Polio is on the brink of eradication
nature.com
nature.com
Even if the last stage of eradication is stubbornly slow, we have obviously been quite successful at limiting the number of cases.
The taliban started attacking polio vaccine workers and the UN suspended operations. Polio exists in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Nigeria
According to a study conducted in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan, respondents misconceived the vaccine to be capable of causing harm to the immune system (93%), triggering adverse reactions 97.5%, to be against their social and moral values (95%), and to be not as good as traditional methods for treating children 98.5%
https://www.emro.who.int/emhj-volume-28-2022/volume-28-issue...
Is not a good rationale for making a decision. Parents, indeed anyone, shouldn't be worried about anything administered by a needle unless proper protocols are not followed, and they always should.
Nowadays it's a horrific notion and should never be done but back then the horrors of polio were so real and frightening that doing multiple vaccinations with one needle was of secondary importance (or so it seems). I've often wondered since how many cases of polio and hepatitis were actually spread back then by using a common needle (I've never understood why even back then doctors weren't concerned about this).
BTW, as I've mentioned previously, we kids were lined in the school's assembly hall in two long lines of over 100 that extended out the doors into the schoolyard—one line for boys and one for girls—and vaccinated immediately one after another. After every dozen or so kids the needle was changed.
It quickly got around that a new needle didn't hurt as much as a well-used one and we kids started jostling for positions in the line. We watched and counted how often the needle was changed then count our position in the line, we then we'd pay pennies to buy an optimal positions in the line (be first after the needle was changed). That being first was less risky never entered our minds.
At no time were we ever told about the dangers of sharing needles. As far as I am aware none of us got ill from that experience.
Incidentally, the whole school of about 1100 kids was vaccinated in about an hour and half—between the morning tea break and lunchtime. Compare that with the slow rigmarole of vaccination campaigns of today.
Which means someone at the CIA said, “Hey that thing that happened in the X-Files, let’s do that but for real!”
Spoiler:
It was the one where Mulder finds his sister’s record, then tears off the name to see his own underneath.
I doesn’t really matter though. The real world CIA vaccines were against Hepatitis B.
It also refers to the part in disc brakes which holds the brake pads and squeezes them together onto the rotor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonas_Salk
Salk was immediately hailed as a "miracle worker" when the vaccine's success was first made public in April 1955, and chose to not patent the vaccine or seek any profit from it in order to maximize its global distribution.
Salk himself wasn't much in favour of a patent, stating that his techniques weren’t novel and the work was built upon the research of others.
https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-polio-vacc...
The famous "could you patent the sun" quote was about obviousness, not about anything else.
Dealing with vaccine-derived polio is going to be the big issue for the next decade, but projections suggest that type 1 polio will go out of control if OPV cessation happens on the desired timeline and the status quo is kept up until then.
If Ken Griffin or Jim Simons (or any hedge fund guy) wants some extra karma or has beef with Bill Gates, this is probably an $X billion project in total, but it seems to need someone who can out-asshole Afghan warlords and is willing to crack a few skulls to get it done.
Wasn't the gates foundation a big promoter of this? I thought it was one of their main focuses.
Gates himself moves between a lot of different "current things" - it was polio 15 years ago, then it became malaria, and now it seems to be the climate (with a brief stopover on COVID).
I vividly recall my parents' mounting anxiety as three of our neighborhood kids were stricken and put in iron lungs. One died (age 4), two recovered (ages 5 & 6) after around 6 months in hospital. I've kept track of one - she's 74. In her 50s, she developed muscle degeneration as part of post-polio syndrome. Wrecked her ability to live independently.
I got both the Salk and the later Sabin vaccine. That took a huge weight from my parents' spirit, improved our family dynamics.
I'll track this story. I deeply hope for polio to follow smallpox into oblivion.
The former I think people accept because if we can eradicate it through vaccination then it's a problem solved, so we are working towards that. The latter I don't think anyone actually accepts, it's just a hard problem and progress is slow.
It seems likely to me that if you can identify the nutrients depleted by the infection and also actually clear the infection from the body, this should be relatively easy to repair compared to something like a broken neck.
I did a quick search ("are there any organizations working specifically on polio paralysis" on Bing) and most hits are about the news currently under discussion, not about research into treating the paralysis. I did find this page on The Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation site:
https://www.christopherreeve.org/todays-care/living-with-par...
They indicate there are a lot of studies on Post Polio Syndrome, which is not per se research into treating paralysis. Some stats from the page:
Over 12 million people, worldwide have been affected by polio as indicated by the CDC.
There is no central system for reporting post-polio syndrome, but it is estimated that 300,000 individuals are survivors of polio in the United States and have mild to severe symptoms.
Of the 300,000 survivors of polio, it is estimated that of one fourth to one half may develop some form of post-polio symptoms.
Does it? We're still unable to cure MS, just slow or stall the progression of it.
AKA personal opinion.
But even when a virus is not targeting the CNS, generally they have the ability to do a lot more lasting damage than blunt force trauma, as a virus can cause DNA mutations / changes at a sub-cellular level, which you will not see from BFT.
Compare it to a skin issue. Which is more difficult to treat: a large blister caused by touching the hot stove, or a blister caused by herpes?
In my experience, viral infections aren't that hard to treat and I no longer get fever blisters (which happen to be caused by herpes, coincidentally). There are lots of natural antivirals out there and this was common knowledge on an email list I once frequented which no longer exists.
I list it as my personal opinion not to say that it's merely a wild-assed guess based on nothing in particular but to say that you aren't going to change my mind and I don't have any sources to cite and don't wish to get into an argument over it.
What we're talking about here with polio isn't suppressing or eliminating a virus, we're talking about fixing damage caused by a viral infection to the CNS. At this point, the polio virus isn't even a problem: people who recover from it don't have the virus anymore, they're just stuck with the damage it's caused, much like people today with "long Covid". This isn't something that's going to be easy to fix.
I was reading a post by someone, a few years ago, lamenting that we had “killed” a virus.
I am not 100% sure they were being serious, but they gave every indication that they were.
In any case, I’m sure that some bioweapons lab, somewhere (like, maybe, in Frederick, MD) has samples of the virus, “just in case it comes back.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox_virus_retention_debat...
Damn I just though I could have been a left arm bicep model.
Of course however we store that genomic code had better be on physical media in a sealed vault that isn’t even within spitting distance of anything with an internet connection.
If it's going to be preserved, I think I'm happier with it not being digital and stored in highly secured areas by professionals, but perhaps the threat model in my head isn't accurate enough.
That's already been done, I think.
That is, if smallpox or another new disease shows up, I hope that vaccine development will be quicker and quicker.
