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A number of stories I vaguely follow have largely been ignored by this space. To start discussion:
Ukraine
Back in November, there was discussion about the imminent fall of Pokrovsk, encirclement of Ukrainian troops and collapse of the frontline:
It seems like the capeshit arc rages on, and yet another prediction of Ukrainian (or Russian, for that matter) collapse goes in the dustbin. Deepstatemap shows the UA holding onto a corner of Pokrovsk, the ISW map doesn't seem to have moved significantly, there haven't been any MSM news articles on Pokrovsk since December (?!), Russian economic collapse seems yet to materialize. Does anyone have more insight?
Measles makes a comeback in the US - who wants some lockdowns?
2025 recorded ~2500 measles cases in the US, and 733 recorded so far in 2026. This is the highest number of cases since about 1990, and for the 90s/2000s we saw low double-digit numbers of cases. A handful of children have died. Solely based on the numbers, I think you'd expect a case or two of encephalitis but I'm unsure. The biggest outbreaks are in Spartanburg county, South Carolina (Trump - 66% of the vote), Gaines county, Texas (Trump won 91% of the vote) and Mohave county, Arizona (Trump won 77% of the vote). As far as I can tell, there are no real cities in any of these counties. We're seeing a remarkable inversion where historically infectious disease outbreaks would start in the cities and people would flee to the suburbs/countryside. Maybe my next startup idea should be a chain of sanatoriums (sanatoria?) in NYC or SF.
Trans identification decreasing?
Several months late to the party, but in October a study came out suggesting the number of trans students applying to Brown had roughly halved, yoy. I suppose it's early to be declaring victory given that the data/methodology don't seem particularly rock-solid, but I'm definitely chalking it as evidence supporting my claim that there is a hardcore group of genuinely trans people, while the significant increases were rebellious teens and some better way to rebel will crop up to replace it. At the least, it's evidence that the doomers and blackpillers claiming lines go up are wrong.
Anecdotally, I've heard gen Z college students get off on being offensive. In 15-20 years Millenials will be even more deeply uncool and taking the place of boomers, while the alphas and betas rebel and move leftwards to areas we can't even imagine (but get ready for AI girlfriends. They'll be called AI-Attracted Individuals, and I'm planting a flag in the AIAI acronym right now).
Poopgate
In the most momentous news since Biden fell off a bike, leftist social media has been circulating a Forbes video claiming to show Trump soiling himself at the 0:34 mark (you'll have to find it on youtube yourself, sorry - and turn up your audio). We've now been blessed with Yahoo News' headline 'No credible evidence Trump pooped himself during executive order signing', which is interesting given the video that millions of people have watched.
It will be interesting watching Trump's mental faculties evolve over the next three years. Biden was notably sharper in 2020 than in his disastrous 2024 debate performance. Presumably Trump won't tolerate handlers the same way Biden did, so it seems like a situation that could rapidly dissolve into a ahem shitshow.
Poopgate is just the natural result of the claims that Trump wears suit jackets with large tails so he can hide evidence of soiling himself. The story was, and is, that he's not just Evil, he's also dementia-riddled and hence losing control of his bowels.
If you really want a selection of Youtube videos of the clickbait form where "medical experts" diagnose all the ailments Trump suffers from "look at the colour of this skin patch on his hand", the algorithm will happily serve them up even if you don't go looking for them. I'm not interested in Poopgate or any of these.
Though I do note how you wove in that last sentence about Trump's mental faculties: are you claiming the Poopgate et al. videos are true, or is it simply a case of "who cares if they're true, so long as the stick beats the dog?"
Regarding what future generations will be doing, it's as likely that they will move hard rightwards as hard leftwards. Millennials are the tolerant generation, so yeah a reaction against all the Coexist and QUILTBAG stuff is likely in the kids/grandkids, but that could be severely socially conservative as much as 'seize the means of production cottagecore Communism'.
Your point about measles outbreaks is interesting, I would ask what those areas have in common besides being rural. Looking at your linked map, for instance, there's an odd clustering on the Connecticut/New York state border. And the areas with low immunisation include New York state, whereas West Virginia has high immunisation coverage. Minnesota, that impeccably Blue state, also has low coverage. So "voted for Trump" does not seem to be correlation, much less cause.
