There were massive protests and constant public pushback against vaccines for as long as vaccines have existed.

There were a handful of outspoken reactionary groups in the early 19th century who registered outsized alarm. But when you look at the data, the rapid decline in smallpox over the century was the direct result of the success of inoculation domestically. By 1898, the mandatory imposition of vaccinations was functionally unnecessary, due to the near complete eradication of the disease on the island. People were - by and large - more than happy to undergo inoculation at a level that provided herd immunity.

The fight for widespread adoption of vaccination has been rough fought against the tides of the confidently ignorant who let their irrational emotions control them.

Confident ignorance has been as much a benefit to vaccine campaigns as an opposition to it. People are, by and large, trusting and appreciative of advancements in medical science, especially when they are subject to regular and repeated trauma from a chronic malady.

Quackery succeeds on this sense of naive desperation. Vaccination does, too (with the added benefit that it actually works). A straightforward solution to an immediate problem is an easy sell.

The real detriment to vaccination policy is its own success. Once you’ve systematically eliminated a disease, the social memory of the disease’s consequences fades through generations. People aren’t afraid of Polio because they don’t have a President in a wheelchair who fell victim to it. People aren’t afraid of measles because they’ve never experienced it, or had to care for children suffering from the disease.

The rapid adoption of prophylactics in the sex work community comes from people who are regularly faced with the threat of STIs, both personally and in their peer groups. People with little direct or indirect exposure to recreational sex are a much harder sell. And so we see STIs flood through religiously insular communities (ex. the sudden surge in Syphilis in Salt Lake City) that had historically shown very low rates of incidence.

This tends to set off a rebalancing of behaviors, as the community rapidly adopts the techniques for prevention. When news of an outbreak spreads, vaccine hesitancy collapses in its wake

In fairness, Expelliarmus has a higher success rate

America doesn’t just do this domestically.

They do. It’s just tied up in the private sector. Tons of quackery on American TV and in news journals. Everything from “Head On, Apply Directly to The Forehead” to Dr Oz shilling ginseng as a panacea to the social media conspiracies about MedBeds that Trump himself retweeted.

The CIA undermined polio vaccination programs in Pakistan when global eradication actually seemed possible.

Can’t let the wrong kind of people benefit

I think what the antivaxers are incapable of understanding and expressing is that they are not actually questioning the science, they are questioning the health care industry and the systems meant to keep them honest.

A lot of the opposition to vaccination reads like fad diets and self-help trends from 20 or 30 years ago. You can prevent autism by fumbles around playing Motzart to your baby in utero? Meditating during Yoga? Eating chocolate? Pick your Oprah-sponsored poison.

But, like, why are we seeing a fixation on a proven medical treatment and not some generic “don’t let your kids eat jelly beans” or “do headstands to get the blood flowing to the brain” hookum?

I think that’s where you get to people really running afoul of an increasingly dysfunctional health media ecosystem. One whose reputation is bloated with empty promises about The Perfect Cancer / Alzheimer’s Cure or Living Forever With Blood Transfusions. And then it’s colliding with an actual system that just seems to throw enormous bills at you for pain killers and palliative care.

On the one end, there’s supposed to be a recipe for perfect health if you have enough money. On the other, I can get a flu shot and still get the flu? How unfair.

I’ve found the best way to deal with a fear of needles is to scream slurs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study#Public_trust

There’s been a systematic undermining of public trust in health and safety instructions going on for decades.

Some of this distrust is earned as with Tuskegee, the bungled Anthrax vaccine, the Reagan Era response to the AIDS epidemic, scandals with weight loss drugs like Fen-phen and Redux, Oxycodone, etc.

Some of it is purely manufactured, with the CIA-sponsored agitation against the Chinese COVID vaccine being a major font of modern day anti-vax Truther Lore.

But to no-sell skepticism as just “you’re a little baby who is scared of needles” really under plays the shift in attitude nationally. We used to be a country that whole heartedly embraced a preventative for small pox, polio, and influenza. Now we’re more terrified of kids getting the shot that gives you bad grades in school than getting measels.

Requires a fully funded and staffed public postal service in a county that’s dismantling, privatizing, and outsourcing core components of public sector package shipping

The Battle of Algiers

“Nothing happened today” isn’t a sign of a slow news day, it’s a sign of institutional decay. Literally people unwilling or unable to do their jobs.

