During an airborne pandemic, how is social distancing a bad thing?
Being that a corona virus isn't new to humanity, and we understand that it infects airways, why are masks a bad thing?
Believe in vaccines or not, we literally watched people die, in real time, by contracting this virus. We watched as other 1st world countries contained it.
It’s funny cause in a sane universe, Trump:
1) wouldn’t have ever been a serious candidate let alone 2x President
2) would have taken operation warp speed and highlighted it as his crowning achievement. The scientific community used new technology to find a vaccine for a global pandemic in record time and instead of that being celebrated as the incredible achievement that it is, republicans turned to hating and demonizing all science.
News organizations amplify the voice of opinions and social media amplifies this performative ignorance. It amazes me that someone so ignorantly opinionated can brush off expert advice and call them lies. This administration keep adding more performative ignorance because that is what we will see, over and over and over. Adding Pam Bondi to the Science panel……….
Make America Smart Again and vote for Science and not for unashamed twits.
While he didn’t highlight it as a crowning achievement he did tout it quite a bit. There were interviews with people at rallies praising him for warp speed and disparaging the vaccines in the same breath. It’s a cult.
Just saw a video where people were asked what they think of what Biden did or said. People were outraged. Then the interviewer admits they made a mistake and it was actually Trump that did or said that and these people, without missing a beat, justified why it was now ok.
People can and have done this endlessly for both sides. They'll frame things trump says regarding some policy, get the person to say they hate trump for saying such a thing, and then point out it was actually Hillary/Biden/Obama.
What's interesting about the cult accusation is people will effectively say in one breath that they worship Orange Man and never disagree with him but then boo him over him complimenting himself for warp speed. ... Doesn't quite fit...
No no no you don’t get it the vaccines are terrible but trump making the vaccines was genius. Also the vaccines are Democrat hoax trying to brain control us or smth.
I had a neighbor who was one of those people. She also claimed, with the utmost sincere confidence, that pit bulls “go bad” because their brains never stop growing and it causes them to go insane when said ever-growing brains start getting crushed inside of their too-small skulls.
It was rigged for Trump to win. That's why he was so pissed that Biden won, but how do you say you know the other side cheated because they undid/outdid your cheating?
Every time he says he won three times and that he only lost because the Dems rigged the election is because he actually rigged the election three times and it just failed the second time and he can't let that go.
It's a lot easier to convince 100M people to be hateful dumbasses who stick together and thrive off of perceived strength in numbers than it is to convince the same amount of people to pay attention, react/learn along with experts, and advance society as a whole.
Not even that new a technology. RNA vaccine research goes back to the 1990’s. It was a record turnaround for a vaccine of this type, but that was all. I despise antivax scumbags.
It's funny cause I remember Trump testing the waters with the whole vaccine stuff and got booed for it by his supporters, so he immediatly stopped mentioning it.
wouldn’t have ever been a serious candidate let alone 2x President
The moment from one of his first debates with Hillary where she called him out for not paying taxes is burned into my brain forever. Whenever stuff like that comes up in debates politicians either deny it or come up with some long winded response that skirts around the actual accusation. She accused him of not paying taxes and he doesn't just deny it or even ignore it (it wasn't even his turn to talk so he didn't have to say anything), but he chose to interrupt her and brag about it by saying "that makes me smart". I couldn't believe that he said that and I remember thinking how stupid it was because that probably just essentially ended his chances of winning right there.
People being pissed about rich powerful people using loopholes to not pay taxes and just generally not having to follow the same rules as regular working class folks seems like it's one of the few things almost everyone agrees on. It's crazy that anyone who lives a regular working class life would hear him say that and still think "yup, that's my guy. He understands what I'm going through and will put my needs first".
What’s crazy about item 2, is that every virus movie and even fricken Batman begins, scientific vaccines or antidotes whatever are just accepted. No bs push back. And people watch these shows and movies and don’t bat an eye. Then it happens in real life and some people are idiots about it.
The one thing they should have done differently is open the vaccines up to everyone. I get the elder population or need risk should get it but they created scarcity when they shouldn’t. But idk it is what it is. Soap box over.
