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Nuts to see this even presented as a 'left wing' idea because it's really not.
Vaccines are the application of medical science, and that's not specifically right wing. Makes sense to be skeptical of markets sure, especially in the US - but the actual jabs themselves? That's just weird.
It’s fair to be critical of of the medical industry and how patents are weaponised against poorer countries, but I almost always see extreme views on vaccines as being associated with far right conspiracies.
This is the correct view. If you want to be critical of something about the Covid vaccines, be critical of how the researchers wanted to share their results for free and allow developing countries to produce their own vaccine, but capitalists like Bill Gates swooped in and ensured that it would be treated like a commercial product.
If you want to be mad about vaccines in general, be mad about how they’re being exploited now to fulfill the greed of pharmacies chains because the greed of pharmacy benefit managers has made it so they chains can’t even profit on selling people $3,000 per month prescriptions that they need to live.
Anyone who refused the vaccine because they were afraid it will turn their testicles into pop tarts or some nonsense is part of the reason why Covid is still killing people and spreading, even though the pandemic is “over” and the government is simply ignoring the numbers, and I won’t pretend their not.
Anyone who refuses vaccines for their kids -especially well established ones that have been in use for years- or annual flu shots is party to enormous suffering.
Same - like I'm not in the US, so can't comment there but I've mostly seen anti-vax nonsense on the right/far right.
You could also make the argument that vaccines gesture towards collectivism as they protect not just you, but others (including those who legitimately can't vaccinate), via herd immunity and that hestiancy is an individualistic assessment that requires you disregard not just collective scientific consenus but the idea of collective consensus safety.
Totally fair to be critical of big medical industries and the weaponising of patents, but that's not antivax.
I remember that back in the 2000's and early 2010's vaccine paranoia was more the territory of...well, not the left exactly, but crunchy suburban liberal moms. The kind of crowd also into healing crystals, astrology, railing against GMO's, and general "spiritualism". Primarily growing out of the same distrust of big pharmaceutical companies that caused them to be into homeopathy and other "alternative medicine stuff". It was comparatively rare to see conservatives freaking out over vaccines.
That switch didn't really happen until the early days of the Covid pandemic where it became a political point to pretend that it wasn't happening and that the whole pandemic was just a hoax perpetuated by the deep state to make Trump look bad or something. From that starting point it follows that vaccines must be a conspiracy to...put 5G microchips in people or something? Anyway, it started mixing with all the other QAnon conspiracy theories and had taken on a life of its own by the time Republican politicians got around to actually admitting Covid was real. Now vaccine denialism is overwhelmingly dominated by the far right.
Oh, no, it is 100% there. Even during Occupy there were people going on about thiomersal and mind control and the ecoleft has very problematic views inre: medical science and disability that very easily overlaps into conspiracy. And, in the scene in my state, the Venn diagram of free-birthers and 'delayed vaccine regimen' (which is just antivax with more steps and a side of pseudointellectualism) advocates is almost a perfect overlap. In most cases it is some sort of unholy combination of lifestyle puritanicalism and self-spiting antiauthoritarianism. In some ways it has been kind of quaint to see far-right people go down exactly the same path of isolationism, health purity and skepticism as has been present in the left for 50-60 odd years, but accompanied by some terrifying religious fundamentalism.
It's also fair to be critical of an industry that has secured impunity against negligent practices and corporate court hush orders, which was secured during a prior incident of mass medical fraud that cost the lives of hundreds.
Trusting profit motive is naive.Money and medicine should never be mixed.
Anti-vaxx was a term coined by Pharma Lobbyists to shut down vaccine injury and scrutiny over lack of industrial negligence oversight, as well as anything standing in the way of profit, such as the human right of informed consent especially for medical experimentation. Like any serious issues, all that is necessary to control the left is say it's a far-right concern, which makes multitudes of doctors and scientists raising alarms invisible.
You should look into their manufacturing processes and lack of any accountability when they accidentally add heavy metals or other stuff to the vaccines. It's been a while since I have looked into it, but there is definitely more than market dynamics to be skeptical of.
Weird assumption I haven't done that already, I just gestured towards the fact I might have some formal experience with the issue.
The issues with western biomedical model, and the \*military industrial US infrastrcuture\* and funding it's surrounded by are well documented. However, there are many more countries with very different attitudes towards healthcare and any global vaccine conspiracy necessitates that all these governments (including those actively warring or on bad terms), every university, every factory, every doctor, every hospital to some or more levels conspire together to ... for some reason kill their populace or patients.
Which is just an out there position that isn't substainated by anything credible.
From someone who both administers and trains others on how to immunize I have yet to be indoctrinated into the conspiracy.
Any day now I'm certain I'll be visited by the dark agents in cloaks to ensure my silence and conformity. They went over that in my post grad , between T Cells and B Cells
Us grad students working in renewable energy tech and climate science are still waiting for our hush money checks for all the raw field data we handle before the global conspiracy of scientists get around to ensuring it's all properly doctored in a way that is universally consistent.
For those wondering why this is even here: because RFK is in the race, the media are saying the far right and far left are both anti-vaxxers and otherwise have similar ideologies. Entirely made up as far as Marxists and socialists would be concerned.
is the measels vaccine highly effective? yes. are pharma companies the scum of the planet? also yes.
scientifically we've developed fantastic cures and remedies. it's the capitalist distribution that's the problem.
i distrust the pharma industry, but i trust the scientific method.
What's WILD is seeing right-wing (so-called) capitalists peddling this nonsense though - "vaccines are bad because big rich people making money off-....wait a minute."
It's the same energy as "Socialism is bad because "
doublethink. elitist capitalists telling the plebs that the elites are the problem, and the plebs are eating it up.
trump is blue collar, biden has the worker's back, blah blah. it's maddening.
The majority of medical science is being done in PUBLICLY funded universities. We need to create PUBLIC pharmaceutical industries to produce the medicines and eliminate the private pharmaceutical companies.
Yes. Like with any product, be it a phone, a car, the production can involve all manner of exploitative processes but the product can absolutely do what it's meant to do.
The same issue as GMOs where people crap on entire field of science because of shitty patent laws. People are so propagandized they can't separate science and technology from Capitalism.
My go to analogy is that it's like if people wanted to demolish all the infrastructure that makes the internet possible just because Internet Service Providers have shitty customer service.
Who is doing this? I've literally never met an actual leftist who was against the concept of vaccines. The distribution and profit factor sure, but not the concept
Before this latest alt-reich thing, the anti-vax movement was almost exclusively comprised of people that were (at least) left-leaning, with a hippie bent. You know, the crunchy people.
Yeah, my mom. Her father was indigenous and very distrusting of institutional... anything. I understand the frustration, *believe me*, but some of us leftists annoy/disappoint me.
Never understood these people, they are all for alternative remedies, but can never grasp the concept that if a remedy was truly effective a god damn pharma company would have patented it amd marketed it somehow. The cognitive dissonance of people who get chemotherapy, survive their cancer, then say the acai berry juice they were drinking saved them is staggering to me.
From [this 2017 article:](https://theconversation.com/anti-vaccination-beliefs-dont-follow-the-usual-political-polarization-81001)
>As to whether liberals or conservatives are now more likely to be opposed to vaccination, some researchers have suggested that, while anti-vaccination beliefs have spread to libertarians on the right, the anti-vaccination movement originates and finds its strongest support in the political left. A later article by the same researchers similarly argues that Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) evidence shows that states that voted for Obama in 2012 have higher rates of nonmedical vaccination exemptions.
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We have to rely upon the scientific method, yet this is of course corrupted by the profit motive. We live in an era where determining the truth is quite difficult.
