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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
The biggest problem is convincing people to take it, Trump's clearly politicized handling of the vaccine has caused almost a third of Americans to be uncertain about whether or not they'd take it
. That in my view is the way Biden could make the most impact, if he could convince Americans that it's not politicized and that they should take it then we'll be one step closer to containing the outbreak.
Some white people are being charged with terrorism...for once.
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.He's already tried this multiple times. The people he's paying just basically continued.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/science/coronavirus-vaccine-tracker.html
Here's the New York Times tracker on Covid-19 vaccines.
One US based one that is in its final stages is here: https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/09/third-covid-vaccine-candidate-starts-phase-3-trial-us
It's the Oxford vaccine.
The Astra Zeneca vaccine, developed at Oxford University, is already in a phase 3 trial in the United Kingdom. The first US volunteers were inoculated today at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison, and Astra Zeneca plans to add 50 participants each day after Sep 7.
Edited by CharlesPhipps on Sep 7th 2020 at 10:07:41 AM
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.Trump Emerges as Inspiration for Germany’s Far Right
By Katrin Bennhold
BERLIN — Just before hundreds of far-right activists recently tried to storm the German Parliament, one of their leaders revved up the crowd by conjuring President Trump.
“Trump is in Berlin!” the woman shouted from a small stage, as if to dedicate the imminent charge to him.
She was so convincing that several groups of far-right activists later showed up at the American Embassy and demanded an audience with Mr. Trump. “We know he’s in there!” they insisted.
Mr. Trump was neither in the embassy nor in Germany that day — and yet there he was. His face was emblazoned on banners, T-shirts and even on Germany’s pre-1918 imperial flag, popular with neo-Nazis in the crowd of 50,000 who had come to protest Germany’s pandemic restrictions. His name was invoked by many with messianic zeal.
It was only the latest evidence that Mr. Trump is emerging as a kind of cult figure in Germany’s increasingly varied far-right scene.
“Trump has become a savior figure, a sort of great redeemer for the German far right,” said Miro Dittrich, an expert on far-right extremism at the Berlin-based Amadeu-Antonio-Foundation.
Germany — a nation generally supportive of a government that has handled the pandemic better than most — may seem an unlikely place for Mr. Trump to gain such a status. Few Western nations have had a more contentious relationship with Mr. Trump than Germany, whose leader, Chancellor Angela Merkel, a pastor’s daughter and scientist, is his opposite in terms of values and temperament. Opinion polls show that Mr. Trump is deeply unpopular among a broad majority of Germans.
But his message of disruption — his unvarnished nationalism and tolerance of white supremacists coupled with his skepticism of the pandemic’s dangers — is spilling well beyond American shores, extremism watchers say.
In a fast-expanding universe of disinformation, that message holds real risks for Western democracies, they say, blurring the lines between real and fake news, allowing far-right groups to extend their reach beyond traditional constituencies and seeding the potential for violent radicalization.
Mr. Trump’s appeal to the political fringe has now added a new and unpredictable element to German politics at a time when the domestic intelligence agency has identified far-right extremism and far-right terrorism as the biggest risks to German democracy.
The authorities have only recently woken up to a problem of far-right infiltration in the police and military. Over the past 15 months, far-right terrorists killed a regional politician on his front porch near the central city of Kassel, attacked a synagogue in the eastern city of Halle and shot dead nine people of immigrant descent in the western city of Hanau. Mr. Trump featured in the manifesto of the Hanau killer, who praised his “America First” policy.
In Germany, as in the United States, Mr. Trump has become an inspiration to these fringe groups. Among them are not only long-established hard-right and neo-Nazi movements, but also now followers of Q Anon, the internet conspiracy theory popular among some of Mr. Trump’s supporters in the United States that hails him as a hero and liberator.
Germany’s Q Anon community, barely existent when the pandemic first hit in March, may now be the biggest outside the United States along with Britain, analysts who track its most popular online channels say.
Matthias Quent, an expert on Germany’s far right and the director of an institute that studies democracy and civil society, calls it the “Trumpification of the German far right.”
