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Donald Trump nominates RFK Jr. to be Secretary of Health and Human Services.
I am not naturally sympathetic to criticizing policy or personnel decisions on the grounds that they "embolden" the wrong people, but I am going to make an exception here. The sheer magnitude of human suffering prevented by vaccines and antibiotics is hard to comprehend. Due to complex structural and psychological reasons, the developers of these treatments capture a miniscule fraction of the total utility surplus created.
Enter the pharma skeptics: I do not know what RFK Jr.'s specific stance on vaccines is, besides "more skeptical than the liberal establishment will accept", but I do know how Twitter works. Twitter is real. It affects real events in actual reality, up to and including the US presidential election. Trans issues are getting dumped from the mainstream Democratic Party agenda because of how much it gets dunked on on Twitter.
In this Twitter thread, the entire concept of rewarding companies for treating disease is getting dunked on like it's a Lia Thomas podium. This is of course not the only example I could have pulled, but it shocked me both because of it's location (Alex Tabarrok's feed), and because of the sheer intensity of what can only be described as concentrated stupid.
But perhaps the most alarming implications are for democracy itself. RFK's endorsement likely won Trump the election, not least because it paved the way for the Rogan endorsement. Republicans won by increasing their share of the stupid vote. Indeed, no party can win a national election without winning large swaths of the stupid vote. There simply aren't enough smart people to win. Perhaps this explains the modern political environment. The decision between Democrat or Republican boils down to a decision on which party's concession to the stupid vote will do the least amount of damage.
Views like your own do not seem uncommon to me, but they seem disconnected from common sense and I can't tell if I'm taking words too literally or if people have internalized so many weird perspectives on things that they've lost their clear-sightedness.
1: If somebody wins democratically, then that's democracy. If you dislike a democratic process, then you're arguing against democracy, and not for it. I can't make sense of rejecting a democratic result with the argument that something democratic is a threat to democracy.
2: I do not see anybody, anywhere, downplay the importance of vaccines and antibiotics. Not even when I follow your link. People dislike one specific vaccine (if you can even call it that), because it wasn't tested properly. And many of the connected companies have some shady histories. I don't even think it's relevant if these companies did anything bad or not, or if the vaccine is harmless or not. A large amount of people lost all trust in these companies and those who support them, and for perfectly valid reasons.
3: The correlation between IQ and ideology is weak, and it doesn't tell you which side is more correct.
RFK supporters I know personally are highly vaccine skeptical and believe in a kind of vaccine/autism link bailey. They do not support vaccinating kids for e.g. measles due to low death rates and are convinced that the only reason kids get so many vaccines is due to the pernicious influence of pharma companies. They are members of Facebook groups of hundreds of people where the consensus view aligns with their beliefs.
The vaccine schedule now includes hundreds of vaccines and the incentives are all screwed up. I think it's pretty reasonable to believe in vaccines as a technology in general and that a lot of them have been captured by special interests.
False. I count 32 doses recommended to all children from age 0 to 18, not counting a yearly flu vaccine and one dose of a covid vaccine.
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines-children/schedules/index.html
This is a perfect example of the belief set I am talking about. The RFK supporters I know believe that kids are getting tens of vaccines in a single day.
Okay. Which vaccines in particular do you believe in?
how many of these doses include multiple vaccines?
to be frank, it's asinine to claim someone "wrong" if they believe MMR is 3 vaccines instead of one
why wouldn't you count these?
"hundreds" is wrong, but so is "32" even if we accept 1 dose=1 vaccine which is hardly some sort of objective fact
Sure, we can break down dtap and mmr into three vaccinations. That brings the total to 48. Still a far cry from hundreds, so I don't see what's asinine about saying that hundreds is wrong. There's just no way you can torture the numbers to get to hundreds.
Simply because in my experience most kids don't get these on a regular basis.
they're on the schedule
hundreds is wrong, but so is 32
the number of vaccines on the CDC schedule for a child born today through age 18 is ~80
How is it 80? 48 I counted above, plus 18 flu, plus 2 covid makes 68.
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What’s your experience?
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My mistake, I should have said dozens. I think I saw "hundreds" somewhere recently and internalized that for some reason.
The technology for smallpox vaccines could be totally sound, and the company that makes the shots puts too much mercury in them or something. A batch could be bad. Maybe the adjuvants are too strong. We have good heuristics for noticing when something causes noticeable immediate side effects, but not when something contributes to chronic stress. Maybe every shot contains one of the 32 arms of Exodia, and you need to catch them all to visit the shadow realm.
Children in the US are no longer vaccinated for smallpox because the disease is extinct.
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So... there's no actual vaccine that you "believe in", and your belief is strictly in the theoretical (but so far unattained) possibility of producing a good vaccine?
It's imminently reasonable to suspect that some vaccines are not manufactured well. That would be a very explanation for why 1) vaccines are a good technology that save lives 2) some people seem to be getting sick from them.
But there's no way to distinguish well manufactured and poorly manufactured vaccines?
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Let's not do the thing where the poster is directionally correct, but we're nitpicking the details. Yeah, it's not 100 shots, but it's a lot, and it's a lot more than before.
Let's flip it. Why should an infant be receiving Hep B and Covid vaccines? Why should they receive any vaccines that they didn't in 1990 (or whenever the Chicken Pox vaccine came out).
The post-1990s vaccines to have vanishingly little benefit and unquantified risk.
Wait a second. There is no "directionally correct" here - the poster said not 100 but "hundreds" and the true number is around 30. It's "directionally correct" in the sense that the sign is right, but that's about it. If he said "thousands", would that still be "directionally correct"?
And it's not a semantic nit, because we can mostly all agree that the ideal number of vaccines is greater than 0 and less than "hundreds". So where exactly we are on that spectrum is basically the entire discussion.
I don't think there's a good reason to vaccinate infants against COVID.
I don't know why infants are vaccinated against hep B but it's been recommended for newborns since the 1991 (and patented in 1972), so by your heuristic that one seems pretty safe.
It's not clear to me that this is the case, but I'd be curious to see if anyone has actually looked at this rigorously. I don't know off the top of my head which ones are post 1990s.
*not including the annual flu shots (sometimes multiple) and covid shots
I guess we'll just forget those even exist
Please show your math for "hundreds" of vaccinations on the schedule. I went through and counted, you can surely put some minimal effort in rather than low effort sneers.
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The RFK-associated site I saw claimed 7 shots in one day, which appears to be true. (RSV, Hep B, Rotavirus, DTaP, Hib, Pneumococcal, Polio).
That's much closer to the truth but not necessarily true.
So taking those two at 2 months instead of 3 months cuts the number to 5.
And polio is a going concern only in a couple of third world eastern hemisphere countries, so you can safely skip that one.
Polio doesn't work like that.
IPV which we use in the US (and basically anywhere where with the infrastructure to manage the necessary cold-chain) has no effect on infection or transmission of polio. It is highly effective at preventing severe disease (although polio normally presents as just a cold with no distinguishing symptoms, so we've never actually studied the vaccine's impact on mild disease), which is what we mean when we say the US has "eradicated polio". In practice, polio spreads largely through poor sanitation, not direct person-to-person contact, so improved sanitation has probably actually reduced spread a fair bit, but there's no reason to believe the vaccine has done so. And we don't know because no one tests for polio (although there's some small push to start doing some wastewater testing).
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What's old is new again
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7 shots in one appointment, however, is a plausible claim, even if it isn't necessary to do it that way.
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