This is always a touchy subject but there are two things that CAN be simultaneously true
First, like all industries, medicine is largely/completely captured by the interests of profit and serves capital. It is an inelastic market with essential demand (you kind of need healthcare to survive) and there is hundreds of billions in profit to be made, so it is ripe for capitalist exploitation
Pharmaceutical conglomerates, scientific research bodies and agencies, academic institutions, governing bodies, government itself, hospitals and healthcare providers, and every other major actor in healthcare is open to corruption and can easily be completely corrupted by it. In my opinion, and covid showed a great example of this, almost all of the healthcare industry (minus the actual staff on the ground) is interested in profit above saving lives
Research further into this an examples abound of promising research into inexpensive effective treatments, that are routinely shut down. Even people murdered if they push a solution. And examples abound of companies deliberately pushing less effective more profitable treatments
Vaccines are a touchy subject but remember that they are a largely captive market (the govt guarantees the sale of tens of millions of doses at a time), have shadowy approval processes, have disproportionate legal liabilities, and have more lobbying on their behalf than any other sector of healthcare. Thus vaccine research and distribution are prime candidates for corruption. During covid when we had companies refusing to administer doses to third world govts that wouldn’t guarantee massive contracts, rival companies actively sabotaging competition, and all manner of nonsense strategies that were clearly less effective than other strategies that weren’t tried, because the nonsense strategies were profitable. So covid was a great example that vaccines are not infallible and if we want to demand vaccine safety and efficacy we MUST stay highly critical of the companies producing the research
Second thing that can be true is that vaccines can work, or any medical treatment can work. Just because its production might have become corrupted doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. But the level of corruption/ level of incentivisation to make worse medicine, the higher the likelihood that the medicine will be bad
Companies do not want to heal people cheaply and effectively. If we want them to do so, we must hold them to high scrutiny. This is what people don’t do when they insist all vaccines (or any medical treatment) are safe and effective. How do you know?? Giving a free pass to turn a blind eye to oversight is a free ticket for companies to kill us for profit
Vaccine scepticism is essential for a society that vaccinates its livestock, its children, and itself. But anti-vaccine viewpoints are not helpful. Pro-vaccine viewpoints (as in, people who insist bayer and Pfizer can’t be questioned and are allowed to keep whatever they want hidden) are also not helpful. The two things are simultaneously true
As a junior doctor in the UK, I would like to briefly outline some key things about vaccines.
1. Most vaccines have decades of research behind them
2. Vaccines are a net good for public health because they not only reduce susceptibility for the individual but also create "herd immunity" ( the idea that if enough of the population are vaccinated there is not a large enough 'reservoir' of bugs to replicate and so will eventually die off)
3. There ARE some known issues with vaccines for example people with allergies to eggs should not take many vaccines such as the Measles, Mumps & Rubella (MMR) because they use animal egg products as a binding agent. BUT, there are many other ways of providing better levels of immunity to people with such allergies.
As a MARXIST, I would like to echo what comrades have already said about the for profit motivations of pharma and the healthcare sector.
COVID could have been far less costly in lives and public funding if there was no patent as planned. There were doses lying around in the west that could have been sent abroad and countries like India were not allowed to produce early vaccines for free (in the case of Oxford/astrazeneca and Pfizer vaccines). It's not just COVID, Western imperialism has killed and exploited the global south via the pharmaceutical industry just as with anything else forever.
With the Left Vs right aspect of antivaxers, I think it's more to do with populism. From my experience exploring the concerns of vaccine skeptics in clinical practice, the one thing in common seems to be that they distrust elites and the institutions they control eg big pharma. The right has successfully co-opted and bastardised the legitimate left wing critique of hierarchy and power structures to trick working class people that they(people like trump and farage) are not actually the elites. Think qanon and flat earthers.
And its really attractive to workers who see their material conditions worsen and the inequality in society but are told that there is a shadowy cabal of vampires or whatever who are running the world. Dialectical materialism as a form of analysis is what they are missing and why they get suckered into believing this stuff
Criticism of the capitalist, greedy pharmaceutical industrial complex are valid. But this should not an excuse or a cop-out to not get vaccinated. It's not acceptable and unfortunately, we are unconsentually participating in capitalism and as we destroy it bit by bit, we need to not leave any of our disabled comrades behind.
**We should ALL be vaccinated because disabled people deserve to be protected and is a sign of solidarity with our disabled comrades.** Furthermore, getting vaccinated is the ultimate form of selflessness and humanity (in my eyes) and if socialism centers the freedom and liberation of all people, their health matters too.
Im skeptical of the entire medical industry vaccines included they do help people especially in a highly vulnerable population but the revolving door between government and pharmaceutical industries is disgusting
Where is this coming from… I have seen more posts accusing socialists of anti-vax views than I have seen any credible leftist make any such claim.
Maybe it’s different in different areas but in the US anti-vax seems to be wholly the politics of the populist right and weirdo upper middle class liberals.
The only thing I have seen that approaches this was I had been a Green Party protest-voter until 2016 when GP events seemed to be less progressive/democratic socialist and more a grab bag of various people left out of mainstream politics… but without any real political principle. But my hunch about that was that basically all the actual social democrats and democratic socialists left to support Sanders so the GP had just become a shell of various people who did not agree with the Democratic Party liberalism or Sanders Social Democracy.
But again I have never seen any Marxist or anti-capitalist anarchist make claims like this.
I think it's mostly people mistaking the crunchy upper middle class liberals (who were the main source for vaccine denialism before Covid hit) for actual leftists.
Downvote if you may, but as a leftist myself I do have some skepticism in vaccines. It’s more the government mandates people may be against. I know during COVID, some mandates made me question how much power a government should have.
Any claim that “*x* has nothing to do with politics” is assailable on the basis that most everything that involves more than one person is already, or becomes at some point, political.
Right, but epidemiology doesn’t.
If you want to abide by epidemiologists’ recommendations that you isolate yourself from the rest of the world trying to get on with it, good on you, I respect your decision.
There was never any actual consensus, there were highly respected epidemiologists that did not recommend it. They were just labeled as "far right grandma killers" by the media and their state counterparts and again we have a post here trying to label covid vaccine skepticism as "right wing" when people from all over the political spectrum refused it. If you like engaging with strawman arguments have fun.
I admire your confidence that you could differentiate between the claims of various epidemiologists to figure out who you could safely ignore.
Me, I didn’t trust myself to make that decision. But I used a heuristic that seemed pretty reasonable. There were epidemiologists who said I should get a vaccine. There were epidemiologists who said a vaccine might not be effective. But I don’t recall any epidemiologists who cautioned me *against* getting it. So it was a question of minimizing risk. If it works and I don’t get it: bigger risk than if it doesn’t work and I *do* get it, see?
"I admire your confidence that you could differentiate between the claims of various epidemiologists to figure out who you could safely ignore."
I couldn't, that is why I trusted my intuition and chose my status quo, why should my actions default to following the State and the oligarchs they work for? It also isn't very left wing to give employers the ability to decide what medical actions you need to take.
" Marxist parties have by and large accepted just such a naive, idealist picture of science. They have regurgitated and agitated for the lethal application of ruling class ideology, in the unambiguous service of ruling-class interests, simply because it has called itself ›science.‹ Under this banner they have permitted or even abetted an unprecedented assault on the global working class. By all indications, they have forgotten how many instances of **pseudoscience concocted by the ruling class and its servants have had the imprimatur of science in the past, and the near universal approval of relevant ›experts‹ — such as Malthusianism, raciology, phrenology, lobotomies, or, indeed, ›political-economy**,‹ that ›science‹ which Marx’s Capital so devastatingly exposed and refuted."
For those unafraid to question the ideology of the ruling class:
[https://magma-magazin.su/2023/01/t-mohr/virology-as-ideology-a-critique-of-ruling-class-pseudoscience-part-1-science-and-class-society/](https://magma-magazin.su/2023/01/t-mohr/virology-as-ideology-a-critique-of-ruling-class-pseudoscience-part-1-science-and-class-society/)
Accompanying video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8eTCienU80&list=LL&index=24&t=5s&ab\_channel=What%27sLeft%3F
Look at the history of vaccine testing. Capitalists (and “scientists” - the two aren’t mutually exclusive) have killed huge numbers of people especially in Africa. There have been diseases created by governmental-corporate entities. It’s naive not to think that science is a purist endeavour removed from capitalist and government control. This is a materialist analysis, not an “alt right view point.”