Just in case you didn't have enough things to worry about!
We currently are de facto breeding antibiotic resistant infections in places without adequate sanitation or water infrastructure and you can go from pretty much anywhere on the planet to pretty much anywhere else these days in 24 hours or less. When people from developed countries get sick while someplace else, they are often medevaced out to get them good care in a modern facility, thereby potentially exposing people in their country to whatever they have.
We need to do a better job of providing basics like adequate water infrastructure worldwide if we want to be free from such diseases in our cushy developed countries.
Population growth tends to stop with adequate education plus reproductive rights for women. Development isn't just about infrastructure. It's also about culture, education, developing the local population so they can sustain a more developed society.
My recollection: water.org was started by a man who went to Africa with a medical charity, concluded that a lot of the health issues they were treating were directly caused by lack of clean water, decided we should fix that.
We already invest in other countries, just not necessarily wisely. Advanced surgery being brought to primitive conditions is more about people wanting to feel heroic than about really improving things.
If the societies are fragile (vulnerable to drought, markets, or violence), or rotting (corruption, superstition, tribalism), even great infrastructure can make for subpar growth.
An analogy I always think of are Wadis (dry riverbeds); in very dry places with little rainfall (like Hudaydah in Yemen / Saudi Arabia), when it DOES rain, the dry dirt riverbeds don't soak up any water and transport it all out in flash floods - but it IS possible (and has been done) to invest in the land's ability to hold that water rather than purge it. Similarly, in a "always-developing" society, there'd have to be a investment in the people to ensure they can benefit from solutions to their issues.
UN prediction for Africa is that they fall close to the reproduction threshold for the end of century. Until that the poverty trap will continue. It also means that by that time now 4 billion people require their needs satisfied instead.
But the population growth has been huge and exponential. From 200 million to 4 billion in 150 years is an incredible amount of growth.
The reason that countries that have high population growth tend to be poor is because when a country gets rich its people have fewer children. The high fertility rate does not cause the poverty, instead its the other way around: the poverty causes the high fertility rate.
There must be a feedback loop that incentivizes to get better education, to get better productivity to get richer. Raising a child is expensive, raising a highly educated child is very expensive. If you have 8 children then you can barely feed them unless you are very rich indeed. Even if you manage to provide good education for few of your children then the larger part of them continues the poverty loop. Breaking out of poverty requires breaking of this loop.
It should be very obvious - if your economy grows 5% but your population grows 10% then everybody is getting poorer as the growth per capita is negative. The same applies for everything, education, sanitation, food production. If you capacity to provide any of them is lower than the population growth then the amount of the poor continues to increase.
And Russia is probably not playing with the grain shortage. They had an agreement in place to let the country they are at war with sell grain because it's so critical.
It's probably more complicated than that and a tangent.
Russia certainly used the risk of hunger as a weapon to increase political pressure on Ukraine on the international level. Fortunately that attempt didn't play out and Russia was instead pressurized to make concessions. But they stopped the agreement the same moment they thought that it is not beneficial for them anymore. But this is just a side topic and was given as an example how the African incapacity to keep up with the population growth has wider geopolitical implications.
There was a time when HN was more conversational than it typically seems these days. It gets hard to assume someone is making conversation rather than making an argument when the default seems to be the latter.
Opinions are divided: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP8CzlFhc14#t=3m>
If anything, the argument is a nationalistic one, and nationalism have traditionally been associated with the right, not the left.
Before the six-seven digit earning engineers here lambast me, I'm talking billionaires.
No one intelligent can/has yet looked me in the eye and told me earnestly: anyone with a billion + $ would have a single degree lower quality of life if their wealth was capped at 999 million
If you want empirics google "highest marginal tax rate 1950- present" and "infrastructure spending 1950- present".
Warren Buffet doesn't have an extravagant lifestyle. He's been entrusted to make decisions about how to spend our economy's resources in part because he's made good decisions in the past.
Obviously it doesn't always happen this way; but the accumulation of wealth by itself isn't necessarily bad. It's bad when it can be accumulated by ways which destroy value for society rather than creating it; and it's bad when it can continue to be accumulated by doing nothing.
I don't know if they're as different as you portray in practice. I agree with the notion in theory, which is why I distinctly used "wealth" in my original comment and not "income".
>He's been entrusted to make decisions about how to spend our economy's resources in part because he's made good decisions in the past.
Sure, no one is saying don't aspire to a meritocracy when considering control of the state's purse strings.
The key to your example and your "accumulation of wealth by itself isn't necessarily bad" notion is the reason I didn't say "no organization" should have more than 999m. I was strictly referring to excess personal accumulation of capital. Which harms us all.
Like I said, no one's quality of life is going to get worse if personal wealth were capped at 999m, but I can think of infinite ways to make a lot of people's quality of life better with the money we'd have in such an organization of the economy.
>and it's bad when it can continue to be accumulated by doing nothing
I don't even know if I agree with this. A state fund that earns interest and spends that interest makes sense. I think the key is the first case you note where it's bad.
It's still the same primate but now it's got a gun.
I think we basically agree on this. The question is whether a flat policy of "nobody can ever control more than a billion dollars" has any justification, either pragmatically or ethically. "Wow that's a lot" and "Maybe they aren't actually very smart" aren't really that well founded.
This is how you end up the management class of people who do basically nothing and collect huge bonuses for it, running companies into the ground slowly by not making them taking any risks/not trying to do anything.
Often that's exactly what prevents bad ideas and gives a chance for good ideas to flourish. The actual strength of democracy is not that it allows to make more decisions, but that it prevents making decisions unless they seem good to a lot of "bosses". At least that's how it works in multi-party democracies. Systems of governance that concentrate a lot of power in single hand may have a good run from time to time when the supreme leader accidentally has a good idea and can move fast with it, but they fail miserably over the long term because they have no safeguard against bad decisions which are way more frequent.
There's nothing unique about capital and its derived power that suddenly makes concentrating it in one hand any less harmful then it is with armies, countries and nations.
Doing nothing is the best course of action more often than any other sort of action. Economy loves stability so it can stably grow. Some amount of disruption is necessary for the development but it's really hard to tell if the billionaires capital reinforces or suppresses the right kind of disruption.
Not necessarily, company could be broken down in to smaller, become employee owned in some part, could have some amount of stock become owned by an infrastructure fund or something. There's many ways to skin a cat
If there are no options, you better believe they'll create them soon enough.
Completely agree, it will always be a cat and mouse game. But it's a worthy aspiration, and I'd argue the reason the wealthy have been the cat more than the mouse in the relationship with the state is due only to the budget disparity between them.
