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Wearing masks accepts that it is mete, just, and our bounden duty to comply with the exercise of the civil power for the greater good.

Mammonites reject any concept of "greater good"; there is good for them, and bad for them, and nothing else. They're not strong on accepting that the civil power might properly be applied to constraining their conduct at all, ever.

This makes it look like a technocratic solution -- vaccines -- might be a compromise position; it avoids having to confront mammonites.

The vaccines are not anything like powerful enough for that to work; against wild type, aggressive mandatory vaccination might have worked. (but only might). Against Delta, it won't, and against Omicron perhaps a greater won't. Aggressive mandatory vaccination _and_ aggressive mandatory public health measures _and_ long-term movement controls _and_ truly aggressive efforts to extirpate the disease in animal reservoirs will all be required.

I could wish for a greater political will to this end; I could wish for a general acknowledgement that extirpation is the only practical course. And while I'm wishing, I could wish that someone in the halls of power would notice that if there are humans in 2100, mammonism will be extinct. We're not getting through this by agreeing that whatever you've done, you get to keep the loot.

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Last year I thought that one good thing to come out of this pandemic was the general acceptance of mask-wearing during seasonal flu outbreaks, just as seems to be standard in some E. Asian countries. That hope has now been kiboshed by the politicization of mask-wearing in many countries. I don't expect social distancing in even its simplest form to become SOP either.

Where vaccinations do work well, e.g measles, I see ever stiffer resistance to accepting them for children. Schools in California require them, but is this universal? Even if it was, would parents gravitate to private schools and home schooling to avoid this requirement?

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Beyond these desiderata, let's add doing whatever we can to make vaccines available, free, to everyone, everywhere. HIV-positive, and other immunocompromised, South Africans apparently have been a fertile breeding ground for Covid varians, meaning "get them vaccinated yesterday!"

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Omicron did not _arise_ in South Africa; it was _detected_ in South Africa, because the South Africans have an effective disease monitoring infrastructure, and almost no where else does. It was already a whole lot of other places before it was detected.

Effective global vaccination won't happen through private production; there's no reason to do it if you're considering shareholder value. Direct public production will be required.

(Y'all do realize that quite a lot of smallpox vaccination was done at gunpoint? When I say "aggressive mandatory vaccination" I do not mean "novel incentive structures"!)

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author

Yep...

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"(Y'all do realize that quite a lot of smallpox vaccination was done at gunpoint? When I say "aggressive mandatory vaccination" I do not mean "novel incentive structures"!)"

Pity there wasn't a vaccine during the early period of European colonization of the Americas. Then, "at gunpoint", meant reducing the indigenous population that could have a vaccine in later periods, had that been desired.

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re: How Notable Is Science?

The problem is not that the NYT "notable" books list is short of science books, but rather that the NYT is even considered an arbiter of "notable" books. It reminds me of Allan Bloom's 1980s railing about the decline of liberal education as if there was a loss when education was no longer focussed on a set of ideas he was exposed to. (Note the NYT gave his book (The Closing of the American Mind) a +ve early review, whereas later reviews by others were far more -ve.) I suspect that the problem is that some want a high place in the pantheon of culture which would require limiting that cultural extent to be encompassed by a single mind. If CP Snow was correct about the Two Cultures (and watching archived BBC shows supports that view), then there are realms of culture that are no longer mainstream. Just as internet commerce by Amazon enabled long-tailed products, so social media allowed the viable fragmentation of interests. Those of us who love science have no problem finding good books on almost any domain of science and can happily ignore the entreaties of those who would peddle other interests.

If we really believe that diversity is a good thing for civilizational adaptability, then this fragmentation is desirable, even if those wishing to maintain a homogenous culture would wish otherwise.

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