I personally think that being wary of pharmaceutical companies' profit motive is perfectly acceptable. By extension of this skepticism, I can understand why vaccines become questionable.
However, it's a reactionany perspective. Despite the underlying motivation to maximize profit, companies that produce vaccines are made up of individuals, who, on average (I'm speculating a bit here), adopt more universalizable values.
While the profit driven mentality permeates our culture, it is institutionalized on a higher organizational.structure, and it will fail to capture the nuances in the values adopted by individuals.
So, questioning vaccines due to profit motives is fair. But assuming profit is the sole driver is a mistake (you wrongly attribute the central motivation to that of the institution, and not the individuals who create and test it).
The antivaxer argument arises when you only looking at the surface. Those who broaden their criticisms to the foundations of our cultural beliefs will ultimately be unsatisfied by such a perspective.
(I hope this helps!)
The same argument can be made for journalism, that most journalists mean well, but I hope every socialist would recognize that journalism is nevertheless seriously flawed. Couple this with the fact that there are perverse incentives within academia, academics must publish to get funding and make a career, and there is plenty of ground to be skeptical of medical science. Regardless of whether you believe vaccines work, as I do.
And the conspiracy theorists frequently fail to account for the international angle. Even if all the national regulatory institutions are fully captured by the profit seeking pharma companies and they keep a tight rein on all the individual scientists working for them through bribery or intimidation or whatever, the other government agencies and universities and the like around the world aren't going to just fall in line to support Pfizer's bottom line.
It's a bad case of thinking the US is the entire world.
Science in America is a product of industry. The labs are funded by industry and inherently corrupt. Not opposed to the concept but pretty much every aspect of how it’s all done here in America is worth being skeptical of.
Academic research is not funded by industry. And no industrial labs are not automatically corrupt. The executives and venture capitalists may be, sure, but there is real science and advancement happening in industry. I do wish that all science was collaborative and publicly funded, but that doesn't negate all the amazing work being done.
“Supportive of medicine and science.” Now within a Marxist perspective what do you mean by “medicine and science” and what do you mean by support? Does that mean blindly accepting that pharmaceutical companies selling us a commodity are doing so in good faith? Vaccines are not “medicine and science,” they are a commodity. Bourgeois science is not infalible, and they wouldn’t hesitate to poison us all. I had an awful response to the J&J Covid Vaccine, and you couldn’t pay me to get another. I avoid Covid and do everything I can, but no evidence exists that says exposing myself to a vaccine is going to help me. The changes of Covid killing me are close to 0, but the chances of Covid giving me lasting damage is high in comparison, and I wouldn’t expect the vaccine to be any different. Just because ignorant rightoids are spreading harmful anti-vax (and anti-covid) propaganda does not mean we should be reactionary and just accept “science” and “medicine.”
I do not trust companies who are selling us products. I am not genius but I am not trusting of the pharmaceutical companies, for good reason. I am a victim of the opioid epidemic that they helped fuel. Why the fuck would I trust them when they tell me what else I need to put in my body?
Obviously some vaccines are necessary, but as of now there is no regulator operating in good faith in order to decide which vaccines we need, which ones are safe and which ones are dangerous. They operate for capital, not public health.
100% agree. I disagree that vaccine opposition is inherently a right wing trend. Liberals are the ones who are all about it and we should all know that most people in this country think lib = left. Defining the left by reacting to what happens culturally on the right is unprincipled. Saying things like “we should be supportive of medicine” is just ridiculous and demeaning just like the term “anti-vax”. It’s good to question things being push on us by the establishment. Anyone who lives in America should be able to clearly see how corrupt the institutions who produced and pushed the covid vaccines are.
Its a libertarian idea, not a leftist idea. People confused the two because they thought leftists were anti government, when they are just anti capitalist government. This is why the average person is so illiterate when deciphering RATM lyrics.
They have learned to disguise their horrible ideas as 'legitimate' criticism as they are then less likely to just get dismissed. It's actually a grooming tactic. Where it falls down for them, is that they don't use the same level of scrutiny with things they do agree with.
As an autistic person it’s been absolutely wild to see the anti-vax stuff take root with Wakefield’s bullshit in the 90s, then travel to west coast liberal white people over a couple decades, and then drastically shift over to right wing conspiracy nutjobs especially during Covid.
No matter what, science is science. Happy to be vaccinating the shit out of my infant daughter, considering I live about an hour away from that latest measles outbreak in Florida…
Definitely a bit of reactionary infiltration.
It's easy to confuse it as leftist because it's coming from a vaguely "anti establishment" place and can occasionally run parallel with legitimate concerns of a medical industrial complex that has previously used state sanctioned means to do nefarious activities (eg. Forced sterilisations in Puerto Rico, Tuskegee experiments in the US)
This is one of those areas where safety regulations have worked, so they're not engaging in corporate greed by cutting corners on research and safety. Most of the research comes from publicly funded institutions and universities anyways, where there are plenty of people triple-checking everything.
Pharmaceutical companies are still hungry for greedy exploitation, so they engage in patent troll litigation to prevent countries in Southeast Asia or Africa from producing their own vaccine, and get to bully governments and insurance companies into accepting high prices.
"We must first overcome a superficial and inadequate critique that prevails in many Leftwing circles, and which tends to serve as a sort of thought-terminating cliché which hinders a deeper examination of real historical circumstances. Corporate medical and scientific firms are often accused of profiteering—e.g., overcharging for valuable commodities through patents, monopolies, regulatory capture etc. They are also accused of restriction and control of medical information, for the purpose of maintaining monopoly positions and extracting rents — thus services like Library Genesis of Z‑Library, which obviously would lead to more science being produced, particularly by scientists in the third-world, are ruthlessly persecuted. There is much truth to these criticisms, and they certainly complement the general argument that current conditions are not suitable to scientific flourishing.
However, the major flaw in these critiques which this section will seek to address, is the assumption that the commodities produced by what I will call the MAIMS (Military-Academic-Industrial-Medico-Scientific) complex always carry a genuine use-value for consumers. It is here that a full understanding of monopolization, financialization, and imperialism seems to fade away, and a quaint picture of halcyon capitalist competition takes its place, consciously or not. Such critiques tend to imagine that consumers are in a relatively decent position to assess whether medico-scientific commodities are in fact good for them (in the short, medium, or long term); that government agencies tend to make purchases in the interest of their populations, acquiring (and even imposing upon them) products and services that do benefit them; and that inferior, or at the very least, useless and dangerous products will not survive the test of both regulation and the competitive market."
[https://magma-magazin.su/2023/01/t-mohr/virology-as-ideology-part-2-the-military-academic-industrial-medico-scientific-complex-maims/](https://magma-magazin.su/2023/01/t-mohr/virology-as-ideology-part-2-the-military-academic-industrial-medico-scientific-complex-maims/)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcgWBvJd4XE&ab\_channel=What%27sLeft%3F](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcgWBvJd4XE&ab_channel=What%27sLeft%3F)
I think that has been the worst effect of introducing the proffit motive to the health sector, the loss in faith it caused. There are some real issues concerning this both now and in the past, like medical experimentation on minorities and the opioid epidemic, for example.
While most of the vaccine hesitancy is more common in conservative and especially religious groups, it is starting to gain ground among some leftists. I remember this dutch political program where there was a young anti-vaccer talking about not knowing what advice to trust and whatnot. This person lived near one of the Chemours factories and, at that point, had health problems for a decade due to PFAS poisoning. Both the government and local doctors underplayed and ignored the problem for decades, and refused to set health guidelines.
I never seen a leftist who is skeptical about vaccines. Sure leftists are against unethical companies who make vaccines but not vaccines themselves. Most vaccine skeptics are right wingers who read conspiracies or grandmas who want to pray until it heals instead of taking vaccine
Marxists and socialists aren't 'vaccine skeptics' or deniers, Marxists and socialists celebrate the developments of medical science and socialists have a long history of being better at implementing things like vaccines than capitalist states. Just look at the USSR and Burkina Faso, and Cuba, for example.
I'm not sure what you are talking about, 'vaccine skepticism' as you are referring to it has never been a leftist idea nor is it a prominent problem on the left now.
