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Trump and RFK blame acetaminophen for childhood autism. I couldn’t find a transcript yet, but the meandering press conference is recorded here. Was this on anyone’s bingo cards?
I’m confused. I vaguely knew that the Trump campaign had decided to fight autism at some point, but I always figured it was appeasement for the antivaxxers. Is there an untapped pool of Tylenol haters out there? Is this a stalking horse for a broader wave of FDA guidelines targeting the usual suspects?
Maybe there’s some sort of political smokescreen going on. We don’t appear to have started any new wars, and domestic hate for Trump looks more or less like it did since last week. If it’s a distraction, it’s not a very efficient one; I had a hard time finding reporting on it, and all the sites that bothered were also eagerly blasting his abuses of the Justice Department and the Supreme Court. That leaves the old-fashioned political motive of throwing meat to the base. Maybe Trump is just checking off campaign promises. But again, it’s so niche.
I suppose there could be some sort of personal beef. If Trump is trying to tank someone’s stock, uh, this is still a pretty weird way to do it.
That’s not even touching the medical case. The administration doesn’t appear to have provided much substance behind their claim. This will dissuade approximately no one. Enjoy your fresh CW battleground.
Why is the American right so obsessed with autism and discovering some unknown or suppressed cause for it?
Politicising medicine in general is baffling to me, like how Ivermectin is right-wing while vaccines are left-wing (and I remember 20 years ago most antivax people were leftwing). At some point it feels like American politics is about picking any conceivable topic and flipping a coin to declare one side Republican and the other Democrat.
It's simple, over the last decades, the left has succesfully taken over multiple fields through academia, including medicine, and there is a fear from conservatives that this political capture is tainting the quality of the science that comes out of it. In some fields of medicine, particularly those at the intersection of hard sciences and social sciences, for instance study of the transgender phenomena, it's hard to argue that the conservatives don't have a massive point. In more hard science aligned ones, such as which drugs are effective/dangerous, it's less legible, but the conservatives do have (IMO) a smaller point that the left relishes the power to force public policy and is not wielding it objectively. The gleefulness with which they they resorted to coercive methods to force people to vaccinate during COVID is a great example.
The problem is that MAGA offers no credible alternative. If they had a trans-skeptic secretary of health who would cut down woke excesses back to the level of empiricism, that would be one thing.
Instead they have someone whose whole point was to bring in the votes of the anti-vaxxers and a president who joins him in announcing their big medical discoveries.
I mean, sure, if one believes that the medical priesthood is made up out of charlatans who talk about make-believe concepts like proteins, p-values, PCR or the like, then there is no problem in replacing them with different charlatans who can make just as convincing a show of knowing the secret language of the priesthood.
I will grant you this. For a lot of vaccines, the social benefit is that the immunized can no longer transmit the infection. Not so for COVID. So the main public health effect is not present.
A fair solution, in my opinion, would have been to announce that vaccination would be entirely voluntary, but that in triage situations, the willfully unvaccinated would simply get a penalty in their QALY-based score. Say divide their expected QALY gain from interventions by a factor of two, so that you might be indifferent between putting a 40yo unvaccinated patient or a 60yo vaccinated patient on oxygen.
This has good precedent: we already allow people to engage in a lot of dangerous activities such as smoking, drinking, or base jumping, which frequently kills them. The idea is that everyone has their own risk appetite, and as long as they just kill themselves we should generally let adults do what they want. Only when they endanger others is when we should restrict their behavior.
So if someone decides to gain immunity to COVID the natural way instead of getting microchipped by Bill Gates, let them. Just don't let them take a spot in the ICU from someone who followed the recommended vaccination schedule if spots are limited, send them home with a bucket of Ivermectin or something.
Sadly, our society is utterly incapable of discussing care prioritization in triage situations at all. The closest we get to it is probably taking current alcohol abuse into account when deciding who gets a new liver first.
