More "own goals" by the US in the fight against infectious disease.
See also:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/health/cdc-sti-lab-gonorr...
replies(1):
See also:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/health/cdc-sti-lab-gonorr...
Herpes is one of those things that obviously isn't as big a deal as cancer but it would be nice to be one less thing to worry about when having sexual encounters with new people, and sufferers of it would love to have some sort of relief from infections and the elimination of the stigma around it. It's also associated with Alzheimer's disease so the cost of not producing this vaccine might be hundreds of billions of dollars and years of life and the prevention of so much suffering down the line.
It's really dismaying to know that this kind of stuff might not come to fruition because of the combination of incompetence and intentional chaos.
Public sector medical research has been decimated in recent months, so adverse effects on products developed by private entities is an unfortunate byproduct of that.
Edit: I was going to say, also don't get raped, but then I remembered, only people asking for it, i.e., Bad People get raped.
Also, all those so-called "experts" with their agendas are out on their asses where they belong! The private market is sufficiently incentivized to keep their workers healthy and develop treatments for whatever ails them.
Besides, we all know that if you just live a proper, completely monogamous lifestyle, you can't get an STD. Why should Trump voters pay for those that fall ill to their own sexual deviance?
Take your pick from these (and likely more) lines of reason.
Whether this will actually benefit Trump voters is an exercise left to them, but so far they seem to think it will.
But this is the problem with capitalism and health care, the providers just stop if there's not enough money in it for them.
I believe many infections both sexually transmitted and otherwise have understudied neurological effects. It wasn't until the widespread wrath of long covid that public discussion really kicked off.
(not my views, oversimplified take on fundamentalists and project 2025)
The millionaires in city center penthouses I have orgies with and sometimes meet in the spaceship-like waiting room of the fancy dermatologist in my home city and I say no.
Do these nationalists always dismantle their nation?
That's a very interesting premise.
I can think of a few counterexamples (Franco in Spain, for all the atrocities committed by his regime, Spain unquestionably progressed economically), but in general yes, nationalists are disasters when in power. Of course it doesn't help that often, especially nowadays, the nationalism is just a wrapper for a bunch of grifters that say whatever is needed to get into power (Farage, Le Pen, Trump, Orban, PiS, Putin). So they're just gifting for personal benefit (which explains the dismantling), advertised as nationalism because that convinces the masses.
It's about pushing Judeo-Christian morality. Punishing women for having sex outside the goal of procreation.
This has the same goal, STDs are a punishment for loose morals. Preventing or curing them works against that punishment.
I mean, sex inevitably causes babies: it’s an incontrovertible but inconvenient truth for the modern urban human species. But we were designed that way, yes?
But that's all beside the point, none of this is something the government should be acting to coerce. Abstinence is fine as a personal choice.
But no, I don't value "chastity" or -- to phrase it more accurately -- denying women control over what happens with their own bodies.
People should have lots of sex! Sex is great!
No, there's a couple of idiots in charge whose policy is being shaped by outside forces that literally want to destroy the country. This isn't some attack on a social issue.
Is this supposed to be a flaw?
If the cost of a lab is $500/patient then the patient (or their insurance) pays the $500 and the lab exists. If the cost of the lab is $50,000,000/patient, the lab probably shouldn't be funded, because its cost/benefit ratio is very bad and the same money could have saved more lives by putting it somewhere else.
What would you do in the alternative? Have the government provide unlimited funding for things that cost more than they're worth?
Are you claiming there aren’t any?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-abortion_violence#United_...: “In the United States, violence directed towards abortion providers has killed at least eleven people, including four doctors, two clinic employees, a security guard, a police officer, two people (unclear of their connection), and a clinic escort.
[…]
According to statistics gathered by the National Abortion Federation (NAF), an organization of abortion providers, since 1977 in the United States and Canada, there have been 17 attempted murders, 383 death threats, 153 incidents of assault or battery, 13 wounded,[I 30] 100 butyric acid stink bomb attacks, 373 physical invasions, 41 bombings, 655 anthrax threats, and 3 kidnappings committed against abortion providers.
