Covid 19 Part XXXV-956,720 ROI (5,952 deaths) 452,946 NI (3,002 deaths) (08/01) Read OP

Would you go away with your xenophobic nonsense!

The worst and loudest anti vaxxer element here, if you look at any of the far right garbage online and who turns up at those bonkers street protests, is absolutely 100% Irish born and bred and usually up to their oxters in online conspiracy theory American politics.

The worst anti vaxxers I know personally are either extremely non scientific hippy dippy types who would probably take it if it were branded “organic”, or those who’ve bought into and swallowed that stuff hook, line and sinker.

One of my not so close cousins, who meets every stereotype of modern hippy dippy type, is a huge anti-vaxxer. None of her household were vaccinated and her whole family got a really bad dose of COVID and two still have long covid symptoms.

The far right types are driving anti vaccine stuff spreading frightening misinformation and out waving their flags and ranting, raving and handing in freemen of the land “legal” documents to people trying to get on with running their businesses and keeping people safe.

They’ve had very little traction, but they’re still obviously worrying a few %.

The cultural issues around vaccines are buy in to modern conspiracy theories. Some places have done better than others in avoiding that, and Ireland has been one to them due to a robust and fairly rational discussion about science and probably due to our relatively smaller population and a political system that hasn’t gone down the populist rabbit holes some places are very much lost in.

We did very, very well on vaccine uptake, and are completely comparable to most of our Northern European neighbours, to Spain and Portugal, most of the sane parts of the US (mostly north eastern states), Canada and parts of Asia, and by the looks of the speed of their later rollout and uptake also Australia and NZ etc.

It’s about present day political culture and that includes most of the people who’ve made Ireland their home. I think there is an element of “would you cop you self on!” in Ireland that managed to play well into this.

A post further back in the thread basically was scapegoating non-irish born people in Ireland for the 8% or so of unvaccinated adults. That’s totally unfair and lacks any statistical or scientific basis whatsoever and doesn’t remotely line up with any experience of anti vaccine issues I’ve seen here, which are being driven by domestic Irish born individuals, even if their ideology seems to be largely coming from the conspiracy fringes of the United States primarily and a global network of organisations that haunts social media.

I mean one of the most prominent anti vaccine people in the world is an Irish college professor.

Some of the worst uptake has also been in rural border counties.

The unvaccinated numbers here are very small but that doesn’t mean they’re not going to cause an issue in terms of hospitalisation etc etc.

The current vaccines don’t seem to limit transmission, but do prevent a high % of bad outcomes. So if you’re unvaccinated, you personally are unprotected and that’s going to be represented as a couple of hundred thousand people , some of whom are potentially going to present in hospital in a bad way. So ideally you’d like to see absolutely everyone vaccinated, but that isn’t realistic.

How you address that, I don’t know, because I think you’re at the 8% or so of unconvincables. You could do a public information campaign or two but I think you’d be wasting your time and you’re not really going to be able to compel anyone to be vaccinated and that hasn’t and won’t happen.

They need to leave the doors open for free vaccines, but I think we could be projecting an issue that they have in parts of the USA and elsewhere onto an Irish population the vast, vast majority of which has fully embraced science.

To be quite honest, I think lecturing the general population about vaccines at this stage would be beyond patronising and insulting.

I still think we have done a poor job on fortifying the public health medicine infrastructure. We seem to be in some weird exceptionalism about antigen / lateral flow self testing, which could be useful if done right and I think there is a very serious lack of recognition by officials about the need to adapt buildings, notably schools, with things like through the wall heat recovery ventilation and portable HEPA filter units.

I can’t understand, for example, why we couldn’t have adapted night clubs and venues, theatres, cinemas etc to have really serious ventilation systems. That could have opened things sooner and safer.

If you want to mandate masks in very tight spaces like public transport, why not do the German approach - FFP2. It seems to work!

We follow the science around vaccines but we have gone full head in sand about other scientific issues and aren’t addressing them at all. We are quick to sneer at the U.K. response but in many ways ours has been as illogical in many areas, even if it has bright spots in others.

FTB2021, they don't care about the Irish people. When people realise that then it's easy to understand why they're doing what they're doing. And it's not just in terms of covid. They're destroying rural Ireland, they're destroying jobs. What people are calling 'incompetence' and 'flip-flopping' is in fact deliberate. Why do you think they have said nothing, or next to nothing, in 18 months about eating right, being healthy etc? It's because they don't care.

I get you, but I'm wondering is there a set definition for the term. If it means not taking any and every vaccine then a lot of people are antivaxxers because very few people take the flu vaccine, for example. But they're not actually opposed to the flu vaccine. It's a very confusing term.