"State of residence" was a predictor in their linear model. A person's state (and its government) will probably affect the outcome variable to some extend, so it's not really surprising that it might be retained as a significant term. However, I find it hard to believe it's so important. I wonder if that predictor is simply confounded with some unobserved variable relating to methods of surveying that differed by state.
Even just looking at counties I'm familiar with it doesn't pass the sniff test.
You've got the "hicks live here" county that's the same color as the "yuppies buy houses in these suburbs" county that's the same color as the "not much English gets spoken here" county and so on. And yet it's all different than the adjacent counties that happen to be across state lines that have similar demographics.
Methodology here.
https://data.cdc.gov/stories/s/Vaccine-Hesitancy-for-COVID-1...
There are also effects here around metro areas.
often, population density affects culture/attitudes toward these sorts of things. as with many such maps, adding an additional analysis layer denoting population density would yield interesting results. (though if you intuitively know the population densities of various "outlier" states, and you know where major cities are in the lesser-populated states, you can already intuitively draw some correlations yourself.)
"My body, my choice" ain't just a political slogan; it makes sense. I'm glad these vaccines are available, but I had this crud early and I'll pass on the vaccine thx.
What's going on?
Compare that to Texas, where shots are going begging at freaking Walmart. It's extremely infuriating. MA's vaccination rate is solely limited by available doses and meanwhile vaccines are expiring unused on the shelf in other states. We could have hit herd immunity by now if we were given the chance.
via https://data.cdc.gov/stories/s/Vaccine-Hesitancy-for-COVID-1...
Not really surprised at the areas that are darkest, but still feel worried that lots of areas near 20%. Specifically the levels of non-Hispanic Black hesitancy in the South is really rough.
Hopefully over time this improves especially as private enterprises put some pressure on getting vaccinated
https://aspe.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/interactive_hesitan...
Every 4 years you also have a lot of people saying "if XXX wins the presidency I'll move to Canada/Mexico". They are all still there.
It's good to ask people but they also change their minds quickly once they have more information.
Having grown up in San Diego, I actually find it somewhat surprising how low the hesitancy is.
Downvoting won’t change this!
[0] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/why-41-percent-of-republic...
1. Vaccines are still difficult to get in a lot of places. I and my partner only just got appointments for this weekend for our first dose. As long as appointments are required and you have to fight to get a spot at 9am it is going to be difficult to get hesitent people to sign up. I think hesitency will go down dramatically when you can just walk in without an appointment and get it.
2. I really don't understand why Public Health officials keep downplaying the vaccines. They are still talking about everyone masking for months, limited gatherings, no vacations, etc. Why is it always doom and gloom? There is no evidence to support this level of paranoia and the messaging should be the exact opposite. These vaccines are scientific miracles. Get the vaccine and go out and have fun again!
3. The worst thing we can do at this point is to start shaming people for being hesitant. I don't think it has started just yet but I can see it bubbling in certain circles. I was just in a work meeting where we were talking about vaccines and everyone on the call was on board BUT some people only wanted the JandJ one because it used older tech and they didn't want to try the new mRNA ones. This was with a group of all college educated software developers...
There is no evidence at all to support this form of hesitancy and yet there it is. Are they Anti-vax? Kind of, but would it have helped matters to argue that they were wrong and that they were helping kill their neighbors by only wanting one of the vaccines? No, let them have their hesitancy, continue vaccinating, and in 6 months when hundreds of thousands of people have it and nothing bad happens they will quietly go get it done.
We know the vaccines work. Just make them widely available and the proof will be in the results.
Because right now, I say -- "anyone who doesn't want a vaccine, well you live with the consequences and if you can't come to rational understanding that it's your own life being saved, then I shed no tears over your choice".
People who do it out of religious (or Republican) dogma, I'm not sympathetic. People who believe in conspiracy theories, I'm not sympathetic. People who have some "cultural history" skeptical of government vaccines, well you have to learn to get over that, one way or another. I'm not that sympathetic. What's the likelihood that the entire US is being subjected to a racially based cruel experiment?
You don't want life saving vaccine, produced from the effort and focus of an entire nation, to bring us out of the worst crisis in a generation? Well, I don't mind if there are fewer of you.
Aside from the issue where people who are not vaccinated affect those who cannot get vaccinated, it's your own life you're gambling with. Go right ahead.
Change my mind please?
If you scroll to the map with state-level data, you can see it has started to resemble the electoral college map. Having checked it out nearly everyday for months now, that resemblance is only growing stronger as time goes on.
