Technology

Is it a lack of empathy?

Yes, it's a disregard for human life

Even with that, the nominated head of Health and Human Services wants to do away with the polio vaccine.

.....I'm sorry, what?

GOD DAMMIT! GET LUIGI MORE BULLETS! THE JOB'S NOT DONE!!!

My dad remembers from his childhood occasionally seeing houses placed under quarantine for diseases like measles and then at some point thanks to vaccines measles pretty much just stopped being a thing in most of the US. He got his polio and smallpox vaccines back in the day, and has lived to see smallpox eradicated and polio nearly so.

My grandfather was born a couple years after the 1918 flu pandemic, he had a brother born a couple years before him who died in infancy, he never talked about it much but the timing lines up that his brother was likely a victim of that pandemic. It was certainly something he heard talked about in his childhood just as we'll probably keep talking about COVID for years to come, and I think it definitely left an impact on him, he always was wary about passing germs along to his grandchildren, he always warned our parents against kissing us and never did himself, the only time he did was on his literal deathbed (cancer, nothing communicable) when he kissed my sister (in a non-creepy familial way) as probably one of his last conscious acts.

He was never one to shy away from a fight, I would have loved to see the hell he would have raised against anti-maskers if he'd lived another decade or so. There are people his age or older still walking among us. These things aren't even out of living memory, we're barely a handful of generations removed from them.

The chickenpox vaccine was introduced when I was in elementary school. I remember a lot of children's shows when I was growing up having a chickenpox episode where one or more of the main characters would get chickenpox, they'd take oatmeal baths and slather on calamine lotion to ease the itching, their parents would discuss having their friends over to get them infected early and give them immunity, etc. It kind of seemed like it was inevitable that many if not most kids would get chickenpox eventually, and at the time it kind of was. The vaccine was still optional at the time, and I remember a lot of discussion about it not being very effective, but a lot of kids in my age range got it, and the number of kids in my school who got chickenpox was probably in the dozens instead of probably hundreds just a few years earlier.

There have been some missteps along the way, my dad had a small hepatitis scare when a blood test turned up antibodies (though no active infection) likely from exposure from reused vaccine needles when he was in the army. The US did a grave disserve to polio vaccination efforts by using them as a cover to track down bin Laden and increased distrust in the vaccine in the process. There have been cases where vaccines have used ingredients that have proven unsafe, where people have had adverse reactions, etc. but still overall, the fact that I have never met anyone who has had smallpox, polio, or measles and probably never will speaks volumes about how much more good than harm vaccines do when 100 years ago I would almost certainly have known people who had died or left disabled or disfigured by those diseases.

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.

There are people who are still in congress who had polio.

Mitch McConnel.

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,

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.

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.

Sometimes it feels like it's all done to grab headlines.

It works, they eat cats and dogs.

If something is irredeemable, it's not the government, it's the voters.

All of this could be fixed if just enough people understood the truth.

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.

Stupidity.