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Vaccine skeptics actually think differently than other people:
In 2000, the measles virus was declared eliminated from the United States. Despite cases coming in from outside the country, there were few outbreaks because most people were vaccinated against measles. And then 2019 happened.
The U.S. saw 1,282 confirmed cases in 31 states -- the greatest number reported since 1992, with nearly three-fourths linked to recent outbreaks in New York, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Most cases were among people who were not vaccinated against measles.
After events like this, many people express confusion about others' hesitancy or unwillingness to get vaccinated or to vaccinate their children, a concept called vaccine skepticism. As vaccine skepticism has become increasingly widespread, two researchers in the Texas Tech University Department of Psychological Sciences have suggested a possible explanation.
In an article published recently in the journal Vaccine, Mark LaCour and Tyler Davis suggest some people find vaccines risky because they overestimate the likelihood of negative events, particularly those that are rare.
The fact that these overestimations carry over through all kinds of negative events -- not just those related to vaccines -- suggests that people higher in vaccine skepticism actually may process information differently than people lower in vaccine skepticism, said Davis, an associate professor of experimental psychology and director of the Caprock FMRI Laboratory.
"We might have assumed that people who are high in vaccine skepticism would have overestimated the likelihood of negative vaccine-related events, but it is more surprising that this is true for negative, mortality-related events as a broader category," Davis said. "Here we saw an overestimation of rare events for things that don't have anything to do with vaccination. This suggests that there are basic cognitive or affective variables that influence vaccine skepticism."
[...] "Do some people encode scary stories -- for instance, hearing about a child that has a seizure after getting vaccinated -- more strongly than others and then consequently remember these anecdotes more easily?" he asked. "Do they instead have certain attitudes and search their memory harder for evidence to support this belief? Is it a bit of both? How can you counteract these processes?
"I'm excited that we're finding basic, cognitive factors that are linked with vaccine skepticism: It could end up being a way of reaching this diverse group."
Mark LaCour, Tyler Davis. Vaccine skepticism reflects basic cognitive differences in mortality-related event frequency estimation. Vaccine, 2020; DOI: 10.1016/j.vaccine.2020.02.052
(Score: 2, Redundant) by Runaway1956 on Friday April 17 2020, @09:09AM (12 children)
We love everyone, unless they disagree with us!!
Want a crazy alternative view? The world we live in is a germ warfare combat zone. Mankind has learned to manipulate a lot of things to tip the war in his favor. Today, mankind's population is at the highest level ever.
Hmmm - what happens to any creature on this earth, when it gets to be overpopulated? Disease, starvation, and predation, usually. So, what's with mankind? Well, there's not much predation. Starvation is limited to a few local areas around the globe. Disease. Hmmmm. What's with this covid19 thing? Welcome to the combat zone, people.
We have been breeding people with poor immune systems for quite a long while now. We save infants and children with all sorts of conditions, so that they may grow up and breed. Mother Nature says "This one is unfit, let it die" and we answer "OH NO! They're all precious and we will save this one!"
I half-way think Covid is Mother Nature's "Fuck you humans" moment.
And, the problem with our population? A new disease was spread around the world in just a number of days. What did it take? 60 days? Certainly not 90 days.
Maybe if we weren't vaxxing for every disease we can imagine, the covid would have faced a tougher challenge. There may well be fewer people on earth, but the people would be tougher.
That's just some food for thought, people. Call it racist, call it whatever you will. Just think about it. Maybe, ultimately, vaccinations make us a poorer people. I know that livestock breeders don't preserve the weakest stock to breed. Animals with undesirable traits are culled out of the breeding stock. Only the best, and the strongest are permitted to breed.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Farkus888 on Friday April 17 2020, @11:03AM (2 children)
Fitness, in the evolution sense, isn't just a fitness, in the athlete sense, problem. New tools that help the species could be developed by quadriplegics, see Hawking as an example. Humanity outcompeted so well because we have distributed knowledge and problem solving. Every human we keep alive and educate adds another node to the cluster. We aren't damaging our evolutionary fitness by saving the sick, we are simply shifting it from direct physical fitness to tool and knowledge based. Since our distributed and shared problem solving is so unique, it arguably makes us more human.
