It is amazing to me how short our memories are as a species. There are people who are still in congress who had polio. There are an estimated 300,000 people still alive in the US who survived polio. Even with that, the nominated head of Health and Human Services wants to do away with the polio vaccine.
I don’t know what the problem is. Is it a lack of empathy? Is it willingness to swallow the bait surrounding conspiracy theories? Is it just a lack of education? How did we get to the point where it is even remotely okay for the future head of Heath and Human Services to be against the polio vaccine?
If being pro-polio isn’t disqualifying for being the head of HHS, and if he gets confirmed, the U.S. will have very clearly shown that it is in rapid decline. It will have shown that the government is corrupt to its core and is irredeemable.
There are many influences. One is pure resentment of elites as know-it-alls which propagandists amplify. A bit of Dunning–Kruger effect at the same time as people without specialized training can’t even comprehend what they don’t know. Another is how difficult it is to think probabilistically so that people can’t easily appreciate risk. And as more and more people proclaim conspiracy theories as truth there is peer pressure to confirm.
Mitch has done nothing but enable the incoming administration, and helped to get it in power, so he has no leg to stand on now in all of his hand waving about the polio vaccine.
I don’t know what the problem is. Is it a lack of empathy? Is it willingness to swallow the bait surrounding conspiracy theories? I
I think it’s education, so many of us are now "educated ", this makes us confident idiots, a superb pinnacle of that example might be Linus Pauling and vitamin C for example.
If my hypothesis is correct, more education wont help.
Empathy is always lacking, just have to look at the refugee debate, its not new. Jews were turned away when Hitler sent them overseas, telling other countries to take then or he’d start killing them,
Japense interment camps in the US in WW2, slavery, endless wars prosecuted on other countries and participants lionised, it’s part of our makeup that’s difficult for most people to overcome,. I’d posit they don’t want to overcome it. . Then there’s the whole treatment of native peoples all over the world. US, Australia, Sweden, New Zealand, Russia and on and on.
The one thing that unites Demorcats and Republicans ? disdain for the homeless, again a lack of empathy.
If that’s true, you’d expect to see more conspiracy theories among more educated populations. People with PhDs and MDs would be the most likely to be antivaxxers. Do you have statistics to confirm that?
Paraphrasing from a recent episode of Behind the Bastards on the Vioxx scandal: There’s a lot of recency bias in humans where it’s difficult to look past the fuckups of the pharma industry. If their “current” MO is to make a shit ton of money at the cost of human lives, then why would someone with lesser critical thinking skills trust them? One needs quite a bit more faculties to separate the capitalism from the good they are doing and tell apart what’s trustworthy and what not.
So pharma fucked their bed spectacularly and aren’t doing fuck all to restore trust. And that’s very sad considering how important they could be if they wanted to.
So pharma fucked their bed spectacularly and aren’t doing fuck all to restore trust.
It goes farther than that, because of how aggressively the US has resisted drug imports and fear mongered against foreign science and development.
The post-COVID “vaccine diplomacy” of European and Chinese state pharmaceutical providers (hell, Cuba even developed a variant) was matched with a flood of early US reporting that amounted to “don’t trust any vaccine that isn’t American!!!” Then there was a dirty war between domestic providers over whose vaccine was the best.
I need to get back to listening to podcasts. I’ve taken a break since the election because many of my favorites were political and I’m currently burying my head in the sand and screaming “I CAN’T HEAR YOU!”.
Maybe I’ll dive back in with BTB. That seems mostly safe…
The above link will give you the overview of the historical background on antivax movement since vaccine invention.
It basically boils down to two arguments, which feed each other.
Risk => Vaccine are/can be/will be/may be/ought to be dangerous to someone somewhere, somehow. I don’t understand and I’m scared.
FrEeDoM => I do not contract and I am free to decide what treatment I get, I am not a sheep and I participate in no herd and the only immunity I accept is from overbearing big government.
In spite of my sarcasm, I do think the second argument has merit, a government should of course be extremely careful with mandatory medical treatment of any kind and bear the burden of proving regularly that the benefits continues to far outweigh any and all alternative.
That reminds me, I have a 10am appointment for my flu shot. Almost forgot.
I agree that governments should be careful about what medical treatments they make mandatory. I think the US government has been pretty judicious with their decisions, though. The vaccines that are mandated for school attendance are wildly effective and have been shown to be safe, both via scientific studies and decades of dispensing many of them.
I see it as a sign of health that people working with vaccines only use them when they are beneficial, and don’t use them when there are reasons not to.
I don’t know the reasons he has in this case. Would be interesting to know more.