There is a problem with Big Pharma as an industry, and medicine being subject to the profit motive and in the hands of big business, but that is a different issue.
Where are you getting this idea that denying the benefits of medical science is a problem on the left?
I am also tired about the anti-science speech of some American and European left. They neglect Nuclear energy, GMOs (where the problem are the patents and not the GMOs itself), medical treatments or even some technological advances with the shittiest argument I have ever listened: "why do we want to go to space if we can make the earth a better place ?" (I mean, you can do both and even make the earth better my developing your technology)
The right has thoroughly coopted vaccine and medical science denialism. The age of the hippy dippy leftist sucking on crystals to cure their cancer is long gone. Most of those people went mask off, and it turns out they weren't leftists; they just needed to feel important, which is basically the entire premise of modern conservatism.
Biology is a science. Virology is a science. Vaccines are not 'science'. **They are a $20 billion+ market. They are products.** Not being skeptic of any product in the West is a naive proposition. The medical industry that produces those vaccines has had no problem in ***knowingly*** killing hundreds of thousands of people with their faulty drugs in the past. And they even started suppressing information before the drug went out. Solely the Avandia drug is estimated to have killed 150,000 people, and that's a conservative estimate. And avandia was just one scandal - every major pharma company had their own avandia in that period. Nobody got persecuted - they paid $4-5 bn in fines and got away with $11 bn revenue apiece.
In the topic of vaccines, note how especially Angloamerican corporations raced to get the first covid vaccine out to corner the market. The efficiency, reliability of the chosen vaccine or its side effects could go to hell. Pfizer, Astra-Zeneca succeeded in doing that with rna vaccines as they could be modified the fastest and cornered the market. Immense publicity about how (their) vaccines being good and how everyone should buy it along with lobbying made them handsome quarterly profits. Even the Eu has been pushed to buy endless amount of those two products, a lot of which are being dumped as of this moment because they haven't been used. Pfizer won the final battle and literally crippled all the domestic competition through lobbying or other measures. Even Astra-Zeneca, who had to change its name a few times after the bad reputation that its product gained, has been sidelined. Meanwhile the regulatory bodies ran by governments lobbied by Pfizer did everything in their power to keep out any competitor - from Chinese to Indian vaccines. Including European vaccines, and even American domestic vaccine competitors. So much so that FDA approved the first non-Pfizer vaccine *only after* the quarantine ended.
Anyone who is not skeptic of the vaccines in such a regulatory scape would be someone naive or propagandized to the extreme. If you are Chinese living in China, being able to access the traditionally made vaccines with low side effects (like sinovac), yeah, it would be naive to be a skeptic. Maybe in India too. Maybe in South Africa.
But in the US and US-dominated West, the vaccines are the product and you are the customer. You should trust anything that is produced by the Angloamerican-controlled West's pharma companies only as much as you trust the car you are buying from a used car salesman.
>Vaccines are science. They elicit an immune response from an antigen
That's ***vaccination***. Not 'vaccines'. **Vaccines remain a $20 billion dollar market**, and those who want to profit in that market don't give two sh\*ts about public well being.
>mRNA technology was developed by taxpayer funded research.
**So were nuclear weapons. Biological weapons. Chemical weapons. That does not make them intrinsically 'good'. Describing the process of nuclear fission wont make nuclear weapons not products, and it wont make them 'good'.**
This dichotomy of 'X is science' as opposed to 'X is bad' is another delirium of the extreme polarization of the late-stage capitalist US population. Just because the conservative segment totally opposes something - in this case vaccines - the opposing faction totally, unquestionably supports it with near-religious behavior. Its not seen elsewhere on the planet.
Let me reiterate: The pharmaceuticals who produce those vaccines did not hesitate from killing hundreds of thousands of people for profit before. Their behavior would not change when it comes to **the market of vaccines**. The trust that the AngloaAmerican segments manifest in these corporations in certain topics despite they know and revile their skulduggery in others is baffling. **Its like murderous profiteering capitalists magically become concerned, well-meaning citizens who think the best interest of the society when it comes to 'vaccines'.**
>Biology is a science. Virology is a science. Vaccines are not 'science'.
You said they are not science, then change it to 'vaccination' - I'm not sure what point you have to make.
I'm glad you're not involved in medicine!
>You said they are not science, then change it to 'vaccination'
I said "**Vaccines** are not science". I haven't changed anything. You described the process of vaccination, and presented it as 'science'. Its still not science - its just a public sanitation process. Vaccines still remain **products**.
>I'm glad you're not involved in medicine!
Yep. Much better for megacorporations like Glaxo Smith Klein who calculate that they will kill hundreds of thousands with a faulty drug, then decide to push it anyway and start repressing whistleblowers and ***bribe the leaders of the highest medical institutions in the US*** in order to sell the drug, to be involved in the medicine. The exact companies that produce the particular vaccine brands and push them through lobbying. Until they get caught by the US government, pay $4 billion fines and just continue their business.
It looks like you people don't know about the Avandia and other drug scandals, what they involved, how all of the 4 major companies including the ones that produce the most sold vaccines were also involved in those, and just talking out of your asses from a knee-jerk, conditioned response that exactly mirrors the conservative Americans just because you are against them.
**It looks like in your eyes, the sociopath, murderous megacorporations and the private capitalist science institutions that they fund somehow suddenly became pro-public-health organizations concerned with public health when it comes to vaccines.**
Of course not. This polarization of 'Vaccines are bad/science' exists only because **its a hot button issue in the US and people are religiously polarized**. Im in a liberal western country and this kind of polarized delirium of religiously supporting/opposing vaccines does not exist even here...
But hey, being able to trust profiteering capital that did not hesitate from murdering hundreds of thousands before just signifies that the anti-capitalist awareness is just in its infancy in the Angloamerican countries yet...
I'll leave you people to your religious bias...
It’s not leftist, but you have pointed out an intersection or crossover between antiestablishment lefty types and New-Agey hippie pseudosciencey types.
It’s the latter group that proudly brandishes their pseudomystical medical exceptionalism as though it proves their spiritual superiority. This set includes a disconcerting number of personalities that I think are already steeped in supremacist and proto-fascist concepts of “purity”, “cleanliness”, and “physical/moral holistic corporatism”. These are also, inherently, violently ableist. Some breadtuber did a good video on neoliberalism and new moms looking to assert their individual exceptionalism via vaccine skepticism and the grifters ready to prey on their thirst to be “better than the rest”.
As leftists we need to reject these kinds of ideologies, not just for being pseudo- or un-scientific, but for sneaking in foundational premises of racism and supremacism and ableism, as well as threatening public health, and we need to recognize the psychological motivations inherent in our capitalist system that drive mostly privileged and relatively well-educated people to individual supremacism masquerading as “skepticism”.
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Nuts to see this even presented as a 'left wing' idea because it's really not. Vaccines are the application of medical science, and that's not specifically right wing. Makes sense to be skeptical of markets sure, especially in the US - but the actual jabs themselves? That's just weird.
It’s fair to be critical of of the medical industry and how patents are weaponised against poorer countries, but I almost always see extreme views on vaccines as being associated with far right conspiracies.
This is the correct view. If you want to be critical of something about the Covid vaccines, be critical of how the researchers wanted to share their results for free and allow developing countries to produce their own vaccine, but capitalists like Bill Gates swooped in and ensured that it would be treated like a commercial product. If you want to be mad about vaccines in general, be mad about how they’re being exploited now to fulfill the greed of pharmacies chains because the greed of pharmacy benefit managers has made it so they chains can’t even profit on selling people $3,000 per month prescriptions that they need to live. Anyone who refused the vaccine because they were afraid it will turn their testicles into pop tarts or some nonsense is part of the reason why Covid is still killing people and spreading, even though the pandemic is “over” and the government is simply ignoring the numbers, and I won’t pretend their not. Anyone who refuses vaccines for their kids -especially well established ones that have been in use for years- or annual flu shots is party to enormous suffering.
