Category Archives: Health

Why are Governments not Trusted?

Death of Truth, Decline of the west, Epidemics/Pandemics, Health, Neo-liberalism, Oligarchy, Social democracy, Social Democracy and Trust, Trust and Distrust

 

As I mentioned in my last post, a lot of hesitance to trust vaccines is a result of distrust of government. This is a shame, because particularly in troubling times such as pandemics, it is essential that people trust their government about the information they give about vaccines or other health measures.  Distrust in government is not a laughing matter.  Distrust in government is a very costly matter.

 

Figuring out why governments are not trusted is a tricky thing.  Nesrine Malik said this about citizens of her country of Sudan who believed the government could not be trusted in giving them good vaccines for free:

 

This sounds like completely irrational behaviour, but in fact it is the opposite. In countries such as Sudan, nothing good, and certainly nothing free, comes from the state. The government is an extractive body that exists not to serve citizens, but to rifle through their pockets and charge them for going about their daily business. Corruption is endemic – from bribing one’s way through traffic violations, to being forced to use private hospitals because government cronies have hoarded medical technology. The state is something that you thrive in spite of. The government’s communication reflects this uneasy relationship. Officials speak to the public either to scold them or spread propaganda, and dissent is banned; in Egypt, doctors who contradicted the government’s account of the pandemic were arrested, while oxygen tanks ran out in intensive care units in Cairo.

 

We tend to learn from experience. Our own experience. In Sudan the consistent experience of people with the government is that it will try to screw the citizens in favor of their cronies. They are naturally reluctant to believe that free vaccines are given to them for the welfare of the people. After all, their government has rarely considered the welfare of the people. This is called crony capitalism, or in extreme cases, oligarchy. Oligarchs won’t hesitate to use their power to screw us. That is what they do all around the world. And in Canada and the US the trajectory is in the direction of oligarchy.

 

In the US they are increasingly nearing oligarchy, if they are not there already. The rich in the US who have the ear of the government use that power to ensure that money is not “wasted” on public health. Many of the health insurance companies do all they can to maximize their profits even at the expense of their customers. Christiane and I have recently experienced a most bizarre version of this that I must blog about some day.

 

As Nesrine Malik said in her Guardian article: “Suspicion is easily sown, because political systems don’t need to be fully authoritarian to sustain exploitative and dishonest regimes that breed mistrust.” Americans know that pharmaceutical companies earn enormous profits. You might even say, as Malik did, “outrageous profits.”  In the UK during the Covid-19  pandemic people were reluctant to trust the government because journalists revealed how their government kept changing the rules while leaders refused to obey the rules themselves. We had that in Canada too. We have no vaccine against corruption. Or ignorance for that matter.  As Malik said, “State failure breeds paranoia. And when trust in government breaks down, people turn to personal vigilance.”

 

This is what Nesrine Malik said,

 “Vaccine rejection doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s easier to dismiss hesitancy and conspiracies as unhinged behaviour; it makes us feel less unnerved by displays of unreason from those who we think are, or should be, rational people. Sure, among vaccine-hesitant people are those who are simply stubborn, misanthropic or selfish. But, just as the pandemic exploited the weaknesses of our economic and public health systems, vaccine hesitancy has exposed the weaknesses of states’ bond with their citizens. There are no easy answers for how to deal with those who repeat conspiracy theories and falsehoods, but scrutinising the systems that lost their trust is perhaps a good place to start.”

 

I think Malik makes a lot of sense. It is not a simple answer to a complex problem. It is a complex answer, as it should be. 

In the west, since the time of extreme neo-liberalism of Saint Ronny Reagan, the Iron Lady, Maggie Thatcher, and to a lesser extent their dedicated follower Brian Mulroney anti-government propaganda has flourished since the 1980s as Americans and Canadians have been fed a steady diet of dubious claims that the state is unreliable and predatory.  As Saint Ronald Reagan said, “the most scary 11 words in the English language are, ‘I am from the government and I have come to help.’ For decades, conservative political leaders have repeated over and over and over again that the government cannot be trusted.

As a result many of us believe this. And that is a costly mistake. This is all part of neo-liberal dogma/propaganda that the government can’t be trusted only the private sector is worth our trust.

