And it comes at a time when a disease we were working on eliminating, measles, has come back and the US is about to lose its measles-free status.
It sounds as if his legacy is to be unique, a feat never to be accomplished again.
And it comes at a time when a disease we were working on eliminating, measles, has come back and the US is about to lose its measles-free status.
It sounds as if his legacy is to be unique, a feat never to be accomplished again.
We still have another chance for eradication in humans with Polio.
Not if the CIA has anything to say about it: CIA fake vaccination campaign in Pakistan[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_fake_vaccination_campaign_...This should be a war crime...
International law does not apply to the leaders of the western hegemony. It is merely a tool used to oppress poor nations even further.
This fact only further proves one thing: the CIA is a terrorist organization and the state behind it is responsible for some of the most disgusting things this planet has ever seen.
Given the period of 2010-2012, the president at the time was Barack Obama. It does not seem realistic that people would accept opening a criminal case.
I would accept it if it even if it was done by Ghandi.
It is approaches like that which gives some hope to the future. War crimes are indeed something which should never be allowed or overlooked. Being a political leader doesn't make people immune to criticism, but rather should be someone held to a higher expectation.
Who is Ghandi?
It's probably a mispelling of a French domain registrar known for its nonviolent resistance.
Why does it matter if it was Obama or Bush in power? Sure, their politics influence the nation's foreign policies. But domestic partisan politics is largely irrelevant to the international partners. To the foreign nationals affected by it, you're just USA either way.
I mentioned just the other day, the problem with anti-intellectualism in the US and how it's fed by these sorts of egregious meddling by the administration. There are much less educated and affluent countries that are nowhere near as anti-science as the US. Yet unfortunately, the US exports it abroad too. I explicitly referred the same Pakistani case as an example of that. I'm all for Osama's elimination, but they jeopardized the entire humanity's future by misusing the vaccination program for it.
Despite a century of this nonsense (remember the radium girls?), neither political party cares enough to not pervert science in the interests of humanity. Smallpox and Polio were horrible diseases that caused untold miseries. Even the remote tribes of Pakistan knew their dangers well enough to participate in their elimination, until the US pulled off this dirty stunt. This is a deeply ingrained toxic culture that was reinforced by both parties over the decade. This should be a war crime irrespective of party allegiances.
> Why does it matter if it was Obama or Bush in power?
If Bush was in Power, of course the accusation would have to made against Bush. So, of course, the accusation has to be made against the president that was in charge at the time. Dark skin color does not give him a "Get Out of Jail Free Card".
> Why does it matter if it was Obama or Bush in power?
How can you open a war crime case against a guy who already got a Peace Nobel Prize? And what war crime? Was there a war? Maybe some special military operation against Bin Laden.
> How can you open a war crime case against a guy who already got a Peace Nobel Prize?
Henry Kissinger (1973 Nobel Peace Prize together with Lê Đức Thọ) can be considered a war criminal:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial_of_Henry_Kissinger
Yasser Arafat (1994 Nobel Peace Prize together with Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres) was also very likely a war criminal.
Should’ve could’ve. If the grandma had a moustache she would be the grandpa.
Are you kidding? A way to smear Obama and portray him as disrespectful to non-whites? The only reason it’s not on Fox is that it reminds Americans that we’ve only had one victory in the War on Terror and the Republican Party contributed nothing positive.
War crimes are "for Africa and thugs like Putin".
CIA at its best, f_cking up world one bit at a time (and amount of those bits amount to quite a few kilobytes at least at this point, I can attest that every European country I've ever lived in carries some more or less visible involvements in past few decades although this one is quite a spectacular clusterf_ck)
Why would this cause everyone in the area to not vaccinate, and not just limited to parents who are on a most-wanted list?
What made me disappointed about this was that they revealed how they did it, and they didn't rescue the doctor who helped them pull it off.
Evil shit
> The program is credited with increasing vaccine hesitancy in …
Sounds like RFK Jr…
Perhaps I'm overly an optimist, but I have a feeling we will develop the informational and psychological technology to combat the destructive misinformation campaigns that brainwash people into harming their children with anti-vaccine beliefs.
We are not there yet, because the destructive media forces are too new and we haven't developed defenses against information diseases like RFK Jr. But we will get there. Two steps forward, one step back.
I admire your optimism. I genuinely wish I could share it. I hope that you are right.
Russia is close to falling, which is the true source of many of the mental viruses that are destroying democracies. And now, Russia's biggest win, the US, is proving that instead of heading towards fascism, that the people will actually stand up and fight back. Six months ago, the outlook was far more uncertain and if the US had not resisted, or Trump had picked a softer target than Minnesotans (never invade a winter people in winter), I would probably be feeing far different.
Things in the US are going to get far worse from here, and there will be a political war, but at least there will be a political war against the fascism. A lower bound has been established for badness that at least allows saving democracy in the US. I have not been this hopeful since October 2024.
Who is we, who will pay for it, and how will such informational inoculation benefit the rich?
The current media status quo, and its consequences does, which is why we get to enjoy it.
How does a public that derives its knowledge from authority (For example, how do 99.999% of people know that the earth is flat and orbits the sun? Would they be able to reach those conclusions if school books taught something else?) stand a chance at resisting misinformation spread by trusted authorities?
> how do 99.999% of people know that the earth is flat and orbits the sun?
Pun intended?
Oops
As a non-American I don't care what you do, if you want to behave like irresponsible idiots without any regard for the lives of others you have that right. Just don't subject vulnerable individuals in other countries to your own bad choices (you can get the MMR vaccine as an adult if your parents were neglectful). Maybe visitors from the United States should have to present vaccine certificates at airports or be quarantined at their own expense.
> you can get the MMR vaccine as an adult if your parents were neglectful
if you are still alive.