Start to shrink the disparity between the enforcement budget (think IRS special forces for the ultra wealthy) and the "avoid taxes" budget and the aspiration looks a lot more doable.
>owner of the 999m will stop investing
Maybe. Or maybe they'll get better and spending rather than hoarding and continuously need to replenish that stock.
Even if these "winners" of a more 'social capitalism' stopped gracing us with their genius, the surplus of wealth in endeavors like free stem schooling for everyone (that wants it) would surely make up for that loss??
If you think taking money from paper billionaires is going to make a material difference to the US's $6 trillion spending each year, can you quantify how much are you expecting it to raise?
Glad to hear that limited government is now considered leftist politics. No more pork barrels for the Democrats?
I still believe in state solutions to healthcare to start, since that's the topic at hand.
And yes, I know it's much bigger than the military and pentagon, but I can't exactly summarize Pikkety's Capital and ideology or the socialist manifesto by sunkara in a couple hn comments can I?
Re the "we're vital for the whole house of cards" to remain standing, lol.
What good have we done recently besides maybe funding ukraine? Were we keeping the house of cards standing in iraq? vietnam? Korea? points to latin america in general Need I go on? Iran? Were we keeping the cards up when we spent money arming the Mujahadeen?
To control the hyper-rich, the solution is simple. Corporate tax breaks for your lowest paid employee's salary. The higher that floor, the less tax you pay. Incentivize prosperity, not taxation and slavery.
The US military has not one, but three aerobatics teams spending over a hundred million per year total. To cite a single example of completely pointless spending
States are ALSO absolutely HORRIBLE at doing this basic thing correctly. They waste enormous amounts of money doing worthless things and under-invest in infrastructure in ways that makes my eyes water. Same as the ultra rich really.
It's all about cultural stories. You have fallen into the base line left-right story so hard you replied to my comment with a non-sequitur. Literally it was nonsense, because your preconceived ideas of the solution space cannot even map what I was saying.
This is a war of ideas where currently sanity isn't only losing, it's not even in the game. The big players are Islam, Christianity, Communism, and Libertarianism/Laissez-faire capitalism. All of which are basically death cults in this context.
Pretty bold to claim that government intervention post-taxes would work better than philanthropic fundations.
How about this: the state is bad because it declares war and sends people to their deaths. Its projects often go astonishingly over budget, corruption is high in many countries, and its funding is unreliable, as it's prone to not keeping the promises of the people previously in charge.
That accurately describes almost every state that ever existed. If you have a similar list for all philanthropic institutions, that would be a good start in justifying your claim that philanthropy doesn't work, so we have to take the money and let the bureaucrats handle it.
Wouldn't it make more sense to conclude war is bad, rather than states themselves?
>Its projects often go astonishingly over budget, corruption is high in many countries, and its funding is unreliable, as it's prone to not keeping the promises of the people previously in charge
All of this I agree with. But the solution isn't "less states" it's... Better states, surely? What am I missing here?
My point with the question about where a majority of our infrastructure comes from, (roads, schools, hospitals, water, electricity and sewage systems to specify as a start) the state or the benevolence of philanthropists was to demonstrate that there is quite a bit of evidence as to what structure is the better steward of societies, a bunch of rich guys, or a state with some mandate to do right by its constituents.
Additionally, our democratic function has strange domain mismatches were it has been overfit on unusual cases. Anyone who is more agency seeking than average will likely confront some vogonic laws and develop conflicting feelings.
try the book Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal.
People in the bottom percentile are tremendously well served by many modern democracies, despite your assertion to the opposite.
If I’m going to be severely disabled (extremely far from average), I would much rather do it in a modern western democracy, instead of any other form of government.
Blind people, cripples, and fetuses barely have a voter base.
You also need to specify in what direction someone is not average. (You meant below average). Wheras my point was just more general. Weirdos wont be represented, whether that means exentric inventor, amish orthodoxy, cripple, or homeless person.
I personally was responding to the other person who was asking why some people come to see the government as an enemy. Assuming they know that for some it is just culture, or indoctrination, I offered a relatable explanation for why an intelligent person might feel impeded by many laws.
I assume given their question they already know and believe democracies are better to live in than other forms of government lol.
A state can provide e.g safety or healthcare for millions, a philanthropist could not operate at that scale for a long time. Philanthropists also die on a shorter time frame than states and their successors may not want to continue to support the same things.
I don't think the claim was that philanthropy doesn't work. But it doesn't scale to the levels of what a state can achieve. And therefore it is an inefficient way to use the resources. For every billionaire philanthropist that builds a hospital wing there are 50 more who buy 2 yachts. Tax them all and you can build 51 hospital wings and they can all have a single yacht each.
My point is, when you're talking about investing in foreign developing countries, government programs will face the exact same failure modes as philanthropist-backed NGOs, with about as much accountability.
Do you suspect if taxes were set to 99% that people would honestly pay them? To me it seems like a solution to two equations intersecting. Find the number that maximizes willing participation (a decreasing function of rates) and maximizes tax revenue (an increasing function of rates).
Truly rich have most of their money in assets like real estate and companies. And goverment through laws is in control of what it even means to own those things. Government could make a law that when any company goes public 20% of shares are a tax.
And they want to stay healthy and live long, also like the rest of us.
It means it is in their own selfish interest to invest loads of money into health, because that is what will help them achieve that goal.
But again, their body is much like our bodies, so every advance in medicine that can help them live longer will ultimately help us live longer. Maybe at first, only the wealthy will be able to get these state of the art treatment, but processes will improve, patents will expire, and sooner or later, they will be available to all of us.
This is one instance where there is no real need to "tax the rich", research is good for all of mankind, the rich are not taking away knowledge from the poor. This is in contrast to natural resources, like land. If the rich want to build their manor on some good spot, the poor that live there will have to leave. But if a cancer treatment is found for the rich, it will not take away a cancer treatment for the poor, in fact, that's the opposite, as it is likely that a few years after, the poor will also get the rich treatment.
Science is a communal, collective effort, more evidently than anything else I can think of. To need to say that here of all places is really unfortunate
To try and act like taxing the rich is incompatible with medical advancement is just wrong. In the 50's and 60's we still made advancements and google the top marginal tax rate then. Do you think research would even slow down if rich people were capped at 999m? Seriously?
No one said that. We are saying that billionaires do NOT do that, and because they don't, they are flaming idiots. Literally killing their own children, and often hastening their own personal deaths.
It baffles me that you chose to share this comment on, of all things, a post about the eradication of Polio, which was primarily funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in a _clear_ example of a "philanthropic approach" working quite well. If I had to identify one organization that has contributed the _most_ to positive changes in public health infrastructure in the last decade it would be them, above any governments, churches, or other non-billionare organizations.