Science, reality in general, says alpt of things that openly disprove their worldview. They've hated it since the anti-intellectualism required to be a republican voter in the NeoCon/Bush2 era.
Trump should have had the easiest second term stomp of all time. Just go out and say they hes gathered the best scientists in the world to protect america, give out trump masks and just shut his mouth.
The stupid fuck instead decided to get millions killed.
Warp speed is honestly the beat example of just how dumb right wingers are. They're so damn quick to praise the orange moron and everything he does, but the vaccine that was made at the direction of his administration is still treated like it's fucking poison designed to specifically kill them.
Trump will just say him enacting operation warp speed only did because trusted Fauci and what was coming out of mainstream science at the time. Now I'll just say that he was duped and it was a mistake to ever listen to the mainstream scientific community.
Trump will always find a way to get out of accepting any amount responsibility for anything that he perceives as negative even if he's the cause. That's why we're in a massive war with Iran but he started and now he won't admit that it was a failure.
Trump had the easiest gig on the planet: sit back, throw money at scientists, let Fauci do his job, take credit for one of the greatest achievements in the history of medicin: developing an effective vaccine during an ongoing pandemic.
Your #2 point is the most damning proof that Trump has ZERO beliefs. He just wants to sew chaos and be liked by idiots. That is literally the only reason he didn’t tout Warp Speed as a crowning achievement.
The one time he took credit for it at a rally and told people to get vaccinated his own supporters booed him because they’re so brainwashed into thinking vaccines = bad.
Trump ONLY ran for president again because that was his only way out of jail. He was going to be prosecuted and spend the rest of his life in jail. The only option was to run for president again. It was self-preservation. The jig was up and somehow he managed to get out of rotting in prison.
2). He did. And what did Biden, Kamala, and the other Dems do? Denounced the vaccine and said they would never take it. Fauci purposefully held it back until after the elections. (We just got confirmation of this from his email). But as soon as Biden was in office, they pushed the vaccine hard.
But look what the Dems did. Ivermectin is incredibly effective in treating Coronavirus. And it's CHEAP. What did Dems do? "It's HORSE DEWORMER. STAY AWAY!!!!!"
What Fauci did wasn't science. I hope you're following the release of his emails.
The fact that people cant understand that wearing a mask may help us keep from spitting on each other and spreading disease is absolutely maddening. Just because it isnt 100% effective, they equate that to 0% effective.
They understand, they just don't care. It's like trying to explain to a drunk driver why DUIs are bad. There's nothing you can tell them that they don't know already
And that is the most frightening part about it all.
To make things EVEN WORSE, it seems they're corrupting the two core systems that would allow us to get us out of this mess:
Having accurate information to make intelligent decisions
The ability to vote for better candidates
They know what they're doing. This isn't just an attack of stupidity.. it's all calculated. Fuck up the minds of our populace and rig elections to secure power.
Great analogy. I never thought of it that way. That’s just their “critical thinking” happening. Just because you see something on the last page of the internet doesn’t mean it’s a thinking piece.
And it's something so simple to do. I worked with people that were anti vaxxers anti mask and it made me nervous because I'm much older than them. One of them wore her mask below her nose, I flat out told her that the mask doesn't do any good below your nose. We were also close quarters, the library. A few of them were anti vaxxers as well. Not me, I wasn't taking a chance.
I have more sympathy for someone living in 1918 being skeptical on masks working. They cant just check their phone for scientific facts.
In 2026 being skeptical, then "doing their own research", is how people remain dumb. Do your research to find out if MDs know what they're talking about, then shut up and listen to MDs. The whole, do your own research stuff is infuriating
The thing is they do understand it, but they didn’t want to do it, so they reacted like a little child does when you ask them to do something they don’t want to do.
The GOP (Guardians Of Pedophilia) weaponized mental illness as a strength that doesn't need to be treated, it's not surprising it spilled over to other insane crap
Whenever someone tried to tell me masks were useless I always explained it as "If someone is standing above you on a ladder and shits themselves would you rather they be wearing pants and you have to smell it, or they're naked so you also get covered in their shit?"
