Boy this gets more confusing by the day.
If Covid is so bad we have to shoot the economy in the head or everyone dies older than 70, and herd immunity can't be reached because the death toll is too large, then and imperfect vaccine is a no brainer if makes it through expedited trials. Except, no, the vaccine is worse than Covid because they didnt test it for years.
What am i missing here? It seems like Covid is terrible and dangerous (i agree) but taking the vaccine is crazy risky assuming it makes it through trials?
My $0.02.....take it for what it's worth. Some people aren't going to like what I'm going to say.
Times are good. Better than they've ever been. People are, for the most part, fed, jobbed, sheltered and healthy beyond the dreams of avarice only 120 years ago. Barely a blink in the time of human existence.
"A Million Ways to Die in the West" was a comedy, to be sure, but that doesn't make it wrong. For the vast, VAST majority of human existence, up until VERY recently, illness, injury and death was painful, sudden, and blind. It came to everyone, in horrific ways, simply by going about your life. Small pox, dysentery, plague, tetanus, rabies, yellow fever, horrible hemorrhagic fevers, cancer, mauled by farm animals...the list is long and that's not even including the ways people injure or kill themselves by being, well, human. In the last 100 years we've accomplished wonders, including mitigating stuff that was simply a nuisance to the vast majority (although not so to a very limited population) like chickenpox and measles.
Humans, however, are NOT wired for zero drama in their lives. There always has to be some, and when there is none, they create it. Its in our very nature, and why this seems worse than it really is. For example, thousands and thousands of children die every year. Some horrifically at the hands of their parents, some due to the ravages of cancer, some due to injury. Yet when one kid, ONE, falls down a well, the entire nation stops.
Why is this relevant? It shows that people have a horrible sense of proportion and a really poor idea of risk. We consume megaliters of water out of plastic bottles, a process that consumes untold resources in production and distribution, creates a tremendous waste problem, and clean water is readily available for the taking, practically EVERYWHERE for absolutely free. The water in the worst dump of a gas station bathroom is completely potable. To quote one aid worker from Africa: "you have so much clean water in the USA, you s4!t in it."
The 1959 flu pandemic killed 100,000 in the US, and a million worldwide, based on a population of 178 million & 3 billion respectively, for a per capita of 0.06% and 0.03%. The 1969 flu had about the same numbers overall, but the population was 202 million & 3.6 billion respectively, so the per capita was slightly lower. Our population now is double that, both in the US and worldwide, so yea, bad bugs come around, you HAVE to assume the numbers will be greater, so 200,000 in the US and 2 million world wide gives you identical numbers. Heck, we're lucky we didn't have one sooner, so if you amortize the break between 1969 and now, that's 50 years....not too shabby, considering back to back flus offed 200,000 people over the course of 10 years.
Yet in both previous cases, the world did not fall off it's axis. Why? Probably because people were not so far removed from true horrors. The horrors of war, the horrors of disease (polio, for instance) and car's that didn't have an inflatable safety bubbles, so street pizza was a much more common occurrence.
We are so far removed from true horror, strife, hunger and deprivation we have to create drama. So when a little bit of true drama occurs, it is magnified beyond all reason.
400,000 die of malaria every year. EVERY YEAR, with 288 MILLION affected. Heck, 200,000 die of blood flukes. EVERY YEAR.
Yet, no one is wearing little mosquito or snail pins.
For vast part of the population, the chance of getting something serious and it sticks with you is impossibly small. Use your head, don't hang around the old or infirm when you're sick, but otherwise spare me the drama, get a sense of proportion, and get back to your lives because nature is going to nature.
