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Comment by dahfizz | Hacker News Reader

> Most hand sanitizers were Ethanol or Rubbing Alcohol

You can't know that. The regulations and testing requirements were suspended, so companies were free to use benzene and nobody would know.

We already know for sure that some companies did use benzene, and its not hard to imagine companies switching to a cheaper, lower grade source for their alcohol.

In any case, the government simultaneously saying "Its okay to put benzene in hand sanitizer" and "Everyone should constantly disinfect with hand sanitizer" was not a good move.

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Had this pandemic turned out to kill 10% of the global population then it would definitely have been the right move. Turns out, that didn't happen. Because we were lucky regarding lethality, regarding contageousness, regardin speed of vaccine development. In hindsight, no biggy, how dare they made everybody sanitize their hands all the time.

I worry about the real thing hitting someday. When the discussions start again and people refuse to do the most basic things (yes, some of them obviously nonsense and some of them perhaps in hindsight) and the conspiracy theories spreading and everybody being a hobby virologist, and when we realize that a significant fraction of us will die and society will collapse and we could have prevented it but now it's too late. Then it won't help me anymore to say "told you so". But at least society will deserve its collapse.

> In hindsight, no biggy, how dare they made everybody sanitize their hands all the time.

I think you're really underplaying this. If the FDA hadn't suspended the rules about benzene, then fine. No biggy.

But the government literally encouraged people to slather themselves with carcinogens on a hunch that it might help with COVID.

I would even be fine with it if we had proof that hand sanitizer was the most effective way to stop COVID, and then the FDA relaxed the regulations secure in the knowledge that it would save lives.

But COVID is airborne, hand sanitizer does basically nothing to protect against it, and people are going to die from leukemia as a result of all this for no reason.

When the real thing hits, a few carcinogens here and there will be ok if it saves civilization. The air in the average U.S. city is full of carcinogens, on top of volunteer smoking and drinking. Have you been as upset about that recently? Been out campaigning for more trains and less smoking?

And we won't have time for waiting for proof that it does or doesn't work. Of course in hindsight everybody is smart. But when the big one hits, there is no time for hindsight. By then we're all dead (or deep into a civil war).

Start with cautious. Adjust/relax rules when knowledge becomes available. Sanitizing your hands and wearing masks are the obvious immediate solution.

You make it sound like all companies suddenly poured toxic waste over the population, ordered by the government. Maybe it's not the government that was exaggerating here.

Hand sanitizer is almost useless. It’s washing your hands that’s effective.

COVID-19 was nature giving us an astoundingly generous "dry run," and humanity utterly failed at nearly every step. I doubt we collectively learned anything, either. When the real thing hits, with, say, a 10+% death rate and cutting uniformly across age demographics, we're going to blow it again. We're going to politicize, downplay and ignore it again. We're going to have idiots out protesting it again. We'll eventually acknowledge it and to try an ineffective and haphazard country-by-country, state-by-state approach again. We'll do the same half-assed "Stay At Home Suggestions" and "Voluntary Travel Restrictions" with no enforcement again. But this time it will be a catastrophe.

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