Seems like a rather devastating flaw.
I don't know anything about biology so admittedly I'm speaking out of my ass here, but that's certainly what it seemed like to me.
Unfortunately there is not enough time to adapt the vaccine between these two seasons
They published a "report" claiming that vaccines cause autism that was lazily created with ChatGPT that had fake citations, or citations that actively go against what they're saying. Everything in the administration is half-assed.
"Letting the virus spread to pass on the genes" seems like an idea that would come from a conversation when two drunks who are discussing how they'd solve all the world's problems.
I think it makes them stronger in the short term, but much weaker in the long term. (Of course, we have to survive the short term to get to the long term...)
I feel like Boris is more of a typical bloviating moron. Trump is that too, but in a far more immature childish sense. Trump is always trying to come up with dumb insulting nicknames for people, every single person who has ever contradicted him is "very mean" and "overrated" and "low-competency" or something like that. Playground insults.
When other American politicians have tried to emulate the Trump style, it comes off as tryhard. Ron DeSantis tried it, it didn't work. That recent guy calling for the denaturalization of the mayoral candidate of NYC tried it, and it didn't work. For whatever reason, the weird immature insulting nature of Trump appears to only work for Trump, at least as of right now.
I'm told not even competent Latin — for a normal person that wouldn't even be worthy of comment because who even speaks it, but he keeps trying to sound impressive by using a language he, too, cannot speak.
This administration is the best argument for DEI I’ve ever seen in my life, if it had anything to do with avoiding this.
Just the other day, RFK’s top vaccine nutjob (new chair of ACIP, Robert Malone) tweeted something to suggest that the Amish’s existence despite waves of infectious disease and ~no~ low vaccination is evidence that vaccines aren’t necessary.
Apparently ignorant[0] of the fact that the Amish are notoriously cloistered and isolated from the rest of society.
[0] By “ignorant” I don’t mean “has never heard the idea,” but that the degree of motivated reasoning has rendered his mind actually incapable of integrating this fact — like many others — into his world view. I’m drawing this distinction because I don’t think this is a matter of smart people pretending to believe stupid things. They are actually, at rock bottom, very stupid people, rendered such by their own ideological commitments if nothing else.
Right, they've essentially implemented reverse DEI: always hire the agreeable white man, no matter what. Which was essentially the status-quo in the fucking 60s.
Now we have a bunch of old white men who can drink more than they can read running our government into the ground. They're all very horribly unqualified. But, they are essentially breathing doormats, which I think is vital to an authoritarian regime.
Democracy isn't good because it makes people feel good, but because in the long run democracies make far more adaptive decisions, and just hobbling along imperfectly over long periods is how you actually achieve growth.
But I think the point they’re making is that it’s moot that they are mean and inflexible if those traits make a good government. It is at least more relevant that they are incompetent at governing; even if both points are likely to fall on deaf ears and even if one naturally follows the other.
They are not aware that even if you were okay with that, that’s not the trade off that autocracy gives you.
And inversely, being “good” does not imply someone is incompetent. In general, the reverse is true because being good is such a powerful tool to achieve things (i.e. to be competent).
Pretty much everyone is racist. I know that sounds harsh, but in America, everyone has been exposed to racial bias at some point in their lives. Usually thousands of times.
It would be quite arrogant in my opinion to confidently proclaim said bias has had no effect on you, or anyone else. Probably, I would think, it has. It may not be measurable, but certainly I don't think that means it doesn't exist.
We've done some studies on this. Even just having a non-white sounding name on your resume lowers your chances of getting hired by over 50%.
It seems, to me, that just leaving things in their "natural" state seems to tend towards benefiting the white man. At least right now, in this particular place. That might not be the case in the future, and certainly it was worse in the past.
Perhaps the criticisms of the former and the descriptions of the latter were not accurate.
Can you describe specifically where/when you’re referring to that implemented your ideal system and achieved a good track record?
I'm going to steal and re-use this beautifully succinct observation in as many ways as I appropriately can.
100 internet points to you.
What a strange argument. Did anyone suggest that people would stop existing if there weren’t vaccines? We haven’t had vaccines throughout most of human history.
People just (correctly) think that not being vaccinated will lead to a lot of unnecessary deaths.
The article says allowing the virus to rip through flocks could kill "billions of birds" [1]. Is that really OK with the movement?