[…]
According to NAF, since 1977 in the United States and Canada, property crimes committed against abortion providers have included 41 bombings, 173 arsons, 91 attempted bombings or arsons, 619 bomb threats, 1630 incidents of trespassing, 1264 incidents of vandalism, and 100 attacks with butyric acid ("stink bombs")”
The real question is, must sex invariably lead to pregnancy when there are known ways to prevent it? Because that's precisely what you're trying to impose on others. Your answer is clear from your comment. But it's completely illogical.
Nothing in the laws of nature say that humans or any other creature can't use their creativity to disrupt the natural order of things to make life more comfortable. To my knowledge, no other creature uses fire to cook food. Yet, human digestive system is uniquely adapted to that. And other animals don't cultivate food on the scale that humans do. Many of the food crop species won't even survive without human effort. I also don't see many other animals using clothes or money. So are you ready to give up those unnatural things - cultivated and cooked food, clothes, money and all modern technology?
The same goes for vaccine - the natural way of diseases is for children/people to simply die on a massive scale. What's the point of going through that when we have a way of preventing it? Why must it be any different for contraception and treatment of STDs?
The real issue here is the imposition of certain beliefs and moral values that are stale by a few millennia on an unwilling population.
That's precisely the question, isn't it? In the case of medical treatment, you decide. Do you want to run a test if it costs you $500? What if it's $50,000,000? Or, in practice, you decide ahead of time by choosing how much insurance to carry, and then it's the premiums on insurance that would cover $50M tests that probably isn't worth it to you.
You might then have concerns about people who can't afford a reasonable amount of insurance, but that's a question of whether the government should provide insurance subsidies to the poor, not a question of who decides how much is worth having. Do you even want someone other than yourself deciding the most that can be spent on saving your life?
> What's the RoE on the military or poetry, for example?
Defense and copyright are tragedy of the commons. Everybody wants there to be a military force to fend off invaders but the benefits redound to everyone, including people who don't pay. People have the incentive not to pay as long as someone else is covering the cost, but then since everyone has that incentive it would end up under-funded. As a result there is a law requiring everyone to pay.
The way things like that ought to work is that there should have to be a separate vote by the general public in order to increase the budget for that specific department. Then bloated budgets get voted down because the public can see when they're excessive.
Medical facilities aren't a tragedy of the commons. You pay for one if you need it and if there are enough people who need one to pay for it to exist, it does. If there aren't, by what reasoning should it? The people paying are the same people using it and they don't value it by as much as it costs.
So if you have a very rare disease which might cost a lot more to treat because there's no economies of scale you are... Not worth it? Your life is unworthy because it's unprofitable to save you? Or your mom, dad, sibling, loved one?
You need to be very, very deep into pure inhumane financial thinking to even consider this as a good outcome for a society. Please die if it's too expensive to care for you, it's economical eugenics.
Meanwhile, the private companies are so incentivized to protect their workers' health that even employed people are dying of diabetes because they still can't afford insulin - something unthinkable in other countries! Insulin injections are so old and cheap to manufacter at this point. Did you forgot to mention that the employees must also be rich? And what about jobless or homeless people?
Meanwhile, about 68K people die annually of preventable diseases because their insurance claims on essential treatment get turned down by insurance companies against their doctors' determination. And that isn't charity money - it's what they paid the premiums for. How many of those thousands will be saved if you cut STD treatments, contraceptives and abortions nationwide?
There are less developed and more conservative countries in the world who know better. I don't understand how such obviously dangerous decisions can be spun as benefits for the masses!
The patient (or whoever is paying the bill) and the provider determines the "worth". If they can't agree on a price, then it's not worthwhile.
In communism, would you really want to extract the equivalent of $50m of labour and resources in order to provide one person with this test? I can't imagine how that would be affordable.