Of course, this ideology has for decades served the interests of the wealthy who care most about minimizing their personal or corporate taxes. This ideology is now so prevalent that even people whose best interests would be served by government are reluctant to accept its help. Governments provide many things of enormous value including hospitals, roads, libraries, universities, parks, environmental regulations, health and safety standards to name only a few. Governments are important!  And vaccines are a very important part of this. For decades we have been taught, and many of us believed, that governments are bad and private enterprise is good. Now we are paying a heavy price for blindly following that ideology.

The Miracle of Vaccines?

Epidemics/Pandemics, Health, Trust and Distrust

Few things have surprised me as much as vaccine hesitancy.  The first time I remember coming across this phenomenon was at a conference at Arizona State University which Christiane and I attended.  It was a conference organized by SCETL, their School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership. It was our first of many annual conferences we attended there. Attending their annual spring conference was a highlight of our trip down south each year. And they also served us lunch. That year they even gave us wine. All of this for free. They had professors from universities around the country and even Europe and Canada speaking. It was fantastic. And they opened it for members of the public. Christiane and I were a bit nervous the first time we attended, thinking, naturally we did not belong. These were top academics and journalists and thinkers from around the world. But we enjoyed it immensely.

 

For lunch that first year we sat at a round table and were joined by a real estate salesperson. She was also an ordinary citizen like us but enjoyed exploring new ideas, like us.  But she shocked me. She countered a statement that one of the professors had made about autism not being caused by vaccines. She said she had done a lot of research and it was now very clear that vaccines were dangerous and did actually cause autism. “We should never take them,” she said. We should never allow our family members to take them either.

 

I had never heard of this idea before. It surprised me because I had always been a staunch advocate of vaccines since as a young lad terrified of polio during the polio pandemic of the 1950s.  I remember hearing that some people who had polio would have to live most of their entire lives inside an iron lung. Even children my age could be subjected to that. How awful was that? We had a polio victim down the street from us. He was not in an iron lung but I feared for him. Even more I feared for me. It was very scary. The disease affected many young children like me and they were kept alive by these iron lungs.

 

Then like a miracle from God a polio vaccine was discovered.  It could protect us from such a fate. Later I realized this was not a miracle from God, it was a miracle of science. Scientists were so smart they figured out how to save us from these dreadful iron lungs.

 

Then years later as a pretty old man in Arizona State University, I was told that  these vaccines were not safe. How could that be? This was before Covid-19 when I learned many people distrusted the Covid-19 vaccines. I, again, was overjoyed when these vaccines were made available.  Who was I to believe? The real estate agent or scientists I heard on TV or read about in respected journals?  I did a little research too. And it indicated there was a crazy conspiracy theory going around that vaccines caused autism.

 

To me the issue was clear. I would not believe the real estate agent even though she had seemed intelligent and sincere. She knew a lot about vaccines. At least compared to me.  I doubted that she learned more on the Internet than these respected scientists. It just seemed highly unlikely. But I was determined to learn more.

 

Dying of Stubbornness and Ignorance

Epidemics/Pandemics, Health, Trump, Trust and Distrust

 

North Americans are repeating what they did during the Covid-19 pandemic. They are not heeding good science in favour of more attractive positions self-learned on the Internet.  Charles Blow wrote in the New York Times this during the Covid pandemic and it sounds ominously familiar:

“So, we have a situation in America where people are dying and will continue to die of ignorance and stubbornness. They are determined to prove that they are right even if it puts them on the wrong side of a eulogy. This is like watching millions of people playing in traffic.”

 

We must remember how during the Covid pandemic people in hospitals diagnosed with Covid-19 refused to believe their physicians even as they lay dying.  We see something similar now with regard to measles. Physicians have made it clear how important the measles vaccine has been in safely reducing the consequences of measles and saving thousands of lives and yet many continue to disbelieve the scientific evidence or the advice of medical advisors in favor of Internet quacks. As Blow said this about those times:

“All the while, the patients on ventilators gasped for breath, and refrigerated trailers filled with bodies. Death is one of the ultimate truths of life, and yet not even it could dissuade the headstrong from casting doubt on the science.”

 

 

Blow called this “anti-vax insanity.” That is what it was during Covid. And that is what it is again in the case of Measles. The Covid-19 vaccines were incredibly safe and so are the measles vaccines, yet too many people refuse to take them.

 

Blow said this about the reaction of conservatives to scientific evidence relating to Covid-19:

“Why were Americans turning away a vaccine that many people in other parts of the world were literally dying for? Many did so because of their fidelity to the lie and their fidelity to the liar. They did it because they were — and still are — slavishly devoted to Trump, and because many politicians and conservative commentators helped Trump propagate his lies.”

 

Once again conservative leaders are leading their faithful adherents to their doom. Blow also said during the Covid-19 pandemic  “They are too dug in, too committed to the lies and conspiracies, too devoted to rebellion.” Again, the vaccine deniers are showing their over commitment to “lies and conspiracies” about the measles vaccines.

 

Note as well the words, “too devoted to rebellion.” I will come back to that in a future post.

 

Mennonites Lead the Charge Against Health Protections

Death of Truth, Health, reason, The Sleep of Reason, Vaccines

 

I used to joke that Mennonites are taking over the world. It’s actually true. And its not a good thing. It’s actually very dangerous. But it is preventable by vaccines. Measles is one of the most contagious diseases in the world. And we have not been taking it seriously, because we have been so effective at combating it. And that is all thanks to vaccines for measles.

 

The United States has just experienced a measles outbreak in the American southwest, particularly in Texas. On February 26, 2025 for the first time in 20 years a child died of Measles in Texas. It was also the first time in nearly a decade in the US. Texas confirmed it had 124 cases mostly in Gaines County and 9 cases in Lea County New Mexico.

 

Here’s the shocking part:

“Most of the cases are occurring in a Mennonite community that largely homeschools, so there would not be school vaccine mandates,” explains Bill Moss, MD, MPH, a professor in Epidemiology and executive director of the International Vaccine Access Center.”

 

You see most schools in the US mandate that children enrolled in the school must be vaccinated against measles. Mennonites in these communities mainly homeschool. And these homes don’t get their children vaccinated.  As Mennonites sometimes say, “We trust in God. We don’t need vaccines.” They think God is stronger than any disease and all they need to do is appeal to God. Sadly, that’s not working so well.

 

As Aliza Rosen of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health said,

 

“At a time of rampant mis- and disinformation about vaccines, public health experts worry outbreaks like this may only become more common in a time of rampant mis- and disinformation about vaccines, public health experts worry outbreaks like this may only become more common.”

 

As Dr. Ron Cook, of Texas Tech University said on PBS News Hour,

 

“If you walk into a room and you have measles, 80 to 90 percent of those individuals within a week will come down with measles. All you have to do is go in that room, breathe, cough a couple of times, but 80 to 90 percent of those individuals in that room will become infected with measles if they’re not vaccinated.”

 

Even though the vast majority of Americans and Canadians believe in the safety and effectiveness and safety of vaccines, there are growing numbers of people who are skeptical about vaccines, unvaccinated people account for the almost all the new cases of measles. And sadly, those numbers include children.

 

As Caitlan Rivers, Senior Scholar, Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, pointed out,

“In fact, 93 percent of people are vaccinated against measles. That is an enormous congruency in a population that otherwise can’t agree on a whole lot.”

 

Rivers also said she was troubled by misinformation coming from the newly Trump appointed secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who has made it clear that he questions vaccines.  All of us should question vaccines, but when we get clear answers from a wide majority of scientists and researchers, we should believe them until we learn for some reason they can’t be trusted. Unfortunately, many Mennonites in some communities don’t trust in the science. They do their own research on line or have faith.

 

Dr. Paul Offit, an expert on vaccines and one of the  committee advisers and director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said,

 

“I just fear that we are slowly sort of tearing apart the public health process that has basically served us well. I mean, we live 30 years longer than we did 100 years ago, primarily because of vaccines. And I just think vaccines have become, I think, following this pandemic, to some, a dirty word.”

 

Dr. Offit, like Caitlan Rivers lays a lot of blame at the feet of people like Robert F. Kennedy for spreading misinformation about vaccines that has influenced people like the home-schooling Mennonites. This is what he said:

 

“So, if you look at that Mennonite community, about 80 percent of those children were vaccinated. That’s not enough. It has to be in the mid-95 percent range to protect against this disease, measles, which is the most contagious infectious disease, more contagious than any other infectious disease.”

 

And so it will find those people who are unvaccinated and cause an infection. I think this was a line that was crossed. This is the first measles death in a child in almost 20 years. That’s a tragedy because, one, any death in the child is a tragedy.

 

This was a preventable death. We basically eliminated measles from this country by the year 2000. It’s come back largely because people have chosen not to vaccinate their children, in part because they’re scared of the vaccine, scared that it has safety issues like autism, something that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been promoting loudly and to many people for the last 20 years. And I think this is the result of that.

 

As a result Mennonites are bringing death to their communities—particularly children—because they are listening to misinformation rather than scientists. As a result children are at risk or even dying from a preventable disease. That’s bad.

 

Insecure People are a template for disaster

Decline of the west, Health

As Astra Taylor says in her 2023 CBC Massey Lectures, this is the age of insecurity.

Charles E. Moore a physician and the Chief of Service Otolaryngology at the Grady Health System points out that for African Americans who have always had a lower life expectancy than comparable whites, it is significant that they have always had chronic stress. The life expectancies of African-Americans have been rising slightly while that of white working-class people has been declining.  He suggests that this might be because whites experiencing stress is something new.

Yet African-American life expectancies are still 3 &1/2 years less than whites. But the gap is closing. Dr. Moore also operates a clinic in Atlanta.  He says you can expect a 12-year difference in life expectancy between the African-Americans he largely treats and the whites that live north of Atlanta. All you have to do is look at their zip codes and you know the story. It is that simple.

Many of his patients have to choose between medication and food, or medication and gas. Those are some tough choices they have to make. That generates a lot of stress.

People who have been laid off from their jobs often blame greed. Often, they believe compassion is lost from society. It is all just about money. The pain they feel can easily turn to despair. Many of the people thought they had job security and then they got laid off. Many times they had committed to buying houses they thought they could afford because they had job security. Then they found out the hard way that they had no security. Those people have suffered. It is even worse when they continually hear that the economy is improving. Laid off people don’t see that. Insecure people don’t see that. Many people don’t see that.

Many of such people find the stress intolerable and turn to suicide. As Dr. Gupta said, “In the United States more people die by suicide with a hand gun than die by homicide with a hand gun. It’s gone up 30% in the last 17 years.”

Dr. Gupta believes that the problem is ultimately expectations. Many people in the United States and Canada for that matter believe that if you just work hard enough everything will work out fine. “Those dashed expectations end up being a unique and toxic feature here. The headline is that stress kills.”

As Dr. Rajita Sinha, a Clinical Neuroscientist and Director of the Yale Stress Center said, “Stress is everywhere. We are drinking more. We were smoking more before we had social interventions; we have a massive obesity epidemic, and we have economic and economic stress. So we have the stage for uncontrollable chronic stress.” That is a template for disaster.

It is also a template for a declining society. That is really the point I am trying to make.

The Meaning of Life under Stress

Decline of the west, Health

“The meaningfulness of the working-class life seems to have evaporated,” Angus Deaton, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, told Dr. Sanjaya Gupta. “The economy just seems to have stopped delivering for these people.” Deaton and Anne Case coined the term “deaths of despair” to describe the surge of mortality from alcohol, drugs and suicide.

In the end of the second decade of the 21st century everyone seems to think the economy is improving, but all these working class people see are plants closing and jobs disappearing. The economy may be booming but they don’t see that for themselves. Everyone else seems to be doing well. The economy may be booming now but so many people are still left behind. These people feel deep resentment. These people feel betrayed. They don’t think America is great. They want it to be great again like it was. And resentment is a powerful and explosive force!

What do you do when the plant you have worked at for decades shuts down? It is tough. It is also tough on those who work in other plants. They can see that this might happen to them too.  That makes people feel uneasy. They are insecure and stressed. And this has happened over and over again in many sectors. Economic insecurity has become rampant.

The key is the lack of control that leads to stress. How much does your job or your status affect your health? There was a famous study out of England called the Whitehall Study that was one of the first that tried to dig into this issue.

Sir Michael Marmot an epidemiologist from University College in England was involved in that study. He said when his study started everybody “knew” that stress caused heart disease. And everybody “knew” that high status people had more stress. It was obvious to everyone. I knew as a lawyer in what I always thought was a high stress profession that I had much more stress than most other people. Then one day I read a report in a newspaper about stress. It might have been a report about the Whitehall Study in fact. It said legal secretaries had more stress than lawyers. How could that be? Yet the study revealed that among civil servants at least the lower your status the shorter your life expectancy. Lack of control at work increases heart disease, mental illness and muscularly skeletal disorders. That is what chronic stress is all about.

As Professor Marmot said, “So close the link between social circumstances and mental health gives us a measure of how well we are doing as a society.”

Insecurity leads to stress which leads to poor health. This is a dangerous path that so many of us are walking and it can transform our lives sometimes in very unpleasant ways.