The problem with suddenly slapping a QALY triage system on covid vaccination is that covid just doesn't have that big an effect on QALY. About 1-2 weeks loss per infection on average. This pales in comparison to other risks, like smoking (loss measured in years) and even to politically polarised risks like being a sexually active gay man. If you were assembling a checklist or survey you use for the calculation you wouldn't bother putting covid vaccination on it over hundreds of other risk factors.
This policy would rightly be seen by its victims as a blatant and obvious political attack on them specifically rather than part of a calculated dispassionate healthcare strategy. So no different than the mandates themselves.
My argument was that in most of situations, if people want to get the covid vaccine or not is a private choice between them and their risk appetite, same as smoking or driving a motorcycle.
The difference between covid patients and lung cancer patients is that covid patients are not poisson distributed and a wave of infections can easily overwhelm the medical system.
In situations where the medical system is overwhelmed, we need some triage procedure to prioritize patients. Using the QALY gains from the intervention seems like the obvious choice here. Obviously this makes a big difference. If a 50yo with severe covid has a 50% higher survival chance with O2 than without, that is decades of QALYs.
However, in health care emergencies, I find it fair to prioritize people who were not complicit in causing the health care emergency. If ten patients come into the ER after a highway accident, and you know for a fact that five of them were involved in an illegal street race which caused the accident, then I would think it fair to operate on the other traffic victims first, all other things being equal. (Typically, you do not know such information reliably, which is why we do not have policies for that.)
Outside of healthcare emergencies, everyone should receive care, of course, no matter how stupid and complicit they were in causing their health care problem. Smokers get lung cancer treatments, anti-vaxxers get ICU beds and so on.
My policy proposal is a lot less paternalistic and impactful than vaccination mandates. Most of the triage situations I heard about were from before vaccines became widespread. It would be also compatible with free market solutions like some anti-vaxxers voluntarily paying a private ICU facility a premium to keep a fraction of a bed to compensate for their higher risk of overwhelming the medical system.
This is very different to my approach to other vaccines where the immunized do not spread the disease, and being unvaccinated means, in the more extreme cases, that you are actively playing for team Nurgle.
Sure, but there is no existing policy for this, no past policy, and to bring it in for 2021 would obviously be perceived as an ad-hoc move to punish political enemies.
Further, if done in a dispassionate way, the main people who are complicit in causing a COVID emergency will be the elderly for the crime of being old.
What is the risk of "overwhelming" a free market private medical system? This is like saying gluttonous people should have to pay restaurants a premium in case they show up when the restaurant is already full - a misunderstanding of what a free market would actually mean in terms of having the choice to turn away customers.
Again this would end up being ad-hoc because we don't actually treat behaviours that spread disease like this in proportion to their risk of spreading disease. Outside of obvious culture war examples like anal sex, consider that alive while immunosuppressed will do a lot of damage all by itself.
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Proposal: triage based on available annual renewable term life insurance premium for each patient conditional only on those attributes predictably downstream of a patient's choices. This plan would ensure that foregoing the covid vaccine resulted in a difference in triage ordering that was correct. This plan has no downsides. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
Covid vaccination has such a minor effect compared to other patient choices that you would never bother surveying for it unless you are doing so for political partisan reasons. Covid just isn't dangerous enough for that to matter.
To provide an example, heavy smoking (which is a lower threshold than you'd expect) costs the average heavy smoker about 10 QALY, so any amount you charge for being unvaccinated, you'd have to charge heavy smokers ~500 times more. Already this stretches the bounds of feasibility. Any cost high enough to cover the cost of repeatedly vaccinating yourself for covid (Yep, that's a thing still, are you up to date according to local recommendations?) will be greater than the additional insurance cost, unless the premium increases by so much that you bankrupt all smokers. Not to mention the "gay tax" you'll have to charge for HIV risk, which for sexually active gay men is also a much higher risk than covid.
Edit: For the sake of providing real-world numbers, with the caveat that the UK doesn't operate on an insurance model, official recommendations are 1 booster shot every 6 months for £100 each when offered privately. Therefore if you increase insurance premiums on the unvaccinated, they will need to be at least £200/y more to be more expensive than simply being unvaccinated. Therefore you'd want to look at charging heavy smokers an extra £100,000 a year, which is multiple times the average annual income in the UK.
