How Americans responded in 1955 when the invention of the polio vaccine was announced
How Americans responded in 1955 when the invention of the polio vaccine was announced
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It is amazing to me how short our memories are as a species. There are people who are still in congress who had polio. There are an estimated 300,000 people still alive in the US who survived polio. Even with that, the nominated head of Health and Human Services wants to do away with the polio vaccine.
I don't know what the problem is. Is it a lack of empathy? Is it willingness to swallow the bait surrounding conspiracy theories? Is it just a lack of education? How did we get to the point where it is even remotely okay for the future head of Heath and Human Services to be against the polio vaccine?
If being pro-polio isn't disqualifying for being the head of HHS, and if he gets confirmed, the U.S. will have very clearly shown that it is in rapid decline. It will have shown that the government is corrupt to its core and is irredeemable.
Is it a lack of empathy?
Yes, it's a disregard for human life
I think that is true for some of the people involved, but I think it is much more complicated than that. There are many people who think vaccines do more harm than good because they believe conspiracy theories and junk science. Not everyone against vaccines is malicious. Some must be, though, for such bullshit to keep propagating the way that it does.
Most of Trump's cabinet ranges from morally indifferent to outright hostile to human beings. The only exception I think I see is RFK Jr. who is just batshit insane.
Agreed. It takes more than Trump, his cabinet, and MAGA to get here, though. It requires complicity and complacency from a ton of other people.
Yeah I think those other people are conspiracy theorists, like you said.
Yep. Biden and Harris come to mind, as does the rest of the Democratic establishment. If they didn't prefer Trump to Bernie, this would be a much sweeter timeline.
Hey! Whoa! Speaking as a member of the batshit insane community, don't you try to dump him off as one of us! He's clearly in the "manipulated puppet" camp. Or at the very least the Kennedys camp. Those guys were always their own bunch to begin with. I mean JFK brought us inches away from WWIII and then said "Peace out bitches! I'm dying by suicide!"
Then he faked his own death, and moved to Boston, where nobody would recognize him.
Don't sell RFK Jr short. He might be crazy but he's also an evil POS.
I'm just going to keep repeating this. RFK killed 20 Samoan children with an anti vaccine campaign.
I disagree. People are always assholes first and then look for rationalisations for their assholery. All that conspiracy bullshit always leads back to racism and antisemitism.
Please explain how the earth being flat, birds not being real, bigfoot, ufo's, and the moonlanding being a hoax have ANYTHING to do with racism and antisemitism.
What is quite scary is that it doesnt have to be vaccines, they could be convinced of anything given time and right approach.
Even with that, the nominated head of Health and Human Services wants to do away with the polio vaccine.
.....I'm sorry, what?
GOD DAMMIT! GET LUIGI MORE BULLETS! THE JOB'S NOT DONE!!!
Oh yeah we're so fucked. As well as believing that vaccines cause autism, RFK believes that HIV doesn't lead to AIDS. He literally believes that "something about the gay lifestyle" causes it.
RFK Jr tried this before in 2022. He's been trying to get the FDA to revoke approval for the vaccine, probably to snowball it into "we need to revoke all vaccine approvals".
My dad remembers from his childhood occasionally seeing houses placed under quarantine for diseases like measles and then at some point thanks to vaccines measles pretty much just stopped being a thing in most of the US. He got his polio and smallpox vaccines back in the day, and has lived to see smallpox eradicated and polio nearly so.
My grandfather was born a couple years after the 1918 flu pandemic, he had a brother born a couple years before him who died in infancy, he never talked about it much but the timing lines up that his brother was likely a victim of that pandemic. It was certainly something he heard talked about in his childhood just as we'll probably keep talking about COVID for years to come, and I think it definitely left an impact on him, he always was wary about passing germs along to his grandchildren, he always warned our parents against kissing us and never did himself, the only time he did was on his literal deathbed (cancer, nothing communicable) when he kissed my sister (in a non-creepy familial way) as probably one of his last conscious acts.
He was never one to shy away from a fight, I would have loved to see the hell he would have raised against anti-maskers if he'd lived another decade or so. There are people his age or older still walking among us. These things aren't even out of living memory, we're barely a handful of generations removed from them.
The chickenpox vaccine was introduced when I was in elementary school. I remember a lot of children's shows when I was growing up having a chickenpox episode where one or more of the main characters would get chickenpox, they'd take oatmeal baths and slather on calamine lotion to ease the itching, their parents would discuss having their friends over to get them infected early and give them immunity, etc. It kind of seemed like it was inevitable that many if not most kids would get chickenpox eventually, and at the time it kind of was. The vaccine was still optional at the time, and I remember a lot of discussion about it not being very effective, but a lot of kids in my age range got it, and the number of kids in my school who got chickenpox was probably in the dozens instead of probably hundreds just a few years earlier.
There have been some missteps along the way, my dad had a small hepatitis scare when a blood test turned up antibodies (though no active infection) likely from exposure from reused vaccine needles when he was in the army. The US did a grave disserve to polio vaccination efforts by using them as a cover to track down bin Laden and increased distrust in the vaccine in the process. There have been cases where vaccines have used ingredients that have proven unsafe, where people have had adverse reactions, etc. but still overall, the fact that I have never met anyone who has had smallpox, polio, or measles and probably never will speaks volumes about how much more good than harm vaccines do when 100 years ago I would almost certainly have known people who had died or left disabled or disfigured by those diseases.