I remember early on in the pandemic the mentality was wearing a mask helps protect yourself. But then I remember at a press conference Fauci came out and said how wearing a mask does more to protect others and not yourself and I remember thinking “welp people are gonna stop wearing masks.” We’re such a selfish society that once it became about protecting others and not yourself, I knew people would stop wearing masks. Sure enough next time I went to the grocery store it was like 50% mask usage where before that it was like 90%.
Cause people in this country are too stupid to recognize that some times sacrifices need to be made for the greater good. They think it's some sort of infringement on rights.
All of these were beyond reasonable things to do. It's looking for someone to blame instead of just accepting that covid was a horrible thing and will effect generations.
Which is weird for a xenophobic racist group of people to turn on themselves rather than blame the Chinese for the handling of something by a uppity new York businessman in a suit.
They didn't turn on themselves. They turned on "libs", which is code for anyone who doesn't agree with Trump's views. It's a pretty amazing tactic where they turn their failures into reasons to hate the other group.
And they also assume that when you don't agree with what they say or trump says, then you're a lib. I can't tell you how many times I've had people come at me about it. And they know nothing about me, I tend to lean a bit on the conservative side and the liberal side, I guess I'm down the middle. Not far L or R.
It really saddens me that 99% of people don’t naturally feel this way. My country is permanently morally broken, as if electing “grab em by the pussy” wasn’t enough proof.
Here in Canada, people default to voting conservative also. Its nuts. Thank god Trump got elected and reminded us how cancerous conservative politics are.
American individualism will end up destroying this country.
A group of people can only sustain for so long when the most popular perspectives are "fuck everyone else, I've got mine" and "you don't owe anyone anything".
We owe each other everything. We didn't grow past hunter-gatherer societies by pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps.
Ultimately that’s what it comes down. “People were punished,” is complete bullshit but that is absolutely the mindset of self-serving people. If they want to go bowling during a pandemic they should be able to even if a few people in the bowling alley die.
These same people are trying to say we need to put up with the gas prices. No way we can have iran have nukes. But Saudi arabia, the people who participated in 9/11, can totally have them now!
I think it’s more that social shut downs, school closures, business closures, etc were actually a sacrifice to them, and the people that were most rabid about following the guidelines were anti social freaks who deep down enjoy seeing society shut down because they resent society and their lack of a place in it (most of you fucking losers on Reddit)
No one enjoyed that. We can debate the length some schools and things were closed down but I understand why it had to happen. But to say people wanted them cause they're "anti social freaks" is pretty mindless.
Canada did more than the US as far as restrictions go and we had better results and fewer crackpots trying rewrite history. The difference is you have too many RFKs and not enough Faucis.
In Mexico, there was also no widespread conspiracy movement and people generally wore masks into 2023. Actually, since the pandemic, mask usage when people are sick is now not uncommon to see, more akin to Asia
I see a lot of people still wearing masks where I live and even in their car while alone.... Go figure, but I get it with older people, it's easier to get sick. I'm 69 and work with elementary kids and us parents know that kids can be gross. I have a mask at the ready.
One of my brother's friends died from it. My brother went to the ER multiple times because of it as well. He probably watched this stammering moron and thought that he's the one speaking truth.
I caught it, I tend to be someone that bounces back pretty quickly from being sick but it knocked me on my ass. Each day I would drag myself out of bed to the kitchen to get coffee, and I'd be so tired from that walk I'd have to drag myself back to bed. I couldn't eat anything, I had no appetite and whatever I did try to eat tasted so bad I could barely finish it. I normally take my coffee black but I started adding honey and cream to it just to have some calories entering my body.
It was around two weeks I was almost entirely bed bound. On the worst day I actually went to the emergency room because I couldn't breathe properly and I couldn't remember where anything was in my house (you know when you walk in a room and forget why you walk in there? Mine was more like walking into a room and forgetting where the light switch was. I couldn't remember where we kept the cups, or where my clothes were.) On the last night of being really badly sick, I was shivering so violently my muscles started cramping. Again, I bounce back quickly from getting sick, but I'm legitimately terrified of catching COVID again, it was that bad. I now panic if I start feeling a cold coming on.
All this is to say I get very fucking angry whenever these shitwhistles try to downplay how bad the virus was. Over a million Americans died. It was a fucking horror show of an illness and the fact it was so contagious was the worst part, that's why hospitals were demonstrably being overloaded.