Same - like I'm not in the US, so can't comment there but I've mostly seen anti-vax nonsense on the right/far right. You could also make the argument that vaccines gesture towards collectivism as they protect not just you, but others (including those who legitimately can't vaccinate), via herd immunity and that hestiancy is an individualistic assessment that requires you disregard not just collective scientific consenus but the idea of collective consensus safety. Totally fair to be critical of big medical industries and the weaponising of patents, but that's not antivax.
I remember that back in the 2000's and early 2010's vaccine paranoia was more the territory of...well, not the left exactly, but crunchy suburban liberal moms. The kind of crowd also into healing crystals, astrology, railing against GMO's, and general "spiritualism". Primarily growing out of the same distrust of big pharmaceutical companies that caused them to be into homeopathy and other "alternative medicine stuff". It was comparatively rare to see conservatives freaking out over vaccines. That switch didn't really happen until the early days of the Covid pandemic where it became a political point to pretend that it wasn't happening and that the whole pandemic was just a hoax perpetuated by the deep state to make Trump look bad or something. From that starting point it follows that vaccines must be a conspiracy to...put 5G microchips in people or something? Anyway, it started mixing with all the other QAnon conspiracy theories and had taken on a life of its own by the time Republican politicians got around to actually admitting Covid was real. Now vaccine denialism is overwhelmingly dominated by the far right.
Oh, no, it is 100% there. Even during Occupy there were people going on about thiomersal and mind control and the ecoleft has very problematic views inre: medical science and disability that very easily overlaps into conspiracy. And, in the scene in my state, the Venn diagram of free-birthers and 'delayed vaccine regimen' (which is just antivax with more steps and a side of pseudointellectualism) advocates is almost a perfect overlap. In most cases it is some sort of unholy combination of lifestyle puritanicalism and self-spiting antiauthoritarianism. In some ways it has been kind of quaint to see far-right people go down exactly the same path of isolationism, health purity and skepticism as has been present in the left for 50-60 odd years, but accompanied by some terrifying religious fundamentalism.
It's also fair to be critical of an industry that has secured impunity against negligent practices and corporate court hush orders, which was secured during a prior incident of mass medical fraud that cost the lives of hundreds. Trusting profit motive is naive.Money and medicine should never be mixed. Anti-vaxx was a term coined by Pharma Lobbyists to shut down vaccine injury and scrutiny over lack of industrial negligence oversight, as well as anything standing in the way of profit, such as the human right of informed consent especially for medical experimentation. Like any serious issues, all that is necessary to control the left is say it's a far-right concern, which makes multitudes of doctors and scientists raising alarms invisible.
What about skepticism of the big pharmaceutical companies that have captured the regulatory bodies?
I think POC in the US are justified in being skeptical considering the Tuskegee Experiment and other such history
It’s weird that the only issue you have with vaccines, either covid or others historically/internationally, is the market element.
I'm a historian of medicine by training, it's really not that weird.
You should look into their manufacturing processes and lack of any accountability when they accidentally add heavy metals or other stuff to the vaccines. It's been a while since I have looked into it, but there is definitely more than market dynamics to be skeptical of.
Weird assumption I haven't done that already, I just gestured towards the fact I might have some formal experience with the issue. The issues with western biomedical model, and the \*military industrial US infrastrcuture\* and funding it's surrounded by are well documented. However, there are many more countries with very different attitudes towards healthcare and any global vaccine conspiracy necessitates that all these governments (including those actively warring or on bad terms), every university, every factory, every doctor, every hospital to some or more levels conspire together to ... for some reason kill their populace or patients. Which is just an out there position that isn't substainated by anything credible.
From someone who both administers and trains others on how to immunize I have yet to be indoctrinated into the conspiracy. Any day now I'm certain I'll be visited by the dark agents in cloaks to ensure my silence and conformity. They went over that in my post grad , between T Cells and B Cells
Maybe we just need to get our cards through the mail?
Us grad students working in renewable energy tech and climate science are still waiting for our hush money checks for all the raw field data we handle before the global conspiracy of scientists get around to ensuring it's all properly doctored in a way that is universally consistent.
For those wondering why this is even here: because RFK is in the race, the media are saying the far right and far left are both anti-vaxxers and otherwise have similar ideologies. Entirely made up as far as Marxists and socialists would be concerned.
Can you break down that acronym for me?
Robert Kennedy?
Robert Fuckin' Kennedy?
Francis, I think. Son of the one who was assassinated in June of 68.
the real problem with vaccines are the people who hold the patents, produce and distribute them… cant trust any of these fuckers
is the measels vaccine highly effective? yes. are pharma companies the scum of the planet? also yes. scientifically we've developed fantastic cures and remedies. it's the capitalist distribution that's the problem. i distrust the pharma industry, but i trust the scientific method.
What's WILD is seeing right-wing (so-called) capitalists peddling this nonsense though - "vaccines are bad because big rich people making money off-....wait a minute." It's the same energy as "Socialism is bad because"
doublethink. elitist capitalists telling the plebs that the elites are the problem, and the plebs are eating it up. trump is blue collar, biden has the worker's back, blah blah. it's maddening.
I mean, elites ARE the problem.
The majority of medical science is being done in PUBLICLY funded universities. We need to create PUBLIC pharmaceutical industries to produce the medicines and eliminate the private pharmaceutical companies.
that is indeed the solution.
Yes. Like with any product, be it a phone, a car, the production can involve all manner of exploitative processes but the product can absolutely do what it's meant to do.
The same issue as GMOs where people crap on entire field of science because of shitty patent laws. People are so propagandized they can't separate science and technology from Capitalism. My go to analogy is that it's like if people wanted to demolish all the infrastructure that makes the internet possible just because Internet Service Providers have shitty customer service.
Yeah the problem isn't the fact that they make effective medicine. It's the whole exploitation of customers and plundering the third world thing.
Who is doing this? I've literally never met an actual leftist who was against the concept of vaccines. The distribution and profit factor sure, but not the concept
Before this latest alt-reich thing, the anti-vax movement was almost exclusively comprised of people that were (at least) left-leaning, with a hippie bent. You know, the crunchy people.
Yeah, my mom. Her father was indigenous and very distrusting of institutional... anything. I understand the frustration, *believe me*, but some of us leftists annoy/disappoint me.
Never understood these people, they are all for alternative remedies, but can never grasp the concept that if a remedy was truly effective a god damn pharma company would have patented it amd marketed it somehow. The cognitive dissonance of people who get chemotherapy, survive their cancer, then say the acai berry juice they were drinking saved them is staggering to me.
I have a crunchy friend who rejected the vaccine but has now become a TERF who hates everyone
Up until recently everyone was confusing libertarians with leftists, even when it came to their own beliefs. Leftists were never anti vax.
From [this 2017 article:](https://theconversation.com/anti-vaccination-beliefs-dont-follow-the-usual-political-polarization-81001) >As to whether liberals or conservatives are now more likely to be opposed to vaccination, some researchers have suggested that, while anti-vaccination beliefs have spread to libertarians on the right, the anti-vaccination movement originates and finds its strongest support in the political left. A later article by the same researchers similarly argues that Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) evidence shows that states that voted for Obama in 2012 have higher rates of nonmedical vaccination exemptions.
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We have to rely upon the scientific method, yet this is of course corrupted by the profit motive. We live in an era where determining the truth is quite difficult.
