What do you think about the fact that we are gonna just have to get a COVID shot every year instead of curing it?

  • happybadger [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Curing viruses is hard. After 30 years of focused research and half a trillion dollars spent yearly globally between 2000-2015, HIV is still a controlled virus without a cure. Idealising that end cure at the expense of not wanting to run a marathon to get there is self-sabotaging. You'd end up aligning with the reactionaries who also want to resist yearly vaccination efforts but for a larger ideological goal. Building antivax sentiments in yourself or the people around you would would just increase your exposure to the virus and increase the chance it mutates into an escape variant.

    The COVID vaccine is a two day hangover. I have given myself hangovers for much less reward. The alternative to the hangover is potentially drowning in blood or living with lifelong disabilities. It's such a minor inconvenience that the only opposition I have is the pharmaceutical companies financially benefiting from the vaccine rollout but I already want to dismantle them for their profiteering with every other drug. The vaccine isn't a new dynamic there.

    • JoeByeThen [he/him, they/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      I think the major issue is not the vaccines on their own, but that the vax should have been our final attack after a healthy, responsible period of lockdowns and proper implementations of social safety nets to save as many lives as possible. As someone who lived through this shit in florida, I've watched Libs go from laughing at the anti-lockdown protests and claiming the protesters don't care about human life to watching those same libs decide that since the government wasn't stopping them they could go back to normal and do whatever they want (fucking theme parks!) as long as they wear a mask. The massive roller coaster of our covid infection and death numbers have proven that assumption to be false. We've been baby stepped by the politicians and media into accepting that a certain amount of lives lost are just the cost of getting back to normal and that goes hand in hand with the idea they've pushed that covid was never going away anyway and regular vaccinations were always our only option.

      And that's not even getting into the ghoulish IP regulations and hoarding of literal life saving resources we've seen in the past couple of years that contributed to rampant surging of variants across the globe that are going to come bite us in the ass every six to nine months.