The cost of science denial

Twitter: @rodgermitchell; Search #monetarysovereignty
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It takes only two things to keep people in chains: The ignorance of the oppressed and the treachery of their leaders..
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Science is not always right. In fact, science advances by being wrong and then conducting research to discover why it was wrong, an effort that leads to better answers.

Almost everything you think you know about the world results from that process: Hypothesis —> Test —> New Hypothesis.

Many science deniers use a different system: Rumor —> belief —> unshakable belief.

Non-scientists do not know more about science than do the real scientists.

The notion that a layman can get away with saying any damn fool thing he or she wishes, and then justify it by saying “Scientists often are wrong,” is nothing more than blissful — and harmful — ignorance.

Here are some examples of that blissful — and harmful — ignorance:

Beetroot for AIDS: Fighting denialism in Mbeki’s South Africa
HIV researcher and doctor Glenda Gray worked through the dark days of Thabo Mbeki’s AIDS denialism. In an era of fake news and climate scepticism, her story has lessons for us allBy Sarah Wild

By 2000, 1 in 5 pregnant South African women were HIV-positive, with about 70,000 infected babies born each year.

Under Nelson Mandela, I was drafting South Africa’s plan to tackle HIV and AIDS, including the roll-out of nationwide treatment.

But in 1999 a new president, Thabo Mbeki, had prejudices about science. Mbeki’s line was that poor nutrition, rather than HIV, was the cause of AIDS.

(Government officials) were advocating beetroot and garlic to prevent AIDS!

A huge problem is the transmission of HIV from mother to baby during childbirth or breastfeeding, which is preventable by giving the mother antiretroviral drugs (ARVs).

But Mbeki’s government would not provide ARVs. I saw the effects of this firsthand. We were counting the dead bodies, many of them babies.

Scientifically, mother-to-child transmission of HIV, and its prevention, weren’t contentious. Why would anyone object to giving AZT or nevirapine – internationally approved drugs that reduce HIV’s ability to replicate – to a pregnant woman to prevent her infecting her baby?

Some even were saying that AZT was toxic and that we were killing black women by using it.

Administrators and civil servants kowtowed to Mbeki whether they believed in AIDS denialism or not, and so toed the party line at whatever cost. I once had a call from a doctor at another hospital, who said, “I have an HIV-pregnant woman in labour. I hear you have the drugs to prevent mother-to-child transmission during childbirth. Can I send an ambulance to fetch them?” The ambulance rushed to our unit, and I gave the driver the package.

When he got there, the hospital boss confiscated the drugs and phoned me, saying, “How dare you send that medicine!”

(Today), when the ARVs finally (have been) rolled out it is like Lazarus syndrome. My patients went from needing wheelchairs and oxygen tanks, from lying on stretchers, to healthy.

Children I was treating went back to school. ARVs were the most amazing thing to happen to South Africa.

In 2008, Mbeki resigned and interim president Kgalema Motlanthe, on his first day in office, appointed a new health minister. It was like waking up from a nightmare. Mbeki’s stance on HIV was ultimately his undoing, and with him gone South Africa began making ARVs available in all its clinics, to anyone who needed them.

Well, that was South Africa, a backward people. Fortunately,  such ignorant science-denial could not happen in The United States of America, a scientifically sophisticated nation.

If one of our leaders arbitrarily denied the scientific consensus, he would be run out of town.  Right?

Can a new history of vaccination silence doubters?
Controversies and scandals cannot obscure the self-evident success story of vaccines told by Meredith Wadman in “The Vaccination Race”

EVERY year, millions of children and adults are vaccinated against diseases that only a few decades ago were terrifying and deadly, including rubella, polio and measles.

Meredith Wadman’s meticulously researched book begins with the heart-rending account of a baby girl born in 1964 who survived just 16 months before succumbing to the effects of maternally transmitted rubella. She spent only nine days of her life outside hospital.

The fear and horror these diseases cause is a fading memory, and despite the fact that vaccines work, the sceptics are gaining ground, their claims given credence by a handful of Hollywood stars and now by US president Donald Trump.

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Trump energizes the anti-vaccine movement in Texas
Some mothers have stopped immunizing their young children because of doubts about vaccine safety.

President Trump’s embrace of discredited theories linking vaccines to autism has energized the anti-vaccine movement. The movement is raising doubts about basic childhood health care.