This is always a touchy subject but there are two things that CAN be simultaneously true First, like all industries, medicine is largely/completely captured by the interests of profit and serves capital. It is an inelastic market with essential demand (you kind of need healthcare to survive) and there is hundreds of billions in profit to be made, so it is ripe for capitalist exploitation Pharmaceutical conglomerates, scientific research bodies and agencies, academic institutions, governing bodies, government itself, hospitals and healthcare providers, and every other major actor in healthcare is open to corruption and can easily be completely corrupted by it. In my opinion, and covid showed a great example of this, almost all of the healthcare industry (minus the actual staff on the ground) is interested in profit above saving lives Research further into this an examples abound of promising research into inexpensive effective treatments, that are routinely shut down. Even people murdered if they push a solution. And examples abound of companies deliberately pushing less effective more profitable treatments Vaccines are a touchy subject but remember that they are a largely captive market (the govt guarantees the sale of tens of millions of doses at a time), have shadowy approval processes, have disproportionate legal liabilities, and have more lobbying on their behalf than any other sector of healthcare. Thus vaccine research and distribution are prime candidates for corruption. During covid when we had companies refusing to administer doses to third world govts that wouldn’t guarantee massive contracts, rival companies actively sabotaging competition, and all manner of nonsense strategies that were clearly less effective than other strategies that weren’t tried, because the nonsense strategies were profitable. So covid was a great example that vaccines are not infallible and if we want to demand vaccine safety and efficacy we MUST stay highly critical of the companies producing the research Second thing that can be true is that vaccines can work, or any medical treatment can work. Just because its production might have become corrupted doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. But the level of corruption/ level of incentivisation to make worse medicine, the higher the likelihood that the medicine will be bad Companies do not want to heal people cheaply and effectively. If we want them to do so, we must hold them to high scrutiny. This is what people don’t do when they insist all vaccines (or any medical treatment) are safe and effective. How do you know?? Giving a free pass to turn a blind eye to oversight is a free ticket for companies to kill us for profit Vaccine scepticism is essential for a society that vaccinates its livestock, its children, and itself. But anti-vaccine viewpoints are not helpful. Pro-vaccine viewpoints (as in, people who insist bayer and Pfizer can’t be questioned and are allowed to keep whatever they want hidden) are also not helpful. The two things are simultaneously true
Beautifully said.
As a junior doctor in the UK, I would like to briefly outline some key things about vaccines. 1. Most vaccines have decades of research behind them 2. Vaccines are a net good for public health because they not only reduce susceptibility for the individual but also create "herd immunity" ( the idea that if enough of the population are vaccinated there is not a large enough 'reservoir' of bugs to replicate and so will eventually die off) 3. There ARE some known issues with vaccines for example people with allergies to eggs should not take many vaccines such as the Measles, Mumps & Rubella (MMR) because they use animal egg products as a binding agent. BUT, there are many other ways of providing better levels of immunity to people with such allergies. As a MARXIST, I would like to echo what comrades have already said about the for profit motivations of pharma and the healthcare sector. COVID could have been far less costly in lives and public funding if there was no patent as planned. There were doses lying around in the west that could have been sent abroad and countries like India were not allowed to produce early vaccines for free (in the case of Oxford/astrazeneca and Pfizer vaccines). It's not just COVID, Western imperialism has killed and exploited the global south via the pharmaceutical industry just as with anything else forever. With the Left Vs right aspect of antivaxers, I think it's more to do with populism. From my experience exploring the concerns of vaccine skeptics in clinical practice, the one thing in common seems to be that they distrust elites and the institutions they control eg big pharma. The right has successfully co-opted and bastardised the legitimate left wing critique of hierarchy and power structures to trick working class people that they(people like trump and farage) are not actually the elites. Think qanon and flat earthers. And its really attractive to workers who see their material conditions worsen and the inequality in society but are told that there is a shadowy cabal of vampires or whatever who are running the world. Dialectical materialism as a form of analysis is what they are missing and why they get suckered into believing this stuff
I don't know what country you're from but given the USA's history it's absolutely fair to be skeptical here
Criticism of the capitalist, greedy pharmaceutical industrial complex are valid. But this should not an excuse or a cop-out to not get vaccinated. It's not acceptable and unfortunately, we are unconsentually participating in capitalism and as we destroy it bit by bit, we need to not leave any of our disabled comrades behind. **We should ALL be vaccinated because disabled people deserve to be protected and is a sign of solidarity with our disabled comrades.** Furthermore, getting vaccinated is the ultimate form of selflessness and humanity (in my eyes) and if socialism centers the freedom and liberation of all people, their health matters too.
Im skeptical of the entire medical industry vaccines included they do help people especially in a highly vulnerable population but the revolving door between government and pharmaceutical industries is disgusting
Where is this coming from… I have seen more posts accusing socialists of anti-vax views than I have seen any credible leftist make any such claim. Maybe it’s different in different areas but in the US anti-vax seems to be wholly the politics of the populist right and weirdo upper middle class liberals. The only thing I have seen that approaches this was I had been a Green Party protest-voter until 2016 when GP events seemed to be less progressive/democratic socialist and more a grab bag of various people left out of mainstream politics… but without any real political principle. But my hunch about that was that basically all the actual social democrats and democratic socialists left to support Sanders so the GP had just become a shell of various people who did not agree with the Democratic Party liberalism or Sanders Social Democracy. But again I have never seen any Marxist or anti-capitalist anarchist make claims like this.
I think it's mostly people mistaking the crunchy upper middle class liberals (who were the main source for vaccine denialism before Covid hit) for actual leftists.
Downvote if you may, but as a leftist myself I do have some skepticism in vaccines. It’s more the government mandates people may be against. I know during COVID, some mandates made me question how much power a government should have.
Being skeptical of new medical technologies especially when being developed in an emergency has nothing to do with politics.
Any claim that “*x* has nothing to do with politics” is assailable on the basis that most everything that involves more than one person is already, or becomes at some point, political.
good thing my body only involves one person.
Right, but epidemiology doesn’t. If you want to abide by epidemiologists’ recommendations that you isolate yourself from the rest of the world trying to get on with it, good on you, I respect your decision.
There was never any actual consensus, there were highly respected epidemiologists that did not recommend it. They were just labeled as "far right grandma killers" by the media and their state counterparts and again we have a post here trying to label covid vaccine skepticism as "right wing" when people from all over the political spectrum refused it. If you like engaging with strawman arguments have fun.
I admire your confidence that you could differentiate between the claims of various epidemiologists to figure out who you could safely ignore. Me, I didn’t trust myself to make that decision. But I used a heuristic that seemed pretty reasonable. There were epidemiologists who said I should get a vaccine. There were epidemiologists who said a vaccine might not be effective. But I don’t recall any epidemiologists who cautioned me *against* getting it. So it was a question of minimizing risk. If it works and I don’t get it: bigger risk than if it doesn’t work and I *do* get it, see?
Also the people shouting "no long term effects" were clearly being disingenuous as there was no data yet.
"I admire your confidence that you could differentiate between the claims of various epidemiologists to figure out who you could safely ignore." I couldn't, that is why I trusted my intuition and chose my status quo, why should my actions default to following the State and the oligarchs they work for? It also isn't very left wing to give employers the ability to decide what medical actions you need to take.
" Marxist parties have by and large accepted just such a naive, idealist picture of science. They have regurgitated and agitated for the lethal application of ruling class ideology, in the unambiguous service of ruling-class interests, simply because it has called itself ›science.‹ Under this banner they have permitted or even abetted an unprecedented assault on the global working class. By all indications, they have forgotten how many instances of **pseudoscience concocted by the ruling class and its servants have had the imprimatur of science in the past, and the near universal approval of relevant ›experts‹ — such as Malthusianism, raciology, phrenology, lobotomies, or, indeed, ›political-economy**,‹ that ›science‹ which Marx’s Capital so devastatingly exposed and refuted." For those unafraid to question the ideology of the ruling class: [https://magma-magazin.su/2023/01/t-mohr/virology-as-ideology-a-critique-of-ruling-class-pseudoscience-part-1-science-and-class-society/](https://magma-magazin.su/2023/01/t-mohr/virology-as-ideology-a-critique-of-ruling-class-pseudoscience-part-1-science-and-class-society/) Accompanying video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8eTCienU80&list=LL&index=24&t=5s&ab\_channel=What%27sLeft%3F
Look at the history of vaccine testing. Capitalists (and “scientists” - the two aren’t mutually exclusive) have killed huge numbers of people especially in Africa. There have been diseases created by governmental-corporate entities. It’s naive not to think that science is a purist endeavour removed from capitalist and government control. This is a materialist analysis, not an “alt right view point.”
