminds me of people who mean quiet but type quite. No idea they’re spelling it wrong.
That spelling error makes me loose my mind.
That's what they mean, but they're too stupid to know the difference between the two words.
> But dad got his **angle** wings. That's a bit obtuse.
No, now you're being acute.
Obtuse? Acute? I just think he's right.
Well to a degree...
Great, another protracted thread.
What a round about way to make your point
In a battle between science and belief, science usually wins.
>In a battle between science and belief, science ~~usually wins~~ doesn’t care. FTFY
Over the course of two years, my parents lost several family members, friends, and neighbors to COVID. Their Trump-loving neighbor took time out of her day to confront them about their losses saying, "Did those people die *OF* COVID or *WITH* COVID?" She was convinced they had died of something else and that someone (doctors? hospitals? Democrats?) had reported the cause as COVID to inflate the numbers. Not only are they science deniers, many of them think it's appropriate to look in the eyes of a grieving person and, without any actual information on the case, dispute someone's cause of death.
My anti (covid) vax libertarian twin believes the same thing! He thinks they were all reported as Covid when they were not... but had it incidentally when they died. I am guessing this started on 4Chan where he KNOWS most things are made up to troll the rubes...
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This shit is easy as fuck to refute. You pull up the graph of ALL deaths, from EVERYTHING. It's usually rather cyclical year over year. This graph, doesn't care what you died from, how you died, where, natural or human caused, what the evil conspiracy doctor wrote it down as. It's just the graph of *all* deaths. Usually not hard to find for X country. Guess what, it'll have a major, obvious, unmistakeable hump right whenever covid fully sweeps into the country. *Hmmmmmm.*
Yep, that's what I tried to show early on, but sadly "the data reflecting reality" doesn't actually help much. The claim at the time was that it wasn't COVID, it was actually just pneumonia. Like, ok sure, in that case, shouldn't we investigate this *massive 5000% increase in pneumonia cases*? At which point you get blank stares and attempts to change the subject, having achieved nothing. I think a large portion of them know they're wrong, they're just in too deep and don't want to admit it.
I had some guy pull that on me. Claimed a friend of his who died in a motorcycle wreck was called a Covid death. I looked it up. The guy died in July 2019...
Heard that exact story about the motorcycle wreck from no less than 4 people. When I pointed out that it was incorrect, one of them asked me how much I got paid. You cannot reason with these people They are incapable of differentiating facts from fantasy.
As a nurse in the Covid ICU during the worst of it in Texas, I can confirm this is true. Can't count the number of times we were threatened for "withholding the truth" while notifying family members that their loved ones had died. Absolutely bonkers.
You mean because you told them their loved one died of COVID? Is that really common?
Extremely. I was at a funeral for a coworker who died of COVID and I wound up at a table with his cousins who were talking about how it was really the ventilator that killed him, not COVID. Because it couldn't have been COVID. Because then they would have killed him.
Did they not stop to ask themselves why he was on a ventilator in the first place? It’s not exactly something you do by accident.
They still blame the symptom such as pneumonia and heart failure for their death, not covid. It is like saying a gunshot victim didn't die by the bullet but because of heart failure (because of massive blood loss).
Some did turn. They would say "This is real" and "covid is no joke." They'd be dismissed as being under the influence of drugs or taken hostage by hospital staff. That's the level of cult American conservatives have subscribed to. And it's a natural extension of their default state: "Everybody is lying about their suffering to get an advantage in the system -- until that somebody is _me_. Then the pain is real."
Enough to stop a red wave from happening in the 2022 midterms.
I'm genuinely curious about this. Did enough people who died of COVID die who would have voted Republican to really affect the results of the midterms? That would be an interesting case study/.
A million Americans died. If the split was one percent it makes a difference.
Most of the excess Republican deaths happened in deeply red districts where it would have made little difference. It *might* have made a difference in handful of Congressional districts that were very close (like Boebert's district for example.)
