A Monkeypox on Both Your Houses: Chapter 1 - Surely This Will Blow Over Soon

NBZ can’t/won’t post better; he’s a one trick pony and it’s not a very good trick. It’s better to just add him to your ignore list and move on if it irritates you; you’re not gonna reason or shame him into posting better when he’s just doing a long running bit.

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:popcorn:

How would the govt “act” assuming we all cooroperate and follow through on linking microphones and raising the body count that makes thing better in the long run?

I leave it up to health experts to decide, but let’s say that some sort of mass vaccination program is one of the steps government might take and that they only start looking to ramp up vaccine production when the body count hits x or public awareness is raised by some sort of spreader event.

If this is the case, having the spreader event early saves lives by not having to reach x to start the program. The greater the value of x, the more valuable it is to be early. Plus, there might be other mitigation efforts that only get started at this point. If a spreader event doesn’t do this, then you just reach x faster and there’s no net additional loss of lives.

The scenario where this doesn’t work is if government does begin mitigation efforts before reaching x and we benefit from maximizing how long it takes to reach x. I’m skeptical that we have the current political will to do much that the masses find inconvenient until we get to the point where the numbers induce panic. It’s reasonable to disagree with me if you have greater faith in our current government and in the people to react appropriately to the threat of monkeypox.

They have ordered more vaccines and are at least three months from getting any more. What exactly do you envision occurring if monkeypox explodes in the meantime?

Your callous disregard for human life is quite terrifying.

I openly admit to not valuing individual lives. I’m immune to Republican hostage-taking that way.

My belief is that one reason that eDems are weak is because they are too scared about short-term losses to think about long-term EV. I seek to advocate for a different way of looking at the world.

If you think I’m just gambling with lives, well, of course I am. This is how poker taught me to think about the world.

I’d bet against intentional infection causing a long term net reduction in infections. How good is your poker game?

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I’ve been known to be more likely to embrace variance in big spots.

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Last week tonight had a great segment on Monkeypox

TLDW: We totally could’ve contained this but fucked it up because racism, homophobia, poor public health funding, and conspiracy theories.

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Your strategy on Monkeypox seems like the poker equivalent of betting the turn then open folding river.

Whatever.

You do better at poker when you see chips as chips and not money. You can save more lives in public policy when you see lives as numbers and not faces. I’m not a politician, so I don’t feel obligated to pretend that I personally care about individuals I haven’t met.

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That’s a broader issue. In this specific case your strategy stinks anyways because vaccines are months away regardless of spread. All spreading monkeypox more broadly now does is cause more monkeypox (and likely accelerates spread to the rodent population making this endemic) There’s no greater good.

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I get that do you don’t value human lives, but why then are you interested in spreading monkeypox to cause the govt to mass vaccinate to save lives?

Unless there’s a way I can kill off a disproportionate number of Republicans, I’m treating lives as fungible. I don’t care about the order in which people die.

Poor public health funding is part of the story, but so is the woeful inadequacy of the CDC even given the funding they’ve got. Michael Lewis’s book on COVID really eviscerated them. They can blame a lack of funding, sure, but they also have a terrible culture and don’t effectively use the resources they’ve got. They are set up to operated in normal times and don’t operated effectively in a crisis. Not great for a pandemic response!

I don’t see the handling of monkeypox leading to any disproportionate number of Republican deaths. I’d imagine something in regards to climate change having a bit more potential there.

Every outbreak is likely to result in a disproportionate amount of deaths among poorer people. That probably will be more of a trend than political affiliation. The climate emergencies are going to be overwhelmingly met with rich people pulling up drawbridges and hoarding all resources for themselves.

My five secs of thought on this subject regarding climate change was that the overwhelming amount of climate skeptics would position themselves in harsher environments causing more poorer republican deaths in the longrun.

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You have to keep in mind that their real job isn’t to prevent the spread of disease and save the most lives. It’s to prevent as much spread as possible and mitigate the loss of life while protecting the economy and political stability.

All throughout human history leaders have lied to their people about diseases during pandemics.

They may also just be bad at doing the job of saving lives and protecting public health, but any evaluation that assumes that’s their actual primary goal is going to overestimate their incompetence and underestimate their immorality.