I'm afraid no matter what you try to do to construct a rational basis for punishing covid vaccine dissidents, it will succumb to the simple fact that covid isn't dangerous enough to justify it, unless you are also willing to simultaneously hit other groups with orders of magnitude more severe punishments.
Unrelated note - it might be fun at some point for us to do an adversarial collaboration on covid vaccines, because I hold the position that the mRNA vaccines (the speed of development and production scaling) were actually a bright spot in the covid pandemic and gave us some tools which we should be investing a bunch more into. Pretty much everything the public health policy makers did during covid in the US was stupid but the vaccines themselves are a medical miracle.
This wouldn't be particularly adversarial. The vaccines are kind of mediocre but fine. A bright spot in the covid pandemic is like the least stinky shit in a sewer. My disagreements are all with how states used vaccines to engage in yet more flagrant violations of human rights and violate medical ethics. I think we shouldn't invest into these tools, not as an isolated principle against mrna or viral vector treatments, but because of the risk the current institutions would use that investment just as they did in 2020-2022 for ill.
If the vaccines were released outside the context of lockdowns and other restrictions I would have nothing to say on them and there would have been no substantial opposition to them.
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The joke was "covid vaccination status fades into noise by the annual renewable term life insurance premium metric". It's similar in spirit to proposing that we keep plastic straws, but charge consumers a carbon tax for the carbon that goes into its production (i.e. proposing to keep plastic straws but tax them at $0.0002 each), except my proposal is also "let's spend lots of time getting price quotes on term life insurance for people in medical triage, trying to address equity concerns in a triage situation is definitely a good use of resources so we should make sure to do it right".
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How many academic journals would even consider a well-researched trans-skeptical study? Not even publish, but get to the point of doing a serious peer review? And going down the list of other things MAGA/MAHA takes seriously, tge same question— if a journal received a paper that was well-researched but says ivermectin is an effective treatment for Covid, do they send it out for peer review, or is it simply circular filed and ignored? In order to start doing the serious alternative research you want MAGA/MAHA to do, they need access to the journals and conferences that give legitimacy to the science. Furthermore, could a secretary go back to empirical evidence if the studies are strongly biased and the journals are captured? If the medical and science establishment were radically traditional Catholic, you aren’t going to be able to roll back to “evidence backed monotheism” because anything that isn’t in line with traditional Catholic teachings hasn’t gotten through.
In theory, a fair amount.There was the Cass Review, which included many published and peer reviewed papers, and the recent Gordon Guyatt drama resulted from trans-skeptical studies being published, though as the authors would have it, the issue was not the studies themselves, but the fact that they were used in a trans-skeptical way, which is why the customary activist pressure was applied.
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I’m pretty sure that’s post hoc reasoning. It’s popular, probably because it dovetails nicely with the Trump’s general platform, but the timeline is wrong. Where was this argument during the fights over Obamacare? During the early-2000s measles resurgence? Even within Trump I, when people were suddenly deeply concerned with institutional capture, medical research was almost a non-issue.
It’s a referendum on COVID policy, plain and simple. Which really means it’s a referendum on Biden. The outcome was predetermined.
I think at that point a big enough portion of the normie-right still believed that the hostages could be saved, that these hostile institutions had to be preserved even if sometimes you had to account for their biases. COVID certainly had an effect as to demonstrate how captured institutions could be weaponised against them. I think another aspect that pushed the normie-right towards preferring burning it all down rather than living with the captured institutions is the insistance from institutions, in and around the same years, on allowing kids to transition without their parents' approval; to a conservative parent, nothing could feel more like an existential threat.
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I’m not American so I’m not too familiar with what you’re describing. Where I live the vaccination enforcement and lockdown measures were significantly harsher than anywhere in the US, and there was broad social support from all political parties. Shouldn’t conservatives, i.e. the party of law and order, be a fan of measures which promote public safety?
