He actually called, and held regular "defense councils" (with generals, etc.) to deal with the Covid situation.
Was it because they are less compromised by industry than public health officials? Or just because it's popular with voters? Your guess is as good as mine.
Right now in Australia, there is a huge gap between indigenous vs. non-indigenous vaccination rates.
Would your strategy be to stigmatize indigenous Australians as stupid, or to stigmatize them in other ways (which ones?) in order to convince them to get vaccinated?
Similar in the US, we have a “vaccine gap” for black and latinx caused by hesitancy/racism. They amazingly don’t trust a system the authorities have been spending a lot of effort telling them is a racist system.
But the media, despite the fact that the most hesitant groups are people of color, have painted a portrait of the vaccine hesitant as bad white people (rural, politically conservative, Christian). So shaming and ridicule have been embraced. The media and most elites, many posters here included, love to hate rural citizens, at least those who they presume to be privileged (ie white). They do not realize they are criticizing the uneducated poor, largely disadvantaged black people in urban areas.
You've unfortunately been using HN primarily for political and ideological battle. That's not allowed here, because it's destructive of what the site is for. It's also the line at which we ban accounts (see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... for past explanations).
Unironically yes. There are simple steps that can be taken to drastically reduce the amount of harm caused unto you and by you unto others and transmission through vaccinated individuals is lowered. We would have been done with this before any variants arrived if stupidity wasn't celebrated.
Since it's too late to genuinely fix now, the best thing that can happen is shaming stupidity. Applying evolutionary pressure to individuals that take bad actions is an incredibly good idea. Making the unvaccinated modern lepers is good for society as a whole.
It's not compliance, it's acting rationally. Politically, I'm not even very far from the group most adamant about not getting vaccinated (card-carrying anti-Democrat, here), yet I still acknowledge that not getting vaccinated is an incredible act of stupidity. People who celebrate stupidity instead of acting rationally in times of plague should have evolutionary pressure applied.
It's too late to turn back time and fix the pandemic by forcing them to act rationally, but by applying pressure to prevent them from having success in society, we can make them much less likely to be around the next time this happens. The society of the United States has been doing things like this since it began quite successfully, and it would be ridiculous to stop doing it now.
You posted a bunch of flamewar comments in this thread. That's bad. It doesn't seem you're in the habit of it (that's good), but would you please review the site guidelines and not do this again? It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for, so we'd appreciate it.
Was it because they are less compromised by industry than public health officials? Or just because it's popular with voters? Your guess is as good as mine.