And permantly disfigured even more with long COVID.
They knew what would happen. The US is wealthy with a huge military force. They could have locked down and mobilised their army to protect people until it was over.
But the oligarchs didn't want to slow their profits and give up even an inch of their wealth and power, so COVID was allowed to run rampant. They sacrified their own people to the virus. These people did not willingly sacrifice themselves, they were killed through purposeful negelect.
They also encouraged other countries to do the same. My own country hardly had any deaths before US officials visited and pressured them to open again.
It's no longer tracked properly so who knows the full extent of the death.
This could be one of the largest mass killings in history.
The worst part is when the news tries to spin how traumatic it was for kids to endure our pathectic excuse for a 'lockdown', instead of how traumatic it was to watch our countries murder millions for nothing and hear our friends and families parrot eugenics talking points to try and justify it.
EDIT: [CONTENT WARNING] There is a blue MAGA from another instance in the comments who is hand waving away peoples COVID experiences, so if you have lost a loved one to this disease or had your life or loved ones affected by it, reading the comments here might stir some trauma. Just a heads up.
My mom was one of them. not get the shot. She was starting to come around to the idea of getting the J&J shot because it's a traditional vaccine, then she was spooked off by the news telling her that it caused blood clots...
CW: Death She fought for about a day to take her breathing mask off because having things strapped to her face caused panic attacks for her. They sedated her as best they could, but any further and it would have likely killed her. For hours on end she wrestled with my partner, the nurse, and I, flailing in a blind panic until she couldn't keep it up anymore. Her lungs were obliterated and showed solid white on the X-rays; she wasn't even a candidate for intubation. I held her hand while she drowned in her own liquified lungs, till her pulse just faded...
I wouldn't feel an ounce of sympathy for the individuals responsible for allowing it to play or like it did. But the capitalist system is what made these monsters, and I don't want the heads of the Hydra, I want to stab straight into the heart.
Thank you. I believe we'll see a better day where these things won't happen anymore.
I'm sorry to hear that this happened to you. I remember seeing my dad in the ITU when he got ill with COVID, and it's not something I'll ever forget.
Remember when it finally became undeniable that China had done a better job responding to covid so the NYT started pushing the idea that China didn't care at all about mental health. It was essentially, "they showed us how to successfully contain covid, but at what cost?"
"they showed us how to successfully contain covid, but at what cost?"
the anti-China rhetoric obviously started pre-pandemic but this shit is when it hit comically deluded levels. BAWCing at every single moment that China did anything to stop the spread of the virus or the deaths of people while simultaneously going "Well, those million people were all going to die anyway, because they're old!!!" truly should have gotten every single journalist who peddled that bullshit fired.
(out of a cannon, into the sun)
There really aren't many professional journalists left. The profession has been utterly mauled, and it started years ago, more than a decade I think. Most of the people writing now aren't journalists, and the ones who are lack the resources that made any degree of credible reporting possible in the past. Go look up how most newspapers have shut down all their foreign offices and investigative offices. Most news now is either re-worded reuters and ap briefs or just reading off government and corporate press releases.
“China’s lockdowns destroyed its economy even though its economy has regularly outpaced the USA’s by three or four times since the pandemic began!”
I've been told by very
people that actually china didn't contain the virus at all and they cremated millions and millions of people because communism governments lies blah blag blah.
That and the the bipartisan antivax position on Russia's and China's vaccines
"Their vaccines don't work, the asiatic brainpan!!!" I did see some fairly compelling studies at the time I could dig up again about Russia's vaccine only being 60% or so effective. Still, something is better than nothing, and the shameless cash grab from Bill Gates over vaccine patents was sickening.
I'd be curious what it was 60% effective at? The vaccines to date lower the chance of hospitalization and death but not much else.
I just went to google scholar to get the study, and apparently I'm very wrong. It was 87% effective at preventing hospitalization with 2 doses and 97% effective with 3. Either I accidentally swallowed some propaganda, was misinformed, or this study is wrong. I'm leaning towards the 2nd option.
I really don't like thinking about how many people have died, having libs tell me they're the harm reduction people just makes me angry, like what the hell have you even done
And then biden just going mask off, waving his hands, and saying it's over and so many of them didn't blink.