Paraphrasing from a recent episode of Behind the Bastards on the Vioxx scandal: There's a lot of recency bias in humans where it's difficult to look past the fuckups of the pharma industry. If their "current" MO is to make a shit ton of money at the cost of human lives, then why would someone with lesser critical thinking skills trust them? One needs quite a bit more faculties to separate the capitalism from the good they are doing and tell apart what's trustworthy and what not.
So pharma fucked their bed spectacularly and aren't doing fuck all to restore trust. And that's very sad considering how important they could be if they wanted to.
So pharma fucked their bed spectacularly and aren’t doing fuck all to restore trust.
It goes farther than that, because of how aggressively the US has resisted drug imports and fear mongered against foreign science and development.
The post-COVID "vaccine diplomacy" of European and Chinese state pharmaceutical providers (hell, Cuba even developed a variant) was matched with a flood of early US reporting that amounted to "don't trust any vaccine that isn't American!!!" Then there was a dirty war between domestic providers over whose vaccine was the best.
All that propaganda took its toll.
Cuba has some of the best doctors in the world. They have a potential lung cancer vaccine in trials. Imagine what they could do if the sanctions were lifted.
I need to get back to listening to podcasts. I've taken a break since the election because many of my favorites were political and I'm currently burying my head in the sand and screaming "I CAN'T HEAR YOU!".
Maybe I'll dive back in with BTB. That seems mostly safe...
Behind the Bastards is an amazing podcast.
I don't know what the problem is. Is it a lack of empathy? Is it willingness to swallow the bait surrounding conspiracy theories? I
I think it's education, so many of us are now "educated ", this makes us confident idiots, a superb pinnacle of that example might be Linus Pauling and vitamin C for example.
If my hypothesis is correct, more education wont help.
Empathy is always lacking, just have to look at the refugee debate, its not new. Jews were turned away when Hitler sent them overseas, telling other countries to take then or he'd start killing them,
Japense interment camps in the US in WW2, slavery, endless wars prosecuted on other countries and participants lionised, it's part of our makeup that's difficult for most people to overcome,. I'd posit they don't want to overcome it. . Then there's the whole treatment of native peoples all over the world. US, Australia, Sweden, New Zealand, Russia and on and on.
The one thing that unites Demorcats and Republicans ? disdain for the homeless, again a lack of empathy.
If that's true, you'd expect to see more conspiracy theories among more educated populations. People with PhDs and MDs would be the most likely to be antivaxxers. Do you have statistics to confirm that?
I believe what they are referring to is a high school education. There are still a fuckton of people in the US that still believe that "no one really needs to go to school past 6th or 8th grade."
There are people who are still in congress who had polio.
Mitch has done nothing but enable the incoming administration, and helped to get it in power, so he has no leg to stand on now in all of his hand waving about the polio vaccine.
Mitch as the Repub leader could have prevented all of this, by voting and allowing other R senators to vote to convict in either the first impeachment or the second impeachment, which would have prevented Trump from being able to run again (and the trials against him would likely have been carried out by now). McConnell bears a huge amount of responsibility for where we are right now.
The above link will give you the overview of the historical background on antivax movement since vaccine invention.
It basically boils down to two arguments, which feed each other.
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Risk => Vaccine are/can be/will be/may be/ought to be dangerous to someone somewhere, somehow. I don't understand and I'm scared.
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FrEeDoM => I do not contract and I am free to decide what treatment I get, I am not a sheep and I participate in no herd and the only immunity I accept is from overbearing big government.
In spite of my sarcasm, I do think the second argument has merit, a government should of course be extremely careful with mandatory medical treatment of any kind and bear the burden of proving regularly that the benefits continues to far outweigh any and all alternative.
That reminds me, I have a 10am appointment for my flu shot. Almost forgot.
I agree that governments should be careful about what medical treatments they make mandatory. I think the US government has been pretty judicious with their decisions, though. The vaccines that are mandated for school attendance are wildly effective and have been shown to be safe, both via scientific studies and decades of dispensing many of them.
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Sometimes it feels like it's all done to grab headlines.
It works, they eat cats and dogs.
If something is irredeemable, it's not the government, it's the voters.
All of this could be fixed if just enough people understood the truth.
The problem is that we have so little media that is both trusted and trustworthy. That so many people don't actively seek out reliable information and think critically about it. Many just find a source that confirms their bias and feeds their emotional state, while others just passively absorb from those around them and on social media. And once you've bought the lies and misinformation, anyone that tries to tell you the truth becomes suspicious, because you know they are wrong.
And because the never ending stream of bullshit is both a lucrative industry and a source of immense political power, there is a vested interest in keeping it highly polarized and partisan. They have to tie it to your identity and tell you that this is what your country stands for, so that you know that everyone who disagrees is an enemy.
Anti-vaxxers are nothing new, but they were never so openly embraced by a political party (to say nothing of those who have claimed that vaccines are suddenly against their religion, discovering a prohibition that no religion has ever had prior to 2020). They don't care how many people will suffer or die because of their actions, as long as they can benefit from it politically. Sadly, this is a fairly consistent theme on the right.
Stupidity.
There are many influences. One is pure resentment of elites as know-it-alls which propagandists amplify. A bit of Dunning–Kruger effect at the same time as people without specialized training can't even comprehend what they don't know. Another is how difficult it is to think probabilistically so that people can't easily appreciate risk. And as more and more people proclaim conspiracy theories as truth there is peer pressure to confirm.
History should be mandatory especially to vote. Some people don't even remember the holocaust and they're repeating it again.
It's because polio is a developing world problem now. Until it comes back to the US the only relevancy it has is as foreign aid. And that's forbidden by these guys unless it's guns.