Reaching back further, many/most top universities have billionaires to thank for their existence (Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, etc.), the widespread existence of public libraries is mostly due to Andrew Carnegie, and a lot of tech/science innovation comes from for-profit companies primarily controlled by or funded by billionaires.
I won't deny that billionaire philanthropy _sometimes_ doesn't work, but that's true for any system of building infrastructure that I can imagine, and is a far cry from your claim that philanthropy is demonstrably an ineffective way to solve public infrastructure problems.
I'm curious if there are other processes you see as being historically more effective, either overall or per-dollar, at producing effective public health outcomes than philanthropic organizations? If so, I'd definitely like to find ways to give them more resources.
while there's some validity in the notion that philanthropists do good occasionally, a better question is would their good more effective than a state solution? I don't have a ton of evidence on hand right now, but highways, the whole new deal america stuff pretty clearly did more for infrastructure than any philanthropist. In the terms of stuff like the gates foundation, at the end of the day I'm a utilitarian. They do good I'm happy.
All I'm sayin is a more egalitarian state might have achieved the goal quicker had they any rich guys' will to solve it.
At the end of the day I don't have the evidence off hand but everything I've read points to the state as the source of modern amenities but admittedly I'm biased towards tech and leftism and I'm no expert. I haven't exactly read ayn rand. I've read stuff like pikkety and sunkara.
In the cases where billionaires do good I ask, Couldn't a state with that same will do more?
It's also a vast overstatement to claim "most top universities have billionaires to thank for their existence" or that "the widespread existence of public libraries is mostly due to" Carnegie libraries. Most top universities in the world are public institutions, and public libraries existed long before Carnegie (there was never a point in American history where most public libraries were Carnegie libraries, let alone in other countries).
Here you're just shoehorning in a specifically ideological posture in the context of a complex situation that's completely irrelevant to your fixation. Government spending today is enormous in the developed countries and among intergovernmental organizations. In the context of existing health research spending there's vastly more than enough money at least available inside government budgets even as they are for increasing that health spending. Just by reducing several gargantuan military budgets, many governments could easily increase health spending without some arbitrary new punitively huge tax on billionaires. The two things are literally unrelated in cause.
In any case, the revenue you'd generate from this billionaire tax you propose would be much less stable or bountiful than you think or is possible through much less antagonistic alternative means, and this revenue tax from basically forbidding billionaires would probably decrease too, because after all, billionaires, generally being protective of their assets in very sophisticated ways, would find ways to circumvent it. Thus just from a practical standpoint, stable funds for medical research would be much better obtained from reasoned, non-punitive incentives and tax schemes complemented by certain budget cuts for absurd outlays that governments often spend ridiculously wasteful amounts on as is.
>No one intelligent can/has yet looked me in the eye and told me earnestly: anyone with a billion + $ would have a single degree lower quality of life if their wealth was capped at 999 million
No, your hypothetical billioniare wouldn't live any less materially good a life by having just under a full billion dollars, but certain incentives that do also contribute to good things in the economic and developmental world could be destroyed by this prohibition. Also, simply, you might with this tax also badly and pointlessly disincentivize pharmaceutical companies when you could have just tolerated high profits and encouraged them to help with medical generosity in other ways. Remember after all that within health spending, a vast and very useful part of its percentage is sustained by a properly incentivized private sector that it would be stupid to burn just for the sake of cheap anti-capitalist ideological notions.
>If you want empirics google "highest marginal tax rate 1950- present" and "infrastructure spending 1950- present".
Seriously? you're comparing the speed of progress in medical infrastructure and related spending during the 50's with today?
You do realize that part of a reduction in gains could simply be because, oh I don't know, the easier problems and projects having been already handled with older, simpler methods and now the harder problems steadily dominating, requiring much more complex solutions with slower progress and higher cost...
Instead, their mission is to gut governments, "burn it all down" for the sake of eradicating those cursed regulations, in the name of making the government "more efficient". In reality it just means "get those pesky bureaucrats out of my way of making even more money with immoral, destructive, and even illegal ways".
Instead we get "effective altruism" which basically means - "my mission is to get as rich as possible in unholy ways, and if you are lucky enough to be within the gravity field of the pet causes I happen to be a fan of, then you get some money".
You cannot find a worse way of a civilized way of distributing money to those in need. It's ineffective by definition.
People need to remind themselves once in a while that the world like this already existed. A bunch of feudal lords running around, trying to get favors with the king. Most people suffered, and rivers of blood were spent to shed that kind of system to create, you know, a civilization.
So stop worshipping the ultra-rich - they are the most destructive anti-civilization force were are dealing with right now, unleashing their wrath if they are not adored enough, stewing in anger and grievances.
And no, I am not saying Capitalism is bad. Sure, greed is good and all that, but running amok and without any oversight, it leads to no good.
It seems as if the targets of your ire are not the only ones in the stewpot.
Someone needs to take an axe to the US fed. If we reduce federal spending by 75%, do you honestly think that would be a bad thing?
The US has produced all the innovation and prosperity and our government was founded on the principle of "fuck the government". Government overgrowth is the problem.
All I can say without wasting too much of my own personal time is: in the world of federal spending you suggested
> US military spending today is (inflation adjusted) almost as high as during WW2.
would be unchanged, if not exacerbated (to continue exerting military/police control on a populace who's tax dollars aren't returned to them in the form of non-private, non-profit entities but now live in literally Bladerunner)
and the privately owned companies that lobbied to have that considerable amount of society's tax dollars spent on their products will certainly not be displaced. See also: basically every other industry
Sometimes I'm jealous of the uber wealthy not because they have nicer bathrooms or destroyed entire generation's qualities of lives and the reliable longevity of the future...but because of how many people seem eager to step up to bat for them, for nothing more than a thin veneer of "yeah well, fuck that other guy, amirite?"
Our social instincts are still tied to old institutional forms. Individuals with economic empires without borders seem to escape our otherwise commonly more organized criticisms.
This makes it painfully easy to get people to rally against "the state", but rallying against the vague, shadowy amalgamation/political party of wealth concentration proves elusive, I suppose. Like rallying against feudalism as a whole. Where do you start or end is the only real question.
Anyone who says "we need to cull the feds" doesn't understand what we actually spend money on.
25% of our spending is Social Security, and 20% is the military. That's 45% right there.
Old people vote. Social Security is going nowhere. You literally can't cut the budget by 75%.
[0] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
You do realize that the reason costs have increased is that State funding for public Universities has been significantly cut over that period? This "government can't do anything right" attitude has been a major driver in this increased cost?