Putting a monetary price on it in order to quantify the cost doesn't fundamentally change the equation. In the communist utopia I imagine it would be more like forcing x architects, engineers and builders to construct the facilities for the testing, x researchers and scientists to develop and conduct the test, x caregivers, plumbers, cleaners, drivers, baristas, chefs, etc for x weeks to provide this "free" test for one individual. Is that "worth" it?
Imagine how all the chemists who study cis/trans isomerization feel right now ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cis%E2%80%93trans_isomerism
As someone who studied an cis/trans isomerase decades ago in grad school, I say this somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but not completely.
I agree with the spirit of your message, but you're going way too far using all there. Some are not profitable, and the society is likely better off to socialize these. As a simple example: it's not profitable to provide food and housing for people without means, but if you don't, your society will be worse off - simply because these people will be forced into directions that are generally harmful to your living spaces.
Sure, you could increase police presence in this particular example, but that'd still be an effective socialization, because now you just put them on jail, which is even more costly then just providing them housing and food.
You don't need to invoke the boogeyman of "communism", in advanced developed societies there's plenty of examples of expensive treatments being provided to the edge cases of healthcare because it's such a minuscule amount of people suffering from these illnesses that on the overall scheme of things it's not a huge burden to society to allow someone to live if they have a chance.
Before you bring it up: yes, of course it's not perfect, of course some people do not get access to some treatments but it's overall a much better outcome than leaving people to fend for themselves and pay for treatments inaccessible to any non-millionaire.
If your only morality is through economic/financial terms I really invite you to question why you think that way, there are many other ways to think of trade-offs for providing access to specialty life-saving treatments even if it's at a cost to society, it just depends on what you think should be valuable. To me, life is valuable, and if a society can support giving more treatments at a loss to create less suffering it's a good society.
== government’s duty
Yes. If Salk had this mentality, then Polio may stand up there with cancer and AIDS as one of the big 3 killers. Instead, he spread the solution and its nearly eradicated in the world. we might have also tried to monetize the COVID vaccine and grind the US into an early depression with that kind of thinking.
>What would you do in the alternative?
Fund the science and make use of taxpayer money to advance society instead of giving billionaires tax cuts. You'd think a community focused on tech would undersand that you can't treat skilled thinking the same way as an assembly line.
if it means me and all my people can one day not get STD's, yes. 50m is a steal. Medcine is one of the few fields like tech where the solution is very hard to come by, but extremely scalable once it is derived. It should be the most important aspect to focus on if you want future RoI. Even if it's the indirect cost of your citizens (or you) not dying of some disease.
we don't think of STDs as deadly, but apply it to cancer and the value is obvious.
unlike drinking, we have quite a few ways to enjoy sex without having babies.But some of those methods can still cause STDs. a vasectomy won't save you from herpes.
>If it turns out that it's significantly cheaper to be in a long-term monogamous relationship
1. Why are we applying the invisible market to our bodies? Do you understand how dehumanizing that is?
2. monagamous relationships can still get STDs. Despite the name, some can also be spread by simple skin contact. So don't shake the wrong person's hand, I guess.
In this case, it was a good opportunity to educate others who may also think that the private sector wouldn't be affected by these public sector cuts. That's much better than flagging a comment that may have been simply made in ignorance.
* Rugged individualism: I stand on my own as an upright citizen made morally righteous by my (or my ancestor's) contributions. I have never needed nor would have accepted welfare (and all the welfare I actually did accept was not actually welfare and was mine by right).
* Moral indignation: there are freeloaders, scammers and grifters everywhere that are unfairly dependent on the welfare state. There's little agreement on who these freeloaders are, other than it's not the wealthy or powerful or people like themselves.
* Religiosity: America was founded as a Christian country and should return to its roots. Often, all the bad things happening in America are God's punishment, the work of the devil, or the natural consequence of wickedness and deviance.