“Trump has managed to attract different milieus, and that’s what we’re seeing here, too,” Mr. Quent said. “We have everything from anti-vaxxers to neo-Nazis marching against corona measures. The common denominator is that it’s people who are quitting the mainstream, who are raging against the establishment.”
Trump, he added, “is the guy fighting the liberal-democratic establishment.”
For some on the far-right fringes, Mr. Trump’s message has been especially welcome at a time when Germany’s homegrown nativist party, the Alternative for Germany, or Af D, is struggling to exploit the pandemic and has seen its support dip to around 10 percent, experts say.
Nationalist populists in Germany have long welcomed the presence of one of their own, as they see it, in the White House. Mr. Trump’s language and ideology have helped legitimize theirs.
The Af D has repeatedly paraphrased Mr. Trump by calling for a “Germany first” approach. But the president is popular in more extremist circles, too. Caroline Sommerfeld, a prominent ideologue of a contingent known as the “new right” with close links to the extremist Generation Identity movement, said she had popped open a bottle of champagne when Mr. Trump won the 2016 election.
The Q Anon phenomenon has added a new kind of fuel to that fire.
Q Anon followers argue that Mr. Trump is fighting a “deep state” that not only controls finance and power, but also abuses and murders children in underground prisons to extract a substance that keeps its members young. German followers contend that the “deep state” is global, and that Ms. Merkel is part of it. Mr. Trump, they say, will liberate Germany from the Merkel “dictatorship.”
The far-right magazine Compact, which has printed Mr. Trump’s speeches for its readers, had a giant Q on its latest cover and held a “Q-week” on its video channel, interviewing far-right extremists like Björn Höcke. On the streets of Berlin last weekend there were Q flags and T-shirts and several banners inscribed with “WWG 1 WGA,” a coded acronym for Q’s hallmark motto, “Where we go one, we go all.”
Hard numbers are difficult to discern, with followers often subscribing to accounts on different platforms, analysts say. News Guard, a U.S.-based disinformation watchdog, found that across Europe, accounts on You Tube, Facebook and Telegram promoting the Q Anon conspiracy counted 448,000 followers.
In Germany alone, the number of followers of Q Anon-related accounts has risen to more than 200,000, Mr. Dittrich said. The largest German-language Q Anon channel on You Tube, Qlobal-Change, has over 17 million views and has quadrupled its following on Telegram to over 124,000 since the coronavirus lockdown in March, he said.
“There is a huge Q community in Germany,” Mr. Dittrich said, with new posts and memes that dominate the message boards in the United States immediately translated and interpreted into German.
The fusion of the traditional far right with the Q Anon crowd was something new, Mr. Quent said. “It’s a new and diffuse kind of populist rebellion that feeds on conspiracy theories and is being supplied with ideology from different corners of the far-right ecosystem,” he said.
One reason the Q Anon conspiracy has taken off in Germany, Mr. Dittrich said, is that it is a good fit with local conspiracy theories and fantasies popular on the far right.
One of them is the “great replacement,” which claims that Ms. Merkel and other governments have been deliberately bringing in immigrants to subvert Germany’s ethnic and cultural identity. Another is a purported national crisis called “Day X,” when Germany’s current order will supposedly collapse and neo-Nazis take over.
A third theory is the belief that Germany is not a sovereign country but an incorporated company and occupied territory controlled by globalists.
This belief is held among a faction known as “Reichsbürger,” or citizens of the Reich, who orchestrated the brief storming on Parliament on Aug. 29. They do not recognize Germany’s post-World War II Federal Republic and are counting on Mr. Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to sign a “peace treaty” to liberate Germans from their own government.
Another reason for Q Anon’s spread is that several German celebrities have become multipliers of the conspiracy, among them a former news presenter and a rapper and former judge on Germany’s equivalent of “American Idol.”
One of the biggest figures spreading the Q Anon conspiracy is Attila Hildmann, a vegan-celebrity-chef-turned-far-right-influencer with more than 80,000 followers on the Telegram messaging app. He has appeared at all major coronavirus marches in Berlin, venting against face masks, Bill Gates and the Rothschild family — and appealing to Mr. Trump to liberate Germany.
“Trump is someone who has been fighting the global ‘deep state’ for years,” Mr. Hildmann said in an interview this past week. “Trump has become a figure of light in this movement, especially for Q Anon, precisely because he fights against these global forces.”