Yes, the availability of some grants and guaranteed loans to people barely old enough to sign contracts did't help, but the big driver of the cost increases is the reduction of public funding. State funding for secondary education has been continuously reduced in the name of lower taxes and "fiscal responsibility".
As for Federal spending, it depends on how you slice it. If you count Social Security and Medicare and other "entitlements"* then SS and Medicare are huge.
If you don't, then the Military is the biggest expenditure. That's a little misleading though, since a large amount of basic and applied research is funded through the military (such as through DARPA and other agencies). If we reduce here we'd need corresponding increases elsewhere to avoid starving basic research. There are some expenditures that are wasteful there (I'm not sure how well the F-22 will handle the shift to drone warfare), so we could back there if we wanted to.
Funding for many other agencies is actually too low to accomplish their stated mission. We either need to reduce the scope of what they are legally required to do or increase funding. For the IRS, one thing we could do is to simplify the tax code to make audits less expensive. Similar changes could be made for the INS.
As for wastefulness, if you compare the government to private companies to implement the same standards, government is always cheaper. The only way private companies get cheaper is to provide less or offset the cost in some other way (unexpected externalities). The real reason expenses are so high is that the government is big -- it provides services to every person in the US and many others around the world. It covers a large number of markets from healthcare, security, finance, etc. There is literally no company comparable to the Federal government in totality. But if you compare just the pieces you still find government usually comes out ahead.
*"Entitlements" really should be considered contractual obligations and treated separately from the budget -- after all, would we allow a private company to include disbursements from their pension fund as part of their budget? Fuck no, that's a separate pile of money that doesn't belong to you. The entire framing around "entitlements" is designed to trick people out of their money.
Not in % of GDP.
Isn't this just lobbying/political contributions? That definitely happens, but I think I'm generally more in favor of keeping the government and laws somewhat isolated from the influence of money, and keeping philanthropic organizations as a separate category from government agencies.
For the most part, private organizations (especially nonprofits) seem mostly willing to operate within the bounds of the laws as currently written, and government organizations like the CIA and NSA and military seem much less perturbed by commiting physical violence to achieve their aims. There are maybe some exceptions, but I can think of a lot more examples of governments being toppled by the CIA than by nonprofits (unless you count the Taliban and ilk as charities, which seems like a stretch).
Coordinating the public health efforts across all countries is incredibly difficult and expensive work that requires constant investment and upkeep. Teaching people to be skeptical of the superstitions that were passed down and to look for real, reproducible evidence is what produced all of the benefits of The Enlightenment and continues to pay off.
For my understanding, if no one else's: are there a lot of places without decent water, but with antibiotics? What's causing that strange inconsistency?
Antibiotic pills are cheap and easy to distribute.
What's causing it? The free market is working great to build the systems to get drugs to people. In fact if a pharmacist refused to give out antibiotics when they weren't needed, the pharmacist would probably just go out of business because the customer would just head up the street to the next guy.
The free market is not so hot at building expensive infrastructure like safe water in a tropical biome, that requires government involvement (not meaning to rag on SE Asian governments: building this stuff is difficult even if your country has been stable for the last 100 years, which is a luxury they haven't been lucky enough to have)
It’s not rocket science. You need to:
1. Build, operate, and maintain wastewater treatment plants
2. Require everyone send their wastewater to a treatment plant
Vietnam has a neat loophole for 2. where if you simply generate too much wastewater for your zone’s plant to handle, you don’t have to send it to the plant. That’s more a policy decision with a side of administrative corruption that’s unrelated to who’s handling the infra.
You'd be surprised at how difficult this is in shitty countries.
First, wastewater plants are rather expensive. Maintaining them is also both expensive and required. And you don't get bonus points for doing the right thing.
My home city of Chişinău, Moldova has a population of about 800 000. The whole city stank of feces for almost two years (and districts close to the sewage treatment facility for much longer than that) because no one cared to maintain the old Soviet-built facility.
Only when you could smell (and almost taste) shit over 20km away, did they scramble to do something (ask for more money from IMF/EU, steal most of it, ask for more money, implement a patchwork solution that barely holds)
In a free market, even the river or the sea has an owner (might be a group of people), so you cannot throw your waste on a river that is not yours. But currently rivers are "common" or public property, so the state cannot limit who polutes the rivers unless they provide an alternative. In rich countries, such alternatives exist. In poor countries they just dump waste in public/common rivers.
In poor countries rivers used to be maintained by the community because of a shared interest in them. This works fine in a gift economy. But in a transactional free market economy the communal river is an externality because it isn't privately owned, which requires outside intervention to create a financial incentive (either via subsidies or regulations/fines).
The tragedy of the commons is not a natural law, it's an emergent property of the economical system. There are three remedies: privatization of the commons (which has its limits unless you literally want to commodify every atom in the biosphere), state intervention (which is how most functional mixed market systems approach it) or changing the system (which goes against the interests of those currently benefiting from it and may as well lead to a worse system than a better one).
EDIT: For sake of clarity: creating a gift economy alongside a transactional free market economy is extremely difficult in an open system. They keep being reinvented in peer groups (e.g. buying "rounds" of drinks among friends without keeping tabs on who spent how much) but they rapidly break down when exposed to a transactional system because "freeloading" becomes an optimal move without the "honor system" enforced by social pressure (e.g. your peers thinking you're taking advantage of them and no longer inviting you to drink with them or having a stern word with you).
Probably the main one is the cost of RO but if that cost can be got down it might work.
There are a number of reasons, but one that hasn't been mentioned so far is the heavy use of antibiotics in food production: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/antibiotic-usage-in-lives...
Oh well. Maybe when that happens.
But we've had plenty of other examples in living memory, with influenza currently averaging about a million deaths in the US every 30 years.
And as the other poster correctly guesses, this was a sarcastic reference to covid.
I've been visiting https://polioeradication.org/ over the years, and every time I get my hopes high, discover more polio cases or polio-positive samples are discovered :(
They have a regularly updates summary: https://polioeradication.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/week...
And the most recent case was on Oct 15 in Pakistan.
For example, if I followed up a statement with "knock on wood" it wouldn't be because I believe it helps, or expect anyone to actually take that physical act (I probably won't unless to emphasize my feeling more), it's to convey I hope something succeeds or does not fail in a way that provides a lot of context in a small amount of words.
I also told him how amazing it is that when I was his age, I had the chickenpox, but that he will never get it because they developed a vaccine for it.
None of this helped him today with not freaking out over getting a shot, but hey, I tried and I made it clear why I had to hold him down. Sometimes, irrational fears win. We’ll get there, he’s just a kid.
