81–90 of 134 posts
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We simply now have a completely nuts anti-vax Secretary of Health. He probably actually thinks he's saving people from vaccine injury.
He was actually injured by the flu vaccine. That’s why his voice sounds the way it does
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They want your money. Nothing to do with MAGA. They “cut” federal spending and fire people from their jobs while MElon makes $100b since December.
how does canceling a meeting to pick a flu strain for development of a flu vaccine help them to acquire money?
Last I spoke to a nurse about this she explained something interesting to me - in selecting the next flu shot they actually watch the opposite hemisphere to predict most likely strain to vax. So despite US shenanigans rest of world may still be OK
Both hemispheres do this if I'm not mistaken. They look to the other hemisphere's winter and expect that 6 month delay will still help predict what's coming.
This is a remarkably stupid decision. Flu vaccines are incredibly successful not just from a public health standpoint but also a business productivity standpoint. I guess we're going to relearn this lesson the hard way. Especially with businesses also demanding people come back to the office to work.
> Flu vaccines are incredibly successfu A big part of the problem is a lot of people don't understand this. How often do you hear people say, "I got the flu vaccine and still got the flu". However, most people who say they have "the flu" are using the term colloquially and it is unlikely that they actually had influenza. Further, as we saw with the COVID vaccines, people are incapable of understanding that vaccines d…
I get how flu vaccines become more important as you age, COVID also (lest you win a Herman Caine award). Younger people getting vaccinated also helps limit transmission to older people who are more likely to die from it, but doing so requires a bit more empathy than just pure self interest.
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I live in a very red state and mostly know Trump voters. I disagree with them on plenty of political topics (though that was true with Biden voters as well). I don't consider many of them hateful though, and they are helpful to neighbors. The last 2-8 years has felt very strange to me comparing what I experience day to day and how I often see our society more broadly described. I've lived in Seattle, Europe, and the…
It's very common for people who do or support terrible things to also be nice to their neighbors, or more generally to be nice to the people they can identify with and know on a personal level. They just don't see the people that they can't identify with as fully human and worthy of the same dignity. This is not to say that your neighbors are evil people - I'm just saying that you can't just judge people by how they…
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Both hemispheres do this if I'm not mistaken. They look to the other hemisphere's winter and expect that 6 month delay will still help predict what's coming.
Flu strains usually originate from Asia (usually China), where flu is more likely to jump from chicken to human. But that was in the past, it is completely possible that the USA could move backwards in health and become the new spot where flu jumps to humans (eg by not culling flocks where infections are found because of rising egg prices). Trump could do a lot of damage in four years, we might end up completely flip…
China has seemed to play a larger role in novel viruses with zoological origins. The average flu season isn't driven by novel viruses, if they were every year would progress more similarly to CoV2.
I've never seen a study comparing the relative efficacy of culling vs. not culling chicken flocks. Unless you have sources for that, you're assuming culling is always best. One consideration there is that culling entire flocks ensures that we are never able to select breeding animals based on those with natural immunity. Maybe that is the right choice, but I don't think we have ever studied that.
Egg prices haven't yet seemed to play an impact in flock culling rates. We have murdered 166 million birds based on a recent article [1] - extremely few of those were ever tested, they just happened to be in a house with a bird either confirmed or suspected of infection. At least based on that article, culling hasn't helped contain the outbreak.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2025-02-26/poultry...
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Flu strains usually originate from Asia (usually China), where flu is more likely to jump from chicken to human. But that was in the past, it is completely possible that the USA could move backwards in health and become the new spot where flu jumps to humans (eg by not culling flocks where infections are found because of rising egg prices). Trump could do a lot of damage in four years, we might end up completely flip…
You're making a lot of assumptions here. China has seemed to play a larger role in novel viruses with zoological origins. The average flu season isn't driven by novel viruses, if they were every year would progress more similarly to CoV2. I've never seen a study comparing the relative efficacy of culling vs. not culling chicken flocks. Unless you have sources for that, you're assuming culling is always best. One cons…
Trump is coming in and saying culling isn’t needed, and he is finding experts that agree with his opinion to back it up. Whatever policy choice coming up, it will be one where science is abused to justify a pre-determined decision rather than using science to come up with the right decision.
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Attempting to steel man the decision, they may not believe the vaccines work or are worth the expense and overhead. They may even go one step deeper and believe the vaccines aren't proven properly to know whether they work well enough.
It seems like the results will be somewhat predictable: the impact flu has every year is variable, with some years being incredibly bad and some being not that bad. Part of that is attributed to the vaccine rate, and how effective the vaccine is (this meeting is key to decision making about our expectations and how to make an effective vaccine), and part is simply random (based on too many correlated values, preventi…
There is an alternative here - a population left to fight an outbreak through natural immunity will be stronger in the end. That's definitely not a popular opinion, and it may not be worth the cost, but it does align with large drops in death rates of past outbreaks which generally happened before a vaccine was even available.
> There is no steel man here
That's not how steel manning an argument works. The whole point is to make the most generous version of the argument, usually assuming the best intent. There is always a most generous explanation that would lead to the argument made, you just may not like it or may not think its likely.
> Or RFK could somehow be right and we see a huge magic increase in public health across the country (not seen in other countries that keep vaccination). I am not aware of very many scientists who believe this will happen
I don't know RFK's stance particularly well, but I would guess that he wouldn't expect a noticeable increase in health over a short timeline and without improving peoples' health in general. I'm pretty sure I've seen him argue for removing toxins from our food and water, reducing dependence on pharmaceuticals, etc. All of those are important factors and it isn't realistic to assume that removing only one factor would magically fix everything.
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Its interesting to see so many conspiracy theories pop up on a more left-leaning site. The last 6-8 years has largely seen democrats deriding republicans (or MAGA specifically) for sharing unproven claims of a deep state, pedophile rings, etc. Now we're seeing a growing list of conspiracy theories related to what and why the Trump administration is up to. The theories may even be right in the end, that does happen. T…
I’m not from the US. I’m just an outside spectator.
I didn't actually mean to imply that I was calling you out as a conspiracy theorist here. I replied here because it seemed to fit well with the comment thread, but was more trying to comment on the general ethos I've seen here in the US and how many conspiracy theories now seem to be talked about in the media from the other side of the aisle as it were (Democratic leaning media instead of Republican leaning).