And the right in the US, especially in its current MAGA incarnation, is just as gleeful in its authoritarian tendencies. It doesn’t even feel economically right wing anymore; tariffs, protectionism, anti-immigration, the government having ownership of major companies… that was all leftist policy 50-60 years ago.
Should Conservatives be a fan of law and order in Stalin's USSR?
This is just bad understanding of what conservatives believe. There are authorities worth following, and authorities that are not, differing slightly depending on form of conservatism.
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Define public safey. Because the moment authorities in the US cracked down on anti-lockdown protestors, but then allowed BLM protestors free reign (because "racism is a bigger threat than COVID) it became transparently obvious that either lockdowns had nothing to do with safety, or that those in charge of determining what constituted safety had no idea what they were doing. Or plausibly both. For mild evidence in support of this, I refer you to Sweden which had more mild lockdowns thsk most of the US, and achieved better outcomes.
It's fairly obvious that you get your US news from lefty sources, but a few moments of consideration would show that mostly what the MAGA agenda is about is deregulation, sprinkled with some mercantilism. I understand there is a great temptation to slap the evil "authoritarian" label on things you don't like, but getting rid of laws is not authoritarian by any possible stretch of the word. The few genuinely authoritarian actions, like banning red dye 40, have mostly gone unnoticed.
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This assumes they perceived the COVID restrictions to have promoted public safety, and significantly biased (and capricious) enforcement blew that all to hell.
Biased vaccine distribution schedules also likely harmed public tolerance and public trust for any measures.
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I don't know how it went in your country, but in the USA, Lockdown measures continued in some places for a LONG time, even after the vaccines were widely available. I personally felt like the goalposts had been moved; all the pro-lockdown people around me had said they wouldn't stop demanding lockdowns until there was a vaccine; a vaccine became available, and the pro-lockdown people continued to be pro-lockdown and said they wouldn't stop until the vaccines were mandatory with 100% compliance, also we need vaccine boosters every X months for the new variant. They also didn't think that anyone gained any natural immunity from having gotten covid, even though that's exactly how the vaccines they were waiting for work, by giving you the benefits of natural immunity without you having to get sick first, because it turns out that the people who Believe The Science don't actually know the fucking science; they were expecting a 100% effective vaccine when even our yearly flu shots are only 70% effective. Masking and Taking Covid Seriously became a leftist cause because they saw a conservative not wearing a mask and hand to triple down on doing the opposite, until of course there was street protesting to be done.
They kept on looking for excuses to keep being afraid. I will neither forgive nor forget that those people trapped me inside, stopped me from dating, stopped me from engaging in my hobbies, stole three(+) years of my life, and when one of them who had been my friend threatened me with vague promises that one day soon I'd be a minority and get my comeuppance, called me a White Supremacist, then betrayed me and his other roommates, emotionally abused his girlfriend and tried holder her hostage, and attacked me with an axe, and suffered NO loss of reputation among his Leftist friends, because he was a Queer Marxist of Color and therefore could do no wrong.
I still see young-ish mask-wearing leftists every. single. day.
The MAGA conservatives in the US chase votes and approval by dunking on the left. The bases of both parties have been radicalized by a decade plus of propaganda that makes them think of the other side as an existential threat to the future; MAGA doesn't have to be consistent or effective on policy, it just needs to give the impression that it's fighting Wokeness, and Woke made a lot of enemies.
Are you on the left coast? Not disputing your claim, merely curious. I'm in flyover country and the only people I see consistently still masking are lib-left Boomers.
Chicago, west side.
Oh yeah that's a bad spot for those types lately. You've got to get good at giving off the "I'm nice but don't fuck with me" vibe, and that doesn't really work if you were enmeshed in those social circles before they went all the way off the deep end.
I don't quite know what you mean.
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I live near an East Coast city, and I too see masked-up young-looking people (seemingly) every time I take the bus or subway or go to the mall. They're not common, they're definitely a small minority, but they're common enough that I continue to notice them during my day-to-day times in public spaces.
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I still saw them a month ago when I went up to Lexington, so they definitely exist east of the Mississippi.
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I very rarely see mask wearers who arent plausibly sick, but when I do they are invariably leftish looking women.