“That’s why the hope for the German national movement, or the liberation movement, lies basically with Q and Trump, because Trump is a figure of light because he shows that you can fight these global powers and that he is victorious,” Mr. Hildmann said.
“The Germans hope that Trump will liberate Germany from the Merkel corona regime,” he said, so that “the German Reich is reactivated.”
Mr. Hildmann’s influence became plain in June, when he mobilized thousands of people to send messages to the U.S. and Russian embassies in Berlin to appeal for help. In the space of a few days, 24,000 tweets had been received by the embassies calling on Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin to “liberate” Germany from Ms. Merkel’s “criminal regime” and prevent “forced vaccination” and “genocide.”
Germany’s domestic intelligence agency has warned of the risk of far-right extremists using the pandemic for their own purposes. This past week the agency’s chief, Thomas Haldenwang, said that “aggressive and disruptive far-right elements” were the driving force behind the protests over coronavirus restrictions.
But extremism experts and lawmakers worry that the security services are not paying close enough attention to the violent potential in the mix of Q Anon disinformation campaigns and homegrown far-right ideology.
In the United States, some Q Anon believers have been charged with violent crimes, including one accused of murdering a mafia boss in New York last year and another arrested in April after reportedly threatening to kill Joseph R. Biden Jr., who has since become the Democratic presidential candidate. The F.B.I. has warned that Q Anon poses a potential domestic terrorism threat.
In Germany, language reminiscent of Q Anon was used in the manifesto of the gunman who killed nine people with immigrant roots in the western city of Hanau in February.
“We have already seen that this conspiracy has the potential to radicalize people,” Mr. Dittrich said.
There are an estimated 19,000 Reichsbürger in Germany, about 1,000 of them classified as far-right extremists by the domestic intelligence service. Many of them are armed.
“At a time when some people are determined to destroy democratic discourse with all means possible,” said Konstantin von Notz, a lawmaker and deputy president of the intelligence oversight committee, “we have to take such a phenomenon very seriously.”
Charles Phillipe wrote: "Yes, it's getting weird how some people think that it will be years before a viable vaccine is ready."
Those people are experts. Really, there's no guarantee that vaccines would work. We've only wiped out a handful of diseases in total, and for many there's never been a vaccine. COVID is a coronavirus like the common cold, and we've never eradicated that, and need yearly new vaccines for it. On top of that, many developing vaccines are aimed at the corona part (A halo-like structure in the virus, hence the name) but if a mutation changed that, it too would render vaccines useless.
On top of that, it wasn't all that certain that immunity would last beyond a couple of weeks either (Making any vaccine fundamentally useless).
COVID Vaccine skepticism is well-founded. There's no one-stop-vaccine-shop solution here. Promising vaccines can fail at any stage. Immune responses may not last, or there may be side-effects that make it worse than COVID itself. This too has precedent in vaccine development.
We don't know any of this for sure until it's passed Stage 3 testing.
Edited by devak on Sep 7th 2020 at 8:24:40 PM
This administration doesn't help with the skepticism either. How many false cures have they peddled out so far since this began to try to make Trump look good? How many times have they tried to downplay this pandemic to make Trump look good? How many times have they gotten in the way of actually fixing things because it would make Trump look bad? Everything they have done is an attempt to try to make Trump look good. We should not trust anything they throw our way, period.
Edited by ScubaWolf on Sep 7th 2020 at 2:27:15 PM
"In a move surprising absolutely no one"![]()
No, they're not. Doctor Fauci is someone I trust despite the Administration and has said that the tested vaccine should be available by the end of the year. Also, Oxford is not pulling a fast one. Much of humanity's best and brightest has pulled together here and will succeed against this virus.
Saying otherwise is anti-science and people who shoot it down are as guilty as Trump.
We HAVE tests for Covid-19 and know how it works because people have survived it.
Edited by CharlesPhipps on Sep 7th 2020 at 11:28:56 AM
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.It's not anti-science to point out that vaccine development is no guarantee. It isn't. It's anti-science to suggest this is something we have figured out. Some scientists say end of this year. Some say next year. Fauci is just one scientist.