You might indeed do well with a chain of sanatoria in NY, given the low immunisation coverage!
Yet this BBC report tells me "The measles vaccination rate for school-aged children is about 90% in Spartanburg County, the epicentre of the outbreak." So if kids are being vaccinated, what is behind the outbreak? This story tells me:
Okay, but are these any people in particular, or from all demographics in the population? It's sounding like adult cases, not children, though again, there's an outbreak at a school:
Okay, so again I ask: who are these people?
So, uh, let's blame those Ukrainian Mennonite Mormon Trump voters?
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Pokrovsk and Mirnograd have effectively fallen, but there's simply no way Russia can convert this or any other conquest into a massive rout to the Dnieper. It can push and probe along the whole frontline and exploit any local weaknesses until Ukraine scrambles enough reserves to plug the hole. It can slowly move the frontline in the Donbass so it can, in the worst case, neutralize the contradiction between Russian and Ukrainian demands.
But both countries are basically looking at the economies more than they are looking at the front. Ukraine's is on European life support, Russia's is circling round the drain. The real "not-loser" will be the one that can recover better, that's why Trump with his "let's just all make more money together" approach to diplomacy is so vital for Russia, Europe has whipped itself into a frenzy and keeps sabotaging peace talks by insisting on terms that ensure Russia will have a harder time recovering from the war, knowing full well that this only prolongs the fighting.
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This sort of nonsense is why I do not follow the war news. It's disgusting seeing people, especially foreigners, cheer on two Slavic teams slowly grinding each other into nothingness, hype up a minor breach (in reality "a group of Russians maybe spotted slightly ahead of their usual positions") or interpret troop movements in the rear as a sign of impending collapse.
My dad used to repeat that the strongest bet in WWII on a day-to-day base was «nothing changes». But WWII was quite dynamic compared to this. It's actually hard to take territory in this kind of a war. Most gains are ephemeral digital map-painting, but losses are very real, and yet very gradual and insufficient to undermine either side's long-term warfighting capacity. Of course there's no decisive defensive line or «logistics hub» the loss of which will doom Ukraine – they can retreat just a little, to a more thoroughly prepared set of fucking trenches, and continue eroding Russian troops with the usual drone-centric tactics. There won't be gallant armor brigades thundering over the steppe, armor burns easily these days. With steady Chinese support of Russian military industry (bought and paid for) and steady European life support for the entire Ukrainian state (presumably Russians will end up paying for that too), it can go on like this for many years more.
Any plausible upset can only come from those external forces – either China ramping up its engagement, actually selling military assets rather than just dual-use goods and some sneakily rebranded «civilian» lasers and such (at the cost of losing European markets and goodwill, won largely through Trump's buffoonery), or the EU/NATO committing forces, or providing Ukraine with F-35s or something to that effect, or maybe the US getting serious. Nobody seems interested, however.
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For a discussion on the study and it's issues, you can check this article by SEGM
Chris has me blocked, so can someone ask him who is he talking about? "Social contagion" and "trans trend" have been the dominant narrative on the anti-trans side for years.
I stopped doing regular dispatches from the Trans Wars because even relatively major developments don't feel like fertile ground for discussion, but since we're already here: the first detransitioner has won $2 miilion in a malpractice lawsuit. A few days later, in a move completely unrelated to the recent news, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons issued a statement recommending against gender surgeries for youth below 19. There's about two dozen more such lawsuits in the pipeline, and they all started prior to the resolution of this case hitting the news.
I'll echo Chris' "too early to declare victory", but I'd say it's safe to assume this will put a major damper on the process of transing kids. Even sympathetic providers will likely find themselves putting some effort into exploring alternatives, to cover their own ass, if nothing else. They'll hopefully also think twice before pommelling parents with "would you rather have a happy son or a dead daughter?".
Remember, it won't affect you in your normal life! So I was thoroughly informed in response to my own little dispatch from the Wars, Irish front. Naturally everyone is ignoring these nothingburger stories which have nothing at all to do with ordinary, non-trans people in their ordinary, non-trans lives. When they said "you must" they didn't mean "you must"!