My sister did everything right, vaccine and all, and still caught the virus because she was forced back to work and a coworker lied about having it. She now has a perminant heart condition. Fuck you and your eugenics supporting ass. I know another in my life who vaccinated and died anyway. How dare you even pretend like how it was handled was okay. You're disgusting.
No, don't come here with that reddit debate bro bullshit. You're trying to gaslight peoples trauma away. You're minimising the pain of a real tragedy . Eat shit.
And you're a lying covid downplayer
Eat all of my shit and hair, you don't deserve any more than a
I'm gonna remember this guy proudly the next time a lib accuses us of defending genocide
I realize you don't know the people on this instance the way we know each other, but I just have to tell you that you've managed to piss off one of the kindest people on this site by being an absolute asshole. They told you how they were personally hurt by the way Covid was handled, and you responded by being rude. You did a bad thing, and you should feel bad.
Okay, I'm sorry. You deserve a real response. Here it is.
spoiler
Proud that I don't downplay millions of COVID deaths. Eat pig shit
Just like every liberal out there, you don’t care about genocide. You don’t care about innocent people dying. All you care about is thinking of yourself as a good person.
You and your disgusting, vile ilk are responsible for the deaths of millions and millions of people.
Amazing, you have really demonstrated that you're a worthless, insignificant beast without the capability of critical, scientific thinking, nor empathy for your fellow human beings.
"I have a family member disabled and someone else in my life died because liberals turned covid mitigation into an individual choice"
And your reflex is to whine about how your words were misrepresented. To just get it out of the way: you're a inhuman callous piece of shit. You should be fucking ashamed of yourself. And no your words weren't misconstrued. On a matter of life and death inaction by democrats holding power was justified by you just now because "republicans would have been worse"
Just fucking defederate from us already. You're worse than bringing nothing of value.
"Just sort by local!" they said, "It's like nothing has changed that way!"
Bullshit. I've been here 3 years and i can say that it was pretty rare to get somebody like this dipshit just wandering in here before federating with these fucking libs, can't wait for all this to end the way that seems inevitable
Agreed. If we are going to stay federated I wish that the mods would at least tackle bad faith wreckers that disregard our trauma tags.
Maybe you should reread it. Probably have a better standard than 'take the vaccine or don't
' when the harm of covid could've been reduced within the first two weeks.Both parties had the means to stop covid, and both chose not to. They both increased harm, substantially.
having a democratic president literally made masking and vaccine compliance worse in the long run because a large number of people were only complying as part of culture war oppositional bullshit (lmao bet that's you) rather than actually paying attention to the science, as can be seen by Biden's CDC constantly making bad decisions and liberals like you just rolling with it.
Also, hey dipshit, what's the govt doing about vaccines or masks now? Oh, yeah, covid is "over" :^]
cancer is more useful than libs like you, at least it sometimes kills fascists
Your party's stance is "don't wear masks because we have a vaccine, the vaccine works like magic and Covid is over. Horay for science"
Are you seriously debating whether Kang is better than Kodos in this shit show of a democracy?
Then maybe that political party is far below standards and maybe shouldn't be considered the bare minimum.
Better than bad isn't good.
Come on, you were there. You had to have at least read about Nancy Pelosi showing off her ice cream freezer or Biden pushing for people to go back to work while we were dealing with new variants.
That's not harm reduction. That's depraved indifference.
You know what, I'm being unfair. You lack such a fundamental understanding of material conditions that you believe a sitting Congressperson talking about ice cream for a viral video wasn't harmful. That's time, effort, and attention that could've gone towards doing her actual job.
Conservatives weren't going to listen to Nancy Pelosi either way, but her minimizing the severity of covid caused actual harm.
Making ice cream videos is comparable to anti-lockdown policies when you're one of the most powerful people in the United States. One of the people who could've pushed for stronger covid policies.
Maybe you should reevaluate your understanding of harm reduction and acceptable harm.
I love getting called a tankie in an edit as you slink away, absolutely craven behavior
You seem to be willfully misunderstanding why I'm upset, have no interest in learning, and until you're honest with yourself about that this clearly isn't going anywhere.
I don't understand what you hoped to gain by butting in here.
Entirely different words put in my mouth.
You're not helping your case by saying something and immediately denying you said it. I haven't seen anyone mischaracterize you, you've said plenty of off-putting stuff without needing to embellish.