Public health experts warn that this growing movement threatens one of the most successful medical innovations of modern times. Globally, vaccines prevent the deaths of about 2.5 million children every year, but deadly diseases such as measles and whooping cough still circulate in populations where enough people are unvaccinated.

Measles was eliminated in the United States more than 15 years ago, but the highly contagious disease has made a return in Texas, in part because of parents refusing to vaccinate their children.

The modern anti-vaccine movement is based on a fraud. A study published almost 20 years ago purported to show a link between childhood vaccines and autism. The data was later found to be falsified, and the study was retracted.

Scores of large-scale, long-term studies from around the world since then have proved that there is no connection between vaccines and autism.

Some Texas public schools are dangerously close to the threshold at which measles outbreaks can be expected. A third of students at some private schools are unvaccinated.

Jinny Suh worries about the risk that the school’s unvaccinated children pose to her 4-month-old, who is too young to be immunized. “I’m sure there are people I go to the grocery store with and go to the park with” who have unimmunized children, she said. “This is a public hazard. You can’t see germs.”

In some parts of Texas, vaccine coverage is slipping below the 90 to 95 percent level that experts say is needed to prevent an outbreak. Many private schools have the highest rates of unvaccinated children, exceeding 20 percent.

One part of the anti-vaccine movement’s message is that vaccine-preventable diseases aren’t dangerous if people get modern medical care. But that’s a myth, and the failure to vaccinate can be catastrophic.

One only can wonder how many children President Trump will kill with his anti-science, anti-vaccination ignorance.

Donald Trump, the non-scientist, does not know more about vaccination than do the doctors. He not only threatens the lives of our children; he threatens the lives of all people:

Trump’s Budget Slashes Climate Change Funding
NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE
If there was any doubt over President Trump’s views on climate change, those doubts evaporated with the unveiling of his proposed federal budget on Thursday.

The budget would end programs to lower domestic greenhouse gas emissions, slash diplomatic efforts to slow climate change and cut scientific missions to study the climate.

“It’s terrible from the perspective of having any concern at all about climate change,” says Andrew Light, a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute’s climate program and a professor at George Mason University.

Previously,  Trump had described climate change as a hoax, but he also (hired) EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt (who) has questioned whether CO2 is causing the globe to warm.

In a press briefing Thursday, Mick Mulvaney, the head of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, was unequivocal about the administration’s attitude toward the issue.

“We’re not spending money on that anymore,” Mulvaney said when asked about climate funding. “We consider that to be a waste of your money to go out and do that.”

At the Environmental Protection Agency, the proposed budget “discontinues funding for the Clean Power Plan, international climate change programs, climate change research and partnership programs, and related efforts.”

Donald Trump does not know more about global warming than do the climate scientists.

If President Trump’s vaccination denial doesn’t kill you and your children with measles, mumps, rubella, chicken pox, diphtheria, polio, and tetanus, etc., he will get your family later with the multitude of disasters caused by his global warming denial.

You are trusting your life and our planet to Donald Trump.

There are stiff penalties for ignorance.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty

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THE RULES

•Those, who do not understand the differences between Monetary Sovereignty and monetary non-sovereignty, do not understand economics.

•Any monetarily NON-sovereign government — be it city, county, state or nation — that runs an ongoing trade deficit, eventually will run out of money no matter how much it taxes its citizens.

•The more federal budgets are cut and taxes increased, the weaker an economy becomes.

•No nation can tax itself into prosperity, nor grow without money growth.

•Cutting federal deficits to grow the economy is like applying leeches to cure anemia.

•A growing economy requires a growing supply of money (GDP = Federal Spending + Non-federal Spending + Net Exports)

•Deficit spending grows the supply of money

•The limit to federal deficit spending is an inflation that cannot be cured with interest rate control. The limit to non-federal deficit spending is the ability to borrow.

•Until the 99% understand the need for federal deficits, the upper 1% will rule.

•Progressives think the purpose of government is to protect the poor and powerless from the rich and powerful. Conservatives think the purpose of government is to protect the rich and powerful from the poor and powerless.

•The single most important problem in economics is the Gap between the rich and the rest.

•Austerity is the government’s method for widening the Gap between the rich and the rest.

•Until the 99% understand the need for federal deficits, the upper 1% will rule.

•Everything in economics devolves to motive, and the motive is the Gap between the rich and the rest..

MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY