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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   28652 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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Notes from Trump-land: the cognitive dissonance of the Trump fandom being against the Trump vaccines is resolved in pre-pandemic reports that Trump is a germophobe, that he’s a man who trusts the American medical establishment including big pharma. It’s only natural that one man (no matter how smart and big-league clever) couldn’t be absolutely right on everything.

Also, he had Mike Pence (out of the fandom’s good graces since saying he wouldn’t halt or delay the tally on 1/6) run the Federal task force on the coronavirus. So, if fans can’t swallow the idea that Trump was fooled by Big Pharma, at least they can find solace in swamp Pence being in with the conspiracy. (“We should have trusted the fly all along.”)

Easier path to resolution from my (admittedly tiny) corner of Trump-land - expedited development of vaccines was a good idea, was executed better than could reasonably be expected with the American federal government obstacles, and the vaccines represented an honest best effort to handle COVID-19. They may have even worked fairly well against vanilla COVID, although that's not entirely clear and became irrelevant in short order. There was no grand conspiracy, the vaccines aren't particularly dangerous, they're just incredibly disappointing when it comes to stopping variant transmission. Trump did approximately nothing wrong with regard to executive action on the vaccines.

The sins around vaccination have nothing to do with development and everything to do with the mandates (both the ones that survived challenges and the ones that were eventually struck down). These mandates were policies of the Biden administration and/or other entities following the federal lead on the topic. With regard to vaccines, the simple resolution to this set of claims rounds to Trump Good, Biden Bad.

deleted

There is also a lot of contempt for the fact that vaccine producers were absolved of liability by the government, with their liability shifted to the gov't fund -- they feel like that's either 1) fishy or 2) irresponsible. T

Is that really the argument? Seems odd, since that has been standard procedure for vaccines since the creation of the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program in 1986.

deleted

Can we at least give some of the due necessary to the reasonable arguments for waving liability? In the middle of an ongoing pandemic that threatens million of lives you actually do have a pretty good case that a potentially dangerous vaccine is more useful than no vaccine at all and that is realistically your alternative if pharma companies feel as though they need enough rounds of testing to mitigate this additional liability. If they were only give to the very high risk populations and had some huge greater than 10% chance of complications that might still be a good play. The calculous is much different when forced on everyone but that's a different objection.

Like /u/drmanhattan16,

Just FYI, this isn't how you mention people here. You would use "@" instead of "/u/".

Did you mean to reply to someone else?

Lol, yes I did. My apologies.

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