this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2024

595 points (99.0% liked)

News

23301 readers

3558 users here now

Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil

Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.

2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.

Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.

3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.

Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.

4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.

Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.

5. Only recent news is allowed.

Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.

6. All posts must be news articles.

No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.

7. No duplicate posts.

If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.

8. Misinformation is prohibited.

Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.

9. No link shorteners.

The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.

10. Don't copy entire article in your post body

For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

595

'I'm dying, you're not': Those terminally ill ask more states to legalize physician-assisted death (apnews.com)

submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

116 comments fedilink hide all child comments

On a brisk day at a restaurant outside Chicago, Deb Robertson sat with her teenage grandson to talk about her death.

She’ll probably miss his high school graduation. She declined the extended warranty on her car. Sometimes she wonders who will be at her funeral.

Those things don’t frighten her much. The 65-year-old didn’t cry when she learned two months ago that the cancerous tumors in her liver were spreading, portending a tormented death.

But later, she received a call. A bill moving through the Illinois Legislature to allow certain terminally ill patients to end their own lives with a doctor’s help had made progress.

Then she cried.

“Medical-aid in dying is not me choosing to die,” she says she told her 17-year-old grandson. “I am going to die. But it is my way of having a little bit more control over what it looks like in the end.”

That same conversation is happening beside hospital beds and around dinner tables across the country, as Americans who are nearing life’s end negotiate the terms with themselves, their families and, now, state lawmakers.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] -1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

The issue with vaccines is though that you need herd immunity. You need at least 90% vaccinated, better 95. Add in people that cannot be vaccinated (immuno compromised, people who are already very I'll from something else, etc) and you have basically no space for healthy individuals to refuse vaccinations. If they do, vaccines will work less well.

I know what hurd immunity is and I said as much. Maybe try reading before you jump to conclusions.

Hurd immunity works really well for things like smallpox or measles because you have vaccines that prevent transmission effectively (not just symptoms, actual transmission and infection), and they don't mutate very quickly so as to overcome the vaccines. It never worked perfectly against influenza because of antigenic shift meaning the virus mutates faster than you can make new vaccines to treat it. There are also too many varieties for a single vaccine to treat. HIV is the same problem on steroids, that's partly why there are no vaccines for it. COVID vaccines face the same issue. This doesn't mean that the vaccines are useless, or that they don't help reduce hospitalisation - I never claimed this at all. Rather it means that by themselves they won't eliminate the disease in their current state.

You specifically talk about hitting 90% of people vaccinated in order to create hurd immunity. That's exactly what we have in the UK, yet still we see infections and deaths.

And on forced medical treatment and vaccines it shows that you too don't understand how vaccines work. No, vaccines don't give 100% protection but it's like wearing a bullet proof vest and get shot at. You still get injured but a shit load less than without. Some people get shot and still die (Bullets hitting US vests were allowed to push up to 2 inches into the chest, which CAN be lethal). Same with vaccines. You have to start thinking in %. Instead of 90% getting sick, now only 5% gets sick and instead of millions dying, only hundreds die.

What makes you think I don't understand vaccines? I probably understand them better than you do. Be honest did you know what antigenic shift was before I brought it up? Do you know what the difference between a killer CF8+ T cell and a CD4+ helper T cell is and what roles they play in the adaptive immune response? What's the difference between a complement protein and an antibody?

I am not claiming vaccines do nothing. I myself have had three of them. What I am saying is this:

a) you can't ethically force any treatment including a vaccine on someone outside of very specific circumstances like a mental health crisis

b) that the effectiveness of COVID vaccines were oversold to the public

c) that said overselling combined with other lies, exaggerations, bad policy and bad research created public distrust that has set back vaccine advocy and science advocacy for a decade or more

d) labelling anyone who has any concerns at all about COVID policy or vaccines as anti-vaxxer or anti-science only hurts advocacy, encourages misinformation, and discourages critical thinking

e) that we need more than just vaccines to fix COVID. That's why we have other treatments and prophylactics like antiviral medicine. This is already used against other diseases like Influenza and HIV that show resistance to vaccination via antigenic shift.

Like it's actually no wonder we have antivaxxers after everything your average pro vaccine person has done, on top of all the government scaremongering, hypocrisy and plain incompetence shown in the pandemic. If you want an example of what that looks like look no further than the UK, where I live. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partygate

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

The way you're name dropping suggests you have a Wikipedia level knowledge of these things. The way you talk about Covid and how it was handled suggests you have a Facebook conspiracy theory level knowledge of the events that transpired.

Yes, ooohhh, a lot of mistakes were made. Yes, some government officials were huge irresponsible assholes.

None of that changes the fact that vaccines are not only important, they are vital in ensuring people won't have to suffer from preventable illnesses. We NEED vaccines, like it or not.

What we as human beings also must do is start listening again to the experts, not to companies, not to politicians with their own agendas, and especially not to Facebook posts and YouTube or TikTok videos of self subscribed "lone wolf scientists"

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

None of that changes the fact that vaccines are not only important, they are vital in ensuring people won't have to suffer from preventable illnesses. We NEED vaccines, like it or not.

I don't dislike vaccines though. You haven't actually listened to anything I am saying.

I am telling you it's not ethical to force treatment on people. You can't make people responsible for the actions of a virus. Forcing people can only lead to violence and even more anti-vaxxers.

Vaccines alone also are not sufficient or applicable for all situations. People claiming they are aren't listening to the experts as you put it. They are a useful tool not a perfect one.

I hate to tell you this but listening to experts isn't enough. They have to get funding somewhere. Individual systematic biases exist. Whenever reading scientific studies you should be looking for the conflict of interest section, for peer review, as well as the reputation of the publisher and the people writing the study. You also have to consider things like sexism, rascism and ableism and how it's affected the scientific process in the past.