KUTradition wrote: ↑Mon Nov 25, 2024 7:18 am
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article ... demic.html
and further handcuffed by the unqualified incoming administration
A lot of people in public health feel like they are being punched in the face repeatedly for their work. It’s important to bear in mind that we had a million people die of COVID in the United States, plus probably 5 to 10 times that many who continue to live with Long COVID. And it was the public health actions that prevented the toll from being worse. Were there mistakes made? Absolutely. Were there places where we underestimated the mental health impact and the amount of education that could be delivered virtually? Absolutely. But it’s a fog of war situation, and you’re going to get things wrong. And people want certainty that simply can’t be provided.
In this case, imagine if you’re public health and you do what is perceived as a heavy-handed intervention to try to stamp out H5 in dairy cattle, and you make farmers incur these economic costs. And you’re successful, and you stamp it out. One of my favorite lines from The Simpsons was from an early season when Homer says something like, “Why are we giving Maggie vaccines for diseases she doesn’t even have yet?” And it’s the same idea, where if we stamped it out and there was no pandemic, people would say, “Look, they did all these things and it was for nothing. There wasn’t even a flu pandemic. And look at all the costs that were incurred.”
this logic, regurgitated here by our epidemiology experts, is so incredibly infuriating
The root of all of this, of course, is in the religious right's (successful, cynical, deceitful) crusade against mandatory vaccinations in public life. Which is of course part of a much broader program to ensure that whispering the word
Jesus means you are exempt from, well, most anything you might find inconvenient, uncomfortable or personally off-putting.