___________
[1] Allowing widespread infection of commercial flocks would kill billions of birds, drive poultry and egg prices up, as well as destabilize local economies and global trade through import restrictions imposed on U.S. products, the authors wrote. Simultaneously, it could also foster reservoirs of H5N1, increasing the virus' odds of making the leap to humans — and gaining the ability for human-to-human infection.
Isn't this just switching from, if you detect any infections you're required to kill your flock, to if you have any infections your flock will die of illness? Your flock is still dead either way.
And guess what, America will have next to no say in the animal welfare of the source of the eggs.
I'd like to see a world where animals are treated better though. I don't really understand why food and food production has to be so shit.
I guess you know that the reason of shitty treatment is price, would you rather buy 20x priced eggs ? There’s many family farms that would be happy to deliver them anywhere at that rate.
I think decent treatment of animals and access to decent food is a basic human and animal right. But yeah, it's hard to have this discussion if all it ever comes down too is economics or the decision between communism and capitalism.
The midterms can’t come soon enough. That is our only hope of putting some real checks on this administration any time soon.
It might be either, but on a personal level, there's multiple things this administration is actively proud of doing/having done that are so bad I expect a noticable reducion in aggregate US life expectency.
I don't disagree with that, I think this administration is terrible and I expect the brain-drain of scientists alone might end up being irreparable damage for the entire country. Not to mention that the fake ChatGPT report released by the CDC will likely cause increased vaccine "skepticism" that would be horrible for everyone.
I just think that this is going to have a "bed of nails" effect. They're doing so much horrible shit so frequently, that it can be hard for people to focus on just one, which has the effect of the entire thing not coming off as awful as it probably should. I'm quite convinced that's how Trump won the first election as well.
It risks the entire local US chicken / egg production industry. They'd have to re-onshore it.
>> What's more, the mortality rate of H5N1 is extremely high among common poultry, reaching 100% in domestic chickens.
So... animal husbandry?
This even happens to species we don’t intend to practice “eugenics” on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vavilovian_mimicry
I know nothing about biology, I know that I know nothing, so if someone decided for whatever reason to appoint me to the position it would be fairly harmless because I would defer extremely heavily to people who actually know about this stuff.
If he had appointed someone with proper medical or biological training, that would be fine because they actually know about stuff and can make informed decisions.
RFK Jr. is the absolute worst person because he thinks he knows a lot about biology, but he actually knows nothing, and is largely informed by a lot of conspiratorial nonsense, meaning he has the potential to cause a lot of irreparable to the US healthcare system. He's not going to defer to actual expertise, he's going to defer to idiotic blog posts filled with anecdotes about how a friend of a friend of theirs got a vaccine and it was bad.
I cannot imagine that this attempt at chicken eugenics will work as intended. I suspect that if this were a good idea, it would have been tried already.
Within the scope of "people who would realistically actually be appointed", he is the absolute worst case scenario.
But really it wasn't all that realistic. Sure it happened, but just 'cause it happened doesn't make it realistic.
It's a legitimate and popular republican strategy, I forgot the exact name. They did the same thing with the EPA during the last Trump administration - appointing an actual oil tycoon to head it. I imagine it's pretty difficult to just find an oil tycoon. The idea is to derail the agency from the inside out.
And the republicans in the senate approved the halfwit because they all fear getting primaried.
in a system with high regulatory capture, you would be defering your power to the industry's interests.
Otherwise there are too many intertwined and conflicting interests.
Or does this logic just magically not apply to things where the consequences of it are more immediately obvious?
You seem to come from a different presumption.
I'd be curious to hear how you explain things like Vioxx, OxyContin abuse, and the COVID19 vaccines that were never properly tested yet are so good for you they never cause side effects according to authorities and their producers, and are perfectly safe up to the xth injection, forever.
You can cultivate state capacity and independent expertise to reduce regulatory capture, not replace it with a kakistocracy where regulatory capture is instead by woo-woo morons.
Since the US has by far the sickest human population on Earth (it's not even debatable), I guess the current system has been a spectacular failure. I don't think that RFK is the right answer either, but "continuing on the same path as before" is a bad idea just as well.
> independent expertise to reduce regulatory capture
What is independent expertise exactly? Where do you find virgin experts completely devoid of external influence? I have yet to meet any expert who has never had grants or speaker engagements.
I suspect everyone affected by the sub-Saharan AIDS epidemic would disagree very strongly, even despite the improvements over the last 20 years.
More generally, the US may be an outlier among industrialised nations, but the floor for health in general is much lower than the USA.
This also means you have a long way further to fall if you allow incompetent leadership.
