The whole vaccination thing… is quite dispiriting. The unexpectedly high number of people I interact with who are vaccine-reluctant seems like a summary of our current cultural atmosphere of distrust in institutions and distrust in science. And yet that distrust also often seems legitimate and justified. We are evolving from what sociologists call a “high trust society” to a “low trust society.” Typically, the low trust societies, with their opaque social norms, struggle to advance, and often result in so-called “failed states.”
My own perspective is: trust, whether in individuals and personal relationships, or in society more broadly, often requires a leap of faith. One must simply decide to trust in something because it’s the right thing to do. I guess that’s my approach. Your views may differ.
I read weird things online, almost every day.
Today, I read an article about a new, more low-tech approach to developing another COVID vaccine. It can be found here. The main point seems to be – a lot of money and effort was expended with all the high-tech vaccines, but ultimately this drove up the price and lowered the worldwide rate of vaccination, especially in lower-income countries (where most humans are). Taking a more low-tech approach could have saved many lives, and could have advanced the cause of achieving herd immunity. That’s fine, but as a counterpoint, it still seems to me that the “rate of confirmed deaths” points to institutional failures, and not a failure of vaccination regimes, specifically. This is the graph I check most often, here. Why are equally-wealthy and developed countries like the US and South Korea so different? And, yet, wait… perhaps now they are converging?
“licensed, with no patents or strings attached” says the article. What an odd phrase, from my perspective. A license is, per se, an attached string.