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I wish you'd include a link to the old Ukraine discussions, as it would be nice to go through and downgrade my opinion of certain forum posters' forecasting ability relative to the confidence they projected in Ukraine's impending doom.
This forum has a lot of pro-Russian (or anti-Western is probably a better term for them) posters who are smart enough not to go full "just 2 more weeks!!!" but who still fall for a lot of the pro-Russian propaganda overall. I vaguely recall a post involving a new Russian missile that would be a wunderwaffe.
As always, Ukraine could experience upsets at any time, but the likelihood of that at any given point is relatively low compared to just muddling along as usual.
You fell head over heels for the obvious fake Selzer poll despite being tell you otherwise. Have you downgraded your forecasting ability?
Excuse you, "obvious" fake? Not at all, it was just muddled in what it was picking up! I have that from the horse's mouth 😁
I'm blocking Zeke since he mostly just posted ad hominems instead of actual arguments when responding to me. I can't see his comment. What does this have to do with Ukraine?
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Sorry, I was actively looking at the thread I had in mind and just forgot to link it. It's this one.
Thank you for the link. That's a pretty juicy one. That sneering, spiteful attitude. Claiming America started the war. Getting pushback in the comments and responding that other people offsite had unrealistic expectations without linking anything. Even seeing "majestic capeshit arc" in context is worth a chuckle.
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As one of the sort of pro-Russian regulars who otherwise never happened to make such predictions I can only make the following observation for now: during every single winter the USSR was engaged in WW2 they completed at least one successful offensive. Compared to this the Russian performance in this war is indeed found wanting. However, it's also true that as of now the Ukrainians had three whole summers to complete the victorious final counteroffensive they and their Western propagandists have been predicting since Spring 2023 which was supposed to be some sort of re-run of North Vietnam's Spring Offensive of 1975 or the Croatian Army's Operation Storm in 1995.
I'm staunchly pro-Western and have been following Ukraine relatively closely for its entire duration. I recall the hype for the summer 2023 offensive, but I don't recall much widespread hype for summer 2024, and I really don't recall anything for summer 2025 nor upcoming 2026.
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A short while ago, someone made a comment which mentioned that technology and wealth seem to be utterly failing at making us happier, and (IIRC rhetorically) asked who could have foreseen that. I was starting to write up my non-rhetorical response, about how the Mennonite wariness of technology is in part specifically due to their having foreseen the risks of being trapped into dependence on some technologies (and the wealth they bring) which end up decreasing our interdependence on our fellow human beings, which weakens the bonds of community we form, which are far more important to human happiness than material wealth.
And then while doing a few searches to get quotes, I ran across the deaths of Kayley Fehr (a 6 year old Mennonite girl) and Daisy Hildebrand (an 8 year old Mennonite girl).
There's still a lot to be said about the distinction between religious laws (Mennonite communities do not prohibit vaccine use!) and religious culture (Mennonites in West Texas only have something like an 80% measles vaccination rate, well under what's believed to be needed for "herd immunity"), or about the pain of balancing Type I vs Type II errors, but I can't bring myself to write it.
As someone who never heard of Gaines county I looked up the Wikipedia article on it out of curiosity after I read your comment. This part stood out:
I'd say whatever their overall attitude is towards measles vaccination it probably has more to do with the 'German speaking "Russian" Mennonites from Mexico' part than with anything else.
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Russia is waging a territory-centric war to secure the Donbas, probably so they can declare victory and wind down operations as much as possible. Ukraine is more attrition-aligned but territory is still necessary because it's good PR when Pokrovsk/Kupyansk/??? Holds. Syrsky is known as General 200 and loves his 'meat' counterattacks, but the Russians are performing similarly brutal operations. The Europeans have tried to pick up the slack from Trump but Belgium refused to liquidate frozen Russian assets. So, who really knows what's happening?
It’s not just that. Once Ukraine gets pushed off its major fortification line around the Donbas and into fields and open steppe, preventing a major collapse of front line gets much harder and more costly. Notice how fast the front is moving along the southern sector. That offensive spent three years jammed up on the Avdiivka-Donetsk-Vuhledar fortifications but once it got passed that it accelerated rapidly.