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Mid-Atlantic here and it's an interesting split, mask-wearers I see are either older black people or (seemingly) younger, especially women, of funny hair color. Not major numbers of either though.
In Northern VA, most of the masked people I see are Asian. I understand that going out in public masked has been very common in East Asia since the SARS epidemic more than twenty years ago.
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As an aside: Do you see the contradiction in these two statements? You are not American, and you admit that you have holes in your cultural knowledge, but you are also able to speak in broad certainties about the behavior of a certain class of citizen?
To go back to the COVID restrictions, there were clear instances of policy positions that were class based and/or tribal in their implementation.
The most egregious was obviously the medical establishment's stance on the fiery but mostly peaceful protests of 2020 vs anti-lockdown protests, but it scaled down as well. One of the great lakes states banning the sales of "red tribe" items (like vegetable seeds) while leaving "blue tribe" store shelves (holding things like personal lubricant) wide open is one that really stuck with me, personally.
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I'll try to explain this cultural gap as someone with a bit of familiarity with both American and European (I assume that's where you're from) conservative culture. To massively generalize, for American conservatives, the purpose of law and order is to enable the liberty of law-abiding people. Strong law enforcement, yes, but of laws written to be relatively minimal and with a common-sense focus on "real crime", with the goal to enable people to freely live a "normal" (i.e. productively employed, not using drugs, etc.) life. Red Tribers are often happy to break laws they see as unnecessary government overreach if they can get away with it. They're concerned about the breakdown of law and order, but just as concerned that abuses of state power will crush that freedom to live one's American life. Covid measures were a question of the latter issue to American conservatives. They don't see what MAGA is doing in terms of law and order, like ICE raids, as authoritarian because it's going after people who have broken what they consider just and reasonable laws, but lockdowns were unjust.
As for MAGA's populist economics, yeah, in many ways it's no longer a movement of 80s free-market economics. The more hardline economic populists will tell you that the left-wingers advocating those policies a hundred years ago were the real populists back then, and they were wrong to give up economic populism in the 20th Century in order to fight over culture and long march through institutions - they'll even be gleeful when leftists point that out.
There remains a fairly large contingent of traditional law-and-order conservatives, the kind who believe every regulation is a good thing and to be followed, that if you were arrested you are guilty and in any conflict between an individual and authority, authority is right. Rather overrepresented among police officers (who of course see themselves as authority), but rather underrepresented among online conservatives, "second amendment people", and MAGA.
I'm sure that's true, also among older conservatives in red states. I've only known big-city cops, who generally take a somewhat cynical attitude to their department and a relaxed attitude to common-sense violations of regulation because both are necessary for their job.
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If they knew for sure that they did, they might. But when they see the medical establishment visibly torturing the science to fit the progressive agenda in subfields that are legible to laypeople (see again, transgenderism, or the immediate endorsement of BLM protests from the american medical establishment despite the pandemic), the result is distrust of the pronouncements in the subfields that are not as legible. If you're lying to my face about something that I can independantly observe, why would I just shut up and believe you when it comes to something I'm not able to observe?
I’m actually in agreement that there is political distortion from the left in the social sciences (less so in medicine), but the American right has not presented any credible alternative and instead doubled down on even worse distortions of their own, and burning down the whole thing. The American medical establishment supporting protests (perhaps due to internal political pressures?) does not mean you should distrust the whole institution when it comes to non politically influenced matters.
I’m transgender myself, and I would love for the left to stay out of my medical condition, and for there to be actual studying of the phenomenon and treatment options without political bias influencing it. Unfortunately the right does not offer any solutions and seems interested in stopping research and putting laws that restrict treatment.
I was a fan of the anti-woke movement early on - the intellectual dark web so to speak - but it really feels like Americans just traded one flavour of woke for another.