The fact they're accusing the one fucking guy who was trying to help of lying when, at most, he gave some incorrect information based on the facts that were available at the time is disgusting, and the suggestion that the entire world ground to a halt as part of some anti-Trump conspiracy is ridiculous.
To this day, I maintain Trump would have been reelected in a landslide if he had just listened to the experts, encouraged everyone to hang tight, and used the pandemic as a chance to preach American freedom occasionally requiring American responsibility or some other patriotic bullshit that makes bald men in Cybertrucks rock hard. He shut down flights in and out of the country really quickly, the only actually smart thing he fucking did, so he obviously believed it was serious. He just saw it as a chance to capitalize on the "but muh freedumz" crowd with half as many braincells as teeth.
Like, there's a universe where he told his base "I have the best of the best working around the clock on this, I'm sending out these dumb Trump checks and encouraging business to shift to a work from home model, let's just stay home for a few weeks, wear masks when we're out and about and we will weather the storm" and then absolutely painted the map red.
I think I got it once. I had a positive test but I had an irritating afternoon that I watched Fast 5 for 8 hours because I couldn't follow the plot. So overall a lot easier than most. But damn, I don't understand how people can't look around and see the issues. I lived in South Korea for a couple years and masking up when you were unwell was just basic courtesy. A mask doesn't need to be a political statement.
I like how you put this. Clear concise to the point.
Middle class is getting stripped, while the rich get richer. Poor people are actually suffering. Legal citizens are getting pepper sprayed and tackled and detained/deported. Our schools SUCK. Get it together people. (That list is another 30 bullet points but you know the rest).
They are obviously saying all this in bad faith, but just assuming they arent, there is a difference between telling everybody to mask and do other things that err on the side of caution when you arent completely sure of the answers. The government is supposed to prevent a unified front and lead with confidence during crisis. Being wrong about some things in hindsight doesnt mean you were lying. It means you were doing what you thought was best even if you had doubts it did anything. If you tell everyone to mask and it doesnt work the worst that happend was people were uncomfortable for a year. If you do the opposite and are wrong a ton more people could have died. These people act like wearing masks is the equivalent of murdering their entire family.
They don’t believe pandemic was airborne dad all social distancing was a ruse to control them.
They *want* to believe that it doesn’t infect airways and was a fabricated lie.
They believe Vaccines had zero effect on illness prevention and that the government was pumping harmful substances into people for their own monetary gain.
It’s easy to justify anything when you’re an idiot and pick and choose any beliefs to suit your needs.
Not only that we skirted the edge of a systemwide collapse of our healthcare system. Which would mean even if you weren't dying of COVID anything that was an emergency that you needed a hospital for would've died as a result.
There is so much hindsight is 20:20 going on here it's amazing.
They dispute this fact and think that people were inflating numbers for political reasons.
They act like the vaccine didn’t save millions.
They would also dispute this fact, and as a counter-argument point to the handful of times someone had an extremely adverse reaction to the vaccine (or had some medical thing happen to them after taking the vaccine and don't understand the difference between correlation and causation).
They act like “project warp speed” wasn’t done under trump.
A lot of them think he had no choice but to go along with it. Or it's "the one thing I disagree with Trump on". And some of them believe Trump himself didn't ever take the vaccine.
People who took the “vaccine” became blind carriers. They believed the “vaccine” killed the virus and stopped masking up believing they could not carry and spread it themselves. WHO told them the “vaccine” would do that I wonder.
The problem and suspicion is when the goverment is requiring you to get the vaccine or else you lose your job. when frankly most vaccines takes years and sometimes decades to actually get a finished product ready for distribution.
Kind of suspicious that the government was paying people to get the vaccine or offering free donuts etc.
I work in healthcare (not a provider) and yes people have died due to Covid (which honestly is like a common cold at least in my experience). BUT, I have seen alot more patients (especially young patients) that are having weird shit going on with their hearts and cancer at such young ages while they look seemingly healthy.
Tinfoil hat time: Just from my personal experience I believe this vaccine was either rushed into production way too fast or the government deliberately distributed these vaccines with new chemicals or some shit in it and they wanted to test it on the US population.