At a certain point, there may need to be some designation given to certain states or counties - something like a travel advisory - so people know if an area has or is likely to have a COVID outbreak due to low vaccination levels.
I really hope I don't lose my job because I don't want to take an experimental, unapproved vaccine for a disease that hospitalizes less than 5% of people across all age groups when I work from home, am a healthy weight, and am under forty.
The risk for me is, in fact, comparable to the flu, and the vaccine has similar drawbacks to the flu vaccine.
Also are you surprised that Black people in the South don't want this experimental vaccine after the Tuskegee Experiment? Combine that with the awful side effects documented on Reddit in r/covidvaccinated and the refusal of the drug company lawyers to accept liability if something is wrong, the very people pushing the vaccine still wearing two masks, the profit incentive of a new annual vaccine, and new reports of menstrual "changes" caused by the vaccines that are rolling in and you know what? I'll take my chances with COVID's death rate, since it's only killed 14000 Americans under forty.
This comment will probably get removed but I'm done buying into #BlueAnon conspiracy theories.
In fact, the risk for you is that you infect someone you care about and they end up hospitalized or dead. That is a very real risk that has played out countless times during this pandemic and has cost thousands and thousands of lives.
In theory the government is supposed to provide a settlement under the countermeasure version of the national vaccine injury compensation fund. I say in theory because the system doesn't work as well as it's marketed to (based on personal experience).
Also, I'm not sure why you are being downvoted. Maybe just an unpopular opinion or the inflammatory remark? I'm of a similar opinion. I don't go anywhere except the food store, have an N95 mask (owned prior to the pandemic), work from home, under 35 with no comorbidities, only elderly I have contact with are family who have already recieved their vaccinations. If they are saying that this might be an annual vaccine and I fit low risk profiles for attributes and actions, then I might as well wait until I'm forced to go back to the office to get it.
> Also are you surprised that Black people in the South don't want this experimental vaccine after the Tuskegee Experiment?
Is a super important and valid point. Historically Black people have had their human rights violated in similar situations. Johnson and Johnson also knowingly targeted Black people with baby powder marketing after they knew it caused cancer. As much as I think it's important to get vaccinated, I wouldn't take the JJ vaccine on principal and personal fear that it's potentially not safe, just based on the company making it (rational or not).
That said, there's a combination of nature and nurture at play, in this case I would suspect mostly nurture, and that's something that most people can't control. So if you want to feel bad for them, feel bad that they didn't have the benefit of the nurturing you had to value the things you do.
It is still difficult to get a vaccine in a lot of places in the country but once we get to summer and there are walk in clinics everywhere my sympathy levels for people who get sick out of vaccine stubbornness is going to be zero.
At some point you need to take personal responsibility for your own health.
You mean 'when'. There's no going back at this point.
When you have a system with
A) massive profit incentive (pfizer and moderna now 'suggesting' annual shots will be neccesary)
B) a populace accepting headlines without verification of what's claimed
C) no accountability if it turns out the vaccine isn't safe
You can't seriously expect that to be accepted. If any individual wants to take those chances with the belief they're doing something good for their community, great, let them take that risk. But the concept of mandating this or even socially expecting your friends and family to take part in this experiment, is absurd, and extremely bewildering to see.
This virus is somewhat more deadly and infectious than the flu or existing cold virus, but looking at the actual numbers of those lost to it, its in fact not much different than the flu. Having lost friends to the flu, I'm not sure people have an understanding of how deadly it actually is. We accept the deadliness of the flu and move on with life because the alternative would defeat much of the point of living. Same as we get in cars every day which kill thousands constantly. Having a suggestion of everyone to simply be more hygienic and socially distance is reasonable, everything else is way beyond necessity.
This is a common statement about the vaccines currently being deployed. What is less common is that the expositor of this perspective has considered that the same is true of the virus itself.
Shingles afflicts people decades after they have recovered from chicken pox. I remember HIV treatments in the 90s that were thought to work until it was later discovered that the virus can hide in various organs and wreak havoc later.
Regardless of the comparisons to other pathogens, nobody today can make a credible claim about the impact a Covid infection will have on a person 20 years later.
As a society, the choice is crystal clear: vaccines that do not kill people today versus a virus that demonstrably overwhelms health systems, killing lots of people now. This is as close to an IQ test as it gets in public policy.
