{"id":89455,"date":"2025-04-07T05:58:00","date_gmt":"2025-04-07T10:58:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=89455"},"modified":"2025-04-07T06:08:21","modified_gmt":"2025-04-07T11:08:21","slug":"outbreak-of-reason","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=89455","title":{"rendered":"Outbreak Of Reason"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

SCENE:\u00a0 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.<\/em><\/p>\n

LIBRELLE:\u00a0 Merg!<\/p>\n

BERG:\u00a0 Ohhhhhh fuuuuun seeing you Avery…<\/p>\n

LIBRELLE:\u00a0 Shut up.\u00a0 Robert F Kennedy is making Americans sick. There’s a huge measles outbreak.<\/p>\n

BERG:\u00a0 Huh.\u00a0 And that’s RFK’s fault?<\/p>\n

LIBRELLE:\u00a0 Absolutely.\u00a0 He’s anti-Vaxx.<\/p>\n

BERG: Whereas an enlightened country like, say, Canada won’t have any trouble with that kind of thing.<\/p>\n

LIBRELLE:\u00a0 Of course not. They’re enlightened and progressive!<\/p>\n

BERG:\u00a0 Huh.<\/p>\n

LIBRELLE: Wait – is this another one of those things where you…<\/p>\n

(BERG opens a link on his iPad<\/a><\/em>):<\/p>\n

\n

Surely they must do better than the United States at controlling communicable diseases, right?<\/p>\n

Yeah, well, not so much. Quite the opposite, actually.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

LIBRELLE:\u00a0 Dammit!\u00a0<\/em>Why do you always\u00a0do\u00a0<\/em>that?<\/p>\n

BERG:\u00a0 (Not very interested<\/em>) Do what?<\/p>\n

LIBRELLE:\u00a0 Shoot down everything I say, and make me look like some kind of idiot?<\/p>\n

BERG:\u00a0 It’s a blessing and a curse.<\/p>\n

And SCENE<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

SCENE:\u00a0 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:\u00a0 Merg! BERG:\u00a0 Ohhhhhh fuuuuun seeing you Avery… LIBRELLE:\u00a0 Shut up.\u00a0 Robert F Kennedy is making Americans sick. There’s a huge measles outbreak. BERG:\u00a0 Huh.\u00a0 And that’s RFK’s fault? […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66,368],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-89455","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health-care","category-trump-derangement"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89455","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=89455"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89455\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":89458,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89455\/revisions\/89458"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=89455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=89455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=89455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}