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Originally Posted by The Franchise
Do you think that can be done here? Honest question.
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It certainly *could* be done. It won't be done because I think too many people are flippant about health issues until it is far too late to solve them (whether it's people non-adherent to their medication, making terrible lifestyle/diet choices, etc.), and I don't think there is the political will to enact the measures necessary to ensure a flattening of the curve. There is also an absolutely horrific strain of anti-intellectualism which has infected this society to the point where some, as you have seen in this thread, treat the preeminent people in their fields as though they are quacks.
Example: ptylon's posts are really the equivalent of saying that Patrick Mahomes can't play quarterback at any level. They are that far off-base. They are that arrogant and uninformed.
Men like Fauci have been working on these issues for decades. He was at NIH when ACT-UP demonstrated there, and he actually brought the leaders of the protest in to discuss the similarities between their goals and the goals of NIH. He started a dialogue that led to real progress in confronting AIDS between the activists and the government. He's served in six administrations of both political parties. He absolutely knows what he's talking about it and what could happen.
Unfortunately, this country does not have a good record of making difficult decisions to confront epidemics/pandemics--look at what wasn't done with the blood bank industry in the early years of the AIDS epidemic--the CDC and the blood industry knew that people were contracting HIV through transfusions, the CDC made recommendations for screening and testing (using the HBV test, actually), and the blood bank industry said it would be too inexpensive and there weren't enough cases to demonstrate a real need. Don Francis, who was part of the CDC at the time, got up and said, "how many dead hemophiliacs do you need?" This was actually dramatized in HBO's version of
And the Band Played On, but it is an actual event. Of course, 25,000 people ended up getting infected via transfusions with a virus with a 100% fatality rate and at that time no treatments, and most of them died before effective therapies were released. That should not have happened and it was a scandal that it did.
Further regarding AIDS, I'll give you this quote: "Later, everybody agreed the baths should have been closed sooner; they agreed health education should have been more direct and more timely. And everybody also agreed blood banks should have tested blood sooner, and that a search for the AIDS virus should have been started sooner, and that scientists should have laid aside their petty intrigues. Everybody subsequently agreed that the news media should have offered better coverage of the epidemic much earlier, and that the federal government should have done much, much more. By the time everyone agreed to all this, however, it was too late. Instead people died. Tens of thousands of them."