Canada and the UK have a ton more measles than even the US's completely unacceptable level of measles.
Thinning this is a US problem completely misunderstands the nature of the misinformation problem.
And I hope there's vaccination requirements for travel, according to how public health officials determine threats.
Canada already lost their measles elimination status and had several times higher measles rate than the US.
At this point, anyone pushing anti-vaccine thinking as an American problem is just pushing anti-American bias. Vaccine misinformation and hesitancy is an almost worldwide problem.
People can simply have different perspectives on things. Measels has mortality rate of around 0.1% while small pox has a mortality rate of around 30%. So the individual risk from measels is relatively low leaving plenty of room for individual choice.
There's less room for the same argument with small pox. In fact small pox is where the term vaccine comes from - it was observed that milk maids weren't getting smallpox, which led to the discovery that infection with cow pox (which is relatively harmless) provided immunity to small pox - hence 'vacca cine', vacca = cow in latin.
But there's a long history of people trying to self vaccinate with all sorts of things against small pox including using scrapings off somebody's small pox wounds to hopefully give oneself a light infection. Needless to say that came with well understood side effects up to and including full-on small pox infection. But when the death rate is 30%, people were willing to do some crazy things, because the risk:reward was seen as worth it.
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FWIW I did ultimately decide to vaccinate my children against measels, but it was not an easy decision, because it is in general not that risky a disease whose mortality rate had already precipitously declined (from 13 per 100k to 0.19 per 100k) [1] before a vaccine was first introduced in 1963. Obviously I think it's the right decision, but I also wouldn't really fault anybody for going the other direction either.
[1] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/measles-cases-and-death-r...
I think that if people observed what a 1 in 1,000 chance of a dead child looked like, they'd have a much easier time making the decision.
A friend's favorite Wiki page is on the micromort. [1] I found it kind of banal, but perhaps that's my more casual attitude towards death. I suspect the average person doesn't realize, or doesn't accept, how brief life truly is. One micromort is something with a 1 in a million chance of death. So with measels, we're talking about 1000 micromorts, if you're infected - which is also extremely unlikely. So if you give yourself a 1% chance of ever being infected with measels (which would be quite high) then not vaccinating would be down to a 1% * 1000 = 10 micromorts of risk.
All non-natural cause of death in the US, excluding suicide, is about 1.3 micromorts per day. So it's the same all non-natural cause risk you'll be exposed to over the next week. The page offers a lot of other comparables - traveling 100 miles by biking, 2500 by car, or 10k by airplane, and so on.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort
In a world with a low vaccination rate, infection with measles is practically 100%. It spreads more easily than COVID.
You can take your risk with herd immunity if you want. That works well now, with a near universal vaccination rate. But if the rate drops below 90%, then you will get infected.
Immunity rate, not vaccination rate. This is why everybody ended up catching COVID, often multiple times, regardless of how much they injected themselves with. Whereas, measles, with an ostensibly higher spread rate, was already on its way out before vaccines were introduced with fewer than 1 new case per 500 people - far below even basic fertility rates. It's because infection with measles is a nice mixture of relatively low risk and providing lifetime immunity. Beyond that, herd immunity is a hand-wavy measurement about statistically preventing perpetual spread within a population, it says much less about individual susceptibility.
Getting sick isn’t just life or death.
My parents both got measels, and they had no hesitancy getting me vaccinated. I’m significantly taller than my dad, who lost 40 pounds when he got German measles when he was 17. I grew several inches that year.
People who don’t get vaccinated are bad people. I have no qualms saying it.
I don't think this is a great argument. The reason is that Rubella/German measels is in the majority of cases very mild, in many - people will not even know they had caught it. If you take a large enough sample you'll absolutely find people winning a lottery that they really don't want to win, but the exact same logic is used to by people to avoid vaccinating. For instance the MMR vaccine can cause all sorts of nasty things in extreme cases, but in the average case it's believed to be mostly harmless. Though of course we're always discovering new things about medicines. There's even new side effects in e.g. tylenol still regularly being discovered and published about.
Your child being vaccinated against measles is 1. yes, protecting them, but 2. also protecting all the other children at school they interact with, and vice-versa. It isn’t just an individual choice. You should definitely fault people for going the other direction because they are willingly increasing the chance of your child or your child’s friends getting measles.
The US sees in the ballpark of a hundred million tourists, business travelers, and migrants per year. And these people are vectors for basically everything and are numerically very large. And you're inevitably going to bump into and interact with these people. So I think the idea of domestic herd immunity is increasingly nonsensical because 'domestic' is no longer even remotely close to a closed system. And global herd immunity is nonsensical simply because it's wholly unrealistic, and at that sort of scale any small issue can explode into a huge one: see - source of most modern cases of polio.
> The US sees in the ballpark of a hundred million tourists, business travelers, and migrants per year
American exceptionalism at its finest!
You do realise the vast majority of those "tourists, business travelers, and migrants" are all fully vaccinated?
One reason the idea of eliminating COVID was nonsensical is that it's carried by many animals, like all coronaviruses, and can be transmitted from humans to animals and vice versa. Measles, by contrast, is thought to be human only. So anytime there is an outbreak it's not from an unknowable cause. It's going to be either from a foreigner or somebody who visited a foreign country and returned with the virus.
Various social decisions have led to countries you might think of as measles free, no longer being measles free. For instance Canada, the UK, Spain, and obviously Mexico are all now considered to have endemic measles, with Canada and Mexico already compromising the majority of visitors and "visitors" to the US. And the vaccines are not complete immunization. Double dose measles is around 97% effective, meaning you can expect at least 3% breakthrough infections, possibly more depending on factors such as age, immuno compromisation, degree of exposure, and so on.