COVID was somehow the visceral turning point. Variations on visitor restrictions in hospitals still exist since then due to the extraordinary and amazing displays of bad behavior from that time.
People could always behave badly. Direct care staff, as one example, have been wearing panic buttons linked directly to security and calling a violence code over the announcement system, since around 2015 on the medical side of things.
But COVID was a severe escalation point. Families screaming in hallways that the diagnoses was “fake news” or part of the hospitals “corporate conspiracy” escalating to the point of pulling medical equipment off their loved ones, who could not breathe without that medical equipment.
Behaviors that could potentially kill people wrapped up in an inexorable belief that science was lying. No trust of medical personnel who are there to help whatever the system around them contrives to do with care.
While the behaviors are not like COVID times any more, there’s a residual skepticism of, well, everything since that time. Sadly, one that is preyed upon by politics to keep us fighting one another instead of punching up.
Forgive me, maybe “punching up” is now a ban-worthy turn of phrase.
I’m in a very conservative state and until recently I worked in hospitals around the country. You would not believe the amount of times I’ve heard covid conspiracy shit from actual healthcare workers. The most common one is that it’s just the flu, but when anyone died for any reason at the time they put down covid as cause of death. Why would anyone do this? I guess it doesn’t have to make sense. Just to hazard a guess I’d say more than half of the people in my state believe some form of covid conspiracy or disinformation.
I used to live in Seattle and while I didn’t work in the medical field… I knew quite a lot of nurses and other, fairly entry level kinds of medical workers.
Most of these people, again, in Seattle, a supposed bastion of lefties… were vaccine skeptics or outright antivax, when COVID happened.
A lot of these people came from the more conservative areas outside Seattle, and then worked in Seattle because it was the only area hiring… but yeah, my anecdotal experience was/is that many medical staff themselves succumbed to vaccine conspiracies, and would freely admit and bitch about masking and vaccines when off the job.
my anecdotal experience was/is that many medical staff themselves succumbed to vaccine conspiracies, and would freely admit and bitch about masking and vaccines when off the job.
Not even just off the job. I worked at a surgery center during the first few years of COVID, and I still distinctly remember at least one surgeon walking around the clinical areas with a mask that read “this mask does nothing”. And I’m pretty sure he was seeing patients wearing that too.
I am still baffled by that, because this fucking window licker had to have taken microbiology, and literally wore a mask every goddamned times they did the thing they trained for.
I’d be discussing declining the procedure based on that. I don’t know if I’d pull the trigger, based on a number of things: how likely can I get the procedure done elsewhere or by a different surgeon, how badly and quickly do I need the procedure, insurance issues. But I’d certainly try to talk to hospital staff about it.
On the other hand, I’ve heard Herman Cain was an idiot savant. So just because they can’t make change without an automatic register doesn’t mean they can’t do surgery.
Maine lost something like a third of its nurses to a vaccine mandate. Which is cute because medical staff, all the way down to janitorial (hi) get updated vaccines every year.
I have heard of and witnessed an incredible amount of cognitive dissonance, horizontal and other ableism, anti-science, anti-masking, anti-vaccine and anti-health behavior and misinformation in my “thank god we live here” blue state, most often by folks who are less marginalized and otherwise less effected by the problems I listed above (but not always) and I don’t necessarily blame these people for being overwhelmed and confused because they’ve been intentionally captured in a disinfo bubble that is the result of being the target of concerted efforts by multiple actors at up to and including the state level to keep them that way for their own purposes, although I do hold them individually responsible for harm they are directly causing as a result, or partially responsible for harm they help to perpetuate that is done by systems or groups which can be massive. The work to undo the programming/socializing needs to start asap on an individual level or if we ever have the chance to make something new it will end up having the same problems. Deconstruction of harmful behaviors and thoughts is necessary, with professionals or loved ones or on ones own, whatever the case, the point is to stop doing the dirty work for corporations and billionaires and anyone else who benefits from these hierarchies by reinforcing the values they want us to have such as obedience to authority and individualism.
This is even more of a specific personal anecdote, but here goes:
My brother is a self described tankie.
Used to live with him.
His entire personality could be described as constantly having a nervous breakdown, and barely masking this with a thin veneer of absurd overconfidence and unchallengable moral superiority.
