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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.
But Tabarrok didn't say "we should reward companies for treating disease". What he actually said (if you scroll up a few posts) was:
When I read this in the political context of the ongoing vaccine debates, the implied connotation I get is something like: "Listen here, you ignorant yokels. You might like to think that you're 'self-sufficient', but you're not. You depend on me, my tribe, the educated elites. Without us, you'd be dead. Specifically, you are dependent on the stock valuations of big megacorps continuing to rise. You know; stocks, the global finance market, i.e. that same thing that is the engine of mass immigration, the offshoring of industrial labor, the woke-industrial complex, and so many other things that you find politically abhorrent."
Obviously, he didn't write those exact words. But that's how it comes off. And that's a poor way to endear people to your cause, regardless of the actual merit of your claims. So the backlash he got on twitter makes perfect sense to me.
I mean, yeah. That is the implied connotation, because it's true. It's true the same way that you or I would tell the guys who set up the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone that their project is doomed without the support of public infrastructure. That's just not how the world works. If they can't tell the difference between investment in medical innovation being driven by the expectation of future profitable sales, and the nebulous forces driving the educated consensus on immigration, then they are just stupid.
Well, not in an entirely unqualified sense, obviously. We know that people can live without vaccines, because they did so for thousands of years. Life expectancy may have been lower, sure, but modern medicine is not a necessary precondition for human civilization to exist.
Vaccines are not even the sine qua non of modern medicine- no doubt they’re much cheaper than things like modern sewage systems and mass availability of antibiotics, but life expectancy started skyrocketing with improvements in sanitation and treatments for infection with vaccines more an acceleration of trend than a cause of it.
Smallpox vaccine was great because it put a stop to outbreaks of mass death. Measles and diphtheria vaccines were great because it ended a whole lot of infant and child mortality. Mumps vaccine is pretty good because it nearly wiped out a less deadly but still nasty childhood illness, similar with pertussis. Rubella also, and rubella is really bad for fetal development. Tetanus immunization is probably less important in the first world, but it is a bulwark against less-than-perfect sanitation.
Chicken pox vaccine is a step down from mumps vaccine; chicken pox is rarely fatal, though it is common and nasty. But when you're immunizing children against hepatitis B in the first world, then unless that vaccine is perfectly safe, you're probably past the point of diminishing returns.
I refused hep b for my kids. It’s clearly a scam and exhibit 1 in terms of the fda hhs and pharma collusion. It was an expensive to develop vaccine for gay men and it drug users. They couldn’t get enough customers to cover the cost of the drug so they got it on the newborn schedule. They give it to a baby in the first 24 hours.
Even if it were a miracle vaccine, it is absurd to give it to a baby in the first 24 hours of life. It’s obvious that the reason they do this is because it’s a garunteed touch point for doctors to administer it. Prioritizing vaccine sales over all other considerations.
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