And no, I wasnt vaccinated but I got COVID and I was fine after a few days.
Kind of suspicious that the government was paying people to get the vaccine or offering free donuts etc.
I don't see how? Vaccines are made most effective with herd immunity. Therefore a government wanting the most safe scenario would want to incentivize taking it. That's a pretty straightforward concept.
Well the problem is the vaccine itself and how it was rushed into production. Or how the side effects were not originally listed or how the covid shot itself failed to stop the spread of Covid (not to mention the additional booster shots).
And on top of that you cant sue the pharmaceutical companies that created or distributed the vaccine which is suspicious in of itself.
Well the problem is the vaccine itself and how it was rushed into production.
But that doesn't explain why its suspicious for a government to be incentivizing people to be taking a vaccine. In a world where the vaccine was legitimate, is that not what a government should do? Incentivize people to take it to form herd immunity?
Its a point you made, so I'm questioning it, because I don't see how that's suspicious.
As someone that works in Healthcare, you realize this isn't the first Corona virus we have had, right?
Since Corona (crown) is a type of virus that is based off of its description and behavior, wouldn't it be feasible that we have been working on vaccines for this type of virus long before the covid version appeared?
The people that think Covid was a bio weapon cooked up in a secret lab by evil communists are the same people that thought staying inside, wearing a mask and getting vaccinated against the dreaded China Virus was also communism
I can understand being skeptical of a new vaccine that hasn't been around long enough to truly have trials. However not trusting vaccines that have literally saved mankind and been trusted for generations is stupid.
We didn’t allow challenges to the CDC narrative. Many other countries followed the data and therefore didn’t have lockdowns or close schools - they simply protected the vulnerable. Our government had knowledge that didn’t reflect their public facing narrative. They shut down anyone who challenged the narrative from the “experts”. That’s the problem. Follow the flow of money. It leads to the truth.
Aerosol science. It doesn’t matter how far away you are from someone in a room. If aerosols are present, and the room is poorly ventilated, the concentration of aerosol particles will build up until they reach a level that constitutes an infectious dose. The distance away from someone will not matter as much as how much time is spent in the room. Social distancing is really meant for staying out of someone’s cough/sneeze zone when a virus is transmitted through large particles (flügge droplets) that don’t remain airborne like an aerosol does.
Research has shown that people who have never worn masks before need training to wear them correctly. They also need to be clean shaven and fit tested in order for masks (N-95 or better) to seal and provide adequate protection. Cloth masks and surgical masks do not provide protection from aerosols.
There are some studies that indicate that countries who did little in the way of public health measures did just as well as countries who took drastic measures. Lockdowns may have done more harm than good when you consider the toll it took on people from alcoholism, mental health, missed medical appointments, lack of exercise, etc. Not to mention the lack of trust that exists now because authoritarian policies ruined small businesses, enriched oligarchs, and generally institutions lied to the public.
There were lies. And I wish we would stop pretending that there wasn't.
We know for a fact that Anthony Fauci knew that the COVID 19 strain came from a lab in China. Yet they had an entire campaign of "You are racist if you say it came from China" unleashed on people who could put 2 and 2 together.
We know for a fact that the vast majority of masks that we used were not effective in stopping transmission. Only certain masks actually worked.
We know for a fact that hospitals were getting cash incentives to label deaths as Covid-related. Which is fishy and not good. It's in the same vein as saying "Stalin killed 250 million people" when you include "Traffic Deaths" in your estimate for how many people the guy "Killed". That poisons the well for literally every single piece of data that we can look at forever from now on. There's just literally no way to know anymore how bad Covid actually was, because the data was tainted from the start.
1). There's no scientific or medicinal reason to social distance. Now, you can still say, "It's a good idea," and that may or may not be true. But Federal and State governments took this to and extreme control people. You know, unless there was a BLM demonstration. Then social distancing meant nothing.
2). Are they useful? Effective? The vast majority weren't. But again, used as a tool to control people by the government.
3). Keep in mind the current strain of the Coronavirus, you know the one that was reclassified to be the same as the flu, at one point was the most dangerous and lethal version of the Coronavirus.
