Is modern medicine good? Views differ
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A couple of Florida women have filed a suit against the federal government, with the help of the usual right wing dark money, for violating the specialness of their snowflakeyness by requiring them to wear masks on airplanes.
The sudden discovery by tens of millions of Republicans that freedom means the government can’t regulate what you do with your body is not something I had on my Sliding Toward Fascism bingo card, that’s for sure:
“When government gets into the business of mandating what people can and can’t do with their bodies, I think that we have a problem,” Leslie Manookian, founder and president of the Health Freedom Defense Fund, said in an interview with the Tampa Bay Times.
I thought this quote from one of the plaintiffs was particularly revealing:
Pope publishes a blog and YouTube channel called The Healthy Home Economist. In a video on her channel, Pope said she wants to promote health the way her generation’s grandparents experienced it.
“When they got sick, they didn’t need the crutch of pharmaceuticals or antibiotics to get better,” she said in the video. “They just got sick and they got well.”
There’s some sort of weird atavistic logic at work in the reactionary mind, whereby the past being so much better than the present now is coming to include beliefs such as that it was better that medical treatment used to be non-existent or actively harmful, because, um, help me out here . . . life unworthy of life would not survive? We did not presume to interfere with God’s will? Science is really witchcraft? (Note that the age adjusted mortality rate in the USA in 1900 was 2,518 per 100,000 while in 2019 it was 715 per 100,000, which means that at any particular age people were three and half times more likely to die during the course of a year than they are now. So they just got sick and they got well . . . or not).
The end point of this logic is that vaccines are actually bad not because they don’t work, but because they do.
I don’t think a lot of people outside the right wing American cult that has now taken over the Republican party are appreciating the extent to which it’s morphing into an outright rejection of modernity tout court, including all the stuff that until fifteen minutes ago was considered to be good by everybody except a few completely off the grid nut cases. Well apparently the grid has now gotten a whole lot wider.
Also just for the heck of it, Nate Silver everybody:
When a precocious ten year old makes these kinds of discoveries and announces them to the world it can be pretty cute. This version . . . not so much.