The purpose of the funds was good. It was supposed to provide an easy mechanism for victims to recover damages that would not be as arduous as traditional litigation. The purpose was to increase public trust in vaccines that are commonly required/pushed by the government. It does perform this for the common or known side effects listed in the compensation table. Although some of the amounts approved as caps may not take into account individual differences, and don't provide great flexibility.
It's extremely difficult if it's a rare issue or if the underlying mechanism is not known. This mechanism part is the real downside. You could be completely healthy, get a shot, and two days later be airlifted to the ICU with a heart issue that has no family history or even an explanation for the cause other than "some people just have this" (no genetics really identified yet either). How can you prove it was the vaccine if they don't know the factors that would normally cause it? There are other reports of the issue in VAERS, the patient is in one of the lowest risk populations for first time presentation, etc. Even if you don't have a conclusive underlying mechanism, there's no opposing theory for the "natural" mechanism that would normally cause it (even stuff like which genes cause it), but the special vaccine court will most likely say 'too bad, it might be a coincidence'. If they do that, this seems contrary to intended purpose of building public trust in vaccines and compensating victims in a less confrontational system. Now you don't fight a company, you have to fight the government.
I won't even say that the issues with the J&J vaccine are indicative or related to their past actions. But who knows? It definitely doesn't look good or assuage anyone's fears.
Basically we dumped a ton of volume into the vaccination funnel from the get go (because we were vaccinating such a wide range of people so early on because of the employment based qualification criteria) so while there was a backup we were always running the "actually vaccinating people" part of the system at full tilt. Other states poured a comparative trickle into the funnel. While there was no backup up top you didn't have the bottom of the vaccine pipeline running at 100%.
I think that's wishful thinking. This will be globally endemic just as the flu is. It will continue mutating in the unvaccinated population as well as the non-human carriers (like pets). Sure, if a lot of people are vaccinated, then it might slow the timeline down for when that mutation will emerge.
"There’s nothing stopping a mutation from really killing 50-75% or more of people. It’s a war of virus vs humanity."
A neverending war, as it always has been. I think the 50-75% casualty numbers are highly unlikely.
Avian viruses on farms have always been a big concern among the epidemiologists, if Dr Greger's book is any indication. Stopping the virus movements among humans and similar mass slaughterings among livestock could work. I takeaway that it's a statistics problem as to when and not if we see another virus capable of becoming a serious pandemic again.
The extent to which society learned how to monitor and react to new viruses during the covid-19 pandemic may well determine our fates next time.
The vaccines are killing an alarming number of people today.
>versus a virus that demonstrably overwhelms health systems,
This is not true. Hospitals were and have been fairly empty. Small hospitals at times have been overloaded and imagery from those exaggerated as though its a general pattern when it's not.
>killing lots of people now. This is as close to an IQ test as it gets in public policy.
The death numbers are slightly higher than that of the flu.
Take a look at historical deaths and those this year attributed to COVID. It doesn't add up to any sort of justification of the handling over the last year, nor the push for vaccination.
The IQ test is if you assume headlines are honest condensation of information or not. Every single day I see tens of articles claiming things about COVID that sound terrifying, only to turn out to be the most fearful bad-faith interpretation of the actual information brought up in the article.
I'm actually more worried that (as in the fall), my city will have to convert our convention center to a field hospital because the local ICUs are full. And then I'm worried that I (or someone I care about) will experience one of the normal things that send people to hospitals, only there won't be capacity to see them in a timely fashion.
And honestly I'm damn sick of the necessary curbs that keep this thing from killing even more people. (It's possible to prefer society arrange itself in such a fashion that we try not to make it actively hostile to the vulnerable.)
This isn't hyperbole, it was 5 months ago. My governor is GOP and doesn't consider Covid to be real. Yet he still authorized giant field hospitals. He still won't open the governor's mansion for tours, in spite of saying all restrictions are lifted (he's not an idiot, he just plays one on TV. Nobody is really stupid enough to want unvaccinated people coming through their house all day.) He has never done any of this for the flu.
Consider yourself fortunate that this did not happen in your area. But don't pretend it didn't happen or is just the media.
And then the main thrust of what I said is this. Nobody knows what a Covid infection today will mean in 20 years. It obviously has neurological impact in some patients. Does that carry long-term import? Nobody knows. Easier to not get it, since vaccines are available and free.
I don't think you're trying to be hyperbolic, I think you've been fed accurate information clothed in fear so as to lead to a bad-faith worst case interpretation of that data.
