This month I encountered a pregnant patient who wanted a pain med. The only safe pain med for pregnant women is Tylenol.
She pauses, asks, are you sure I can take that? I’ve heard something about it not being safe any more.
What did you hear?
Just that it might not be safe any more.
There is no current evidence of that, but your choices are your own.
She accepted the Tylenol.
However, it’s clear that even vague remembering of “something” impact how people make health care choices.
The long game on this movement isn’t even about vaccines. It’s about thinning the herd and creating generalized doubt in regards to science.
It is a well known scientific fact in psychology that simply encountering a proposition will make you more likely to believe it is true long after the fact.
If I tell you, erroneously, that the population of Russia is 10 million people, then if you have no clue, five years later if I asked you about the population of Russia, you would say “I remember hearing it’s around 10 million”, and some other cunt from the other side of the bar goes, “Yeah! I heard that too!”
It’s easy to prey on people’s cognitive heuristics. Like, you don’t need to know that information on a day to day basis, you got to take the kids to school, and then head off to your two jobs back to back to make enough money to eat. So our brains work at a “best possible result for the lowest average cognitive cost”, kind of.
That’s the whole shtick. Just bombard people with misinformation, they have neither time nor faculty to make sense of it. That’s why human society and democracy is so precious- we agree that we are not going to do that to each other, and cooperate instead.
Of course, sooner or later one of those fucking assholes get born who are all like, “the world is mine and I will gladly dance on the corpses of millions just to be on top, and even that will never be enough”. And that’s it!
It’s easier to destroy a sand castle someone spent hours building on the beach than building one yourself.
Ugh I had to go look up the population of Russia so that 10mm figure wouldn’t get stuck in there
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia
Russia has an estimated population of 146.0 million as of 1 January 2025,
Thank you for combatting that misinfo.
See how easy it is? Now imagine the shit someone’d say if there’s a $500 billion missile contract on the line.
After the regime falls, it will take years to repair everything that the Republicans vandalized.
I feel like most Republican supporters won’t learn or change.
There’s going to be a “They thought they were free: Trump Edition” that’s going to be extremely depressing. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Thought_They_Were_Free )
Sick reference, bro.
“Years”
Get a load of Mr. Fucking Optimistic over here, guys.
We’ll have fucking Edward Gibbon writing “The Rise and Fall of the American Empire” in twenty years.
Add the CDC to the ever-growing list of government organizations staffed exclusively with bootlickers and cowards.