If you focus on obesity-related deaths, the USA is even further down the charts, as somehow even Palestine (albeit in 2021, but still) manages to get a higher percentage of those than the USA: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-deaths-obesity?t...
For diabetes rates, the USA (10.7%) isn't just lower than Egypt (20.9%), but also is also lower than Mexico (16.9%), and far short of the worst, which is Pakistan (30.8%): https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/diabetes-prevalence?tab=c...
Each of Egypt, Qatar, and Kuwait are worse than the USA on both measures simultaneously.
I am having trouble finding evidence for this claim that you said is “not debatable”. I found some articles that the US is the sickest in the developed world, but that’s pretty different than “sickest human population on earth”.
Are they independent?
https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/01/22/nx...
My mum was New Age type who regularly gave me homeopathic tablets labelled "sodium chloride" and "titanium dioxide", and later Bach flower remedies.
Someone in the pocket of, say, Big Tobacco is going to downplay smoking risks; but that's still not as bad as suggesting replacing all pharmacies with table salt and white sand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathic_hospitals_in_the_N...
Trump has never had a majority of the votes, just a plurality. The majority of voters did not want this.
They got to keep their ideological purity though. I guess that will keep them warm at night when it's their turn to get rounded up.
Voted for Trump: 77.3M
Voted for Harris: 75M
Voted for other candidates: 2.6M
Eligible to vote, but didn't vote: 90M
Unfortunately, the largest constituency continues to be the "can't be fucked to vote" party.
But I don’t want to pretend I understand what compels people to vote for people that I don’t like. Maybe the majority of people really did want to have RFK Jr. in charge all of our health stuff.
Where are your second amendment guys? Still in full support of tyranny? The only guys trying to get a shot at your politicians are psychos and dumb idiots who want to become famous. Not a single hint of politics - except as a show - in their empty head.
I'm not going to judge the majority of people for "not doing anything", because what you're suggesting would put them (and a lot of other people, some of which are innocent) at risk. I'm certainly not going to risk going to jail or facing capital punishment to hurt a politician, even if I thought it was a net good for the country.
I'm definitely not a "second amendment" guy though, I don't really think most people should have guns.
Helloooo, have you already forgotten the topic you reply to? The guy in charge of public health want to breed bird flu. Do you think innocent people are safe?
Most people don’t want to kill politicians and I am not going to judge them for not wanting to do so. I am certainly not going to go assassinate a politician because I do not want to go to jail. I am not going to blame someone else for not doing it either, especially if that person has a family.
[edit]: misspelled "imagine"
The producers and the audience prefer it that way. It's less effort for everyone involved.
It's in the spirit of hn to attack the person rather than the specific proposal?
2. babymetal claims to be a bookseller and, if true, they offered a specialist's insight into the quality of the information disseminated by a person being discussed at HN. (Though, their observation was off topic -- like most comments in most HN discussions.)
3. You want HN users, who are mostly code monkeys, to criticize a proposal to address viral diseases?
Also babymetal admits he didn't read the book. How can anything he says of the book be trusted?
I read the book. Actually there are two stories in the book, the first mostly about Fauci and COVID-19 and the second about Fauci and AIDS. FWIW I'm glad RFK is in power now.
I thought their fairly brief comment was pretty clear.
It’s just so incredibly dumb to listen to recurrent (and especially unrepentant) liars. Even if you know they’re lying, your brain subjected to that will break down. Propagandists and conmen through all of history have discovered it. All you’ve gotta do is say it over and over again and hope there are people dumb enough not to stop listening the first 15 lies.
It's why Fox News works, it's why "flood the zone" is a shrewd tactic, and why "alternative facts" was Yet Another Milepost along our journey to the full-blown post-truth America of today.
"I'm glad (the guy who drove to the beach to cut of a stranded whale's head with a chainsaw) is (in charge of our health) now"
"I'm glad (the guy who dumped a dead bear cub in Central Park and threw a bicycle on top to put the blame on those pesky bikers after doing a photo-op with his hand in the dead cub's open mouth) is (responsible for medical research programs) now"
"I'm glad (someone who has been thriving financially on bogus claims to disparage vaccines) is (overseeing vaccination policies in the US) now"
"I'm glad (another incompetent creep) is (joining the gang of criminals known as The Trump Admin) now"
The CIA tried to kill Castro a bunch of times [1], presumably because they felt that him being in power was harmful and killing him was a net good. It's not like this kind of stuff is unprecedented.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_assassination_attempts_on_...