@Chrisprattalpharaptr
It’s not going great for Ukraine. Losing Pokrovsk is bad because it was a major logistical hub for the whole front. The last major fortification line at Sloviansk-Kramantorsk-Konstantivka is rapidly being surrounded. Once that goes the eastern front is basically cooked. There are also minor incursions into Kharkiv oblast that are gradually being developed into a more major offensive. The Zaprozhia axis is collapsing.
And like @Lizzardspawn was saying, their air defense is basically gone and their logistics are rapidly being diced up with airstrikes. I don’t know what the casulties/manpower situation is but my guess is “not great”.
Overall I would say July-August is when the oh-shit moment comes and it becomes obvious they could lose the eastern half of the country.
Alright, we'll see if I remember to check back in this summer.
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I have heard variations of this every few months for four years now, it’s always the same. Some random town I’ve never heard of with a population of 300 is about to fall which will cause the entire Ukrainian defense to collapse in a matter of days. Nobody is more consistently wrong than pro-Russian “realist” posters on The Motte. I know nothing about the situation but I know you’re wrong
You won’t be talking so tough once Stinky (population 265) has fallen.
Repent, westoid. The spare room in Kovalenko's dacha has been captured with only 300 casualties.
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Deepstate are as reliable as the numbers that Ukraine MOD produced about their AA effectiveness. ISW are marginally better. How many hours per day there is electricity in Kiev is better indicator how the war is going. Not saying this sarcastically - Russia right now is doing their best to keep Ukraine in the dark. So by how dark is - you can think of how the war is going. Also this hurts their GDP quite a lot - it makes the funding gap even bigger.
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In 1964 there were 458,000 measles cases, and 421 deaths, over a smaller population, no lockdowns. Lockdowns are just a bad idea.
As far as I can tell, the outbreak is mostly among religious communities who have low vaccination rates (though apparently not actually for religious reasons). There has been a small general drop in vaccination, but it's not clear if it has had a significant effect. The general drop you can blame on government overreaction to COVID.
How barbaric. Our ancestors were truly uncivilized.
It's...not? I mean, I guess I don't have healthcare records for every measles patient, but are you genuinely going to make the argument that a nearly 100x increase in measles cases, centered around political strongholds for the vaccine-skeptical party and away from population centers, is due to some other factor? What would that be?
No, I think I'll blame the people who choose to not get vaccinated instead. Unless you'd like to make the argument that vaccine-skeptics lack the mental capacity to be assigned agency?
Mennonites
Fundamentalist Mormons
Slavic-language church
Come on, man. You should know better than this. At least do the 30-second google research instead of jumping to the convenient correlation. I recall you being not so far away from this field professionally, and I've spent some time at the coalface on this, and when it comes to outbreaks of easily-avoidable communicable disease it's pretty much always oddball religious sects or low-trust immigrant communities or, in the latter case, apparently both. I'm totally happy to make the argument that "a nearly 100x increase in measles cases, centered around political strongholds for the vaccine-skeptical party and away from population centers, is due to some other factor", because it's right.
Feel free to cite this post smugly in a couple years if the possible trend continues and normie republicans do get memed into antivaxxing below herd immunity, or just down to the level of granola moms that have caused minor outbreaks in the past. Until then,
Minnesota has low vaccination rates, due to - uh, the Somali community and fears about vaccination there? Gosh, who knew there was a secret nest of Trump voters in that community!
Oh, look. The reason is not correlated with voting for Trump. Impeccably Blue and vaccinated California has outbreaks, one traced to someone who visited Texas and picked up a case from the outbreak there, plus exposure traced to international travellers (one of whom visited Disneyland).
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"Ancestors" is rather an odd term since 1964 is well within living memory (not mine, but that of many actual Boomers). They just realized the world couldn't come to a stop because of a disease.
Already answered. It is spreading among particular religious communities who, while they are not religiously scrupulous of vaccination, intentionally don't have a lot of contact with the public health system. This includes having their own schools. Since those communities have contact with each other, it has also been spreading between them, both within the US and internationally. This has been going on for a few years now.