* Anti-intellectualism: Book learning and higher education are just a program of radicalization to promote moral relativism and unjust authority of "elites", and a "culture war". Moreover, all the intellectuals/elites are equally suspect, even those that claim to be helping everyone by advocating for environmentalism, cures and prevention of disease, sound economic policy, social advocacy, etc.
* A desire for positional authority, both above them and for themselves: A sense that people that are rich or powerful are rightfully so. The pastor of your church is the positional moral authority. Your boss is the positional fiscal authority. The police are the criminal authority. The supreme court is the positional judicial authority. The president is the positional executive authority. A father has positional authority over his children. And (unstated), "real Americans" have positional authority over marginalized groups. Any sense that the authority must be earned, maintained or justified is rejected.
How could it possibly be otherwise?
Never mind $50M, suppose it would cost twenty trillion dollars to save you. The large majority of the entire US GDP. The majority of everyone in the whole country, ignoring all other problems and lives to dedicate all of their time to saving you. And if they did that, they could; but not otherwise.
Is that worth it? No, it can't be, because a million other people would die instead. There exist things that are possible but not reasonable and some of those things are in medicine.
General healthcare is a very ordinary market. You want to go to the doctor once a year to get checked out, they send your blood to a lab to check your cholesterol etc., you pay them money for this. If they find some condition with a known treatment, you pay for the treatment. In case the treatment is very expensive, you buy insurance ahead of time.
The reason people hate it is that people are willing to do anything in order to not die, so they want that level of resources to be available to them, but they don't actually want to pay anything, or to be denied if they decline to pay an extraordinarily large amount, because the alternative is death. But "pay a lot of money or people die" is the nature of it. You can try to paper over it with insurance or taxpayer subsidies but that trade off is inherent and that it makes people uncomfortable doesn't change the fact.
If Salk had this mentality, the patent still would have expired after 17 years and he could have used the money to try to cure cancer or AIDS.
> we might have also tried to monetize the COVID vaccine and grind the US into an early depression with that kind of thinking.
Three different companies developed a COVID vaccine and it's not the kind of market where you can make more money by charging a million dollars each to a hundred people than by charging $100 each to the insurance companies of a billion people.
> Fund the science and make use of taxpayer money to advance society instead of giving billionaires tax cuts.
"Giving billionaires tax cuts" is not the only alternative use for the money and isn't even necessarily a worse one.
If someone is a billionaire because of regulatory capture and monopolistic practices then we shouldn't be giving them anything, we should be breaking up their companies and eliminating the laws they bought to concentrate the market.
If they're a billionaire because they built an honest company that employs thousands of people and makes useful products for reasonable prices, that's the thing that gives the government anything to tax in order to provide roads and schools and provides people with jobs and goods and services. We want more of that. Taking more of the money away should only be done if the government's use for it is high value. Which, by definition, things with a poor cost/benefit ratio aren't.
You're making the case that the market would have the incentive to provide these things because the insurance company would rather pay for an expensive test than have a larger number of claims if the disease spreads.
Suppose we have a program which is saving lives for $50M each. There are other ways to spend the money that would save lives for $10,000 each. If we have $50M, should we save one life or 5000? This is not an academic trade off, it's what actually happens whenever the government allocates money to something with poor cost/benefit because there actually are ways to save lives or do other highly valuable things for even less than that amount of money and we don't have unlimited resources.
> Is that worth it? No, it can't be, because a million other people would die instead. There exist things that are possible but not reasonable and some of those things are in medicine.
We are talking about reality here, not some made-up fantasy to justify your outlook on it. I don't think I needed to preface my argument with that since I'd expect to discuss with rational and reasonable beings. Considering reality, where we live and touch grass, it's better that some rare diseases with high costs for treatment get subsidised by the whole pool of money society gathers for healthcare, within reasonable bounds of what the aforementioned system can bear.
