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Comment by analyte123 | Hacker News Reader

Aside from the benzene and methanol [1] contamination, I've never heard anyone else comment on all the sketchy emergency-authorization sanitizers at restaurants and other places that cause your hands to smell like prohibition era whiskey mixed with Pine-Sol for an hour. It's funny but it's also not, given the tons of money made selling chemical waste for people to put on their skin.

[1] https://www.fda.gov/drugs/drug-safety-and-availability/fda-u...

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My hope is in the wake of resistant bacteria and diseases caused by a tsunami of endocrine disrupting chemical products, maybe society will come to the conclusion we ought to pragmatically consider data and peer reviewed science when we weigh the pros and cons of public policy. Nobody seems to be asking whether unprecedented amounts of waste, the sky-rocketing rates of suicide and deaths from child abuse, or state sanctioned extermination of species were worth it. Nobody seems to be asking how effective any of these measures were, or whether the goal was ever realistic. Let alone whether all this was worth preventing the inevitable spread of a disease that when all is said and done will kill around a couple million people, average age older than the average lifespan. Begs the question when we live in a world where 8 million people die of diseases associated with fossil fuel pollution, average age around 5 years old. Not going to hold my breath. If growing up post 9-11 taught me anything it's that humans just want to live their lives in fear of the unlikely and use it to be a jerk those they view as outsiders to the tribe.

Fwiw the US really botched the lockdown strategy through lack of coordination. Lockdowns don’t appear to be feasible for longer than a month; people begin to break the rules and reduce its efficacy, plus the economic damage starts to overshadow the health effects. For shorter periods, however, they stop outbreaks. The best strategy is then to use masks, cancel large gatherings, and use lockdowns in short bursts to respond to outbreaks.

The US couldn’t form a cohesive strategy around this and fell into a partisan fight over whether to lockdown at all, leading to a perpetual half-implemented lockdown, the worst of all options. If we choose to do a retrospective on the value of lockdowns, we should bear in mind that “perpetually” is not the only way to use them.

Since the hand sanitizer that smells like whiskey (mine smells more like tequila) comes from beverage distillers, it seems that they'd already know how to make ethanol without benzene and other contaminants since they are distilling for human consumption.

Or at least one would hope so.

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