(Score: 2) by quixote on Tuesday April 21 2020, @02:56AM (1 child)
Evolutionary biologist here. Fitness in the evolution sense has nothing to do with athletic fitness. It refers to the likelihood an organism will be able to reproduce and that those offspring can also reproduce.
In vertebrates, being able to move around well could contribute to evolutionary fitness. In plants, not so much. In amoebae? Probably yes again, but who knows what goes into being an athletic amoeba? Ability to build out the cytoskeleton very rapidly, perhaps.
So, to go back to the main point, what makes humans "fit" evolutionarily is whatever allows us to multiply the most. Two factors I see: social organization, which gets back to that trust issue since without a basic level of trust the society falls apart. (Bruce Schneier has written excellent pieces on that.) And technology. Everything from being able to weave rope and make pots up to guns, planes, and computers. None of those rely on athleticism at all.
(Score: 2) by Farkus888 on Thursday April 23 2020, @12:23PM
I mean it isn't nothing, sometimes someone had to run down prey or outrun a predator. I just called out that aspect because I was replying to someone with a common very shallow view of evolution. I personally agree that cooperation and technology are the biggest keys to human evolutionary fitness these days. People with that common misunderstanding are also usually anti cooperation, which makes sense. It also means that they are most hurting our species. I usually try to clear things up whenever I can. It would make one more node in the cluster so to speak to get them cooperating.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by gtomorrow on Friday April 17 2020, @01:47PM (6 children)
Again with this ultimately dangerous line of thinking? It's just getting sooooooooooooooo stale.
tl;dr version: You first, my dear Runaway.
gtomorrow's usual verbose version: Where do you draw that line, my friend? Who gets to draw that line? Especially in a unprecedented case such as in these strange and worrying times.
When the Coronavirus first hit the UK, the geniuses there said "herd immunity" which isn't wrong only in a mental-exercise theoretical sense. Purely mathematically-speaking the logic speaks for itself. But we're not talking about numbers or vague concepts here. We're talking your parents, your family and friends, your co-workers. In a poetic-justice type of way, the Head Twit of the Britischers was soon after infected with COVID-19 and spent serious time in the ICU. Who knows how many people he directly infected beforehand? Now I know it's not nice to wish harm on others but...it's almost O. Henry.
So, Runaway, while I'm watching military trucks on the news carrying literally hundreds of bodies through the streets to be cremated because all funerals have been temporarily suspended...pick 10-20% of your family and friends to develop "herd immunity". Go ahead...we're all waiting.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday April 17 2020, @02:43PM (3 children)
Ahhhhh, I'm not God, so I don't get to pick and choose. Not even among my own family do I get to pick and choose.
These kids didn't get to choose, either - https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-3837131/Rare-group-children-IMMUNE-AIDS-scientists-reveal-researchers-claim-cusp-cure-HIV.html [dailymail.co.uk]
My point is, life is harsh, and sometimes you just have to be tough to survive. Breeding weakness into the species isn't going to make life any easier, is it?
I expect that like AIDS, we'll see adaptations to this covid19. Not immediately, but eventually. It's even possible that those who don't get the adaptations won't survive. Reality says, we won't all survive contact with the disease. Maybe that includes me not surviving, who knows?
But, I just gave food for thought here. You can think about it, or not, it's entirely up to you.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by gtomorrow on Friday April 17 2020, @06:47PM (2 children)
Ah, no, Mr Runaway. You started it. Now you're gonna finish it...instead of, like your account name, run away. All of a sudden you're not god, eh?
Go ahead...choose.
I'm so tired of hearing these thought exercises from certain empathy-impaired replicants that infest this site and elsewhere. Yeah, thanks for the tip that life is harsh. What would I do without you and your trite pearls of wisdom?
I'm still waiting...choose.