The right totally offers solutions -- see that clip that was circulating of Charlie Kirk talking to somebody considering hormones; you just don't like the solution. (ie. talk therapy, find a way to be comfortable in your own body that doesn't involve intense, largely unstudied, lifelong pharmaceutical intake + extremely invasive surgeries, carry on with life)
The politicization is the reason that this hasn't been studied -- while there's no intrinsic reason such a study couldn't be done in an ethical way, you would struggle to get it by and IRB (due to politics), and even taking such a thing on would be a death sentence both career-wise and socially in the current campus/PMC political milieu.
Why are you blaming the right when the left has blocked all the paths (ed. other than the one that they chose, apparently for political reasons) to a scientific solution? "Burn it down and start over" seems like the only thing to be done in the current situation, and it's not the right that has brought us here.
And what if those other solutions just don't work? I did try talk therapy for years, I did everything I could to convince myself I didn't need to transition. I went to the gym and became very physically fit, I dated men and women both, I talked to TERFs and tried to read what they said with an open mind. And yet, the pharmaceutical route - just a estradiol gel you apply daily to your skin - is so far what has made me the most comfortable in my body and reduced my body dysmorphia by a huuge amount.
The history of trans medicine goes back over a hundred years and is not just a fringe modern leftist medical movement. If you read say, Harry Benjamin's famous book from the 1960s, he describes how psychotherapy has been completely unable to cure transsexuals and transvestites from their mental affliction and provides numerous psychiatrist reports to that effect. This is from a time when gender non-confirming behavior risked severe social disapproval, and was often outright illegal, and all pressure would have been on patients to not be a transsexual as opposed to today where there is acceptance and even encouragement. Psychotherapy has advanced since the 1960s sure, but why do you think talk therapy would be more effective at reducing gender dysphoria now than it did back when transitioning meant losing your job, your family, your friends?
There's plenty wrong with the modern trans movement, I won't deny that. But the right wing proposal - "find a way to be comfortable with your own body", "carry on with life", I'm sorry, that's not an actionable solution I can put in practice, that just sounds like "cope harder". Why would I subject myself to lifelong psychological pain, have it be this constant weight on my shoulder, have difficulty being intimate with a partner when I can just... accept that I'm trans, follow an established treatment plan, and have all that inner suffering massively reduced? I didn't pick that option out of some ideological belief, it's just the best option I tried so far, and I'm lucky enough that it hasn't had any negative social or professional consequences.
I do think talk therapy, etc, have a place as a first-line intervention and everyone is too quick to jump to puberty blockers/HRT, but ultimately I agree with you: estradiol worked, the other things didn't.
I even had reason recently to stop it for a while which seemed like a good chance to test if it was still necessary or whether the other changes were enough. Sure enough, things were terrible again (long after the period where the hormone changes had largely settled down).
My position is that it's kind of like chemo: it may not solve things and dear God don't do it if you don't have the relevant issue, but if it works it's invaluable.
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Give it a couple decades and the cycle will start again.
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Of course the right doesn't have any replacement, outside of "rogue" doctors and scientists who by being outside of the medical establishment will cluster around non-central views.
But you can hardly blame them; just telling the right to shut up and inject whatever people that have already clearly revealed themselves to be their ideological enemies tell them to is not going to go smoothly. Even if they cannot really tell whether what they're asked is harmful or not, the people telling them to do it are not trustworthy anymore.
It's the same with libraries; having a place funded by the community where kids can discover reading material for free is great, perhaps even important, and I think everyone in that community would agree with in general. But if the librarians insist they must host drag queen story hour, and that this is not a negociable part of its functions, despite it being considered unacceptable by a very large part of the community, then they shouldn't be surprised if the answer is to cut funding to the library, even if it affects the non-objectionable part of its functions.
Basically, the left is learning, a bit late, that they cannot hold important impartial societal functions hostage to get their way in politics. The right is willing (and increasingly able) to shoot the hostages to remove the threat.
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Rather in the same way that a cop killing an innocent person is more outrageous than rando killing someone; the cop is supposed to protect people, and is empowered by the state to do so. I have high standards for the medical and scientific establishment and find it particularly perverse and outrageous when they cave to/follow political pressure. I have very low standards for a populist movement of anti-vaxxers and fox news youtube clip viewers led by Orange Man.
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