Just a bubbling cauldron of insecurity.
He spent tons of time following the progression of COVID, and was well informed.
He spent months keeping up with all the updates on vaccine types and availability and different kinds of masks, talking about it all the time.
… Then, after about 9 months of constantly being either having or being on the verge of a nervous breakdown… he managed to convince himself that it would be a great idea to fly to an in person work related convention, in Vegas, during the height of a COVID wave.
He did so, came back with COVID, got me sick, and I lost 2 weeks of work from it.
I was paying more than half the rent, and his finances were way more fucked than he let on, and then proceeded to freak out about that.
… He… knew that even if everyone is wearing masks, it doesn’t work as well when you’re in an enclosed area with a lot of people, and that a convention should be avoided at all costs to minimize exposure risk.
We’d talked about these scenarios in the months prior, in detail.
He knew that I had a bunch of comorbidities at the time for having a way worse time with COVID. Overweight, only recently stopped smoking cigarettes, other chronic health problems.
But nope, it was somehow my fault for causing him stress by … assuming I didn’t have vacation/sick time I could use, assuming I wouldn’t be able to pay my share of the rent…
Not his fault for nearly fucking killing me via COVID, when he knew that was a fairly likely result of his own actions.
… And all of that is even more insane in the context of our shared history, which includes 3 instances where I dropped everything, abandoned commitments to other friends or family, spent a lot of my own money… to save him from being homeless and/or save his life from ODing or carrying through with a very credible suicide attempt.
… I got him the job that he went to the convention for… I got him that job a decade earlier when he was homeless, connected him to some of my friends who worked at the same place and convinced them to convince the owner to pity hire him.
He just stayed there and worked his way up the ranks of a small family business.
Sorry, I’m just having a therapy session for myself at this point, but… jesus fuck, I am so glad I am far away from him.
Most of the skepticism was rooted in the shorter testing period of the initial mRNA vaccines. We have the data now to prove they’re safe, but that initial fast-tracking spooked people.
COVID was somehow the visceral turning point. Variations on visitor restrictions in hospitals still exist since then due to the extraordinary and amazing displays of bad behavior from that time.
People could always behave badly. Direct care staff, as one example, have been wearing panic buttons linked directly to security and calling a violence code over the announcement system, since around 2015 on the medical side of things.
But COVID was a severe escalation point. Families screaming in hallways that the diagnoses was “fake news” or part of the hospitals “corporate conspiracy” escalating to the point of pulling medical equipment off their loved ones, who could not breathe without that medical equipment.
Behaviors that could potentially kill people wrapped up in an inexorable belief that science was lying. No trust of medical personnel who are there to help whatever the system around them contrives to do with care.
While the behaviors are not like COVID times any more, there’s a residual skepticism of, well, everything since that time. Sadly, one that is preyed upon by politics to keep us fighting one another instead of punching up.
Forgive me, maybe “punching up” is now a ban-worthy turn of phrase.
I’m in a very conservative state and until recently I worked in hospitals around the country. You would not believe the amount of times I’ve heard covid conspiracy shit from actual healthcare workers. The most common one is that it’s just the flu, but when anyone died for any reason at the time they put down covid as cause of death. Why would anyone do this? I guess it doesn’t have to make sense. Just to hazard a guess I’d say more than half of the people in my state believe some form of covid conspiracy or disinformation.
I used to live in Seattle and while I didn’t work in the medical field… I knew quite a lot of nurses and other, fairly entry level kinds of medical workers.
Most of these people, again, in Seattle, a supposed bastion of lefties… were vaccine skeptics or outright antivax, when COVID happened.
A lot of these people came from the more conservative areas outside Seattle, and then worked in Seattle because it was the only area hiring… but yeah, my anecdotal experience was/is that many medical staff themselves succumbed to vaccine conspiracies, and would freely admit and bitch about masking and vaccines when off the job.
Not even just off the job. I worked at a surgery center during the first few years of COVID, and I still distinctly remember at least one surgeon walking around the clinical areas with a mask that read “this mask does nothing”. And I’m pretty sure he was seeing patients wearing that too.