Modern hustle culture has it’s own problems, but suggesting we should be applauding a national broadcaster just doing Ferris Beuller’s Day Off? Come on.

Real “nothing to see here, move along” moment

The goal of these rules is to minimize the utility of SNAP benefits and discourage application for and usage of these benefits.

What starts in Gaza demolishes the world

Why are people not trusting experts?

People are trusting “experts”. That’s how they’re getting the information necessary to distrust other experts.

Dr Oz has “Doctor” right in his name! If he goes on Oprah - the show that brings on a parade of ahem “experts” to explain the world to a population of shut-in housewives - and warns that vaccinations are why your kids aren’t Ivy League Material, people listen.

It’s because they believe their ignorant opinion is just as valid as a researched conclusion.

Their opinions don’t just emerge Ex Nihilo. And they aren’t breaking arbitrarily for or against certain topics. They’re polarized around a set of reactionary beliefs because they’re trained into it by reactionary media, reactionary politicians, and reactionary local institutions.

Anti-intellectualism isn’t real. Same for misinformation.

There’s a kernel of truth to this. People aren’t “anti-intellectual” in the broad sense, they’re biased to a certain worldview or partisan to an ideological lens. You can get liberals and conservatives to agree on quite a bit if you just channel the message through a trustworthy proxy. You can get them to split by making them watch Crossfire for an hour a day.

Vaccination is a great example of this in action. Big church groups that value being able to meet in public do a 180 on the jab when they see the impact a disease has on its congregation. Meanwhile, woo-woo liberals living in heavily insulated suburban communities can get very cavalier about vaccination when they hear an Oprah spokesperson claim it impacts their childrens’ academic performance.

I remember when COVID first hit and we got an earful about needing to conserve medical masks. “Don’t bother wearing them, just socially distance, they don’t really help” was a thing we initially got from liberals. Conservatives were masked up and liberals weren’t. And then the zietgeist flipped and it was liberals clutching them while conservatives were tearing at the gazy discount paper covers screaming “I can’t breath! I can’t breath!”

What we like to call “anti-intellectualism” is, at its heart, a trust issue. Which professionals do you consider credible? Which personal experiences inform your worldview? What do you value - personal safety? financial success? self-expression? religious dogma?

If you’re living in a country that functionally eliminated measles 30 years ago, you can get pretty fair on herd immunity and never have to see your beliefs challenged. Then, when your bubble is breached by the outside world, all those warnings about Diseased Immigrants ruining your pocket paradise are reinforced by the same crop of reactionary news shows and fascist politicians who raised you.

That’s Future Ms Juan Guaidó to you

If you seriously think the internet is better now than 08 ish, well I dont agree.

I think it’s heavily predicated on what you’re using the Internet for. In the business world, we’ve improved system redundancy, backup/recovery, and transfer speeds by leaps and bounds.

Back in 2008, I was in my car driving to Dallas to escape Hurricane Ike, with a trunk full of server hardware needed to keep our business running. Datacenter proliferation has fully eliminated the need to do anything like that again.

We have significantly more high speed broadband. We have superior wireless connectivity. HTML5 is much better than it’s predecessors. We’ve modernized APIs and broadly adopted JSON for transmission. The hardware is so much better, from phones to routers to raspberry pis for self-hosting.

I get you don’t like the current content of big Web 2.0 publishers. But you’re really missing the forest for a few big ugly trees

In 2008 you could do a web search and have relevant real results

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bombing

Google had (mostly) solved this problem by 2007. I couldn’t name another search engine that could claim the same.

But the process of Spamdexing has been an ongoing war of the websites since the nineties. Google never fully solved it, they just did a better job than most up until the big executive shift in 2018.

The spam site takeover of your search results in the modern day is as much a consequence of modernization in Spamdexing as it is any search engine’s own failures. None of those AI content mill sites existed to index 20 years ago

Hey now. China’s been churning out much higher quality merch of late. And the American Tech Giants have been increasingly wrapped up in US trade war politics. So a lot of this shit now comes from the Philippines, India, and Bangladesh.

Amazon’s going through the same enshitification cycle as Sears and JC Penny did a decade ago.

It’s not a question of “Will people stop using Amazon?” but “Will people start using <X>” where X is better than Amazon. Solve for X.

I mean, if you’ve got an REI in your neighborhood, that can be handy. But even they still get their merch from somewhere that isn’t the storefront or even the city. There really isn’t a “buy local” option for textiles in a material sense, unless you really know where to look.