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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

I’m as pro-vaccine as they come. But if you didn’t want anti-vaxxers you shouldn’t have done “racism is a public health issue.” https://www.npr.org/2021/04/08/985524494/cdc-director-declar.... Or exemptions to social distancing for protests but not churches: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/04/public-hea.... Ideologically-captured institutions shredded their scientific credibility and now we’re all suffering for it.

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So you're not as pro-vaccine as they come, because if you were, you'd be pro-vaccine even after other vaccine advocates did dumb stuff. People are always going to do dumb stuff, so invoking those dumb things as a defense for bad policy is just a way of revealing the softness of your original commitment.

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So, in wanting to "wipe out" the "current generation" of scientists, you're in fact pretty far from as "pro-vaccine" as they come --- like, significantly farther than the median American. That's fine, let's just make sure our premises are all aligned.

It's actually very much not "fine" to want to "wipe out" an entire generation of a nation's scientists and replace them with ones that fit your ideological preferences.

If you want to take the bait, by all means.

To the contrary. I grew up in public health and think it's tremendously important. The old school public health people didn't "bring their whole selves to work." If you're working in a Bangladeshi village and an old Muslim man wants a male doctor instead of a female doctor, you go and find a male doctor. The public health field has always been full of liberals, that was never the problem. But the new generation is full of evangelicals,[1] and that makes it impossible for them to do the job. And if they can't do what's required for the job, they need to be replaced with people who can--for the good of the field itself.

[1] I would say the same thing about evangelicals on the other side of the aisle. You cannot be in Bangladesh working in public health while being an evangelical Christian. You will never gain people's trust, and without that you cannot do the job.

I didn't say a single thing about public health professionals.

We are in the middle of a thread about public health professionals. Which "scientists and administrators" do you think I'm talking about?

You said "scientists" and "health administrators". I know what a "scientist" is and I know what a "health administrator" is. My son is working out how tenuous his biochem PhD offers are right now, which is pretty nerve-wracking. For obvious reasons, I take you to be saying he should be "getting wiped out". Fine, just so we're clear what you're saying.

Look, this is a solved problem. When my dad was developing vaccine and maternal health programs in Bangladesh, he knew there would be no faster way to destroy a vaccine program than by linking it to advocacy in favor of the country’s hindu minority.

The norm against that must be reestablished. So the people who did things like apply different hiring standards to medical students based on race, or proposed triaging care based on race, must go. Not because of their ideology—you can be a communist in public health as long as you compartmentalize—but because they hurt their institutions’ ability to do the job. And the people who sat by while that happened—who didn’t speak up to defend institutional values over progressive ones—need to learn some harsh lessons so that doesn’t happen again. I like you personally and hope your kid is part of rebuilding our public health institutions into what they once were.

I don't know what this has to do with what you said upthread but if this is a roundabout way of telling my son you're not happy he has to worry about whether his PhD offers are all going to be rescinded, I'll let him know you didn't really mean him when you talked about wiping people out.

TL;DR the people with "In this house we believe..." signs on their lawns have shredded the credibility of shared institutions by using those institutions as platforms for advancing their ideology on unrelated social and political issues. To restore faith in our institutions we will need to reboot them. Obviously there will be consequences, especially for PMCs and their children.

I hope the ones I know personally escape those consequences. Just as I assume they weren't intending for anyone they know personally to e.g. have their small towns flooded with illegal immigrants.

Oh, you don't know him personally, so I'll update him: you're good with his PhD program offers being withdrawn, because natural products biochemistry work is a small price to pay for exacting revenge on unrelated people who said some stupid shit back in 2020. Good note, Rayiner.

> Not because of their ideology—you can be a communist in public health as long as you compartmentalize

Seemingly this is something you don't actually agree with, considering as I've mentioned to you multiple times now of the Trump admin kicking out and discriminating against transgender individuals in the military despite having nothing to do with anything else.

Other than that you've been just continually justifying petty revenge for increasingly insane reasons.

> ideological neutrality

Could you point to an institution or even individual you feel is an exemplar of ideological neutrality? I don't believe this exists but I'm very curious how you perceive it.

Your idea of 'ideological neutrality' involves open and flagrant discrimination against individuals as a form of political retribution [1] [2]. The fact that you can say this while arguing that you really care about people who are discriminated against (as you have done in the past) shows what you really mean whenever you write things like this.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43279708

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43201888

I am extremely dubious of your concept of ideological neutrality.

Further, that you want all current scientists and health administrators "wiped out" because you disagree with a tiny number of statements or situations pins you as an extreme anti-vaxxer, just one that isn't very honest about it. As an ideological extremist.

It's the classic "I'm super for vaccines, just not any of the existing ones..." bit that antivaxxers often use to try to launder their nonsense.

Ala Jack Posobiec's "What if instead of a vaccine we just were able to get exposed to a weak version of the virus that enabled us to build the antibodies we need to fight the real thing" bit (which is hilariously real, btw).

Sounds like you just want scientists and researchers to share your ideological biases. Who would be the arbiter of neutrality?

"Wipe out"? Absolutely abhorrent and authoritarian take. I'll note the common thread of brutal authoritarian regimes who executed purges of scientists and professionals convicted of wrongthink.

You want to destroy the future of science in this country because of some manufactured culture war. So much for free speech.

> Sounds like you just want scientists and researchers to share your ideological biases.

Not at all. My dad worked in public health, and I grew up around extremely liberal northeastern white people who worked in Africa and Asia while adapting themselves to the moral environment of wherever they happened to be working. You'd never know from their work they had any beliefs other than "vaccines are good" and "pregnant women should get sufficient folate."

> Who would be the arbiter of neutrality?

The public as a whole. Either they perceive you as neutral or they don't.

> "Wipe out"? Absolutely abhorrent and authoritarian take.

Public health as a field needs people who prioritize institutional values to the exclusion of everything else, because that's the only way you can build trust across the whole population. People who "bring their whole selves to work" endanger lives by destroying confidence in the public health system. If they can't do what the job requires they must leave.

First, racism is a public health issue. I know you're imagining "no blacks" signs on restaurants but it's actually that... well Jesus damn near everything is set up in a way that produces worse health outcomes for people of color. But even if you don't subscribe to the wider systemic effects it's still an issue even restricted to our healthcare system itself. They weren't saying that bullets from cops was a public health crisis, your own article outlines it really well.

The second was because if they didn't the ACLU was going to sue them into the ground on a 1A violation because protesting is the most bright line clear cut political speech. This wasn't a Black Lives Matter thing only either, the protests against the (in practice) vaccine mandate and social distancing itself were protected by this. How else could you protest them?

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