The most intelligent people I know who have the most experience in the medical field, have always suggested, and still do with the COVID vaccine, to wait a minimum of 5 years before expecting safety in something like that.
To be clear, to the response "be glad it isn't in your area", it is, I've had people directly claim to me a local hospital is overrun with patients. A friend had to goto the same hospital for unrelated reasons. Parking lot was nearly empty, calm and boring inside. Someone is lying, my friend doesn't have a trackrecord of lying, quite the opposite. The news media on the other hand, I can't say the same.
why does everyone assume—when obviously, demonstrably massive profit incentives are on the line—that everyone in key positions of power will act 100% honestly and altruistically?
I'm not even advocating that everyone be a complete vaccine-denier or whatever, I'm just kind of shocked at the immune system response-like reaction to even skepticism of the situation, given that the aforementioned factors are at play. it's never, "well, I understand and empathize with your skepticism, but I still believe what I believe to be the truth." instead, you get attacked for even sharing mild skepticism!
how did things come to be this way?
So for example in this case, the skeptic asserts that the virus is not much worse than the flu. This, despite evidence that basically everyone on earth has seen that this is not the case. (Many people personally know someone who has died of Covid in the last year, despite not ever having known anyone who has died of the flu over the prior decades of their lives.)
Even prominent Covid denialist Trump a) took an experimental antibody treatment and then b) got an early dose of the vaccine after c) spending trillions of taxpayer dollars on Covid relief efforts. If someone like Trump who actually thinks it's the flu also behaves as if it's a serious disease, it makes skeptics like OP here seem much less credible.
What's interesting about the vaccine skepticism on HN is that in any biotech thread, the discussion is around how the FDA is too strict (skeptical) about approving new therapies. But now people suddenly think the FDA is too loose in approving new therapies? The irony is that the FDA is already the skeptic here (see the J&J pause, for example). Occam, again.
If I hit the nail on the head, you hammered it all the way in putting it that way. Thank you. It's really bewildering, I never expected to see something like this happen, I mean, to see a massive government/corporate push of something, sure, but to see so many just go along with it with seemingly little to no questioning of legitimacy...and when the ability to do further research with hard factual numbers you can think up your own conclusions from...its just bewildering.
b) I do get the flu vaccine every year, even though it's not very efficacious. Having the flu is awful, even if it's unlikely to kill me.
c) Your notion that COVID is mildly more deadly than the flu seems wildly off base. Despite all our efforts to contain the spread (which were sufficient to drive flu cases to effectively zero this season) it has killed > 500K in the U.S., 10-20x a typical flu season.
b) Thats your choice. I've never opted for the flu vaccine because the lack of accountability of its efficacy and profit incentives don't make sense as far as motivating any belief that that sort of thing is designed to be good for me
c) Examine the numbers of actual confirmed deaths from COVID vs comorbidities. Yes, it still is more deadly, and I clearly say that, but its not enough more to justify how its being treated.
You got me, I didn't triage each patient at all the hospitals in a major metro area. You're probably right that everyone came in at the same time for muscle cramps and sprains. The hospitals pretended to give them Covid tests but really just said they all tested positive because that's how unethical medical practitioners are these days. Further, the hospital administrators lied about census numbers in a coordinated fashion so that the census numbers would match predictions from infection data weeks prior. Then, the Covid-denying governor decided to open massive field hospitals because he thought that projecting the image of being overrun with a plague was a good strategy to help Senators from his party win reelection.
You're probably right, Occam was completely wrong.
This is based on first hand reports by people working in those hospitals.
in your second paragraph, you use anecdotes as a means of persuasion, despite referring to "accepted facts" two sentences prior.
none of this addresses my point which is that well-reasoned skepticism is usually met with seemingly dogmatic opposition. for example, elsewhere in the threads here, it was posited that perhaps not every death that was reported as being due to covid was accurately reported as such, given that a.) it's possible to die with covid in your system without it being the thing that killed you (especially assuming the popular "asymptomatic carrier" assertion is true) and b.) that there are demonstrable profit motives for hospitals (many of which, including my local one, have been condensed into mega-corporations in the past couple of decades). this is a reasoned, reasonable cause for skepticism. yet again, to express things like this is to be deemed a "conspiracy theorist," and to have one's reputation diminished and one's statements nullified as a result.
e: re: 4th paragraph, how is one supposed to experience cognitive dissonance from holding both of the following ideas in their mind at the same time?
