That’s many levels of awful.
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I remember when Sicko came out, Micheal Moore absolutely skewered the medical insurance industry, while doing nothing to make Big Pharma look any better. And the industry response was to try to de-rail the conversation by pointing out how morbidly obese was the messenger. Few people seemed to take that bait at the time.
But now (as shitty as it is) Obama care has put the fear of God into these profit obsessed jerks, and avoidable childhood illnesses have become the singular emblem of health care for the country. We’re proportionally more outraged about this issue than we are about shark attacks. And gun violence against children, the underinsured, abusive medical billing, any nber of other outrages get a pass, because those fucking antivaxxers are to blame.
This, in a country where the people who serve your food don’t get paid sick leave.
It reminds me of how angry we used to all get at the few people who abuse the safety net, letting corporate welfare go unnoticed. Sure, there are some blue collar bad players out there, who are a drop in the bucket compared to the ones reallya king the big mess. If you can blame the poor for the world’s problems, it makes things that much better for the rich, and who doesn’t want to be rich someday?
This is becoming such a witch hunt, asking the simplest questions about these drugs is liable to get one (figuratively) feathered and tarred as an antivaxxer. It’s certainly not an atmosphere conducive to educating the ignorant.
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I have no solution to this problem, despite thinking about it for hours at a time for over thirty years. That doesn’t mean I’ll ignore it, though… categorical imperative and all that. My own personal responses have been to limit my biological reproduction to below the replacement rate, and to help increase the number of loved and educated children through adoption. Obviously that’s not a solution unless everyone does it, and nowadays our culture finds it acceptable for an insurance company to spend millions of other people’s dollars on fertility treatments, despite 17,900,000 children who have lost both parents living in orphanages or on the streets, lacking the care and attention required for healthy development. And it seems that some parents would rather spend their lifetimes sustaining a genetically damaged offspring as an unconscious vegetable than take in a fully functional homeless orphan, some religions reject all forms of birth control, some cultures reject adoption, some political and religious movements follow the “quiverful” strategy - given all this bad craziness, it’s not unlikely that we are heading relentlessly for a catastrophe that will make a measles outbreak seem like a walk in the park. It’s just a matter of how long we can stave it off, really.
@chenille, I see your point(s), although I don’t have any good response. Nonetheless I’m still not going to join in the anti-vaxxer pile-on… I will continue to vaccinate my children, and I will continue to be OK with other people refusing to vaccinate theirs, and I will continue to be very sorry that some people suffer and die from preventable causes. There are too many variables in this equation for me to be willing to punish or ostracize anyone, and I value the control group that unvaccinated people represent, despite disagreeing with their choices. Let’s face it, the unvaccinated are far less dangerous than many things we take for granted. Do you drive a car? Cars kill more children than measles, don’t they? Why should people be allowed to choose driving, if they shouldn’t be allowed to choose contagious disease? Why do people become enraged at such suggestions? Why are anti-anti-vaxxers so vitriolic in general? I have no answer, although there are lots more questions…
I would prefer to have the debate before it’s too late to make any difference, personally.
At this point I believe the biggest manipulable factor in birth rates is free comprehensive education. Something we seem to be turning away from, on a nearly global level. Most countries do not want free comprehensive secular education for all people, they want targeted indoctrination, and often only for children of citizens (that is, if you judge by their actions and not their words).
If we can stabilize the population and assure a source of energy that will be sustainable at that stable level, then everybody wins. This seems highly unlikely, though, if we can’t entertain policy discussions before mass starvation begins.
You’ll have to step it right on up to interplanetary matter transmission using zero-source energy, then. The math does not work for space emigration; we reproduce faster than we can lift bodies out of the gravity well, and the energy cost of lifting even one body makes the whole thing unsustainable anyway.
On the other claw, if you achieve this you are totally my hero. I would be far more pleased by the unlikely technology deus ex machina than the dies irae we seem headed for today.
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Sadly I am not that guy, although I do work for the man who is trying to do that… Just not at that company.
Cool, I am guessing you work for Tesla Motors or Id Software then. Good guesses? I turned down a job with Virgin Galactic because it would have involved moving to the Mojave desert, but sadly SpaceX has never made me an offer.
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By all means.
I just wouldn’t put “let otherwise preventable diseases run rampant by allowing misinformed people to make bad choices” very high on the list of useful solutions. If nothing else, it probably wouldn’t have a huge impact unless you set the entire global medical system back to the dark ages.
Sharks are gentle, peaceful creatures who are, as a taxon unfairly maligned for occasionally mistaking the odd human for food. They barely warrant a glance from public health officials.