Anne Case and Angus Deacon: Deaths of Despair

Decline of the west, Drugs, Health, Substance Abuse

Dr. Sanjay Gupta for his HBO special and Nicholas Kristof and Cheryl WuDunn for the New York Times, all interviewed Anne Case and her husband Angus Deacon. Both of them are economists from Princeton University but we won’t hold that against them. As she said, “Whites are reporting poorer and poorer health, more and more pain, and more and more social isolation. More depression. Along with this increase in mortality from drugs, alcohol, suicide there is just a lot more morbidity, pain, and social isolation.” Anne Case came up with the expression “deaths of despair” and it has become very popular.

Anne Case and Angus Deaton, conducted an important study of mortality and wrote the book, Mortality and Morbidity in the 21st Century. Dr. Gupta interviewed them for the television show. In that book they described “deaths of despair” as “death by drugs, alcohol and suicide.” According to them, so many people have died from deaths of despair to equal all the people who have died of AIDs since the beginning of the AIDs crisis. Those deaths were enough to cause life expectancy to fall first for whites and then for the entire population. That is a very unusual event.

These people were the children of the people that won the world war and were expected to live glorious lives in the land of the free and the brave. The parents expected their children to do even better than they did. Those expectations were often not met. As Deaton put it, “They were promised the earth but they did not inherit it.” Case said, “in every state but 2, cirrhosis of the liver and alcoholic liver disease went up. And in every state drug poisoning went up. In every state between 1999 and 2015 suicide rates went up for people aged 22 to 64. If you treat people in a really shabby way for long enough bad things happen to them. That happened to African Americans forever and it started to happen to whites with a High School degree or less, starting probably in the mid-seventies. And now bad things are happening to both of those groups.

Dr. Gupta that if we wanted to know the effects of economic decline all we had to do was visit the American Rust Belt.  There they produced more steel than the rest of the world put together. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week smog from those plants went into the atmosphere of American cities.

Swissvale Pennsylvania , according to Eric Horgos, is the valley that is  “the epicenter of the greatest industrial collapse in the entire developed world in the 1980s. 1983 is when economic Armageddon hit them.”

Is it surprising that people who lived a certain way that they liked for 30 years and then had the rug pulled out from under them wanted to commit suicide? Is it any wonder they turned to alcohol or drugs? Is it any wonder that they despaired? Is it any wonder that they gave up on politicians that that they had once respected, and then turned instead to a demagogue?

Constant Change

Decline of the west, Drugs, Health, Substance Abuse

 

Americans, like Canadians, are living in a world that is changing faster than ever before. And that is change is constant. As a friend of mine always says, ‘Change is the only constant”.  And such constant change can be stressful.

There are all kinds of health problems out there. I know some of them too personally for my taste. People are obese.  It is astonishing how obese people are in the richest nation on earth. In Arizona where I spend a lot of time in recent years, we see it all the time. People have heart conditions. They have cancers. Yet, there is something harder to define. What Dr. Sanjay Gupta called the “real state of stress” in his HBO special.

And everyone wants a pill to solve their health problems. People want quick solutions to their problems. So do I of course. Americans take more drugs than the people of any other country on earth. And Canada is not far behind. Those drugs served a really useful purpose. They can save lives. They can ease pain. Yet, as Dr. Gupta pointed out, in the US  “50 people die every day from prescription pain killers!”

Shown on Dr. Gupta’s special, Angela Glass was a mother in Victoria Texas. She knew that stress can be ugly. It can cause issues in every area of your life. Wherever you already have problems, stress can make them worse. Stress compounds the problem. Angela was prescribed a huge cocktail of drugs every day for her stress. She took pain medication–hydrocodone. She took other drugs for anxiety.  Things got worse. She lost a child. She took way more drugs than she was supposed to. She had suicidal thoughts. She considered taking all her pills and ending the pain once and for all. She couldn’t sleep. She was haunted. How many Americans and Canadians have been led down this path to drug dependence? How many Americans and Canadians have died as a result? In one year more Americans died from drug over doses than died in the entire Vietnam War! Since that happened in the United States, it has happened again!

 

Dr. Gupta believes that all this chronic stress, the pain which comes with the stress, and the desire to make that pain go away have combined to create a toxic brew that is destroying America and Canada. Many take medications even when they know it could take their lives.

This is dangerous stuff.