The earlier the warning of a jump to humans, the sooner global health officials can take steps to protect people by launching vaccine development, wide-scale testing and containment measures.
What do you think the odds are of us getting people who refuse to take the Covid vaccine to take the bird flu vaccine?
Unvaccinated people become mutation factories and the disease mutates so that the vaccine is no longer effective, that's why it's important to have everyone vaccinated to prevent the outbreak from worsening.
If only 1/2 of people get the vaccine, we're fucked.
I firmly believe when it comes to serious medical issues like this, personal freedom of choice can just go fuck itself.
You don't want to be vaccinated? Too bad, we'll tie you down and give it to you anyway.
How much would it mutate before it was through getting through those people to the point that the vaccine loses effectiveness? They're a danger to us too.
Viruses evolve, some quite quickly. The flu isn't the fastest (looking at you, HIV), but it's up there. Over time, existing vaccines train your body to fight something that doesn't quite match what's in the wild (i.e. efficacy goes down with time). That's why there's a different seasonal flu vaccine every year.
They create flu vaccines on a yearly cycle, and a pandemic can kick off in a matter of weeks and months, so if it doesn't match the preplanned cycle, they'll have to invest more resources to creating the most up to date vaccine off-cycle.
I don't know if it's like other influenza vaccines, but their effectiveness could be a lot higher. That might be easier when we're just talking about one specific strain. I don't really know enough about the science.
People see a lot of immigrants coming into their area, and taking jobs. It’s not hard to see how people would draw a connection between the above statement and connect it to “that’s why I couldn’t get a job”. There’s a natural push back there.
Some companies see the influx of immigrants and realize they can get cheaper labor, and those that don’t get the job (the ones who already lived in that area) get disgruntled. It’s easy to talk some of them into joining a side that pushes back on immigration.
One of the things the far right looks at is immigration.
The left typically asks for bigger government and more social welfare programs (more taxes).
The right is typically smaller government and less social welfare programs (less taxes).
At a time when we are drowning in debt and can’t afford to buy food, have less taxes and more money in our pocket is an enticing idea. Easy to pull people to the right.
The worse the above problems get, the further to the right people go.
The further to the right they go, the less they hear from the left. Now they only see and hear one side. It becomes a vicious cycle at that point.
"60% growth" seems large, but there are almost 85,000,000 people in Germany, so we're talking about growing from ~0.03% to ~0.05% of the population here.
You're saying this now but they're on course to leave the left in the dust and are likely to compete with greens in terms of members and votes by election sunday next year.
They already have a presence, and are shaping the politics of Germany indirectly. As our leading conservative party (and our socialdemocatric middle -left party to some extent) makes the same error as in US as trying to cater to those extremist views. Which is frightening as fuck, as more and more fascist views are being adopted and normalized
Numbers on the far left are misleading as Die Linke is bleeding members to the BSW but the BSW is taking their sweet time handing out membership cards, double-checking every single applicant. Reportedly they have a backlog of at least 8000 applicants or such and at least 20k people generally interested. Wagenknecht is at least 70% tankie so it doesn't surprise that they're doing a vanguard thing.
Since not everyone is expected to become member of a political party, a more apt comparison would be to membership numbers (and changes in those) for other German parties.
Thanks for the link. Some big parties seem to have hundreds of thousands of members. Didn’t see much for 2024 other than:
Zu Beginn des Jahres 2024 meldeten mehrere Parteien einen starken Mitgliederzuwachs. Bündnis 90/Die Grünen berichteten von 8.000 Neumitgliedern in den ersten beiden Monaten des Jahres.
In any case, considering the political context of our times, AfD’s growth is nothing to scoff at.
I'm sorry, but if you went into the debate not knowing who to vote for where the fuck have you been for eight years?
And to come out the other side saying, "yea the orange lunatic lied to my face about everything , but on the other hand Biden looked kind of tired and stumbled on his words. I think I'll vote for the convicted felon.", I mean, are we humans really just this stupid?
Yes, yes we are. I feel your pain. I said it before and I'll say it again: I would personally vote for a corpse, but it's not me you have to convince.
And if I want to be slightly more kind and less impatient, many humans may mean well, but are so woefully uneducated and uninformed that they fall prey for the mass amount of right-wing misinformation from billions of dollars injected into the media-stream.