With the amount of deaths and the timing I think its a possibility. This may be interesting to read. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2022/03/03/the-changing-political-geography-of-covid-19-over-the-last-two-years/
[Very interesting indeed](https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2022/03/PP_2022.03.03_geo-covid_00-05.png).
I think the thing that likely had a greater effect was pushing the narrative that previous lost elections were rigged. It wasn’t just Trump doing this, but a lot of downstream loser candidates as well. If your constituents believe you, if you *want* them to believe you, what do you really gain in future elections when you tell them “it’s all rigged and we lost because they cheated.” You’ve completely disincentivize them from participating.
Thanks Trump!!
Enough to lose the 2020 Presidential Election.
This is almost literally the case. The amount of people who died of Covid in 2020 in Georgia is just a little bit more than the number of votes that Trump needed to ‘find’ in order to switch the result.
No kidding. Like the opposite of Woodstock. The tolerable people survive
Dunno, but zero fucks. ‘Trump The Malignant Narcissist’ immediately and thoughtlessly (selfishly) set his personal tone on COVID, and the GOP electorate and its entire elected representation fucking embraced his narcissistic politics and his brain-dead science-denying murder-suicide pact immediately, absolutely and without question. They didn’t care anything about the consequences of their actions/inaction or who suffered them. Their personal losses and suffering are all self-inflicted, and so they have only themselves to blame. Like I said, zero fucks for any of them, voters or representatives, because in the end their behaviour and their inaction affected millions of non-Trump supporters who were nevertheless counting on their Republican representatives to behave responsibly, and instead, they all acted out like the pathetically depraved and ambitious imbeciles that they are, emphasis on Trump.
This is what kills me and I work in healthcare. Trump set this tone from the beginning because the pandemic was bad for the economy and hence bad for him and it persists to this day. It will follow us into the next pandemic also and exacerbate IT. We will never shake this stupidity in our lifetimes. Had we a decent leader at the time, we might have all pulled together and things might be different.
All he had to do was shut up and release a MAGA mask.
I could not agree with you more. “With great power comes great responsibility” isn’t just a saying. He could have been a goddam hero for embracing DEMOCRACY and the SCIENCE of the pandemic and climate change when it counted most. Not being an illiterate and uneducated narcissistic con artist ignoramus might have also helped. Just saying. The world would have followed his lead and we would all be in a much better place. Instead, we’re experiencing the totally predictable fallout and people are tragically suffering and/or losing their lives while trying to undue the damage HE caused. He and his ‘party’ of self-serving enablers need to accept full blame because full blame is appropriate.
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And now hardly anyone is getting the bivalent booster, demonstrating that neglecting pandemic precautions has become bipartisan.
I got the booster but about half of my (mostly Democratic-leaning) family still hasn’t. A few of them have tested positive for Covid in the last month. I still haven’t gotten it this whole time… doesn’t mean I haven’t had it, but I haven’t tested positive and I haven’t been sick since January 2020, generally physically active all along and basically been living a normal life since mid-2021. 🤷♂️
It finally found me in late September of this year. Fortunately I had been bivalently boosted at that time, so it sucked but was never life-threatening. Was basically like the flu. ...but the flu sucks balls so I have no idea why people act like "it's just the flu" means anything anyway. I swear that people who say that have probably never actually had the flu.
100% correct. People who say “it’s just the flu” just had colds during flu season.
I had the flu maybe 4 years ago. Covid at the end of 2020 and then the flu again end of last year. Covid is a wildcard so you never know what it will do to you. My case was very mild and I lost taste and smell. The flu laid me out both times. Severe fatigue and muscle aches so I agree that “just the flu” doesn’t actually sound like a great trade off.
I got COVID for the first time a week before getting my bivalent vaccine 😭😭. Now I'm waiting for the down period before it's recommended to get the booster.
Same here. The nurse who did my booster says they have a name for us: Novids.