I am still baffled by that, because this fucking window licker had to have taken microbiology, and literally wore a mask every goddamned times they did the thing they trained for.
I’d be discussing declining the procedure based on that. I don’t know if I’d pull the trigger, based on a number of things: how likely can I get the procedure done elsewhere or by a different surgeon, how badly and quickly do I need the procedure, insurance issues. But I’d certainly try to talk to hospital staff about it.
On the other hand, I’ve heard Herman Cain was an idiot savant. So just because they can’t make change without an automatic register doesn’t mean they can’t do surgery.
Maine lost something like a third of its nurses to a vaccine mandate. Which is cute because medical staff, all the way down to janitorial (hi) get updated vaccines every year.
I have heard of and witnessed an incredible amount of cognitive dissonance, horizontal and other ableism, anti-science, anti-masking, anti-vaccine and anti-health behavior and misinformation in my “thank god we live here” blue state, most often by folks who are less marginalized and otherwise less effected by the problems I listed above (but not always) and I don’t necessarily blame these people for being overwhelmed and confused because they’ve been intentionally captured in a disinfo bubble that is the result of being the target of concerted efforts by multiple actors at up to and including the state level to keep them that way for their own purposes, although I do hold them individually responsible for harm they are directly causing as a result, or partially responsible for harm they help to perpetuate that is done by systems or groups which can be massive. The work to undo the programming/socializing needs to start asap on an individual level or if we ever have the chance to make something new it will end up having the same problems. Deconstruction of harmful behaviors and thoughts is necessary, with professionals or loved ones or on ones own, whatever the case, the point is to stop doing the dirty work for corporations and billionaires and anyone else who benefits from these hierarchies by reinforcing the values they want us to have such as obedience to authority and individualism.
This is even more of a specific personal anecdote, but here goes:
My brother is a self described tankie.
Used to live with him.
His entire personality could be described as constantly having a nervous breakdown, and barely masking this with a thin veneer of absurd overconfidence and unchallengable moral superiority.
Just a bubbling cauldron of insecurity.
He spent tons of time following the progression of COVID, and was well informed.
He spent months keeping up with all the updates on vaccine types and availability and different kinds of masks, talking about it all the time.
… Then, after about 9 months of constantly being either having or being on the verge of a nervous breakdown… he managed to convince himself that it would be a great idea to fly to an in person work related convention, in Vegas, during the height of a COVID wave.
He did so, came back with COVID, got me sick, and I lost 2 weeks of work from it.
I was paying more than half the rent, and his finances were way more fucked than he let on, and then proceeded to freak out about that.
… He… knew that even if everyone is wearing masks, it doesn’t work as well when you’re in an enclosed area with a lot of people, and that a convention should be avoided at all costs to minimize exposure risk.
We’d talked about these scenarios in the months prior, in detail.
He knew that I had a bunch of comorbidities at the time for having a way worse time with COVID. Overweight, only recently stopped smoking cigarettes, other chronic health problems.
But nope, it was somehow my fault for causing him stress by … assuming I didn’t have vacation/sick time I could use, assuming I wouldn’t be able to pay my share of the rent…
Not his fault for nearly fucking killing me via COVID, when he knew that was a fairly likely result of his own actions.
… And all of that is even more insane in the context of our shared history, which includes 3 instances where I dropped everything, abandoned commitments to other friends or family, spent a lot of my own money… to save him from being homeless and/or save his life from ODing or carrying through with a very credible suicide attempt.
… I got him the job that he went to the convention for… I got him that job a decade earlier when he was homeless, connected him to some of my friends who worked at the same place and convinced them to convince the owner to pity hire him.
He just stayed there and worked his way up the ranks of a small family business.
Sorry, I’m just having a therapy session for myself at this point, but… jesus fuck, I am so glad I am far away from him.
Most of the skepticism was rooted in the shorter testing period of the initial mRNA vaccines. We have the data now to prove they’re safe, but that initial fast-tracking spooked people.
If it wasn’t mRNA it would’ve been something else. They gotta have a wedge issue to turn people against each other.
The skepticism was mostly based on propaganda, misinformation, and ignorance.
This isn’t reddit, you can say whatever you want
Luigi did nothing wrong and neither did the guy who actually fired the gun