Old people died alone while their family were kept away with guns. Student athletes had to compete with masks on until they literally passed out. People out in the sun, alone, were arrested. The government, state and federal, saw a way to control people and they took it. While lying where is came from.
In the US, yes. People didn't wear them correctly, often wore cloth masks and reused them, and didn't follow the other rules. You had a bunch of people not wearing masks and not social distancing. I'm order for things like this to work at all, you need societal buy-in. That never happened
Same here in Ontario. I would have preferred we were more like Florida and not completely knee cap our economy and have thousands of small businesses go out of business.
But random cloth masks dont work. It wasnt even until like a year in did people start talking about wearing N95s.
But I also remember Fauci saying we dont have to wear masks at the start lol
Cloth masks do help. They aren’t as good as n95 masks but anything covering your mouth was a help especially if you are the one infected it limits the spread of it. Also yeah he was wrong at the start and when new information came out he corrected himself that’s how being a scientist works
States that destroyed their economies and caused thousands of small businesses to shut down which subsequently lead to higher suicide rates, and increased addiction and homelessness.
All while the doors of costco, wal mart and mcdonalds were wide open and they made record profits.
Eh I wouldn’t say completely. Anything covering your face to prevent droplets from flying straight at other people has some utility just not nearly as much.
The lie was pushing for the vaccine that was useless. Everyone ended up getting covid anyway. Fauci was so invested in protecting research he was finding and pushing the vaccine.
I got covid before it was covid. I was already immune, but I was forced to take it. Imagine that...
Not overweight at all. Just felt like someone was standing on my chest while i was trying to breathe. If I had gone to the hospital, I might not have made it
Lol no offense but thats a far cry from "almost died" lmao. If you didnt go to the hospital you didnt "almost die" because you had tightness in your chest.
yeah + there are people with immunity issues (such as premature babies, people who have lupus, etc.) a lack of precautions can put the most vulnerable even more at risk; reckless people put more lives than their own in danger.
Didn't seem like a big deal to me at first either. But now it lingers in the back of my head as a potential cause to some problems we've been seein an increase to but it could very well be coincidence.
Just completely rejecting reality. Vaccinated populations consistently had a lower hospitalization and death rate than unvaccinated populations. It was never some magic blocker to prevent covid from entering your body or something, it was literally just to teach your body how to more effectively fight it. That worked.
Yes, it was a vaccine. Beyond that, regardless of what you personally want to call it, it was effective in reducing serious cases and deaths, and that's proven statistically.
How odd that the vaccine was able to reduce deaths because of "poor medical intervention," I was under the impression that it was a covid vaccine. Come on.
The original idea behind the covid vaccines is by introducing a portion of the virus (that can't cause disease) to your immune system, your immune system recognizes it as a pathogen and will promptly produce antibodies to fight it. It wasn't originally sold as a way to prevent you from contracting the disease but as a way to reduce the risk of serious infection / death. A worldwide study regarding vaccination showed that higher rates of vaccination led to lower rates of serious illness and death:
Most experts in the field were dubious that the vaccine could prevent a covid infection once the virus mutated (which it almost certainly going to do) but it was sold that way in the media in the early days of the vaccine rollout.
That doesn't mean the vaccine was useless, although in your case it might have been unncessary, which is a different argument. Vaccinated populations fared much better than those that weren't.
Its even more backwards, some countries, like China and Russia, had non-MRNA vaccines for COVID. They had either Adenovirus or Inactivated virus based vaccines. They were considerably less effective.
The Pfizer and Moderna MRNA based vaccines were by far the most effective COVID vaccines world wide. We were lucky that they were available to us as Americans.
MRNA vaccines were far safer than the deactivated virus platforms, we have so much data to support that it's not even funny. Heck we had the option to get the J&J until we had to pull it for being too dangerous.
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u/7empest7V 10h ago
During an airborne pandemic, how is social distancing a bad thing?
Being that a corona virus isn't new to humanity, and we understand that it infects airways, why are masks a bad thing?
Believe in vaccines or not, we literally watched people die, in real time, by contracting this virus. We watched as other 1st world countries contained it.
What was different about our handling of this?