You can do that if you want to be hardheaded, but burning the credibility of the CDC had a cost nevertheless. But as far as I know it has nothing to do with the current outbreak.
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I wouldn't go quite so far but it's just open-and-shut correct that many people can't properly evaluate the things that we use to establish the safety of vaccines, like randomized trials. Add in the possibility of fraud/bias (which is a legitimate concern in academia and science) and that almost certainly rises from "many" to "most." Can you sit down and read an RCT and determine if it has fraudulent data?
Thus people have to fall back on cruder heuristics such as "do I trust this institution." Keeping that trust is part of the institution. And, well, if an institution explodes its institutional trust it's pretty fair to assign at least some of the blame for the resulting fire to the institution for deceiving people.
Not if they just make up or fudge the numbers. In my field I can catch most of the bullshit that isn't outright lying. If it's far enough outside my wheelhouse, almost certainly not.
When half the country is panicking and wants lockdowns, and half the country is enraged and fedposting about civil liberties, how exactly is an institution supposed to maintain credibility with the entire population? If Fauci had noped out day one and been replaced by a COVID mega-dove, you still would have burned credibility with half the country. We'd just be having this conversation with inverse valence.
I maintain that:
The same two things every technical expert wanting to preserve their credibility should do:
They violated the first by making a lot of confident claims that later turned out to be incorrect. They violated the second by advocating for the implementation of a bunch of specific solutions which had non-medical trade-offs.
If they'd done neither and kept to relatively generic advice and a little bit of carefully-phrased speculation they might get criticism for being useless but would have avoided much of the trust loss from saying wrong things. I think you would have also seen much less aggressive fights over lockdowns and masking without The Science pushing specific solutions.
A lot of the credibility current institutions are burning came from past institutions getting things right. When they said that vaccinating everyone against measles would get rid of measles it actually did do so. The same was not so for the coronavirus.
Past institutions could just have been lucky, but I think a more sensible default assumption is that they got better results because they were better.
Problem is, most people don't distinguish between individual experts and instead just see the scientific community as a big undifferentiated blob. People who speak confidently and get political tend to get a lot more attention than people who don't do those things, so generally speaking it seems to me that such people will come to be very over-represented in the average person's idea of what "the science" is saying.
During COVID, the scientific and medical communities enforced conformity, by ostracizing those like Bhattacharya and calling his ideas "unethical", and pulling the licenses of dissident doctors. They intended to be seen as a solid front.
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I think Arjin responded to the first part more eloquently than I can. I'll just add that to the degree that this was pushed by scientists as a group then scientists should share blame for it as a group.
I've seen this argument before and the aim is usually to imply that because some of the lower-level scientists were correct you should not lose trust in science from failures of science-driven policy. Sorry if that's not what you're getting at here.
That idea is bullshit because nothing has changed in the pipeline of science to policy. When the public next gets some more fancy science-based policy it won't be from the random scientist who has sane opinions but from the same kind of people who got things wrong last time. If scientists want credit for being correct they need to actually speak up when the public is being told incorrect science. Otherwise what the scientists are saying among themselves is irrelevant to whether or not the public should trust the science that gets to them.
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And this was something deliberately cultivated by the scientific community itself. During Covid there were credentialed experts coming out against lockdowns or MRNA vaccines, etc., and the response was that it's the scientific consensus that counts, not individual opinions.
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They could start by admitting that they are capable of being wrong, and when they update their advice, not pretending that We Have Always Been At War With Eastasia.
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My suggestion would be to not inflame the population over it with a massive fear-mongering media campaign combined with insane unconstitutional regulations -- the lockdowns might have been popular-ish for the first few weeks or so, but without all the media and 'nudging' I think this would have faded pretty fast. Indeed it probably could have been nipped in the bud by China coverage along the lines of "look what the crazy totalitarians are doing now" and some pictures of Tank Man rather than "what a good idea!"
Public opinion is super malleable at the moment, is what I'm saying.
That's taking it a tad far.
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I caught my garage in a lie the other day.
They tried to claim my windshield wipers were worn out even though I had replaced them just a few weeks before. They were embarrassed when I said so and at least did not try to push it further. But they did try to cheat me, and they tried to cheat me for about 50 bucks to boot. They have recently been bought out by a different owner, who I'm sure told them to try this, as before they didn't try such tricks.
