> Other nations would do well to follow Japan’s lead [...]. This policy appropriately places the responsibility for this healthcare decision with the individual or family.
I'm sorry, no.
This only works in countries like Japan.
I'm sorry, no.
This only works in countries like Japan.
The far left and far right are both out of balance, and social media has fed a radicalization of both sides.
I'm a liberal, but there's a disease in the left right now where many think that censorship is a good thing and that individual liberty should be suppressed for the greater whole. While it's great to imagine the outcomes for your world view, these new powers will not be used in the ways you anticipate. When the next political party comes to bat, they'll use your newfound disregard for liberty to strip you of yours.
I'm pro-vaccination, but the way far left liberals are talking to conservatives is not going to win any allies. You're mocking their dead and calling for them to all lose their jobs. It's like Richard Dawkins trying to convert religious folks to atheism - do you seriously think this approach is going to work? These are supposed to be your neighbors. Please learn how to talk to them as human beings without sounding superior.
We need to do some serious soul searching. We have to stop hating each other and turning literally everything into a political matter. We're not all that different for fuck's sake.
Voluntary measures tend to work well in places where people have a reasonable trust in their government, scientific and medical authorities etc.
When the government of Japan says "Please get vaccinated of your own decision, understanding both the effectiveness in preventing infectious diseases and the risk of side effects. No vaccination will be given without consent.", they can be confident that the people of Japan will take rational, sensible, well-informed action. A large proportion will get vaccinated purely because the government recommend it.
Look me in the eye and tell me you believe the same about the US populace.
Japanese peoples' trust in govt for 2020 was actually less than that of the US's. Their vaccination rates are more likely due to their community-oriented culture rather than their trust in government officials.
Thanks for that link, though I find it a little bit ambiguous that the measure is trust but the question asked is "In this country, do you have confidence in… national government?", which I think is slightly different to what I was alluding to which is trust in the motives of government.
For instance I trust the motives of the health establishment in the UK, but I have considerably less confidence that I will get the best outcomes from it.
Does that make sense? I wonder if it applies here and people in Japan are not confident in the ability of their government to deliver good outcomes. Whereas in the US a significant number question the motives.
Or I could just be wrong :) Always worth entertaining that possibility.
Yes, the community-oriented culture thing seems like a great explanation.
Perhaps this is a slightly more useful analysis: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/07/20/tokyo-olymp...
They look at peoples' opinion on specifically covid related policy, although they still don't address how this relates to opinion on health outcomes. At the same time I'm not sure if useful conclusions on vaccine policy can be drawn from these stats. Largely because the above numbers are from right before the Olympics, which would have politicized covid policy the same way it has been politicized in the US. However, while that politicization would have ended with the Olympics, the US is still stuck in the stupidity of politicizing a disease.
Perhaps a key difference between the two is that we in the US have a problem where political affiliation seemingly trumps everything. A vaccine must be rushed and risky if a republican is in charge or it must be an attempt to take away basic freedoms if a democrat is in charge etc.
Maybe if we didn't have that issue, the so-called individualists would actually act like individualists and look at all the evidence for the safety and efficacy of the vaccine.
If the Republicans were pro-vaccination, the numbers would change overnight. The reason they're not is because the establishment threatened the ego of Trump, and he couldn't have any group challenge his ego.
This is all political fighting, and it's stupid.
Our politicians in the UK are pretty damned incompetent, arrogant and nakedly self-interested. But to their credit they didn't turn much of it into a party-political exercise.
They f*cked it up in so many other ways though!
(I am now resident elsewhere and glad to be off plague island)
Liberalism is an economically right-wing, pro-capitalist ideology (this part is incompatible with leftism!), that is socially liberal (this part isn't).
In the US, due to the two-party system, liberals and leftists are forced to share a party, but that doesn't mean they want the same things.
We're not just winning for science. We're winning for people. Their thoughts, minds, intentions, and health. The long term direction for this country. There's a meta game, and the far left and far right are both ruining it.
Step 2: Implement this policy.
Where do I apply?
Great country, highly recommend moving to Japan if the culture and environment appeals to you.
They don't need to force because it's unlikely people wouldn't
How many people in Japan voluntarily used masks before Covid again?
How many cases of people protesting the use of them in Japan has there been?
Personal responsibility works well in countries where people don't think a virus has a political leaning and where people have a modicum of consideration for their fellow citizens.
And in general it seems to have worked pretty well in the UK, as the country is now around 85% double vaccinated and 60% triple vaccinated (in people over 12).
This could be down to the fact that while we British love to complain about the NHS, people trust the motives those who work for it and the motives of the health system as a whole, even if we don't always trust the way the system is set up or that it will always give the best outcomes.
The U.S. has shit canned any semblance of trust with it's medical apparatus in my opinion. When you have War on Drugs policies being back door enforced through manufacturers, insurers, etc... (wasn't long ago that FDA was considering tainting ADHD drugs with additives for "anti-abuse" purposes, granting a new patent on an existing treatment, literally giving an official stamp to poison people like they did with cough syrup);
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4406920/
Make no mistake. The language is flowery, it sounds good. Insurers use it because it doesn't sound like what it really is: adding complicating factors to treatment regimens that hardly anyone checks in on overtime in order to leverage a political ask (War on Drugs) as an ongoing business opportunity rather than keeping overall complexity down.
When you have for profit hospitals getting federal kickbacks for case reporting;
Caution: Lede is buried in the first part of the article, I'll quote the important bit here, but feel free to read it as a whole: TLDR was no one is getting put on ventilators to get paid more; point I'm more concerned on is I've got immediate people I know who've got relatives going into hospitals and getting reported as COVID, or getting poorer care for not being vaccinated.
https://www.factcheck.org/2020/04/hospital-payments-and-the-...
>It is true, however, that the government will pay more to hospitals for COVID-19 cases in two senses: By paying an additional 20% on top of traditional Medicare rates for COVID-19 patients during the public health emergency, and by reimbursing hospitals for treating the uninsured patients with the disease (at that enhanced Medicare rate).
>Both of those provisions stem from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, or CARES Act.
Where the above is the accountant/MBA's incentive, and the understandable frustration of medical practitioner's not being listened to due to most normal people's implicit awareness of the monetary incentive misalignment.
When your medical education apparatus is tuned specifically to act as an artificial supply limiter that ensures that massive fee extraction is assured. See AMA and statutory limits on Doctors "blessed" to begin practice a year.
https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/4561/does-the-a...
When your drug approval process is so rife with controversy, 3 of 11 of your non-bureaucratic advisory panel resigns out of frustration because you fast tracked approval of a drug where you had two contraindications studies. (See Aduhelm).
https://www.npr.org/2021/06/11/1005567149/3-experts-have-res...
When you have gems like: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/04/curing-disease-n...
This is a field where even the appearance of impropriety costs lives in the long run. Every actor in the space should be cognizant of and acting as such. There is far too little appreciation and value paid to this fact. Honestly, I'm just astounded more and more that people aren't more aware of how much sketchyness there is.
Maybe people are aware, and just don't care. Maybe I'm the nut. I don't even know anymore.