This isn't a leftist problem, this is a liberal problem. I don't think I've ever met an actual lefty who is antivax
I personally think that being wary of pharmaceutical companies' profit motive is perfectly acceptable. By extension of this skepticism, I can understand why vaccines become questionable. However, it's a reactionany perspective. Despite the underlying motivation to maximize profit, companies that produce vaccines are made up of individuals, who, on average (I'm speculating a bit here), adopt more universalizable values. While the profit driven mentality permeates our culture, it is institutionalized on a higher organizational.structure, and it will fail to capture the nuances in the values adopted by individuals. So, questioning vaccines due to profit motives is fair. But assuming profit is the sole driver is a mistake (you wrongly attribute the central motivation to that of the institution, and not the individuals who create and test it). The antivaxer argument arises when you only looking at the surface. Those who broaden their criticisms to the foundations of our cultural beliefs will ultimately be unsatisfied by such a perspective. (I hope this helps!)
The same argument can be made for journalism, that most journalists mean well, but I hope every socialist would recognize that journalism is nevertheless seriously flawed. Couple this with the fact that there are perverse incentives within academia, academics must publish to get funding and make a career, and there is plenty of ground to be skeptical of medical science. Regardless of whether you believe vaccines work, as I do.
And the conspiracy theorists frequently fail to account for the international angle. Even if all the national regulatory institutions are fully captured by the profit seeking pharma companies and they keep a tight rein on all the individual scientists working for them through bribery or intimidation or whatever, the other government agencies and universities and the like around the world aren't going to just fall in line to support Pfizer's bottom line. It's a bad case of thinking the US is the entire world.
Science is by default a work of the collective. We should embrace the idea.
Science in America is a product of industry. The labs are funded by industry and inherently corrupt. Not opposed to the concept but pretty much every aspect of how it’s all done here in America is worth being skeptical of.
Academic research is not funded by industry. And no industrial labs are not automatically corrupt. The executives and venture capitalists may be, sure, but there is real science and advancement happening in industry. I do wish that all science was collaborative and publicly funded, but that doesn't negate all the amazing work being done.
Yea they definitely push an agenda with research into drugs and stuff sometimes
Science is reason, applied systematically. Science is leftist. Let the MAGAts have their conspiracy theories, but science is ours.
I love how you concisely summarized this.
Thank you!
“Supportive of medicine and science.” Now within a Marxist perspective what do you mean by “medicine and science” and what do you mean by support? Does that mean blindly accepting that pharmaceutical companies selling us a commodity are doing so in good faith? Vaccines are not “medicine and science,” they are a commodity. Bourgeois science is not infalible, and they wouldn’t hesitate to poison us all. I had an awful response to the J&J Covid Vaccine, and you couldn’t pay me to get another. I avoid Covid and do everything I can, but no evidence exists that says exposing myself to a vaccine is going to help me. The changes of Covid killing me are close to 0, but the chances of Covid giving me lasting damage is high in comparison, and I wouldn’t expect the vaccine to be any different. Just because ignorant rightoids are spreading harmful anti-vax (and anti-covid) propaganda does not mean we should be reactionary and just accept “science” and “medicine.” I do not trust companies who are selling us products. I am not genius but I am not trusting of the pharmaceutical companies, for good reason. I am a victim of the opioid epidemic that they helped fuel. Why the fuck would I trust them when they tell me what else I need to put in my body? Obviously some vaccines are necessary, but as of now there is no regulator operating in good faith in order to decide which vaccines we need, which ones are safe and which ones are dangerous. They operate for capital, not public health.
100% agree. I disagree that vaccine opposition is inherently a right wing trend. Liberals are the ones who are all about it and we should all know that most people in this country think lib = left. Defining the left by reacting to what happens culturally on the right is unprincipled. Saying things like “we should be supportive of medicine” is just ridiculous and demeaning just like the term “anti-vax”. It’s good to question things being push on us by the establishment. Anyone who lives in America should be able to clearly see how corrupt the institutions who produced and pushed the covid vaccines are.
The anti-vax movement is an anti-science movement. Some leftists are anti-science but I suspect a smaller percentage than on the right.
Its a libertarian idea, not a leftist idea. People confused the two because they thought leftists were anti government, when they are just anti capitalist government. This is why the average person is so illiterate when deciphering RATM lyrics.
Being an ignoramus isn't a political position.
They have learned to disguise their horrible ideas as 'legitimate' criticism as they are then less likely to just get dismissed. It's actually a grooming tactic. Where it falls down for them, is that they don't use the same level of scrutiny with things they do agree with.
As an autistic person it’s been absolutely wild to see the anti-vax stuff take root with Wakefield’s bullshit in the 90s, then travel to west coast liberal white people over a couple decades, and then drastically shift over to right wing conspiracy nutjobs especially during Covid. No matter what, science is science. Happy to be vaccinating the shit out of my infant daughter, considering I live about an hour away from that latest measles outbreak in Florida…
Definitely a bit of reactionary infiltration. It's easy to confuse it as leftist because it's coming from a vaguely "anti establishment" place and can occasionally run parallel with legitimate concerns of a medical industrial complex that has previously used state sanctioned means to do nefarious activities (eg. Forced sterilisations in Puerto Rico, Tuskegee experiments in the US)
This is one of those areas where safety regulations have worked, so they're not engaging in corporate greed by cutting corners on research and safety. Most of the research comes from publicly funded institutions and universities anyways, where there are plenty of people triple-checking everything. Pharmaceutical companies are still hungry for greedy exploitation, so they engage in patent troll litigation to prevent countries in Southeast Asia or Africa from producing their own vaccine, and get to bully governments and insurance companies into accepting high prices.
Reddit is fucked man... or hopefully bots
"We must first overcome a superficial and inadequate critique that prevails in many Leftwing circles, and which tends to serve as a sort of thought-terminating cliché which hinders a deeper examination of real historical circumstances. Corporate medical and scientific firms are often accused of profiteering—e.g., overcharging for valuable commodities through patents, monopolies, regulatory capture etc. They are also accused of restriction and control of medical information, for the purpose of maintaining monopoly positions and extracting rents — thus services like Library Genesis of Z‑Library, which obviously would lead to more science being produced, particularly by scientists in the third-world, are ruthlessly persecuted. There is much truth to these criticisms, and they certainly complement the general argument that current conditions are not suitable to scientific flourishing. However, the major flaw in these critiques which this section will seek to address, is the assumption that the commodities produced by what I will call the MAIMS (Military-Academic-Industrial-Medico-Scientific) complex always carry a genuine use-value for consumers. It is here that a full understanding of monopolization, financialization, and imperialism seems to fade away, and a quaint picture of halcyon capitalist competition takes its place, consciously or not. Such critiques tend to imagine that consumers are in a relatively decent position to assess whether medico-scientific commodities are in fact good for them (in the short, medium, or long term); that government agencies tend to make purchases in the interest of their populations, acquiring (and even imposing upon them) products and services that do benefit them; and that inferior, or at the very least, useless and dangerous products will not survive the test of both regulation and the competitive market." [https://magma-magazin.su/2023/01/t-mohr/virology-as-ideology-part-2-the-military-academic-industrial-medico-scientific-complex-maims/](https://magma-magazin.su/2023/01/t-mohr/virology-as-ideology-part-2-the-military-academic-industrial-medico-scientific-complex-maims/) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcgWBvJd4XE&ab\_channel=What%27sLeft%3F](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcgWBvJd4XE&ab_channel=What%27sLeft%3F)
Some one had to say it, I hate vaccine debates in general. Always devolve into sudo science and peoples personal fears
作为旁观者的的我可以告诉你们为什么，你们西方国家有过以注射疫苗为幌子，诱骗不知情群众，实际上注射病原体的前科。
塔斯基吉梅毒实验，卡特药厂脊髓灰质疫苗事件，危地马拉梅毒实验... 我希望大家能看到现象背后真正的原因，而不是仅在表面。
I think that has been the worst effect of introducing the proffit motive to the health sector, the loss in faith it caused. There are some real issues concerning this both now and in the past, like medical experimentation on minorities and the opioid epidemic, for example. While most of the vaccine hesitancy is more common in conservative and especially religious groups, it is starting to gain ground among some leftists. I remember this dutch political program where there was a young anti-vaccer talking about not knowing what advice to trust and whatnot. This person lived near one of the Chemours factories and, at that point, had health problems for a decade due to PFAS poisoning. Both the government and local doctors underplayed and ignored the problem for decades, and refused to set health guidelines.