Brian is at high risk of shingles, and Logan isn't. https://xkcd.com/1950/
IMHO it's quite natural to have an aversion to being pierced.
So looks another "(((them))) in (((control)))" bollocks.
https://kffhealthnews.org/news/why-measles-hits-so-hard-with...
There's a large concentration of ultra-orthodox Jews living there that don't vaccinate for anything on religious grounds. As a result the county is notorious for essentially being a living archive of otherwise eliminated diseases, in particular they have outsized issues with any disease that could be dealt with through vaccination.
All of this is on the first page of google search results for "Rockland County polio", but thanks for not doing even that much and jumping straight to "hmm, lots of jews live there, this guy must be a neonazi!".
I look up "Rockland County"; I see a bunch of things that specifically mention it being Jewish. So okay, what am I supposed to assume on a topic that 1) has nothing to do with Jews, but which 2) has a long history of conspiracy theories attached to it, which sometimes includes Jews (because all conspiracy theories do)?
I did not think of a list of search queries I could possibly do in order to find some obscure event I didn't know existed.
If you don't want people making assumptions then try being less vague in your references to some obscure little-known non-obvious event, because "making assumptions" is pretty much the only think anyone can do with a cryptic comment like that unless they're already aware of what you're on about.
Polio the disease caused by polio virus could be eradicated with widespread and continuous vaccination.
The problem is the current vaccine used in most places around the world is an attenuated live virus vaccine.
It gives the recipient immunity by infecting them with a strain that doesn’t cause disease in most people but is still able to replicate in the gut and spread to others and eventually reverts to being able to cause disease. So anyone who isn’t vaccinated can still get the reverted vaccine strain. The most common cause of polio outbreaks now is the vaccine strain.
In rich countries they use an inactivated vaccine that works great against disease and can’t become virulent but is expensive, requires more infrastructure for delivery (needles etc), and doesn’t give enough immunity to prevent spreading the virus if infected.
There are possible solutions to all of these problems but they require research and the eradication campaigners are making research more and more difficult by restricting which labs can work on polio research.
The podcast TWiV is hosted by the guy who first figured out the Polio virus genome and they frequently discuss it. The episode below is about a new attenuated vaccine that was recently created with hopes of not reverting but even it has reverted in some small number of cases.
0: https://asm.org/podcasts/twiv/episodes/driven-to-immunodistr...
Every domains expert disagrees. That most people get the non-sterilizing IPV is not a secret. Switching from the sterilizing, but virus-producing OPV to the non-sterilizing, but non-spreading (and more expensive) IPV is a well-run playbook.
Yes, it means when an unvaccinated nutter from Brooklyn gets polio in Europe [1] that it spreads--inefficiently and without further consequence--through the vaccinated population. But those are edge cases which are diminishing in frequency as we switch from OPV to IPV on the periphery.
First we eradicate the wild type. Then we eradicate the weaker vaccine-derived virus. It's a simple, precedented and achievable playbook. All we have to do is keep vaccinating (and keep our poop water away from our drinking water).
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/21/health/new-york-polio/index.h...
A kid once told me that when he was about 8 he went to visit his grandparents, who live in the desert. He played outside, alone, for awhile. When he returned, he had an odd mark on his arm.
His grandparents told him it needed immediate attention, and brought him to the hospital.
The guard who inspected their car at the hospital parking, told them not to leave the car and to keep the windows up. Within a few minutes, several men in "Corona suits" escorted them all into a closed room, and left them for a few hours.
The docs then came and told the child and his grandad, that the marks looked liked the bubonic plague, and so they immediately quarantined them. The fact that they are both alive and healthy three hours later, implies that it is something else, so they will now get regular treatment.
I have no way of verifying the story but I imagine it is true (though perhaps not recalled 100%, he was 8 at the time).
It reminded me just how close we really could be to having another worldwide plague.
Polio teams workers still get killed regularly, and in fact, in searching for news on polio workers, discovered tragically that one worker was killed just today:
https://twitter.com/TNNEnglish/status/1727695070906957889
and polio vaccination drives have been delayed in other areas too (separate from the unfortunate incident above)
https://twitter.com/MajidBuhair/status/1727755867666452722
I mean what can I say of others, back in my own extended family, I have cousins who refused to vaccinate their kids at all, like no vaccine of any kind, and nothing I or anyone can say will change their mind. Thing is that they are not illiterate, they have been to schools, they are just.. stubborn.
That means attack vectors exist in all directions.
I personally discovered this the hard way when I randomly caught a case of mumps despite having been vaccinated as a child with the MMR vaccine (my dumbass doctor thought I had "mild-tonsillitis" and sent me home with antibiotics) Not sure where I caught it from but thankfully it was mild and I recovered after 10 days of absolute misery.
But the moral of the story is, not only is polio unlikely to be eradicated, but even people like me who thought they were covered by vaccination from dutiful parents, are still vulnerable to all these diseases, either as patients or carriers.
Our vaccination drives are not forming effective vaccine shields, and that means we have to think of treatment and not prevention as the "first" step of our fights against diseases.
____
> The result came back a month later: it was wild polio type 1, not seen in the continent since 2016.
> Sequencing traced its origin to Pakistan, but also revealed that the virus had been circulating for two years undetected — possibly in Malawi, and possibly elsewhere. Because Malawi had no wastewater surveillance at the time, it was impossible to know.
I was surprised to see that some of the vaccines I thought are rock solid share some traits with the great COVID vaccines: not everyone develops immunity, and the immunity gets worse and worse over time, so you need "boosters" every 5-10 years, and most adults have very little actual protection against the diseases they thought they are vaxxed against.
Example, whooping cough:
> In children, DTaP protects: > (...) About 7 out of 10 children for five years after the fifth shot. > In adults, Tdap protects: > About 7 in 10 people for the first year after the shot. > About 4 in 10 people for four years after the shot.
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/drugs/21639-pertussis-...
These numbers don't look all that great to me.
> In the early 2010s, the CIA ran a fake vaccination program in Abbottabad, offering free Hepatitis B vaccines to children in an attempt to collect DNA evidence linking Osama bin Laden to the compound where he was suspected of residing. It is unclear how samples were to be collected or how they would lead to bin Laden, but when news of this scheme broke, it added proof to existing conspiracy theories about vaccinations. As a consequence, many local leaders began urging people not to vaccinate their kids, various districts banned vaccination teams, and the Taliban issued a fatwa against vaccination programs. To this day, local leaders rail against vaccines as Western spying programs.
- https://www.vox.com/first-person/22256595/vaccine-covid-paki...