From our perspective you're rolling up to minimize everyone's lived experience witnessing people die of a preventable illness. Like it took a lot of restraint for me not to just yell at you for doing a whataboutism, showing up to tell me how bad republicans are. I know how bad republicans are, but the democrats have got a lot of people killed by prematurely rolling back all restrictions.
Under Trump there were fat unemployment checks, Democrats ended that.
Under Trump there was a massively expanded child tax credit, that also got ended by democrats. Do you see how this is a pattern that you can't just make go away by calling it a tankie?
Under Trump there was a mask mandate, that also got ended under Biden
and before you misrepresent me, I fucking hate Trump- but you guys have managed to actually be worse on this front somehow, in addition to stoking culture war shit in defense of your dogshit record.
You didn't "come off" as rude lib, you were intentionally callous and cruel. And you know you were.
Genuinely trying to understand why hexbear is getting defederated from other instances and see if my vague understanding of it matched reality.
So are you admitting that you already had a negative view of us and came here to pick a fight? That's what it sounds like. Why should anyone here be sympathetic to that kind of behavior? If someone here went over to a sensitive thread on another instance and just started accusing everyone of being libs, I'd fully expect for them to get the same treatment. Maybe it would be good to step back for a second and look at why you're getting this response.
Your debatebro bullshit doesn’t fly here, dumbass. Maybe you can even sneak in a reference to your MI6 snitch author George Orwell next time
Don't forget how many of us there are lib. And we're all packing these
There is more to covid reduction than just supporting the vaccine. Paying people to stay home, like more humane countries, making vaccines mandatory for most, and not declaring covid over prematurely are things libs could have done.
But noooope, COVID over!! APPARENTLY!
Saying "oh the conservatives are worse" when democrats enabled disease through inaction is fucking gross my dude.
No shit conservatives are worse. But that's like being stabbed in the eye is worse than having your eye removed under anesthetic. At the end of the day you still lost an eye. Millions still died due to neglegence. Facing reality doesn't mean we support the GOP.
You delusional tankies just don't understand that if you don't support vote blue no matter who, you're the same as Republicans! In fact, you're worse, because my uncle is a Republican cop who shot someone a while back and got a raise for it, he's a real hero!
I thought you were arguing that liberals making choices that increased harm were actually reducing harm.
Maybe holding patents for vaccines was reducing harm in ways we couldn't otherwise see.
That's true. Every night before I go to bed I look in the mirror and tell myself "the adults are now in charge and you are not smarter than them. Everything is back to normal, and that's good."
To be fair they are as adult as it gets without being corpses and even then some of em may be.
Imagine thinking electeds in america have any qualifications beyond how much campaign money they have. Meritocracy is such a trip.
I remember arguing with a load of libs about that when they started to praise Bill Gates as a good billionaire. Even his own fucking foundation eventually realised that they were wrong and there are still people arguing that the important thing to focus on when people were dying by the millions was upholding fucking patent law.
The most important thing was protecting the profit of pharma corps even when the ENTIRE FUCKING RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT COST WAS PAID FOR WITH PUBLIC MONEY in order to reward 'innovation'. Just covering the wages and costs wasn't enough, gotta reward the fuckig shareholders for a job well done.
The "redemption" of bill gates is one of those things that makes me wonder if i haven't disconnected from reality. He's such a ruthlessly evil, destructive person.
What the fuck do you even think my complaint is? it's the rollback of covid precautions at a federal level, cutting the aid they were giving out, ending mask mandate.
You shitheads acted like vaccines were a magic bullet because it was a convenient lie to tell everyone try to get 'back to normal'. Instead you abdicate responsibility and act like it's the most anyone could done.
It honestly might’ve been better to not have the vaccine in the fucking first place if this was how they were gonna use it
The vaccines literally came out under Trump, what are you on about? Obviously vaccines reduce harm, they both are for them, the only reason they posture one way or another is because of our culture war politics.
There were concrete things that prevented people from dying and the democrats intentionally rolled them back and declared the pandemic over. Eat my entire ass.
edit: before I get the fact checking nerds up my ass, I know operation warp speed was technically completed under biden, but it was like a month into his term, I just don't care
From what i remember it was deliveratley delayed because trump was pressuring them not to and they did not want to give in to politics.