This is what happens when you try to substitute undecided voters for your progressive base. It's always been a dumb, high-risk strategy, but it's the only way neoliberals can put off being phased out.
Biden never had a problem with the mass slaughter of women and children. Here's him in 1982:
Begin said Biden “rose and delivered a very impassioned speech” defending the invasion. Begin said he was shocked at how passionately Biden supported Israel’s invasion when Biden “said he would go even further than Israel, adding that he’d forcefully fend off anyone who sought to invade his country, even if that meant killing women or children.” Begin said, “I disassociated myself from these remarks,” adding: “I said to him: No, sir; attention must be paid. According to our values, it is forbidden to hurt women and children, even in war. Sometimes there are casualties among the civilian population as well. But it is forbidden to aspire to this. This is a yardstick of human civilization, not to hurt civilians.” The comments were striking from Begin, who had been notorious as a leader of the Irgun, a militant group that carried out some of the worst acts of ethnic cleansing accompanying the creation of the state of Israel, including the 1948 Deir Yassin massacre.
This is a focus-group of undecided voters -- a small population set to begin with and a sample set designed to be small, but who will clearly decide this election on the margins. You do understand how focus groups work and quite literally all campaigns use these, correct?
And finally, little data is better than no data. Nobody came away from the debate thinking Biden won; so it's not particularly a stretch to see this would hurt him with critical battleground state undecided voters.
Edit: Whew, talk about vote manipulation. I'm astounded by the complete and utter lack of substantive rebuttal.
13 "undecideds" is a poor sampling. Given one of the "undecideds" was basically between Biden or third party, they didn't control for any "never-Bideners" or "never-Trumpers".
Add on this level of ignorance:
Hands down I would vote for a liar and a convict over a person who doesn't seem to be all there mentally.
You're basically scraping the bottom of the barrel to force a clickbait headline and choosing the most bombastic quote from them to include.
You're getting downvotes because it's pretty much never the case of someone honestly and in good faith posting seemingly pro-Trump rhetoric. It always starts out nice, but devolves into the quote above like "I like the convicted felon".
Given how pivotal this moment is, I think it kind of is. Considering only 40,000 votes decided 2020, a handful of undecided voters is extremely vital. What other format would you have it in?
Focus groups aren't meant to be used for gaining an understanding of a broad swath of the population. Focus groups are used for exploratory research, concept testing, and understanding the "why" behind opinions and behaviors.
If you want to generalize trends towards large populations, you're going to need a large sample size. It's statistics that suggests that many respondents will leave you with extremely low confidence in the outcome.
For example, if you are trying to judge the voting preferences of a population of 100,000 people, you'll need 383 randomly sampled people in a survey to reach a 95% confidence interval. 13 is nowhere near the amount of people required to cover those that considered themselves "independents" before the debate.
That's not to say this tells us nothing, but it's by no means a predictive study.
*edit: I actually would say it's harmful because I think that it portrays the narrative as if it is predictive, when it's not.
Not to say this falls on deaf ears because I appreciate your actually understanding how scientific surveys work, but as you said yourself: These focus-groups of undecided voters are certainly warning-signs, and if it was flipped around, users would be up-voting this and BIden's campaign would be touting this as a great thing.
I'm all for larger studies being conducted to show the damage done; the question will then be: How will you change your perception on what needs to be done?
And golly, if only we had large sample sizes of populations comparing Donald Trump and Joe Biden in battleground swing-states. If only we could then compare those numbers to their respective numbers in 2020.... That, combined with said focus group insights, sure would be useful! /s
And that's just the start, pre-debate no less. I cannot think of a single data-point where Biden isn't doing significantly worse than his 2020 performance. National approval ratings, black/hispanic vote, voter enthusiasm, etc.
You want the reason we're down voting you and the post? Because anyone undecided is a fucking moron so we don't give a shit what they think. Same with those voting for Trump.
Because undecided swing-voters in battle-ground states will decide this election on the margins. It's Not you. It's not me. It's those stupid undecided voters that we unfortunately need to cater to, and Joe Biden lost some of those voters in the debate. If the electorate were informed and intelligent, we wouldn't have either of these candidates in the first place.
Reminder that 2020 was decided by something like 40,000 votes thanks to the electoral college.