I think I can understand your reasoning but I disagree with it.
A few years back, a vaccine was removed from our national vaccination plan. It was deemed as unnecessary, as the disease was considered erradicated. The decision was mostly political, with our National Healthcare Council keeping a very terse silence on the matter.
Precisely two years after the alteration, a sudden, unpredictable, with no known vector of origin, series of cases surged. Luckily, no child died, as the our NHS is robust enough to handle this kind of situation but there was a swift public backlash from the National Healthcare Council, on why the withdrawal of the vaccine had opened doors to a ressurgence of the disease. The vaccine was quickly reintroduced.
Smallpox was erradicated because of vaccination efforts. Many more could have been, if wasn’t for stupidity and religious fanaticis. Having an openly admitted vaccine denier take office is a sad joke, made at the expense of who knows how many lifes.
If you want to know more, go read the lawsuit he is associated with to remove FDA approval of the polo vaccine. Essentially, he believes fraudulent research that indicates that vaccines cause autism.
Then, before you take what he says at face value, go read a history of polio.
If you give the materials an honest read, you’ll find that polio is horrific, that the vaccine was one of the greatest medical achievements of the 20th century, and that the evidence indicating that the vaccine causes autism is all junk.
Ooooh no. No, fuck off. This disingenuous “just asking questions” shtick can fuck right off. This is about polio you fucking lunatic, get a fucking grip.
I think that is true for some of the people involved, but I think it is much more complicated than that. There are many people who think vaccines do more harm than good because they believe conspiracy theories and junk science. Not everyone against vaccines is malicious. Some must be, though, for such bullshit to keep propagating the way that it does.
Most of Trump’s cabinet ranges from morally indifferent to outright hostile to human beings. The only exception I think I see is RFK Jr. who is just batshit insane.
Yep. Biden and Harris come to mind, as does the rest of the Democratic establishment. If they didn’t prefer Trump to Bernie, this would be a much sweeter timeline.
It is amazing to me how short our memories are as a species. There are people who are still in congress who had polio. There are an estimated 300,000 people still alive in the US who survived polio. Even with that, the nominated head of Health and Human Services wants to do away with the polio vaccine.
I don’t know what the problem is. Is it a lack of empathy? Is it willingness to swallow the bait surrounding conspiracy theories? Is it just a lack of education? How did we get to the point where it is even remotely okay for the future head of Heath and Human Services to be against the polio vaccine?
If being pro-polio isn’t disqualifying for being the head of HHS, and if he gets confirmed, the U.S. will have very clearly shown that it is in rapid decline. It will have shown that the government is corrupt to its core and is irredeemable.
There are many influences. One is pure resentment of elites as know-it-alls which propagandists amplify. A bit of Dunning–Kruger effect at the same time as people without specialized training can’t even comprehend what they don’t know. Another is how difficult it is to think probabilistically so that people can’t easily appreciate risk. And as more and more people proclaim conspiracy theories as truth there is peer pressure to confirm.
History should be mandatory especially to vote. Some people don’t even remember the holocaust and they’re repeating it again.
Mitch McConnel.
Mitch has done nothing but enable the incoming administration, and helped to get it in power, so he has no leg to stand on now in all of his hand waving about the polio vaccine.
I think it’s education, so many of us are now "educated ", this makes us confident idiots, a superb pinnacle of that example might be Linus Pauling and vitamin C for example.
If my hypothesis is correct, more education wont help.
Empathy is always lacking, just have to look at the refugee debate, its not new. Jews were turned away when Hitler sent them overseas, telling other countries to take then or he’d start killing them,
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/us-government-turned-away-thousands-jewish-refugees-fearing-they-were-nazi-spies-180957324/
Japense interment camps in the US in WW2, slavery, endless wars prosecuted on other countries and participants lionised, it’s part of our makeup that’s difficult for most people to overcome,. I’d posit they don’t want to overcome it. . Then there’s the whole treatment of native peoples all over the world. US, Australia, Sweden, New Zealand, Russia and on and on.
The one thing that unites Demorcats and Republicans ? disdain for the homeless, again a lack of empathy.
If that’s true, you’d expect to see more conspiracy theories among more educated populations. People with PhDs and MDs would be the most likely to be antivaxxers. Do you have statistics to confirm that?
Sometimes it feels like it’s all done to grab headlines.
It works, they eat cats and dogs.
Stupidity.
