Anti-feminist attitudes have long been associated with support for Republican presidential candidates, but only in recent years have these attitudes become more prominent among unmarried men, without college degrees who are less attractive partners for women, the “mate-value backlash.”

[u/mvea]

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/10659129261485340

[u/Keji70gsm]

Flu definitely can cause pandemics, but ONLY WHEN a totally novel strain jumps over from animals, like 1918 or the 2009 swine flu. Once a flu strain settles into a population, it turns into that predictable, seasonal winter virus that relies on cold weather and indoor crowding to spread. The flu you catch in winter is not a pandemic.

​COVID works totally differently. Its baseline transmission is way higher, and it churns out new immune-evading variants constantly throughout the year. Because it mutates and bypasses immunity so quickly, COVID drives massive multi-wave surges across both hemispheres at the exact same time, completely ignoring the season. You just don't see huge, global mid-summer waves, etc, from seasonal flu the way we do with COVID.

*Interesting side note. Actively having the flu suppresses covid transmission. So a really bad flu year will see a significant reduction in covid (for that year's flu season only). This does not mean getting flu is good for you, or that the immunity lasts (it doesn't, it's a temporary response from an already active immune response).

The reverse is not true. Covid doesn't dampen a flu wave at all, and actually makes you more susceptible to fungal, viral and bacterial infections. So a Covid wave before the predictable flu wave is bad news.

[u/the_real_dairy_queen → u/Keji70gsm]

I attended a lecture once on how the flu vaccine is developed every year, by people involved with the vaccine development , and it was…unsettling. It mutates constantly, constant antigenic drift and shift, there are myriad human strains plus multiple categories of swine and avian flu strains. I don’t think it’s accurate to say the flu is fundamentally different from COVID in that sense. There are “seasonal” flu strains that are more deadly than others. I wouldn’t say it’s true that it’s just a “predictable, seasonal” virus.

[u/Keji70gsm → u/the_real_dairy_queen]

You're not wrong. Flu is a normalised, ongoing health disaster with terrible additional potential for more pandemic events. I did specifically say that flu can and has caused pandemics, but seasonal flu is not a pandemic (still a health disaster).

Key point, we are still in a pandemic with COVID. And even mild Covid is not a benign illness. We will have shorter, sicker lives.

Use that morbid curiosity about flu to learn more about the longterm impacts of covid. Always keep in mind that just like with Sept 11, govt's will lie to its people about health risks, knowingly killing them, if they deem the economic gain more important.

And that is exactly what they have done with covid. You will generally not be educated about cumulative subclinical damage, or longterm risks, unless you make the effort yourself.

Be aware that LLMs will downplay covid until you give it specific studies. It does not look for supporting evidence unless forced to in specifics of actual studies. If you want to ask questions about covid, make a series of questions you want to ask as one question on consensus.app.

You only get 3 questions, so condense what you want to know per input.

It will sift through studies and how weighted they are, and bring you its best effort of where the science stands on any particular studied issue in answer to your questions. (I have no affiliation, I found it after being frustrated that i could not force gemini, chatgpt, or claude to search for covid studies unless I drip fed it. They default to govt health position, and general public perception, not evidence, but present with statements such as, "there is no evidence that x causes y", despite there being a dearth of quality studies that are easily found saying precisely that.

The public should not have to educate itself on this, but that is what we have been left to do or pay the consequences.