You don't publish initial results without a significant population sample. 13 people is an abysmal sample size. You need around 10% of a population polled up until about 1,000 people because of the way the curve levels out. 100 people minimum to get something remotely confident. The confidence level of this poll is so low that the publishing of it is irresponsible and unethical.
To your argument about the other poll having only 8, that's also irresponsible. Both articles are clearly jumping to conclusions in an effort to grab views. However, that it received a more positive response is clearly indicative of the way the lemmy population leans. That's really about all you can grab from that... Well, that and people have no idea how statistical averaging works.
Again, you don't seem to understand the intent of focus groups or why they're used by political campaigns. In a way focus groups are more akin to Case Studies, which are still extremely insightful.
Besides, we already have a broader set of polling data of battleground states, and what we see here is a reflection of those wider, scientific polls that didn't bode well for Joe Biden even pre-Debate.
The mere fact that ANY random sample of undecided voters came away with these views, is downright dangerous.
Oh no, I very much do. I have a degree in psychology that requires being able to do statistical analysis for research.
You use a focus group to elicit qualitative, not quantitative, info from a targeted group in a study, not as the study itself. The issue is, it's not meant for broad populations or for quantitative studies. Even then, the data is easily skewed by biases from the group themselves, the moderator, and the interpreter and shouldn't be the only thing used.
Focus groups are meant for things like quality indicators, where you use a range of them in general analysis, which can help to triangulate where an issue is.
To properly employ a focus group, you would first need to poll an appropriate sample size of undecided voters then you target demographics within the sample to gain insight into why they answered their poll as they did.
And how, qualitatively, did these focus groups triangulate where undecided voters are on the issue of who to vote for?
To properly employ a focus group, you would first need to poll an appropriate sample size of undecided voters then you target demographics within the sample to gain insight into why they answered their poll as they did.
Isn't it quite probable they did exactly this? They certainly didn't just pull these people off the streets. They had to aggregate undecided voters to begin with, after all.
I think it's reaching for straws to suggest this isn't saying what we already recognize from polling conducted in battleground states.
Edit:
About 20% of voters say they have not picked a candidate in this year's presidential race, are leaning toward third-party options or might not vote at all, according to the most recent Reuters/Ipsos poll.
Reuters interviewed 15 such voters ahead of Thursday's debate, and they agreed to be interviewed again after the event about whether the debate changed their views.
Then they need to state it, because the only data they've given is that they asked a group of 13 people, one group, which is still not an adequate sample. Period.
That, right there, is why focus groups shouldn't be used for this to generalize a larger population, because the data is being misinterpreted to sell a biased story! Probability would be estimated if they actually conducted a full study. Which they clearly didn't.
And you can't use previously gathered data from battleground states to estimate results after an event. They're snapshots of an opinion at that given time. You can't use them for an event that occurred after the fact. Again, that's unethical and inappropriate.
About 20% of voters say they have not picked a candidate in this year's presidential race, are leaning toward third-party options or might not vote at all, according to the most recent Reuters/Ipsos poll.
Reuters interviewed 15 such voters ahead of Thursday's debate, and they agreed to be interviewed again after the event about whether the debate changed their views.
The data wasn't good before, and it doesn't take a statistician to know they're going to be as-bad or worse than before post-debate. I'll happily take that bet with you and circle back in the coming weeks as state-wide polling proves this.
Yep, if it doesn't go with lefts narrative, they just downvote it. Facts, or nothing else matters. What you just posted proves it. I've also noticed that a lot of the comments from the left are very childish, and always made me think that a lot of them are either just the young keyboard warrior type that doesn't have a job, or that their just bots or something. It seems like they have a lot of supporters online, but when's the last time you've seen someone with a Biden bumper sticker, Tshirt, flag, sign in their yard, etc.? I know I never see them
Lemmy/Reddit is full of Dems and any article that goes against the narrative of the day gets downvoted and it's the same with comments. It's not how it's supposed to work but it does
The Supreme Court has re-assumed their rightful place as elitist reactionaries. From Dred Scott to Plessy v. Ferguson to the New Deal, the main role of the Supreme Court has been to stand on the side of money and power against decency and equality. It is a fundamentally undemocratic institution that has assumed powers never granted to it by any law, and was allowed to do so because it is the last backstop for wealth and power against democratic popular will.
reuters.com
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