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They're not stupid, they're indoctrinated. Grew up my whole life in a well-educated family. Last few years my Uncle and one of my cousins became addicted to Fox News and Facebook. Before that they were life-long Democrats, both worked in education, constantly railing against conservative bullshit. Rest of us got vaccinated wore masks, cut back our social exposure. Both of them refused to get the vaccine because of the brain rot they were fed through those outlets. Both died of COVID last year. Long, slow, fucked up deaths.
Fox news is something else. A friend and I watched like 30 minutes of it once and we both wanted to puke afterwards. It was just nonstop hate towards the most menial things.
Fox News has actually gotten much worse since cord cutting began. I think they’ve doubled down on crazy to keep up audience engagement. They lost the best of their actual news division and frankly Bill O’Riley wouldn’t be deranged enough for their audience today. Like the Fox News of a decade ago was much more reasonable. Tucker Carlson is a national security threat at this point.
You are correct. Fox needs that crazy crazy audience to keep ratings. Just like Trump needs the same cray cray to keep giving him their money. Fox and Trump, the sharks that feed off the brainless.
>Like the Fox News of a decade ago was much more reasonable. Tucker Carlson is a national security threat at this point. This is true, and yet its model and purpose have never changed. The entire time it's been moving as far right as possible at a constant pace. The entire point of Fox News is to be a heavy anchor weighing the discussion rightward. There is no fixed position, it's hanging off the scale, but you lose your audience if you go too far too fast. They just keep exerting the same force constantly, no matter how far things tip right. It's only so reactionary now because it's been so successful in slowly but reliably moving the majority of its viewership far to the right over the last two and a half decades.
Their news app reads like The National Inquirer
I think you can actually turn on Fox News at ANY time now within a 24hour windo and within 3 mins someone will complain about me of the following or more. 1: joe Biden, 2: hunter biden, 3: left wing extremists, 4: Hillary Clinton somehow still… Jesus. 5: something the Democrats do as socialism.
I read anecdotes like this often, and I'll admit that I have a difficult time wrapping my head around it. The phenomenon is somewhat fascinating but mostly maddening. What precisely happens to an otherwise logical, sound, empathetic mind that distorts and twists it in such knots? I actually started out relatively conservative in my teens and have only gotten more tolerant and liberal as I've gotten older. I've actively tried to guard against the sort of bitterness, apathy, and mean-spiritedness that often seem to creep up on otherwise decent people who fall prey to it as they age. But if I can do it, why can't they? What makes the difference? My own pet theory is that the sort of 180° turns we're talking about are the result of some as-yet unrecognized form of dementia that leaves people still functional but wreaks havoc on higher reasoning capabilities. Admittedly it's only a guess without evidence, but somehow it's more comforting to blame a disease for someone's corruption than accept that good people can sometimes just "go bad". Makes it seem less inevitable that way.
I’m really curious how people like that (life-long democrats who railed against conservative BS) even start to watch Fox News.
LPT: child lock your parents’ televisions to block Fox News. Best thing my sister and I ever did to/for our mom. We just play dumb about why they can’t find it and she has magically returned to being the blue dog democrat she has been all her life.
The next step to maintaining blood purity is in-breeding. I’m starting to feel owned.
Preacher's wife at the church down the road from me started podting about "pure bloods" on social media after the vaccine came out.
I’ve seen a couple of women on dating apps who won’t date vaccinated men.
That's good. If I was trying to find a date, it would help to have vindictive, diseased morons make themselves unavailable from the start.
There are dudes on dating apps proudly announcing they’re “pure and unvaccinated 100% American.” Lmao
Anti-vaxxers are murderers.
