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coords1306's avatar

The tragedy here is the real answer is common cause. As I went down the anti-vaccine rabbit hole I found the concerns with Glyphosate from environmentalists something that annoyed me. Part of me wanted the uptick in chronic conditions to be due to only the explosion in the childhood vaccine schedule as that would mean the actual fix was an easy one. Where as taking on chemicals that have become important for yield and so were everywhere seemed too much. A scope bomb as it were. But the reality is the fight does need to include both vaccines and rampant use of chemicals in our food supply chain.

The good news is that there is proof that by finding common cause real gains can be made. Arguably the biggest win for anti-vaccine proponents over the last 2 decades may be the little bit of ground made by RFK Jr. on Thimerosol. In that case what happened was the EPA, an alternative institution, found that its guidelines came into conflict with the information coming out of the FDA/CDC about mercury. This is where the competing information couldn't be dismissed as misinformation as it was the EPA, though they tried. (Our mercury doesn't count as real mercury. Something like that. We all know the only real mercury is Freddie Mercury, who may have been killed by bogus HIV drugs..but now I digress too much.)

I wish everyone would read in order Forest Maraedy's The Moth in the Iron Lung, and then Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. As I think those two books in tandem give the overview of how anti-vaccine is a subset of a larger historical struggle against capital and its one time pollutants/externalities being bundled up and sold to used in a misguided war against nature. It's the same fight and while it is a larger fight, it may actually be more productive taking it on due to the undeniable information that is to be had out of the environmentalism that came out of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.

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