My brake pads were also worn out. Or so they said. I chose to believe them about the brake pads despite their lie about the windshield wipers, as the brake pads had been on there for about 100k miles and the previous set didn't make it that far. Despite that, I had to restrain myself from telling them to go fuck themselves.
I'm sure that someone who is a bit more hot-headed, and/or with a bit less of an idea of how long brake pads last, would've given them the middle finger they did surely deserve for that stunt right then and there, and gone on to drive another 100k miles with worn-out brake pads. "Oh, sure, the brake pads are worn out. That's what the last guy said, and I know for damn sure he was a cheater and a liar." That would be the wrong thing to do, but I would completely get it if someone did react in that way.
I'm going to go find a different garage. But I can't just go find a different medical establishment.
And while I may have some idea of how long brake pads last, because that's the kind of knowledge you gain just by living your life and paying a little attention, I did not study medicine. I only know about my own field. You can't expect people to have in-depth knowledge about fields other than their own. But you can certainly expect people who've been lied to, to react badly.
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Isn't it, compared to influenza, 10x as infectious, with 10x the hospitalization rate and 5-10x as deadly?
If we had a vaccine that reliably stopped influenza (instead of the bullshit yearly one people try taking which misses 75% of the time) I can't imagine why we wouldn't all be on it? But the measles vaccine is a lot more reliable than the influenza vaccine? And you don't have to take it annually?
It seems like a tragedy that our society is rejecting the measles vaccine. What am I missing?
Supposedly it reduces symptoms more than prevents you from getting sick in the first place, but I haven't dug into the clinical literature.
As for the rest - I was joking. I am pro MMR.
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There has been a marginal change, likely due to the reasons @ABigGuy4U gives -- backlash from all that pushing of the COVID vaccine, which seemed to work about as well as the flu vaccine. Especially the pushing of it on children, who were at very low risk from COVID.
Can you maybe offer some information regarding regulations of measles vaccination in the three federal states OP has mentioned? I guess it'd be relevant here.
South Carolina requires measles vaccination for kindergarten students; they allow both medical and religious exemptions. Texas requires it for pre-K students, and allows medical, religious, and personal belief exemptions. Arizona requires it for daycare and kindergarten and allows medical, religious, and personal belief exemptions. As I understand it, these particular Mennonite communities have their own schools which are simply not covered by any of this.
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When you flood your country with a firehose of malignant propaganda the people eventually stop trusting you, even about basic stuff.
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You're an actual expert on this stuff. I am very much not. But the common rebuttal I've seen from right-wingers is that Canada is seeing a proportionally worse increase with no RFK. The "other" factor they point to that both nations have in common over the relevant time frame is mass immigration from nations with much lower overall vaccination rates.
At a quick glance, that doesn't look like it holds much explanatory power for Spartansburg, but Gains County does seem have a high immigrant rate.. Mojave looks like it might be lower levels of immigrants than the surrounding area.
The bitter lessons of COVID were that my colleagues and I aren't epidemiologists, our actual specialty is worthless for making predictions in the real world and internet autists with sufficient time and motivation are at least as knowledgeable about the literature. At this point, a literate caveman with GPT terminal debating me about the literature would be like watching stockfish demolish a grade school chess class.
I was actually unaware of the outbreak in Canada. Seems like I was wrong and @The_Nybbler was right, it's the mennonite communities in Canada/Texas and apparently 'Slavic' (Ukrainian? Russian? Apparently services are held in both) immigrants in South Carolina. Not really your garden variety Trump supporters. Mea culpa.
FWIW, I'm not giving a lot of credit to the right-wingers on this one either. "Mennonites who came from Mexico in the 70's" is maybe the finest split possible between technically correct, but also really not what I took away from what those guys meant by "immigrants". Just so with "Russo-Ukranian Evangelicals".
When I was looking for links for that last post, I found this ranking of nations by MMR vaccination rate, and it does have some hotly topical immigrant source nations near the bottom, like Somalia, Haiti, and Venezuela. But that doesn't seem to have actually translated into outbreaks.
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