In fact the only ones who did the vaccine rollout rigth were the rusians. They released them before they were fully tested because there was an emergency. And the libs complained endlessly that they were unsafe. When in fact once the data came out they were the most efective ones. Even if they gadnt been you can always use another round of vaccination. Like it happened with some of the chinise and many of the western ones. Other countries un ordered the russian vaccibe because of preassure using this as an excuse. Harming vaccine production and leaving those countries whithout vaccines for almost a year.
In reality these delays were just ritualistic and made things much worse than they could have been. And in this aspect everyone fucked up even china cuba and iran. The only ones who were the exception were the russians.
In fact the only ones who did the vaccine rollout rigth were the rusians. They released them before they were fully tested because there was an emergency
Yes!!! I’ve been saying this for years. I would’ve happily been the first person in line for a test vaccine. The possible risks of a faulty vaccine were so so so much lower than the risks of covid from day 1. We should’ve been pumping them out as we tested them.
Wearing masks? You mean that thing that the US let people get away with not doing regardless of the party in charge?
Not sure why you are so keen on downplaying covid but it's some sick shit.
Yes, why did the fucking Biden admin end that recommendation?
I thought you dumbass libs were all about harm reduction, now you're fine with people dying from unnecessary covid spread because the virus wouldn't be completely eradicated by masks?
Very left leaning of you to let Hitler kill only half the jews.
My brother in Christ, In WW2 Germany you would have the guy okay with killing half the Jews because it's 'harm reduction'
I'm the one saying we should have mobilised the allies to stop as many deaths as possible.
You have got to be intentionally trolling, fuck the democrats, and fuck you and people like you for protecting their dogshit record. I wear a mask because I care about my disabled comrades and I don't want to make them sick either. People like you have determined that disabled people they are a worthy sacrifice to 'return to normal'.
At this point I legit can't tell what you're trying to convince me of here, but I just want you to know that you disgust me.
You just said that the Biden admin got rid of masks because they 'only' reduce harm, like seriously what is this
Shut the fuck up shut the fuck up
Before you say a god damn additional word admit that you either can't keep track of any of the things you've said in this thread or are operating in bad faith.
"Why did Biden end masking"
You: "Because's only harm reduction, not elimination."
"You just claimed that the Biden admin ended masking because it only reduces covid spread"
You: "Pretty sure I didn't say that
"Fuckin admit you're acting in bad faith
I don't care about the article, what the fuck does the article have to do with the Biden admin lifting the mask mandate last year?
You've already demonstrated you're not paying attention to anything I say, let alone enough attention to remember your own responses. I'm being way too nice by even responding to you at this point.
You say harm is getting reduced, I say you chose to sacrifice disabled people in favor of a vaccine-only approach and arbitrarily "ending' covid. Liberals would administer the final solution if it was on a long enough timescale that shitheads like you could run interference for it.
Not if you use them as an excuse to not actually contain covid. That's actually increasing harm. We do huge mobilization at the drop of a hat to kill middle eastern and eastern European workers, but the only covid response on offer was wait for a somewhat effective vaccine, and in the meantime keep making money for the rich.
oh good it's a lemmy liberal
the only way to handle covid was how china handled it, joe biden didn't do dick differently than Trump (except hit the "covid is over" button a few months ago, cutting $200/mo from my food stamps. Thanks
ObamaBiden)you are brainless blueMAGA fuck if you really think any harm has been reduced here
Unlike you, the paragon of empathy.
You jumped a into a discussion about the death of over 1,000,000 people on a communist instance just to throw out some lame lib "muh team bleu slightly not as bad as le ebil team red" bait take, just to pointlessly argue over people "not getting your simple (pointless) statement."
That's tasteless enough, that you disregard the over 1,000,000 lives that were lost in this country because of liberalism, but then you insult and trivialize the trauma of one of our users in the most callous and condescending way. And not just any of our users, but one of the best ans most loved comrades on this site.
I don't think its possible for us to go down a dark enough path to be callous toeard the death of 1,000,000 people, and then hurl reddit nerd, logic pervert insults toward someone who experienced personal tragedy related to the mass death of over 1,000,000 people.
Here's a little something just for you lib. Wait for it
It's my genuine opinion that a lot of this rhetoric is originating from propaganda and astroturfing.
