Outbreak Of Reason
By Mitch Berg
SCENE: Mitch BERG is pondering the tragedy that is his backyard garden when Avery LIBRELLE, riding a recumbent bike, rides up the alley, unbeknownst to BERG.
LIBRELLE: Merg!
BERG: Ohhhhhh fuuuuun seeing you Avery…
LIBRELLE: Shut up. Robert F Kennedy is making Americans sick. There’s a huge measles outbreak.
BERG: Huh. And that’s RFK’s fault?
LIBRELLE: Absolutely. He’s anti-Vaxx.
BERG: Whereas an enlightened country like, say, Canada won’t have any trouble with that kind of thing.
LIBRELLE: Of course not. They’re enlightened and progressive!
BERG: Huh.
LIBRELLE: Wait – is this another one of those things where you…
(BERG opens a link on his iPad):
Surely they must do better than the United States at controlling communicable diseases, right?
Yeah, well, not so much. Quite the opposite, actually.
While the numbers are inherently unreliable to some extent, we can get a rough estimate of the relative risk of somebody getting Measles here vs in Canada. Both have advanced healthcare systems that collect a lot of data, and both have active media environments that love to focus on scary stuff like spreading diseases.
Want to know the relative risk? Americans contract Measles at a rate of 1.1 per million more or less, while Canadians have a rate of 12.2 per million.
Canadians are more than 11 times more likely to get the disease than people in the United States. And they don’t have any mean, nasty conspiracy theorists like RFK Jr. to spread conspiracy theories. The English, a similar society to both Canada and the United States, has a rate 5 1/2 times the US. France and Germany have rates similar to ours, if a tiny bit higher at the moment.
LIBRELLE: Dammit! Why do you always do that?
BERG: (Not very interested) Do what?
LIBRELLE: Shoot down everything I say, and make me look like some kind of idiot?
BERG: It’s a blessing and a curse.
And SCENE
April 7th, 2025 at 7:47 am
Don’t take false credit Mitch. You’re just the messenger of other people’s facts, Avery makes themself look stupid without your help. 😉
April 7th, 2025 at 8:27 am
Examples from history or other jurisdictions are irrelevant because they didn’t do it right. This time, it will be different.
And if we learned anything from Covid, it’s that lockdowns work on infectious diseases. Want to stop the spread of measles? Lock down the world. Don’t believe me? Look around, how many Covid cases are there today? How many people are dying of Covid in nursing homes and schools and hospitals? None. Proof that the anti vaxxers were wrong all along.
April 7th, 2025 at 9:31 am
Would be interesting to see what the relative vaccination rates are, as well as the relative rates of living in large apartment buildings, a.k.a. “tenements”. I’m one who supports many, but not all, vaccinations, but I also suspect that a big reason infectious disease rates plunged is that soldiers who’d grown up in tenements moved out to the ‘burbs.
Also would be interesting to see the demographics of infection, and how that correlates to vaccination and tenements and the like. I know that many immigrants who work in meatpacking plants basically live like cordwood in rented homes, and that was a chief way COVID got spread there. Again, “tenements”, and “do they do vaccinations in the countries they came from?”.
April 7th, 2025 at 10:14 am
Pffft. Measles? Please.
Enlightened™️ Canadians are light years ahead of us mud hut dwellers as regards Science™️ and Health Care©️
I am surprised we are not still trepanning skulls to let the Demons out. Just looking over the crowds at leftist protests proves frontal lobotomies aren’t working.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/medically-assisted-deaths-canada-2023/
April 7th, 2025 at 9:37 pm
One other note; Kennedy has noted his support for the MMR vaccine. He’s stunk up the place, IMO, with his statements on thimerosal, and has probably helped dissuade many people from vaccinating altogether with those comments (though many vaccines do not contain thimerosal), but he’s at least come out in favor of MMR, and really most of the critical childhood vaccines.
But more importantly, what on earth is going wrong with Canada, eh?
April 8th, 2025 at 1:13 am
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April 8th, 2025 at 6:19 am
Arthur;
Also proves that public education and college, don’t work either. Or, maybe they are one in the same.