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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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