There's not a terrible chance (although I would give it less than a coin flip) that the CIA hasn't developed any assets in any of these medical NGOs since then, but the illusion has been shattered with the one incident.
Source: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
As a result part of the Afghan and Pakistani population stopped believing in what WHO workers told them.
Look at the chart in TFA: 2022 is in line with 2017.
Still: there is progress, even the current numbers are already incredibly low. This is already a story of success, even if the "brink" is still a bit off.
There are two polio vaccines. One takes four injections, spaced months apart, and cannot cause polio because it doesn't contain an active virus. The other is a live-virus vaccine, as a pill, and has about a one in a million chance of causing polio. These are both 1950s technology.
"For most people, (polio) has no symptoms. For about a quarter of people who get the polio virus, they will have mild symptoms that may include fever, gastroenteritis, upset stomach, aches, and so-on—in other words, flu-like symptoms. Most people would not know they have a polio infection because those symptoms are so common to many other infections."
"Somewhere around one in 200 to one in 1000 people that get infected with the polio virus will develop poliomyelitis, which is also known as paralytic polio or acute flaccid paralysis but can also include presentations that are less and more severe, including delayed post-polio syndrome with mild disability or acute respiratory failure and death."
Those who are not suffering still spread the disease.
What happened when the anti-vaxxers reached Pakistan.[2]
[1] https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/is-polio-making-a-com...
This was a valid question in 2022. I don't think it's the case anymore in 2023. We seem to have eliminated it from the African continent. At this point, it's contained to Pakistan and Afghanistan. One of those is cooperating with vaccination efforts; the other is effectively quarantining itself.
> The CIA’s efforts to capture Osama bin Laden via a fake vaccination drive in Pakistan led to a rise in vaccine hesitancy in the years after the scheme was revealed.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2277145-cias-hunt-for-o...
I went to the ER recently and saw an orthodox jewish kid in a polio bed. I felt so sad for him. (This was in NYC).
Turned out I was a few years overdue for a 10 year booster (which was immediately remedied).
And then vaccine manufacturers across the world fuck up and cause an outbreak.
This is one of those cases that I have no sympathy for the hype piece, no sympathy for "the science", or the pharma companies making bank off of keeping this thing rolling. Only sympathy goes out to the people hurt by polio and human idiocy.
What?
Many years ago on Sixty Minutes, an elderly man who changed the diaper for his grandchild caught it and diagnosis and treatment was delayed because the doctor literally said something like "Decades ago, I would say this was polio. You have all the symptoms." and didn't consider that was possible because "we've eradicated it."
(And we use the non-sterilising, non-virus containing non-polio-producing IPV in the United States. So the unvaccinated can change babies’ diapers without fear.)
Not necessarily. All those migrants coming into the country? Mostly they got the cheaper OPV vaccine, if they got any. There was a case of it last year in New York: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/polio/hcp/vaccine-derived-p...
Stopping vaccinating populations with oral polio vaccine tends to make cases trend upwards, and the only fix for that I suspect is to change over to injectable vaccines for a whole generation of people (ie. 50 years).
Sorry if I’m bitter, I just had a nurse tell me yesterday to not take the flu vaccine because she said it doesn’t prevent flu and why would I “put that junk in my body.”
Having said that, as an asthmatic I've had the Flu vaccine every year for the last 20 or so years, and knock on wood haven't had Flu since. I also had the multivalent pneumonia vaccine a while ago, so fingers crossed!
My doctor friend doesn't get flu vaccine even when recommended, because, to quote her, "in my line of work, I was already exposed to everything ten times at least". She works as an ORL expert in a big hospital, so she is constantly staring down some sick throats.
Startup idea - vaccine delivery service. Pay a fee or subscription and someone comes to your house or workplace and jabs you with flu vaccine plus any travel shots required.
Not a slight against the flu shot, just a funny tidbit since it reminded me that the vaccine doesn't make me invincible from all similar disease.
"We identified a statistically significant increased risk of noninfluenza respiratory virus infection among TIV recipients (Table 3), including significant increases in the risk of rhinovirus and coxsackie/echovirus infection" [1]
That's one of the complications in assessing efficacy: if the benefit in flu vaccine is potentially quite modest (as determined by some long-running studies [2]), and it causes an increased risk of other noninfluenza respiratory viruses, then we need higher-quality, more detailed studies to understand what's happening.
But based on the discussion of the Cochrane review it seems unlikely. [3]
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3404712/
[2] https://www.cochrane.org/news/featured-review-three-updated-...
[3] https://community.cochrane.org/news/why-have-three-long-runn...
And then unfortunately the one you met(who is probably otherwise good at their job)
A little ironic after making a plea that the world is “filled with shades of grey”
> ought not be the same as the word for those that are intended to confer herd immunity.
This is really based on a misinformed view about vaccines though.
> If we used two words, the problem of anti vaxx would be partially ameliorated it seems.
Doubt it. Even after Covid the major anti vaxx issue remains childhood vaccines such as MMR.
Is the antivax problem worse after COVID? Why doubt what is empirically very well-established?
I suspect that most doctors are bad, because in general medicine appears to be very medieval to the extent I have explored. Same goes for vaccines. Most seem to be ineffective or harmful, and when they appear to work it can be difficult to attribute it to the vaccine. Quality verifiable evidence and integrity seems to be missing in the medical sciences.
What would make you think that?
You do need to be willing to go where the evidence leads you, but that doesn't require or guarantee a fully-consistent belief system.
> CDC conducts studies each year to determine how well influenza (flu) vaccines protect against flu. While vaccine effectiveness (VE) can vary, recent studies show that flu vaccination reduces the risk of flu illness by between 40% and 60% among the overall population during seasons when most circulating flu viruses are well-matched to those used to make flu vaccines
> How well flu vaccines work (or their ability to protect against a certain outcome) can vary from season to season. Protection can vary depending on who is being vaccinated. At least two factors play an important role in determining the likelihood that vaccination will protect a person from flu illness: 1) characteristics of the person being vaccinated (such as their age and health), and 2) how well the vaccines “match” the flu viruses spreading in the community. When flu vaccines are not well matched to some viruses spreading in the community, vaccination may provide little or no protection against illness caused by those viruses.
Compare it with something like tetanus vaccines:
> Today, diphtheria and tetanus are at historic low rates in the United States. No one has ever studied the efficacy of tetanus toxoid and diphtheria toxoid in a vaccine trial. However, experts infer efficacy from protective antitoxin levels. A complete vaccine series has a clinical efficacy of virtually 100% for tetanus and 97% for diphtheria.
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/dtap-tdap-td/hcp/about-vacc...
It's not crazy to behave differently around something with 40-60% efficacy and something with 97-100% efficacy.