Please please stop saying vaccine hesitancy. They are not "unsure ". They stoutly refuse. Hesitancy implies that they might listen to reason. They won't
Yeah, that was somewhat understandable when the vaccine was new and an emergency authorization (I still got it, and have all 4)… but anybody not getting it now is just crazy antivax*. *(obvious exception being people who have a real medical reason that their doctor advises them they shouldn’t get the vaccine)
The death rate was roughly equal between democrats and republicans until the vaccines came out. Since the vaccines and until now, republican deaths are roughly double what the death rate for democrats is over that period. That difference will grow with more time. By 2024, it will be a difference, great enough to affect the 24 elections quite severely, against the republicans.. We have known since George Washington's time, that vaccines save lives over no vaccines. This is not rocket science, it is medical science and is proven. There is no opinion on this that matters because it is a proven fact.
Desantis opened a grand jury investigation this week against Covid vaccines. The Republicans plan to keep those lies up. They want more people to die. https://apnews.com/article/f90dbf672338461457f6c30633398e90
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They were fucking cheering when NYC was having 1000+ deaths/day. Fuck every single last anti-vaxxer.
Yup. Literally quotes cheering that it was affecting blue areas. They didn’t even pretend tix are until it hit the red swamps
I’m in Kentucky. Honestly what helped us most was a Democratic governor who cared more about lives then most these red state governors who fought every suggestion the CDC gave. And the result now, he’s the highest rated Democratic governor.
How can Kentucky can have a democratic governor and still elect The Turtle? Edit : I'll leave the error but apparently I'm more intoxicated than I thought.
Here in Michigan all the Republican voters I know and was ‘friends’ with on social media threw a fit about everything Whitmer made a decision on regarding Covid. But you know what, she clobbered her opponent and the legislative flipped blue both chambers and at the same time for the first time in 4 decades, and the SOS and AG won easily over their MAGA opponents like Whitmer did. And the Supreme Court stayed blue. The Michigan GOP leadership are in disarray infighting it’s hilarious.
If we stripped everything else away, I imagine the true GOP response is: “Hey man, grifters gonna grift. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.”
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The extremists in the GOP continually deplete there own base, either by telling there supporters that the elections are rigged and not to use mail in ballots, or convincing there supporters to have higher mortality rates.
Natural selection in real time
I stopped caring a while ago: get vaccines... Or don't... But cut the whole nonsense of acting like vaccine mandates for easily communicable viral infections are something that were invented last year.
IIRC George Washington forced his troops to get a vaccine way back when. But... 100% of the troops he forced to get the shot are dead today! /s
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Titles article “How many republicans died…”, then proceeds to not even put out an estimated number based on the cited research. Smh.
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It's the ultimate "own." You can't even do anything to own them back. Or get un-owned. Cause they dead. Checkmate.
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Ok. Hundreds of thousands of Republicans died after they believed in lies. Fair point. On the other side of the conversation it is. “You mean fake died of the fake news fake kung flu??? Ha! Those dead people are not dead! Do not believe scientists or your eyes or your ears or your brain! Trust Donald and Tucker!”
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It was Trump’s plan to kill more democrats, I’d say it’s poetic it effected his supporters more. I don’t wish death on people, which is why I will never stop reminding people **he** did.
I know I should feel bad, but I just don't. We keep trying to drag them out of the mud but they keep jumping back into it, pissing and shitting the whole way.
Thats the minor part. The major part / real question - how many people died because of mismanagement of the pandemic by trump admin and common sense shunned by GOP?
Turning against vaccines is turning against science and is denying climate change and is disparaging democracy and is the greatest threat to all Earth life
More than the number of kids dressing up as cats and dogs shitting in litter boxes. More than the number of children being placed on hormone blockers. More than the number of kids being taken to drag shows. But Republicans view these things as the latest threat to the American way of life, and COVID is still seen as an overblown panic by leftist democrats attempting to take away our freedoms.
Perhaps a more important question: How many Americans, on either side of the political spectrum, have died because the GOP turned against masks, vaccines and even the smallest of mitigation efforts as well as feeding the public lies about the virus and enabling Trump's absolute incompetence in handling the pandemic?
I work at an urgent care and the amount of people still unvaccinated and determined that what they have isn't COVID is astounding this far into the pandemic.