Paraphrasing from a recent episode of Behind the Bastards on the Vioxx scandal: There’s a lot of recency bias in humans where it’s difficult to look past the fuckups of the pharma industry. If their “current” MO is to make a shit ton of money at the cost of human lives, then why would someone with lesser critical thinking skills trust them? One needs quite a bit more faculties to separate the capitalism from the good they are doing and tell apart what’s trustworthy and what not.
So pharma fucked their bed spectacularly and aren’t doing fuck all to restore trust. And that’s very sad considering how important they could be if they wanted to.
It goes farther than that, because of how aggressively the US has resisted drug imports and fear mongered against foreign science and development.
The post-COVID “vaccine diplomacy” of European and Chinese state pharmaceutical providers (hell, Cuba even developed a variant) was matched with a flood of early US reporting that amounted to “don’t trust any vaccine that isn’t American!!!” Then there was a dirty war between domestic providers over whose vaccine was the best.
All that propaganda took its toll.
I need to get back to listening to podcasts. I’ve taken a break since the election because many of my favorites were political and I’m currently burying my head in the sand and screaming “I CAN’T HEAR YOU!”.
Maybe I’ll dive back in with BTB. That seems mostly safe…
https://historyofvaccines.org/vaccines-101/misconceptions-about-vaccines/history-anti-vaccination-movements
The above link will give you the overview of the historical background on antivax movement since vaccine invention.
It basically boils down to two arguments, which feed each other.
Risk => Vaccine are/can be/will be/may be/ought to be dangerous to someone somewhere, somehow. I don’t understand and I’m scared.
FrEeDoM => I do not contract and I am free to decide what treatment I get, I am not a sheep and I participate in no herd and the only immunity I accept is from overbearing big government.
In spite of my sarcasm, I do think the second argument has merit, a government should of course be extremely careful with mandatory medical treatment of any kind and bear the burden of proving regularly that the benefits continues to far outweigh any and all alternative.
That reminds me, I have a 10am appointment for my flu shot. Almost forgot.
I agree that governments should be careful about what medical treatments they make mandatory. I think the US government has been pretty judicious with their decisions, though. The vaccines that are mandated for school attendance are wildly effective and have been shown to be safe, both via scientific studies and decades of dispensing many of them.
I see it as a sign of health that people working with vaccines only use them when they are beneficial, and don’t use them when there are reasons not to.
I don’t know the reasons he has in this case. Would be interesting to know more.
I think I can understand your reasoning but I disagree with it.
A few years back, a vaccine was removed from our national vaccination plan. It was deemed as unnecessary, as the disease was considered erradicated. The decision was mostly political, with our National Healthcare Council keeping a very terse silence on the matter.
Precisely two years after the alteration, a sudden, unpredictable, with no known vector of origin, series of cases surged. Luckily, no child died, as the our NHS is robust enough to handle this kind of situation but there was a swift public backlash from the National Healthcare Council, on why the withdrawal of the vaccine had opened doors to a ressurgence of the disease. The vaccine was quickly reintroduced.
Smallpox was erradicated because of vaccination efforts. Many more could have been, if wasn’t for stupidity and religious fanaticis. Having an openly admitted vaccine denier take office is a sad joke, made at the expense of who knows how many lifes.
If you want to know more, go read the lawsuit he is associated with to remove FDA approval of the polo vaccine. Essentially, he believes fraudulent research that indicates that vaccines cause autism.
Then, before you take what he says at face value, go read a history of polio.
If you give the materials an honest read, you’ll find that polio is horrific, that the vaccine was one of the greatest medical achievements of the 20th century, and that the evidence indicating that the vaccine causes autism is all junk.
Ooooh no. No, fuck off. This disingenuous “just asking questions” shtick can fuck right off. This is about polio you fucking lunatic, get a fucking grip.
Yes, it’s a disregard for human life
I think that is true for some of the people involved, but I think it is much more complicated than that. There are many people who think vaccines do more harm than good because they believe conspiracy theories and junk science. Not everyone against vaccines is malicious. Some must be, though, for such bullshit to keep propagating the way that it does.
What is quite scary is that it doesnt have to be vaccines, they could be convinced of anything given time and right approach.
Most of Trump’s cabinet ranges from morally indifferent to outright hostile to human beings. The only exception I think I see is RFK Jr. who is just batshit insane.
Don’t sell RFK Jr short. He might be crazy but he’s also an evil POS.
Agreed. It takes more than Trump, his cabinet, and MAGA to get here, though. It requires complicity and complacency from a ton of other people.
Yep. Biden and Harris come to mind, as does the rest of the Democratic establishment. If they didn’t prefer Trump to Bernie, this would be a much sweeter timeline.
Yeah I think those other people are conspiracy theorists, like you said.