The correct word is “hospitalization” of the unvaccinated, since nearly everyone who wound up in the hospital from covid was not protected. Empathy is in sharp decline in our society, whether it’s recognizing humanity of people with different politics (look at the demonization by MAGA of the Democrats), Qanonsense, Pizzagate and the rest of the unhinged conspiracy crap, or the willful blindness to over a million corpses due to Covid (in the USA alone).
Everyone I know - or know of personally - who wound up in the hospital from covid was unvaccinated.
Here’s a non-binary view: it would be nice for Pharma companies to be run as worker owned cooperatives. But they’re not, and not likely to be any time soon. What matters most is do their products work, and with the covid vaccines, the verdict is YES. The fear mongering from the nutters is just noise and nonsense.
I got the Omicron bivalent vaccine a week ago and was impressed that the after effect was almost nothing. For those of you who visit doctors, you will know the 0 - 10 scale to rate one’s pain. This vaccine was maybe 0.5 or 0.25 the next day. Granted, other people might have a bigger reaction, it’s not fully understood why there is variation in how the immune system reacts to being briefed about a virus to watch out for (the best thing that we can all do to improve our immune responses). I did have a little more reaction to the initial vaccine than this booster. Sure would be nice to see the conspiracy people calling for continued federal funding to ensure that everyone, regardless of income, had access to this health care. And if efforts for a vaccine 2.0 that provides "sterilizing immunity" are successful - that would end any trnasmission - I doubt that would persuade the anti-vaxxers to get protected. They'd come up with a new excuse about how it would wreck their precious bodily fluids or something.
Canada had a much lower death rate from Covid because they were more vaccinated than the USA. Parts of the USA were very vaccinated (ie. San Francisco) and the hospitalization and death rates were low. Parts were majority unvaccinated and the death rates were high.
New Zealand, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Finland, Denmark, Norway handled covid far better than the US of Alienation. They didn’t have the far right wing noise machine spreading BS, in part to deflect from the Trump administration deliberately choosing to stand down in 2020. Sure all you 9/11 truthers remember the term “stand down?” That’s what 45 did when faced with the initial spread, in part because the pandemic was worst in New York, at least at first, and 45 hated New York (and New York hated Trump). When it spread to the rest of the country it was too late to admit making a mistake and now 13 states are above New York in terms of death rates - almost all in the south and all are run by Republicans. Even this understates the problem since a couple states - notably Florida - lied about case counts and should be recognized as downplaying the deaths. Most of New York’s deaths happened before vaccines were rolled out. Most of Trumpland’s deaths happened after vaccines became available. Meanwhile, Trump himself, nearly all rich Republicans, Fox News executives, etc. were vaccinated while they made refusals to be a political litmus test. That is a real conspiracy, in case the conspiracy addicts are interested. Jim Jones only killed about 900. MAGA antiva (with some help from its liberal fellow travelers) killed a million.
I’m not a fan of NATO. I’m a pacifist. I wish we were in the parallel universe where JFK got re-elected, ended the Cold War, Krushchev was not toppled by his generals, and we never saw Nixon, Bush, Clinton, Trump, Brezhnev, Putin.
But what Putin is doing to Ukraine fits the term genocide. Read the Genocide Convention. Depriving populations of the means of survival is genocide - and destroying Ukraine’s critical infrastructure, utilities, water purification, hospitals, schools, etc. is genocide. Look at what Putin did to the former city of Mariupol. And since this blog, what’s left of it, is or was a haven for people interested in false flags, I assume from your comment you may not remember Putin’s false flag in September 1999 where the FSB (KGB) blew up apartment buildings in Moscow and another city, blamed the attacks on Chechens and used it to start a war on Chechnya. Putin committed war crimes in Grozny (the capitol city of Chechnya). He also committed atrocities in Syria, invaded Georgia, murdered opposition leaders and journalists, invaded parts of Ukraine and now has really invaded Ukraine. You may not know nor care about any of this, but Russia’s neighbors all know it and that is why they wanted to join NATO, whether you or I like it or not. Small countries with a history of being invaded by Russia got scared watching Putin’s aggressive militarism and sought alliance with the only other option they had (speaking of binary views). Even Sweden and Finland, which were against NATO membership for many decades, both changed their view after seeing destruction of Ukraine this year. It wasn’t just the politicians, public opinion in both countries completely changed, thanks to Putin. Would have been nice if the UN had teeth, the Security Council didn’t grant veto power to the H-bomb countries (US, Russia, UK, France, China), but that’s not what happened.
If you watch Oliver Stone’s films on Ukraine, you may notice they are solely from the Putin view, that the Ukrainian voices are lackeys of Putin, and the “history” lesson at the start is ridiculously wrong. Russia has been trying to control Ukraine for centuries, before the USA was even created. It was part of the Russian empire under the Tsars. After the Soviet revolution, Stalin murdered millions of Ukrainians in 1932 in the “Holodomor” - starvation. I’m not expert on that episode, there are a variety of estimates of how many millions and I don’t know which is correct (4 or 2 or 8). Stalin wasn’t as meticulous in documenting his crimes as Hitler was. But I know it happened, even if Oliver Stone “forgot” to mention it in his film.
Stone is correct about JFK’s foreign policies and the assassination, but he’s wrong about Ukraine, he’s working on a new movie praising nuclear power (the most dangerous / toxic way to boil water) and he’s bought into RFK Junior’s right wing virus denial disinformation. Both Stone and Junior have become so toxic for most of the rest of our country that to cite them as champions for “JFK Truth” has become often counterproductive. Perhaps you’ve encountered similar reactions while trying to discuss these topics? Even in Berkeley and Oakland most people are Democrats and vaccinated, even if there are health deniers who have severe iatrophobia (fear of doctors). But the unvaccinated still go to the hospital when they get very sick, not to a church or vitamin store or yoga center or whatever. Tragic and avoidable …
Ukraine has a militaristic component in their society, the result of many traumas over the centuries that have scarred that society. Russia also has a similar ugly history. Anyone know who Zirinovsky was? Far right fascist nationalist in the Duma? He died of covid a couple months ago, but he was a blowhard for decades - and strong Putin supporter. The longer the attack on Ukraine continues the more the war will empower the militaristic parts of Ukrainian society … but it’s ridiculous to expect they will stop fighting back, they will do this whether you like it or not, just as most countries would in similar circumstances.
One factor that the corporate media and the “tankies” all ignore is that oil and gas depletion gave Putin more leverage over Western European countries - he clearly thought that their energy systems being dependent on Russian energy would limit their ability to send weapons to Ukraine. I realize the newer crop of “conspiracy” websites that denounce vaccines and demonize Fauci generally pretend that peak oil is a fake claim or something, but it’s a physical reality that truth move originally acknowledged as real. It was a conspiracy to destroy understanding of conspiracy.