I really thought I didn't need to guard myself against some bizarre outworldly conjecture with no basis in reality. You can toy with models and inflated situations to be pedantically argumentative but I'd much rather try for us to base this in more-or-less real situations. Paying for the US$ 5 million treatment of one kid with a very, very rare disease which is treatable can be afforded if a society is wealthy enough.
Or isn't the USA wealthy enough to care for its population?
If I choose to drive drunk, I am not magically not responsible when I mow down a mother with a child in her stroller.
No, and there never has been and there are exactly zero people on Earth saying there is.
The problem with this viewpoint is that as soon as people say “hey, let’s not punish people” then people crawl out of the woodwork and cry about others attacking monogamy. Sigh, nobody is attacking monogamy. You are the status quo, you can calm down now.
> But we were designed that way, yes?
We were “designed” in a lot of ways, many of them stupid. For example, the infant mortality rate should be closer to 50%. That’s what it’s always been. Humans are extraordinarily shit at giving birth. It’s almost impressive how bad our bodies are at pushing out babies.
But it’s not, because of medicine. Even just since the 70s infant mortality has gone down significantly.
Appeal to nature is lame. I don’t even know what you consider is nature, and furthermore I don’t know why it’s good. You have to explain why what you’re saying is good. You didn’t do that, people with the argument usually don’t. That means you aren’t worth listening to.
The existing law has a massive defect that prevents any of that sort of thing from happening right now.
We capped insurance company profits as a percentage of claims, so the only way they can make more money is by paying out more and bigger claims. We basically banned them from having any incentive to lower costs because now lower costs mean lower profits instead of higher ones.
But that's a flaw in the existing system, not a flaw in the general concept.
> They'd be ripping a new one in the meat industry to forestall antibiotic resistance, for example.
There are already various state and federal laws restricting the use of antibiotics in livestock. But in general what leverage does an insurance company have over the meat industry?
Meanwhile there are charities that can save a life for on the order of $3000-$5000. Spending millions of dollars on one person is saying that person's life is worth more than the thousand others who could have been saved with the same money.
People have a hard time understanding this because the consequences are indirect. You spend millions of dollars to save a kid, but you took it from a company that would have hired a hundred people. Three of those people really needed the money. One of them needed it to pay someone to get the mold out of their house, so instead that family of five ended up in the hospital and two of them died. Another would have used it to repair the brakes on their car and because they couldn't, they died in a car crash along with the person they hit. The third simply couldn't afford to make rent without a job and then froze to death in the street.
On top of this you have the other 97 people who wouldn't have died, but certainly didn't enjoy being unemployed.
Should we care about one person more than all of these others put together, or does it matter how much something costs because it's always a trade off against something else?
> wasted their Soviet heritage military arsenal
30-year-old arsenals require replacement, and war (even an embarrassing one) is an to modernize them.
Generally it should only be reserved for obviously egregious things, not mere perceived bad faith.
From a particularly deranged wicked brand of human who see empathy as weakness, who see human prosperity as bad unless someone at the top is getting very rich.
https://www.business-standard.com/health/shingles-vaccine-ma...
Framing it as "not profitable" is conservative messaging trying to drown out the idea that externalities exist.
False dichotomy. Furthermore, “treat” is a creepy term that tends to conjure up images of sticky lollipops and Hallowe’en bandits with loaded diapers.
Some of us prefer not to subsidize immoral behaviors and activity on group health plans.
But in a hypothetical parallel utopia where chemotherapy is 100% out-of-pocket, my people would welcome fewer deaths from chemotherapy, far fewer invasive biopsies & “spelunking” diagnostics, and perhaps increasing incentives to produce cures, rather than Kevorkians.
Vandalism and stink bombs are what bored teens do, trespassing is a person refusing to leave, and bomb threats are also called in by students hoping to avoid an exam.
As for what matters, even being nice and assuming all the arson crimes were serious..
The 41 bombings and 173 arson events over 48 years in all of North America is nothing