Food for thought, my ass. Try and remember this moment the next time you feel flippant with potentially ~200,000 lives...hell, for when you're flippant with 1.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday April 17 2020, @07:49PM (1 child)
Choose? I get a choice? I get to be God? Fine, I'm going first, and all the rest of my family stays behind and works for another twenty or thirty years. They say only the good die young, well, dammit IT'S MY TURN!! I'm as good as any of my bro's who checked out decades ago!
And, seeing that you don't like thought exercises, I suppose you don't read a helluva lot of science fiction. You should think about turning in your nerd card.
(Score: 2) by gtomorrow on Saturday April 18 2020, @08:57AM
Just as I suspected. Run away. Sidestep any implication of your mental (midget) calisthenics...and thus any responsibility.
Personally, I love thought-exercises, science-fiction or otherwise (although I'm at a loss to explain your non sequitur regarding). I just happen to have a pretty good grasp on the difference between theory and practice...and spouting my mouth off in public. Bonus points for me for not once citing Godwin's law in this conversation that was just begging for it from the get-go.
In summation, as originally stated in my first tl:dr rebuttal (which you, by way of your so-eloquent retort above, seem to agree): You first.
And I never had a nerd card...nerd.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 17 2020, @02:59PM (1 child)
Arguments to your loved ones rarely make for good public policy. I know no one personally who tested positive for Covid-19 let alone is being treated, yet I know hundreds who, along with their families, live in uncertainty where their next meal is coming from.
You're not going to get a vaccine that is safe to force on people. Looking at SARS-1, not for many years, if at all. So herd immunity combined with supportive treatment, along with anybody feeling at risk to voluntarily seclude themselves, are the only sensible actions.
Johnson spending time in the ICU was an example what is done for your betters. He wasn't even on a ventilator, so I would be interested in just how he was intensively cared for. I'll also bet money that they blocked off the other beds in the ward to not let him be together with filthy citizens.
If funerals have been suspended, that is due to government action. Theoretically, you're supposed to have a voice and they are supposed to be limited to the least intrusion in your lives. It is not the virus that is destroying our lives, it is government.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by gtomorrow on Friday April 17 2020, @06:30PM
You, sir, win the Idiot of The Day Award! Congratulations! (Sorry, Runaway...it was close though.)
Flame ON!
Really? Hundreds?! You know these hundreds of people personally?! Y'know, 'cos I want a verified list. Even if you reach 99, I'm gonna count 'em. Do you watch them starve, oh anonymous coward with disposable cash, a computer/smartphone and an internet connection, from your balcony...like watching television...or an ant farm?
Your betters, maybe.
But lastly, and this clinched it...
Abggg...aggg...this is so insanely stupid, I hardly can find the words to reply! It borders on surrealism/absurdism. Do you not have the minimum idea of how even the common cold is spread throughout a population? Are you implying that funerals (among other activities) have been suspended, not for damage control but purely for populace control or a coordinated show of power...or maybe some other half-baked, intelligent-design, flat-earth conspiracy theory?
Congratulations...idiot. I realize, thanks to the global quarantines and lockdowns, we all have time to kill, but please...next time, just please refrain. Throw scraps from your balcony to your hundreds of non-infected, starving friends instead.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Friday April 17 2020, @02:31PM
>I half-way think Covid is Mother Nature's "Fuck you humans" moment.
Nah, at worse it's a gentle reminder of reality. If it swept through the population like wildfire, infecting everyone, and killing maybe 10% or so (since hospitals would be severely overloaded)... it would only undo a few years of population growth.
>Maybe if we weren't vaxxing for every disease we can imagine, the covid would have faced a tougher challenge. There may well be fewer people on earth, but the people would be tougher.
Probably not - vaccines are like boot-camp for your immune system. They don't do anything against the disease directly, they just offer a training ground so you can figure out how to fight before the real battle begins. And since the "learning" is mostly just randomly trying the various weapons in your genetic arsenal to see what works against this particular disease, killing off everyone who doesn't have the right weapons for Disease A doesn't really have much effect on your chances of surviving Disease B, unless it happens to only be vulnerable to the same weapons.
(Score: 2) by Aegis on Friday April 17 2020, @02:56PM
We love everyone, unless their ignorant actions cause others harm!!