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Very much so, but I think it takes some unpacking before it’s a useful comparison. Part of that is that cars, in contrast to infectious diseases, do have a lot to recommend them. I don’t mean that in terms of their prevalence, but to say changing that would involve some work restructuring on a large scale; the way things are now asking an individual to forgo cars is can be a very difficult change.
There are changes that can reduce the risk from cars, though, and these sorts of things can and do get mandated. It’s hard to get world figures, but in America I found estimates that seatbelts save about 10000 lives per year, and even though there are rules against it drunk driving kills about the same. Since those are easily preventable, I think they make a better reference point.
Measles itself is not particular consequential in comparison; prior to vaccination it looks like it killed about 400 people per year. But it’s not the only disease considered here. Pertussis is cited by the CDC as having killed some 9000 more children per year back in the 1940s, and while one might hope we would be better treating it now, the population has almost doubled since then.
And of course there is the difficulty that individual actions don’t scale the same way. A single person who without vaccines doesn’t really change much, and of course we expect to have some people like that, for instance for medical reasons. But when multiple people go without them it creates pathways for infections to spread and so the consequences are much more dramatic.
All in all, though, it doesn’t look to me like the threat of easily-preventable diseases is really that much less than from some of the easily-preventable risks of cars that we do generally expect action on. And while I can’t be sure, I expect a movement of celebrities promoting drunk driving would probably get a comparably angry response. Neither is close to our biggest problem, but they’re both ones that are so easily solved.
For the record, it looks like shark attacks kill about one person per year, and it looks like there are less than 100 children killed by accidental firearms per year. There are absolutely tens of thousands of deaths from guns and from lack of health care; I guess the political climate puts them in the same category as cars, but honestly I have no idea why people aren’t more outraged about them.
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So (genuine question as I’m not in the US) this Paul Rand is suggesting that the State have no role in mandating vaccination, so that parents can duke out in court whose fault it was that their offspring got ill/disabled/died?
If that’s the case, sorting out the issue just gets even more expensive and the only winners are lawyers and rich people.
That sounds very much like ‘The American Way’ to me, but please tell me I’m wrong?
And just to put another spanner in the works, surely children are held in stewardship by their parents and society until they can be responsible for themselves? People shouldn’t be property.
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So, before they are born, the state has the right to tell you what to do with your kids, but after they are born they have no business doing it?
OK. I get it now. Just wanted to make sure.
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Marilyn Manson and Alice In Chains heavy metal? Someone’s confused all right.
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So when it comes down to a parent saying “I have the right to neglect or abuse my child as I see fit, because they are my property”, and the state saying “no you can’t, because they’re human beings”, you’re going to side with the abusive parent?
That’s pretty messed-up.
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Close: before they are born they are people, but after they are born, they are property. Because reasons.
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In real life, children are the chattels of their parents, unless the local community claims they are being abused, in which case the state intervenes. That’s how it actually works outside the rarefied demesnes of childless philosophers and emotion-driven semantics. It’s the same as for pets and livestock, regardless of what people dream it “should” be. And that would be a good system, too - except that unfortunately the local community tends to report parents for letting their children walk home alone, and not notice the children held in basement torture chambers. Our communities are increasingly less closely-knit and that makes the existing system ever more prone to failure. Again, I have no solution to this problem, but these lofty pronouncements that “children aren’t property” are meaningless drivel even less useful than my own observations. Sound and fury, signifying… nothing.
Yeah, I do strongly agree, but I do not believe that anti-vaxxers are causing “rampant” disease. The actual numbers tell me anti-vaxxers have a negligible effect on public health compared to things like food safety (which we have been de-regulating since Reagan, with no end in sight to that trend) and obesity and diabetes &etc. To my mind preventable disease in the USA is just not really very high on the list of public health problems, despite how much people would like to think it is. And you know, if we devoted all our strongest efforts to fixing our educational system we’d do more than good than any number of forcible vaccinations… simply because well educated people will choose vaccination and today’s ignorant anti-vaxxers will resist coercion.
@chenille, I think if we accounted for all the people killed by pollution we’d find that petroleum-fueled cars do not have any beneficial effect that outweighs the harm they do. And of course we already know they do vastly more harm than anti-vaxxers, even without proper accounting.
I submit that we are in the process of literally destroying the entire human race with gasoline and diesel engines, and that most of us purposely blind ourselves to that truth because just like the anti-vaxxers we do not want to face up to the fact that our own everyday actions are part of a pattern of large-scale harm. Any of us could choose to make a difference, just like anti-vaxxers could choose to vaccinate, but for the most part we simply don’t. We don’t vote Green or scrimp and save to buy electric vehicles because that might cause some discomfort in our lives, or a realignment of our values, and just like the anti-vaxxers we are nearly all unwilling to endure that.
