With god as my armour I need no vaccines

Science showed things like climate change, which was hurting the bottom line of giant corporations who donate huge amounts of money to Republicans, so Republicans convinced their base that science is against God, and that it's all part of the evil woke liberals thing. So now anything that comes from science, including vaccines, is tainted.

1. The people who aren't idiots are already vaccinated so they'll be fine.

2. The people who are idiots think they are safer without vaccination. They are the ones who will die (or their children) but they aren't aware of it.

3. The people who can't get vaccinated but aren't idiots are kind of just screwed but this is an incredibly small minority of the population.

Because we also die from totally preventable school shootings too.

We're actively disinformed. That's why. It's really that simple.

To own the libs!

Because

1. taxing the rich is a partisan stance

2. people are unaware that the government would spend less on singlepayer than it spends currently dealing with middlemen

3. a non-negligible number of people don't believe in micro-organisms, nutrition, or cancer as it is understood by doctors

TLDR: decentralized education with zero funding makes a whole country of dumb assholes.

"preventable disease" and "Americans" are very broad terms

Not just americans. this started in the uk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wakefield

Most of us are concerned.

The minority are concerned because the US government has done unethical and malicious medical stuff to minorities, which makes some level of hesitancy for those groups understandable. Not the cod oil instead of vaccines bullshit white middle class and up promote, that is pure snake oil propaganda.

We're concerned, we just can't afford health care

I think a lot of Americans have the option that these contagious diseases aren't really dangerous anymore and that THEY won't be affected by any fallout. THEY will be able to survive it so THEY don't care.

In reality, lots of people live in small communities and even though they might go on the internet, they don't go very deep. So unless it's in their face, they don't know much about it. And "my gran pappy had the mumps and he was fine!" mentality.

Because, in spite (or perhaps because of) the 'rough individualist' propaganda, most Americans have a strong sense of powerlessness and that all they can do is keep their head down and hope for the best. It veers into some really absurdist fatalism at times.

t. leftist American from a conservative area who still keeps tabs on family

Questions like this seem stupid, or they just need to be phrased in a more reasonable way.

we have a domestic cult that doesn't listen to anything outside of the cult. for the people not in the cult, most are not against medicine and other modern things. some of us are actual scientists and feel like we just live here.

People only care about narratives, and a side effect of having a scientific/naturalistic worldview is that things like disease become narratively inert.

People used to care a lot more about diseases when they could be given narrative causes like witchcraft or demons.

I think many of us don't realize that there's a better option. As in, this is just the way it is. Many who do learn there are alternatives then fall to propaganda about how the alternatives are worse or communist, etc.

We also have a chronic disposition toward optimism. You know “the American dream” and all that.

So a disease with a 10% mortality rate has a 90% survival rate. And 90% is bigger than 50%, so when you factor in chronic optimism it’s basically a 100% survival rate in our brains.

Because we are so far removed from poor conditions that some of us don't even think they exist. And since they've never seen it, misinformation can just slide right in.

What is there to live for? Collective pain and misery. Be a mensch and let go.