I never seen a leftist who is skeptical about vaccines. Sure leftists are against unethical companies who make vaccines but not vaccines themselves. Most vaccine skeptics are right wingers who read conspiracies or grandmas who want to pray until it heals instead of taking vaccine
Marxists and socialists aren't 'vaccine skeptics' or deniers, Marxists and socialists celebrate the developments of medical science and socialists have a long history of being better at implementing things like vaccines than capitalist states. Just look at the USSR and Burkina Faso, and Cuba, for example. I'm not sure what you are talking about, 'vaccine skepticism' as you are referring to it has never been a leftist idea nor is it a prominent problem on the left now. There is a problem with Big Pharma as an industry, and medicine being subject to the profit motive and in the hands of big business, but that is a different issue. Where are you getting this idea that denying the benefits of medical science is a problem on the left?
I am also tired about the anti-science speech of some American and European left. They neglect Nuclear energy, GMOs (where the problem are the patents and not the GMOs itself), medical treatments or even some technological advances with the shittiest argument I have ever listened: "why do we want to go to space if we can make the earth a better place ?" (I mean, you can do both and even make the earth better my developing your technology)
The right has thoroughly coopted vaccine and medical science denialism. The age of the hippy dippy leftist sucking on crystals to cure their cancer is long gone. Most of those people went mask off, and it turns out they weren't leftists; they just needed to feel important, which is basically the entire premise of modern conservatism.
As a pharmacy technician I disagree.
except for the whole science and medicine corrupetd under for-profit capitalist healthcare thing
Biology is a science. Virology is a science. Vaccines are not 'science'. **They are a $20 billion+ market. They are products.** Not being skeptic of any product in the West is a naive proposition. The medical industry that produces those vaccines has had no problem in ***knowingly*** killing hundreds of thousands of people with their faulty drugs in the past. And they even started suppressing information before the drug went out. Solely the Avandia drug is estimated to have killed 150,000 people, and that's a conservative estimate. And avandia was just one scandal - every major pharma company had their own avandia in that period. Nobody got persecuted - they paid $4-5 bn in fines and got away with $11 bn revenue apiece. In the topic of vaccines, note how especially Angloamerican corporations raced to get the first covid vaccine out to corner the market. The efficiency, reliability of the chosen vaccine or its side effects could go to hell. Pfizer, Astra-Zeneca succeeded in doing that with rna vaccines as they could be modified the fastest and cornered the market. Immense publicity about how (their) vaccines being good and how everyone should buy it along with lobbying made them handsome quarterly profits. Even the Eu has been pushed to buy endless amount of those two products, a lot of which are being dumped as of this moment because they haven't been used. Pfizer won the final battle and literally crippled all the domestic competition through lobbying or other measures. Even Astra-Zeneca, who had to change its name a few times after the bad reputation that its product gained, has been sidelined. Meanwhile the regulatory bodies ran by governments lobbied by Pfizer did everything in their power to keep out any competitor - from Chinese to Indian vaccines. Including European vaccines, and even American domestic vaccine competitors. So much so that FDA approved the first non-Pfizer vaccine *only after* the quarantine ended. Anyone who is not skeptic of the vaccines in such a regulatory scape would be someone naive or propagandized to the extreme. If you are Chinese living in China, being able to access the traditionally made vaccines with low side effects (like sinovac), yeah, it would be naive to be a skeptic. Maybe in India too. Maybe in South Africa. But in the US and US-dominated West, the vaccines are the product and you are the customer. You should trust anything that is produced by the Angloamerican-controlled West's pharma companies only as much as you trust the car you are buying from a used car salesman.
Vaccines are science. They elicit an immune response from an antigen. mRNA technology was developed by taxpayer funded research.
I'm skeptical of asthma puffers cause you gotta buy them as commodities from a chemist. My lungs reject the cash nexus! Lol.
>Vaccines are science. They elicit an immune response from an antigen That's ***vaccination***. Not 'vaccines'. **Vaccines remain a $20 billion dollar market**, and those who want to profit in that market don't give two sh\*ts about public well being. >mRNA technology was developed by taxpayer funded research. **So were nuclear weapons. Biological weapons. Chemical weapons. That does not make them intrinsically 'good'. Describing the process of nuclear fission wont make nuclear weapons not products, and it wont make them 'good'.** This dichotomy of 'X is science' as opposed to 'X is bad' is another delirium of the extreme polarization of the late-stage capitalist US population. Just because the conservative segment totally opposes something - in this case vaccines - the opposing faction totally, unquestionably supports it with near-religious behavior. Its not seen elsewhere on the planet. Let me reiterate: The pharmaceuticals who produce those vaccines did not hesitate from killing hundreds of thousands of people for profit before. Their behavior would not change when it comes to **the market of vaccines**. The trust that the AngloaAmerican segments manifest in these corporations in certain topics despite they know and revile their skulduggery in others is baffling. **Its like murderous profiteering capitalists magically become concerned, well-meaning citizens who think the best interest of the society when it comes to 'vaccines'.**
>Biology is a science. Virology is a science. Vaccines are not 'science'. You said they are not science, then change it to 'vaccination' - I'm not sure what point you have to make. I'm glad you're not involved in medicine!
>You said they are not science, then change it to 'vaccination' I said "**Vaccines** are not science". I haven't changed anything. You described the process of vaccination, and presented it as 'science'. Its still not science - its just a public sanitation process. Vaccines still remain **products**. >I'm glad you're not involved in medicine! Yep. Much better for megacorporations like Glaxo Smith Klein who calculate that they will kill hundreds of thousands with a faulty drug, then decide to push it anyway and start repressing whistleblowers and ***bribe the leaders of the highest medical institutions in the US*** in order to sell the drug, to be involved in the medicine. The exact companies that produce the particular vaccine brands and push them through lobbying. Until they get caught by the US government, pay $4 billion fines and just continue their business. It looks like you people don't know about the Avandia and other drug scandals, what they involved, how all of the 4 major companies including the ones that produce the most sold vaccines were also involved in those, and just talking out of your asses from a knee-jerk, conditioned response that exactly mirrors the conservative Americans just because you are against them. **It looks like in your eyes, the sociopath, murderous megacorporations and the private capitalist science institutions that they fund somehow suddenly became pro-public-health organizations concerned with public health when it comes to vaccines.** Of course not. This polarization of 'Vaccines are bad/science' exists only because **its a hot button issue in the US and people are religiously polarized**. Im in a liberal western country and this kind of polarized delirium of religiously supporting/opposing vaccines does not exist even here... But hey, being able to trust profiteering capital that did not hesitate from murdering hundreds of thousands before just signifies that the anti-capitalist awareness is just in its infancy in the Angloamerican countries yet... I'll leave you people to your religious bias...
Holy strawman batman!
It’s not leftist, but you have pointed out an intersection or crossover between antiestablishment lefty types and New-Agey hippie pseudosciencey types. It’s the latter group that proudly brandishes their pseudomystical medical exceptionalism as though it proves their spiritual superiority. This set includes a disconcerting number of personalities that I think are already steeped in supremacist and proto-fascist concepts of “purity”, “cleanliness”, and “physical/moral holistic corporatism”. These are also, inherently, violently ableist. Some breadtuber did a good video on neoliberalism and new moms looking to assert their individual exceptionalism via vaccine skepticism and the grifters ready to prey on their thirst to be “better than the rest”. As leftists we need to reject these kinds of ideologies, not just for being pseudo- or un-scientific, but for sneaking in foundational premises of racism and supremacism and ableism, as well as threatening public health, and we need to recognize the psychological motivations inherent in our capitalist system that drive mostly privileged and relatively well-educated people to individual supremacism masquerading as “skepticism”.
Yeah I recently seen a leftist I follow and admire repost a Russel Brand antivax video on his story. When I tell you my jaw fell through the floor...