SARS and MERS are also coronaviruses and no vaccines exist for those. Oxford is promising,yes,but it can still fail in Phase 3. There's no guarantee of a vaccine, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying.
I'm sorry, but this is a fundamental misunderstanding. At the basic level there are some 20-something viruses which can cause the common cold, some four of which are already extant coronaviruses. Furthermore, yearly vaccinations are provided against different flu strains, not a cold.
It is entirely plausible that (according to one theory) these older virus strains started as something akin to the current pandemic and then mutated into a less-lethal but still virulent strain, which has since become endemic and not economically viable to eradicate by the present day but that does not mean we cannot vaccinate against them; we vaccinate against coronaviruses in agriculture all the time.
As long as the aim is to act against a singular virus strain and not a broad category disease and there remains sufficient incentive to do so, there is no evidence that it is utterly impossible for current medical technology.
SARS and MERS operate on the opposite end of virus lethality: they're so deadly that they choke themselves and vaccine development is disincentivised. There is a reason that the current Oxford-produced Covid vaccine is derived from work vaccinating against them: it wasn't a major research area, but the technology was working away at it.
Edited by RainehDaze on Sep 7th 2020 at 7:44:30 PM
I forgot to add:
Vaccine development takes years. If a covid vaccine would become ready this year (or next year), it would be one of the fastest ever developed, possibly THE fastest ever developed.
It doesn't change anything. We haven't eradicated the coronavirusses that cause the common cold either, and we still need yearly new vaccines because these viruses keep changing. The number of diseases we have eradicated are few.
"SARS and MERS operate on the opposite end of virus lethality: they're so deadly that they choke themselves and vaccine development is disincentivised. There is a reason that the current Oxford-produced Covid vaccine is derived from work vaccinating against them: it wasn't a major research area, but the technology was working away at it."
Coronavirus research is a board subject, yes. Not sure what your point is otherwise, since the basic premise remains: no vaccine was ever made. A number of vaccines for Covid 19 are repurposed Corona vaccines but again, no guarantee.
There's no certainty of a vaccine. There's the hope that if everything goes well, we can have one soon, but that remains a hope. There's plenty of historical precedent that it's not that easy to both vaccinate against a virus and eradicate it totally.
Edited by devak on Sep 7th 2020 at 8:52:47 PM
Yeah I think people don’t realise that a big part of why we haven’t eradicated other viruses isn’t a lack of science or technology, it’s because we’ve not before had planetary consensus on an urgent need to eradicate a virus.
If COVID mutates to become less lethal than we might well see the urgency go away and vaccine development stall, but right now we’re at a rare moment in history where the entire human race is united in a desire to fix an issue and fix it fast.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranAnd as has been repeatedly brought up, the phase 3 trials include "this was being worked on for years but we changed the specifics to focus on THIS coronavirus"? There's both a big incentive to develop fast and taking advantage of existing work to shorten the time required.
We haven't eradicated them because it was never tried. This is something that needs to be emphasised again and again: these low-mutation virus strains? We could almost certainly immunise against them. But there is no economic incentive to develop a dozen+ low-cost vaccines and launch a wide vaccination spree to protect the population against the cold. The up front cost, low profit returns, numerous strains, and lack of obvious costs (lost work time is easily overlooked), means nobody has wanted to.
Edited by RainehDaze on Sep 7th 2020 at 7:55:57 PM
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I'm not saying it's disqualifying. I'm saying that there's no certainty of a virus, and that skepticism of a virus vaccine is well-founded. A woman takes 9 months to produce a baby, but 9 women won't produce a baby in 1 month. Some things, such as trials, take time. If a trial fails, it's back to the drawing board. You then have to do 3 trials again, each bigger and longer than the next. This is a process that takes months, you can't rush that because it's fundamentally not how it works.
Edited by devak on Sep 7th 2020 at 8:56:01 PM
And that’s why Oxford has such a huge lead, to butcher your analogy it’s not trying to produce a baby in 1 month via 9 women, it’s finding an already pregnant women and seeing if her baby will fit the need.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran

And naturally he'll do all he can to withhold it from Democratic cities and anyone not white.
Remember, these idiots drive, fuck, and vote. Not always in that order.