And that’s why whenever I hear petroleum addicts preaching how terrible the anti-vaxxers are, I usually say “a plague upon both your houses!” Although, honestly, I am far more disappointed by the actions of the petroleum addicts, because they do far more harm. I suspect that if we shot all the anti-vaxxers and their offspring tomorrow, it would do nothing to decrease the suffering that we are driving towards as a species.
Well, if we are going to try to encapsulate the anti-abortionist value system, perhaps before they are born, they are the property of the church, with the full backing of the state, and afterwards they are the property of the parents, with the full backing of the church?
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Well with Rand being a “Libertarian” he expects the “free market” to sort everything out. And yes, the rich would get richer but a quickier rate. My apologies for the excessive use of quotation marks, but you can pretty much use those anytime you refer to any politician and the verbal diarrhea that is forcefully ejected from their noise holes.
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i think we need a unicorn chaser.
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I did not mean it is “rampant” currently, but “more of a problem than it was before the anti-vaccination movement took hold”. Since you started out talking about disease in context of curtailing human population, and since these diseases would need to be able to run fairly rampant to have much of an impact in that context, I was extrapolating. Sorry I was unclear.
I don’t think that saying “we shouldn’t let these people cause us to lose ground against diseases that we’ve managed to reduce to a rarity” necessarily requires us to ignore other things that are (currently) larger public health problems. It certainly doesn’t require us to ignore completely unrelated things, like obesity, diabetes, or petroleum use.
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I’m certainly not going to disagree with that, especially since I know you properly take pollution to include non-local effects like global warming. I don’t think it is going to wipe out the human race, as cosmopolitan generalists, but we’re talking about stress and damage on an incredible scale anyway, so I’m not going to quibble with your description.
I will say that as far as my personal ire goes, when a failure to act is so widespread I have a tough time considering it a failing of the individuals involved. In the case of vaccines, there is an excellent system in place, and we only need people to use it. Even here, though, there are problems at a higher level; there are now groups deliberately confusing the issue, and you can see how people get confused by it. It’s those groups, not the non-experts they fool, who deserve our full contempt.
And as far as that goes, I absolutely apply the same principle to the harm from petroleum. Here there’s no system in place to reduce harm, quite the opposite, and while there certainly are good steps individuals should be taking they’re constantly lied to about its importance. Here the ring-leaders are a whole industry, complete with professional liars and venal politicians, all dedicated to confusing what needs to be done and holding up systemic change.
So that’s what I would be inclined to focus on, and while I think doing it here is a derail, I completely agree that these people are the far more terrible of the two sets. I hate how much of our society is shaped by them, I hate how untouchable they are, and I hate that so many people seem not to understand how much worse they are than the Wakefields out there. We really do need to get out from under their yoke yesterday.
But where there is hypocrisy I think it’s in ignoring them, and to return to this topic, the Wakefields still deserve the reaction they’ve gotten. Leaving children to be shredded by viruses until their immune system ends up cooking their own brain in a vain attempt to save it is a horrible thing, it’s a cruel insult every time someone suggests otherwise, and it’s been made very easy to prevent. It’s horrible that people are misleading others into not doing so.
We can stand up for that here and worry about making it just as easy to stop the greater problem. If your concern is that people don’t care nearly enough about the monstrous way our society is set up around pollution, I fully agree; it doesn’t require anyone to forget about the smaller number of lives at stake here.
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I think what people are objecting to is exactly this false dichotomy. It’s based on the premise that some one party has the right to dictate how a child is treated. That leads us naturally to the question “who is the supreme ruler of your child: you, or the State?”
How about neither? I don’t trust individuals to make good individualistic choices about public health, because the problem is a collective one, not an individual one. But I don’t trust the government to make those choices either, because the government is inclined to abuse that power to advance its own interests at the expense of many individuals.
How can we solve collective problems without just having the State step in and make our decisions for us? We need to figure something out, because this “individual vs. state” dichotomy is producing terrible results in terms of actual social behavior.
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I think I agree with everything you’ve just said (including the point about my derailing of the topic) with this single exception - forcible vaccination isn’t a strategy I can support under any post-Reagan US government. I would prefer the same monies be spent on educational campaigns, which are more likely to succeed, if we aren’t going to spend it on something that would be more helpful on a global scale. Government coercion is already out of control!
This in particular I find worth repeating:
The contemptible groups, I would say, are primarily the celebrity anti-vaxxers, if they can be properly called a group, and secondarily the pharmaceutical industry. I can’t really fault any large fraction of the medical profession; the small minority that do not strongly press patients to vaccinate usually have concerns about government coercion that I share. (The exceptions within the medical professions seem to be mostly Scientologists and individual outliers, at least to my eyes - but correct me if I’m wrong!)
I stand properly rebuked; @Nonentity made this point also. You are both correct.
