A friend wrote:
Better read up your history first…for the macrobiotic organic eating natives.
smallpox etc. never calmed down in Europe either…waves of plagues were the norm…anybody from Egypt?
the placebo effect is real because it’s measurable but the death rate of disease is also real and measurable. trying to put some kind of questioning equivalence there to go against vaccines is a losing historical proposition.
anyway, to answer your questions about vaccine effects and mechanicals and psychological , i’m sure there is a boat load of real scientific papers that quantify it…over the last hundred years.
My response:
Catching up on mail, having just read this one the first thing I'd like to say is this is not history, it's speculation with a lot of disagreement and debate among the scholars who study this. Which variation of the debate is the actual history? We don't know and we likely never will. But it's difficult for humans to say I don't know and leave it at that. So we have theories. Nothing wrong with theories except they tend to become "fact" because we hate not knowing. Not knowing means we cannot adequately defend ourselves against death. The predominant myth science is infused with is we can know everything, if not now, eventually. A central metaphor of science is "in search of the God particle".
I agree however that it's very likely Europeans arriving in the americas were carrying the diseases of civilization they had developed immunity to, and these diseases were more virulant than the diseases the native americans had developed immunity to. That is a logical conclusion based on the question: "why didn't the native american's wipe out the Europeans with their diseases instead? The Europeans were not "virgin tinder" for those earlier, pre civilization diseases, they had immunity to those too.
The point Zack Bush and many others are making is the biological immune function is complicated in ways we are only beginning to understand. Hidden in "only beginning to understand" is, again, the search for the god particle, the point at which humans finally transcend nature completely.
It ain't gonna happen.
Meanwhile humans live longer as an accidental consequence of the most rudimentary form of technology, shelter from the elements. Based on what we know of the remaining centenarian cultures, longevity was a consequence of benign natural conditions, relative freedom from predatory assault, harsh weather, and difficult growing conditions. Technology has otherwise, within the context of longer life, reduced healthy life span significantly relative to the (now historical) pre-technological centenarians.
I'm not saying technology is "bad", I'm saying it's a double edged sword and we have not yet fully grasped that "problem" yet, much less began mitigating the effects of it.
Meanwhile the only way out is through, so we plunge ahead pushing current limits of tech, learning from mistakes as we go, using our species as the lab animals. The fundamental two problems with tech is it allows much more efficient access to resources, and as a consequence much greater population density, which creates a downward spiral in the ecology and in health. The dream of course (search for the god particle) is that we will find our way to "zero footprint".
That ain't gonna happen either.
The problem with vaccines will be the same problem of all tech, unintended negative consequences to health. We're headed toward genetic modification of our species. We didn't like GMO foods for obvious reasons (it destroys nutritional complexity for one), are we going to like GMO "us" any better? The blinded scientists will be clamoring for it.
Bush and the other "naturalists" are dreamers too. There will be, IMHO, no way out of the mess we are making of food sources and the ecology that sustains us. Except one, population collapses of large enough magnitude to "wake us up" (maybe, if we're lucky) to the "double edged" problem of tech.
Meanwhile it is now thought the 6th mass extinction began 100 years ago as a consequence of the industrial revolution. As Keith is fond of saying "it happens slowly then all at once". The primary impact on us mere biological humans of the great extinction so far is the exponential rise in so-called metabolic disease. A better term is diseases of poor nutrition. There's an as yet (mostly) invisible unintended consequence for you. Imagine that, the most technologically advanced civilizations so far...and the primary threat is bad food we created ourselves?
And this is a problem that dwarfs the threat of pandemics....so far. I feel it's very likely pandemics will catch up at some point (we won't be around to see it), and vaccines will play a role. Junk food, and now we'll have a junk immune system, as the unintended consequence of vaccines will be a destruction of the "nutritional complexity" of our innate organic immune functionality, which we still don't understand as we call it a system, as if it was a discrete anatomical system, which it is not. And in so doing have unconsciously minimized the complexity of it, in the same way we did (and still do) with food.
There is a philosophical problem with science that science is generally blind to. It is the fact that human intelligence is limited by brain size, just as it is in all species. And that intelligence is also bounded by survival instinct, just as it is in all species. But we think we are above that limitation and technology proves the point. If that were true we wouldn't be making such a mess of things. Instinct predominates intelligence, and we do not operate with a functional understanding of that yet. There is a lot of work pointing in that direction (including Kahneman and Tversky and many others), perhaps we will get there yet. Imagine humans operating with a keen understanding of the limits of human intelligence. There is also a death instinct, according to Freud. That would be the one that does not allow us to see and comprehend the limits of human intelligence.
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