There is a world of difference between having your healthcare provider tell you "the flu vaccine has to be made in advance and often targets the wrong strain, so can therefore be ineffective even the majority of the time" vs calling the vaccine putting "junk in [your] body".
Tangentially, there is no value in arguing with antivaxxers or conspiracy theorists. You might as well attempt to talk them out of their religion. Effort better spent elsewhere. Regardless, informed consent must be mandatory in a healthcare or medical setting, so the patient can make a choice with all available information. I am not arguing choice in this subthread. I’m also not willing to argue vaccine safety data or statistics.
Why is 50% less flu not a good thing?
This is like the sterilising argument about the Covid vaccine. It’s somehow damning for the Covid jab but not for polio.
On top of that, vaccines need >50% efficacy to get approval. If the flu vaccine was invented today, it wouldn't pass.
> On May 16, 2014, the White House announced that the CIA will no longer use vaccination programmes as a cover for espionage. The news comes in the wake of a series of militant attacks on polio vaccination workers in Pakistan, with legitimate health-care workers targeted as being US spies. The attacks have forced organisations such as the UN to suspend polio vaccination efforts in Pakistan, and have severely hampered anti-polio efforts, with parents refusing to have their children vaccinated. News of the vaccination programme led to a banning of vaccination in areas controlled by the Pakistan Taliban, and added to existing scepticism surrounding the sincerity of public health efforts by the international health community.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/11/cia-fake-vacci...
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
If I recall correctly, the conspiracy theory that emerged was that vaccines were secretly being used to render the people sterile.
It is interesting how 8 years later nearly the same line of thinking took hold in the West (albeit with claim of injected mind control chips) amid anti-vaxxers.
That line of thinking always existed in the West, among the "Mark of the Beast" set. The interesting thing is the degree to which it, and conspiratorial politics in general, became so normalized in such a short time. Also how the anti-vax movement switched from a generally leftist ideology to being captured by right-wing identity politics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterilization_of_Native_Americ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study
Notions of conspiracy form easily when reality provides so much material.
After all, it isn’t like the government has a long history of eugenics, forcefully drugging people for weeks at a time with combinations of LSD, barbiturates, and other fun stuff, right?
Our government would never do that.
Context is everything. The US government did that in the context of their genocidal war against indigenous peoples. There were fully transparent laws on the books that rewarded people for murdering native populations. No conspiracy needed.
As for your claim from 3 years ago, you've thrown out an allegation without providing any evidence. Involuntary sterilizations likely do occur, but that's far from an indication of a systemic government conspiracy.
The context of COVID vaccines was a global pandemic, not a genocide.
Also, nobody has shown up at the hospital yet to discover that their ailments were caused by a malfunctioning mind control chip delivered in a vaccine. Defect rates for such a "chip" if it existed would not be that low.
Stop lying. You come in with a false faith argument and can’t be bothered to research elementary facts.
Where do you see the word systemic?
And once again, your question could be easily answered with Google. Seeing as how you’re the one that came in sprouting completely incorrect information that would have been easily avoided had you just bothered to skim the Wikipedia article on the topic, which would also have answered this particular question, I humbly request that you DYOR.
The ends cannot justify the means.
Oh they absolutely can in an utilitarian sense. But a basic utilitarian argument would tell that jeopardizing an entire region's vaccine rollout program to get revenge on some asshole already living the rest of his life out of a hole was not worth it.
Is that good reasoning? No.
Is it what some humans will do? Yes.
Then they aren't being utilitarian because they are not including the risk into their cost calculation.
Or at least not a good one. Definitely not "any"
edit:
Oh I see this now > who wanted to do the op
Yeah any person can make any false argument to justify a conclusion they wanna reach. You don't have to be utilitarian for that. Just unethical.
Sure they are.
They just estimate the risk much lower than you do.
You have no way to know who's right for sure.
Maybe they legitimately have found a really low-risk way to massively increase utils by cheating / mistreating a few people.
I don't know of a way to protect utilitarian systems from such conditions.
Where is that, exactly? Because it certainly isn’t in the US.
Geriatric nurses tend to not get paid well, but resident nurses in hospitals do.
It’s a wide field.
Try again.
We should probably stop comparing incomes to the global mean to decide if they're "fair" or "correct."
Flu vaccine efficacy has been <50% for over a decade. Usually it floats around 30-40%. So even by the official numbers, it doesn't do a lot for groups not really at risk.
This is not a surprise: The yearly shots are for a subset of flus, created in the spring/summer for the strains they think will be most prevalent in the fall.
What is this referring to?
I did it twice during the pandemic. In one case it was someone I trusted for many years.
Non-immunizing treatments should not be called vaccines, the annual flu shot should not be considered a vaccine, nor should the mRNA COVID "vaccine", for which they had to change the very definition of what a vaccine is to even include it for legal purposes.
For the flu shot it is a crap shot, as there are soo many flu variants annually they make a best guess as to which one(s) will likely because prominent based on trends and package them up, often they are correct sometimes they are not...
For more traditional vaccines like Polio and other long term immunizing vaccines society ends up suffering because of the inclusion of these short term annual or less treatments and over all is a net negative
As to " politically weaponized by AI and social media algorithms" it was more than AI and Social media that made these things political, it was the political branches of government that made it so by mandates and rhetoric that pitted people against each other. Attempting to exile people that even questioned their government masters... That is what made it political.
The best vaccines are sterilizing, meaning that they prevent disease and transmission often enough that very high rates of vaccination extirpate the virus.
It might be useful for discussion purposes if "vaccine" meant "sterilizing vaccine" and vaccines which don't work as well had some other name, but that's not how it works.
yes they keep changing the definition to include more and more things legally as "vaccines" are shielded from any liability so you can not sue big pharma if they injury with their "vaccine"
this however does not change the fact that the way the law (and you) use the term is very very very different than what the ordinary person thinks and understands a vaccine to be
When this person then discovers that the government uses a different (your) "correct" definition to include things they traditionally would not think of as a vaccine this erodes trust in the entire system.
This was made very very clear with COVID.
What do you consider immunizing?
But social media did wonders at spreading & amplifying that message, since pitting people against each other in endless arguments generates lots of "engagement".
The flu vaccine is notoriously kinda like shooting in the dark because it's hard to predict which strain will dominate the winter.
It just shows that a lot can go wrong in this process and good intentions are not enough.
Why is it alarming? The sterilising vaccine produces vaccine-derived polioviruses. The non-sterilising type does not.
First you sterilise, then switch to non-sterilising as the wild type is eradicated. It’s a precedented playbook which makes it the opposite of alarming.