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The way to address it is to treat public health as a national security issue. This is actually what happened here in the UK after WW1 and pushed forward hard af
by simonh 5y ago
The way to address it is to treat public health as a national security issue. This is actually what happened here in the UK after WW1 and pushed forward hard after WW2 with the establishment of the NHS.
In WW1 the UK armed forces were shocked at the low levels of health and nutrition in recruits, such that large numbers were unfit to serve. This also affected labour available for strategic industries like arms and munitions. This is why the establishment of robust public health systems and a public primary care system were not controversial here and mostly still aren't. I say this as a lifelong conservative voter. This isn't about socialism. We're not a huge nation and we needed a healthy capable population.
We're waging a global war on this virus, whether we like it or not. What we need is co-ordinated and effective action on a global scale to combat it. The virus itself, and the delta variant has showed that what happens in one country is of vital interest to the rest of the world, we're all in this together. However the first step to effective international action is for the nations with the resources to act globally to put their own houses in order first. Here in Britain this is what we've done, with a few missteps and misjudgements along the way, but we're finally on top of this thing.
Vaccination, vaccination, vaccination. All the other tools we have - lockdowns, mitigating treatments, masks, they're all useful tools in their place, but the Vaccine research efforts were our Manhattan project. The vaccines are the wonder weapons. They're the path to getting on top of this thing.
We're in this for the long haul. New variants will arise that are more infection, more deadly, vaccine resistant, or all three. We need to be ready for them. This is the real deal, it's a proper global war with a massive global body count, and we need to stop bickering about it and get organised.
- maxerickson 5y agoWe really don't know if/how the virus will mutate. Especially in the sense of how a given set of mutations will impact transmissibility, virulence and vaccine effectiveness.
- simonh 5y agoTechnically true, we can't predict when or if specific mutations will or won't occur. We do know this virus has in fact already mutated significantly on two of these axes though (virulence and vaccine resistance), as variants have emerged that vary in some degree in those ways, and it seems somewhat optimistic to think it won't continue to do so. Fortunately it's not mutated too much in terms of vaccine resistance. Delta seems significantly more resistant to single doses than Alpha but a second dose so far does the job. We've only recently exposed the virus to large numbers of vaccinated people though, so there's not been much time for resistant variants to gain an advantage.
- xyzzy21 5y ago"Wars on X" have NEVER worked except in elementary symmetric warfare (where both sides where well visible uniforms and do not practice any stealth techniques). The "War on Drugs", "War on Poverty", "War on Terrorism", "War on Alcohol" (Prohibition) all are 100% failures.