You came into thread on a sensitive topic on another instance clearly trying to pick a fight with people, and then when people call you out for it, you double down and accuse them of astroturfing while also smearing them with some McCarthyist nonsense about "tankies"? Can't you see that you are the astroturfing troll here? I'm dumbfounded that you're acting this way and then think you're somehow the victim in all this.
I would love to know which organization or agency is paying a bunch of online leftists to pretend to care about covid this late in the game. Like do they have any idea what astroturfing even means?
These terms like “astroturfer”, “Russian/Chinese bots”, and “tankie” are excuses people make up to justify being too cowardly to engage in discussion with people who have opinions that contradict their own. I know most people here get that already, but it’s worth saying out loud.
Biden and his could have done MANY things. They could have threatened to lift federal funding over misinformation being spread by conservatives, they could have continued masking mandates, they could have done a litany of things that would have actually been meaningful.
Doing the barest minimum is not something worthy of support, and willfully misinterpreting people's anger at liberals' failure to do better then that is disingenuous at best.
The "biden is a powerless smol bean doing everything he can" shtick is infuriating. Like right now he's telling Hawaiians to fuck off and die and libs still can't find any fault.
It's my genuine opinion that a lot of this rhetoric is originating from propaganda and astroturfing.
funny, that's exactly what i'd say about you, dumbass
Fuck you and all the people like you that have condemned me to having to take care of COVID patients forever. Plenty of my patients have had the vaccine and gotten COVID still, several of them died or were so damaged afterwards that they couldn't go back to a remotely similar living situation. I work with the vulnerable populations and just saying it's up to vaccines is a fucking joke. Harm reduction would be doing a proper lockdown and eradicating COVID, letting it rip over populations and turning the vaccine into an individualist choice is no different than what the red team would do.
If there's a sucking chest wound, do I just cover it with some petroleum gauze and call it a day, or do I go to the fucking hospital to get it properly healed? The vaccine is part of the treatment process but not the goddamn solution.
I don't even know what they said but you don't deserve it.
working in these conditions and staying sane requires so much strenght that no one should ever have been asked to use.
Couldn’t keep the mask on and showed the whole world their disgusting, craven self
"Not that many" compared to what lmfao, fucking global nuclear winter???? Climate change???? An asteroid cutting earth in half?????
"So you're saying I have to wear a mask to eat at Goofus's Pancakes now??? It's over, brunch has fallen, millions must die."
The worst is that it's over a million that we know of.
Like half the country stopped recording any statistics 3 months into the pandemic, before the worst spikes even occurred.
It's possible the true number is at least twice that.
The whole open question of how many deaths now are a result of damage caused by prior covid infections.
The mass death from COVID is also weird from a cultural perspective. There's never been a national grieving for all the deaths. There was this massive event that touched huge numbers of people all over the country and it's been erased from the cultural memory despite it still being ongoing. There was a bigger event for the queen finally kicking the bucket than there has been for all the deaths from COVID. People don't even talk about it anymore, it's like those people just disappeared as if they never existed. We truly live in a completely atomized society, this was treated as a million individual deaths. America has absolutely no shared cultural experience outside of pop culture and consumerism.
Not just the US, but the majority of the Western world at least. Shouldn't we have a global remembrance ritual? Some kind of ceremony? A few monuments?
This handwavy back to business thing is so weird when you analyze it.I'm usually pretty indifferent on "let's have a minute of silence" kinda things because sometimes it's used in lieu of actual action, but we really should like, have something like that. chuds will complain about being silenced but who gives a shit about them.
I know the UK has a national day of mourning on March 23rd but idk, it doesn't seem enough to me given how many people died. it's a massive tragedy that has been memoryholed. we're more likely to debate whether the lockdowns were a good thing or not than talk about the hundreds of thousands of dead and disabled people that the pandemic created.
it demonstrates how liberals don't give even the slightest shit about mass death per se, it's merely a cudgel to use against other people and ideologies. if they did actually care, they'd acknowledge the deaths from Western imperialism (not even talking about post-1945 stuff, literally just the age of colonialism) as deaths from capitalism, and demand the end of support for wars like Ukraine and Yemen, etc.
I'm really not into ritual, but... God damn. That actually sounds nice. I think it's worthy of global mourning.
I think it's the majority of the world. 20 million deaths from COVID. And no one even acknowledges it.
