Measles cases are on the rise because of lower vaccination rates. It's one of the most contagious diseases out there, but that's still not going to budge policy.
An article in yesterday's Guardian explains that we're actually less prepared to cope with any viral activity now than we were in 2019. We've lost capacity to work with viruses! The guy in charge of the UK's vaccine taskforce, Dr. Clive Dix, said there's been a "'complete demise' of work to ensure the UK was better equipped with vaccines." He told the government his recommendations and was more than ignored:
"There were activities already going on that were stopped. . . . The UK also drove vaccine manufacturers away by treating them so poorly. . . . What we've seen is a whole list of incompetent decisions."
He also talks about concern with reliance on mRNA vaccines which need to chase after each specific strain, and are always behind the curve. We have better options, but McKinsey's in bed with Pfizer and Moderna here, so we might not ever get a chance to access them.
It's almost as if we refuse to advance any further. Have we peaked as a species?? Did we get so clever that we're witnessing the downward trend in the willingness to implement care for the public? I often think about the chimp wars the way some men apparently think of the Roman Empire. The chiimps seemed to hit a specific population density or just had too many alpha males, and they turned on each other, taking their own numbers down by half within four years. Maybe that's us right now, willing to let people die by more passive means that protects everyone from ever taking responsibility for anything.
Science writer Helen De Cruz wrote this excellent bit about our ahistorical erasure of public health advances:
"People used to live life to the fullest when the plague and smallpox were going around," is a minimizing argument that's used against people who, in spite of public health and governments having given up, continue to protect themselves. Here's why it doesn't work: I think it seriously underestimates how horrible it was/is to live in times where infectious disease goes rampant and can come for your children, your middle-aged parents, and of course you. Hence Jane Austen "Are your parents well" before convo could even begin.
I read a lot of 17th-century letters for a new project, and it's kinda disconcerting to see how people are really sad and devastated by how their kids, spouse, loved ones, keep on getting killed by diseases. They were not cavalier about it! They were very sad!! Like Descartes saying how it's not unmanly to cry if your daughter dies age four of scarlet fever. He never quite got over this. (A whole separate story). He was devastated! It really wasn't the case that people shrugged that off.
Also, sorry but I thought we could do better? We have tools. We know how disease transmission works. How weird to plunge yourself in ignorance. Imagine if people did this when we made major public works to clean our drinking water: too much effort! Let's just die of cholera "People in the past died of infectious diseases all the time and so we should likewise do that today" is weird ahistorical erasure of all the public health advances we've made, all the infrastructure we've created to improve health and to remove sources of infection.
Public health has improved by clear information (remember the back to sleep campaign, saving thousands of infants from cot death), regulation (e.g., removing smoking in public places), yes by vaccine mandates (saving thousands of kids from the fate of Descartes's daughter). It has improved through infrastructure such as food safety inspection, asbestos removal, clean drinking water and restrooms, removal of pests etc etc. All things we should be doing with covid. We should mandate clean air standards in buildings like we do with fire or water regulations. Never would public health have made all these advances and remarkable increases in life expectancy (driven a lot by young children no longer dying of infectious disease) if public health was mired in misinformation and minimization or if they just left it up to individuals.
Compare public health messaging in the back to sleep campaign. It saved many babies' lives from cot death. Imagine if they had said: "Oh but cot death is super rare. Only a few in a thousand. So if you want to put your kid on its tummy go right ahead! Make risk assessment" Or, "vehicle crashes are really rare, so we leave it up to you to wear a seat belt." This all sounds bizarre, but this is exactly what's happening with covid. All these public health bodies minimizing by asking people to do a risk assessment or playing down the risk; it's unique.
So, we're not going back to the time of Descartes when alas infectious disease is inevitable but live, life, love, right? No problem if your kid dies of scarlet fever age four, you just shed some manly tears and get on with it? No, this is entirely different. This is a society, unlike Descartes's, that has the tools. A society that has used public health messaging, regulation, infrastructural standards to successfully improve health but that now minimizes a dangerous infectious disease for purely political and economic gains. So it is no wonder that people are not wanting to vax their kids anymore against dangerous diseases. It's no wonder that people are even driving more dangerously (check it out, vehicle-related deaths are way up since 2020). What they're hearing is: just screw it! Carpe diem! It's a scam. This live life to the fullest like they did in the olden days.
This isn't the olden days. It oughtn't be. We know better."
That's the frustrating part. It's not like we're throwing up our hands because there's just no way we can do anything about these viruses. We know what to do. We're throwing up our hands because it's too hard to acknowledge it. Officials seem paralyzed by indifference to this. Or something. Meanwhile, Ontario cases are at finding new heights to hit (Moriarty's grassroots stats were featured on the CBC!):
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Well-fitting N95s reduce transmission by about 95% - even higher if everyone wears them; cleaning the air helps by about 30%, and vaccines reduces hospitalization by 60%. Put together, we could ALL be 99.999% protected from this mess and more! We don't have to get sick every winter; it's a choice.
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