- the FDA is too strict when it comes to approving experimental, elective procedures and medications
- the FDA isn't strict enough when it comes to allowing several competing drugs to be emergency-use-authorized without sufficient testing, especially when for many people the choice is between taking an experimental drug and losing employment (or worse...?)
If you don't believe the reported COVID death numbers, you can look at excess deaths over prior years, which largely track with or exceeds the reported numbers for COVID deaths.
Ultimately, for most people it's pretty obvious at this point that COVID is a catastrophe of the likes we haven't seen in many decades. Trying to persuade people at this point is tiresome, it would be like living in 1943 and trying to persuade skeptics that, yes World War II is a big deal.
except for the lack of conspiracy? when did the definition of "conspiracy" change to encompass the actions of individuals not explicitly working in concert with each other?
why is it so difficult to entertain a possible world wherein sars-cov-2 was hyped to be this massively devastating pandemic, and it was indeed pretty bad in terms of confirmed cases... but then when the number of deaths, while definitely nonzero, wasn't reaching the numbers it was "supposed to" on a per-hospital basis, many individual hospitals fudged some numbers here and there in order to get covid money since there was so much of it flying around into everyone else's pockets? this seems like a completely pragmatic, if unethical, course of action to take. there's a lot of hospitals in the US. do you find it likely that nothing along these lines happened at all, and that, again, with billions of dollars getting moved around here and there, and basically zero chance of getting caught, everyone in positions of decision-making unilaterally chose to act 100% as honestly and altruistically as possible?
again, I'm not asking you to accept this possible world as unconditionally Proven Fact or anything like that—I'm merely asking you to entertain the possibility, without breaking the glass and pulling the "Conspiracy Theory" lever. why is this sort of thinking seemingly beyond many peoples' abilities?
where does one acquire this massively optimistic outlook on human nature, especially with regard to those in positions of power, and in the presence of gargantuan amounts of money?
You seem to be excluding a large middle. You seem to be saying that either COVID is a fraud perpetrated on us by hospitals, or else I must be arguing there is no such thing as corruption.
Your theory is not impossible but it would require a large amount of evidence to believe or even seriously consider. It's similar to the argument that Trump was actually elected president, but large amounts of independent local fraud threw enough votes to Biden to flip the result.
There's also the problem of independent lines of evidence that also point to major Covid death (e.g. excess deaths), and the fact that the Covid pandemic is a global problem - does every country have Covid money incentives that explain inflated deaths?
I didn't leave the middle out at all... in fact, I was claiming that it was you who was leaving out the middle by asserting that a non-zero amount of corruption by multiple separate hospitals would be a "conspiracy theory."
my goal in the posts in this thread is not any specific worldview that I may or may not subscribe to, but instead to point out that skepticism is healthy and shouldn't be shouted down with cries of "conspiracy theory." especially for a situation fraught with other such discrepancies, if one is willing to look for them, and, again, not assume honesty and altruism for 100% of humans in positions of power who are involved.
your comparison example is a poor analogy, because the voter fraud theory is that there was a conspiracy of multiple state/local actors acting in concert to obtain a desired electoral result. this specific aspect of the larger "covid situation" requires no such conspiracy, only human greed and corruption on the individual scale.
you state that you still require evidence to "believe or even seriously consider" my hypothetical scenario. why is that the case? again, do you think it's more likely that everyone at every hospital in the US acted 100% honestly & altruistically in this regard? when it comes to the individual, it's "innocent until proven guilty," of course. but when looking at large numbers of unconnected individuals making discrete decisions, from positions of power, with billions of dollars on the line... why do you assume "uncorrupt until proven corrupt?"
Again, I never claimed that there has been zero corruption, that is your strawman. What requires evidence is that corruption is the reason for large numbers of reported covid deaths, in the face of the obvious alternative explanation, which is that it's substantially more contagious and more deadly than the flu.
If I started from the assumption that if someone has a motive to do something nefarious then they probably did it, and then had to work to disprove it, that would be corrosive to all human relations. How could you even function in society under that worldview?
again, for most individuals, you're right. when it comes to those in power, incentivized by large sums of money, with basically zero means of being caught, it's only pragmatic to assume that it happened. to what extent is up for debate to be sure, but only a few posts up, you instinctively deemed any amount of this hypothetical corruption a "conspiracy theory." why is that the reflexive term you reach for when presented with the scenario I outlined? why do you assume that those in power are uncorrupt until proven otherwise? where does this inherent, implicit complete trust in authority come from?