Fuck that blue MAGA asshole. That's the kind of bullshit we never would have had to deal with prior to federation. They don't usually anger me. Their logic pervert pedantry is too silly to actually get angry about. But the fact that it happened in the middle of a thread about over 1,000,000 people dying. A mass murder event by this fucking government. I can't not be honestly pissed off.
COVID is one thing that really broke my brain. I knew i was veiwed as expendable refuse in this society, but this took it and shoved it in my face every day for years. And i can't ever go back to a mind state pre-COVID. I got it even though i did everything not to get it, and my lungs have been fucked up since then. Fuck liberalism
Love to all you comrades
I worked in the treat dispensing business. Overpriced food and wine to fancy treat loving boomers mostly. I remember the day they announced they were closing all nonnecessary businesses. The restaurant was dead right before to announcement. About half an hour later a bunch of burgerlanders came in to get their treat fix while being served by peasants in before it all shut down. They didn't give a fuck. Last day i ever worked in a restaurant
Yeah. There's no going back now. The veil has been lifted, the mask has been ripped off. Most countries in the world, and many of the people, refused to do anything to protect their citizens, their loved ones, themselves.
Remember when the trump staff guys, especially whatever that bald nazi fuck's name was, said "let er rip" because it would affect blue states the worst? Into the memory hole it went, genocidal rhetoric against political opponents swept under the rug
I want to say his name is Steve but I don't remember
Either way I get only one thought when I see that melon of his
Ah right the guy that was in charge of the DHS when it posted 14/88 on its own government website
Is he the guy who got shot the only time anyone has ever actually done something useful to stop the gop?
It’s crazy how Joe Biden, one of the most milquetoast men in history, is one of history’s greatest killers now
Also directly responsible for the horrors of the drug war over the last 30 years. He's an amazing refutation of great man theory. Not especially clever, not really competent or charismatic, succeeded because he unquestioningly does the bidding of credit card companies, and somehow he failed up to becoming one of the great monsters of history.
Wow, you just reminded me of this post I made 3 years ago about the grief I was feeling about the mass death we were experiencing. It's almost strange to think about the grief I felt then, compared to how numb I feel to it now. I mean, I can still get sad and angry over specific things that are happening, but I'm not feeling the weight of the mass death the same way anymore. Coping mechanisms are wild.
Also, shoutout to @sappho@hexbear.net for helping me talk through my feelings at the time.
Me too, I still feel sad, it's in a different way though. Mostly anger now.
I'm mostly feeling a mixture of indifference and anger. I've spent the whole pandemic to date indoors, i've avoided symptomatic infection, i've watched so many friends lose loved ones and seen my own family members in hospital. And what i've gotten out of it is a profound anger at american culture for allowing this, and being indifferent to it. It's drastically changed how i look at unmasked people in the super market, which is the only place I go. Whatever forgiveness i had for American's failings is gone. And I really don't like how that's made me look at "My fellow Americans"
It warms my heart to know my one comment actually helped you. It's odd for me as well to look back on that conversation now. I'm also feeling remarkably numb in comparison. My long covid is substantially worse, but I've given up on convincing the people I care about to avoid infection. Things don't feel as raw, painful, and urgent as they once did. It's like I boxed up some of my pandemic feelings and put them neatly aside, and I can't tell if that's acceptance or suppression. But maybe there isn't a "correct" way to emotionally process something like this.
Yeah, when I read that old post and contrasted my feelings then with my feelings now, I was like, "I'm not sure this is healthy" 😬 But like you say, maybe there isn't a right way.
I'm sorry to hear you've got long covid. That must be scary, since there's no way to predict what outcomes to expect.
I remember an early struggle session where I asserted that Fauci was a piece of shit for not using his platform to explain that a lockdown was the only way to contain covid.
I'm still a hermit, because covid is still incredibly dangerous to me. I inject myself with weekly "turn-off-your-immune-system-because-its-being-a-dick-juice", so one bout and I could be dead. Or wreck my brain, which is about all I've got left to survive for myself, because my body is already disabled.
I love that my comrades still care about me and people like me.
You matter, comrade! Your life and well-being are valuable, I'm glad you're here with us! I think about the people I never see because they stay inside to protect themselves every time I put my mask on.
Not a single person had to die, but because the heath of the economy was more important, a million deaths were given that werent even asked for.
