Public health operations are hard because often when you reduce total life years lost you also redistribute the life years lost. Take the original Oral Polio Vaccine. I suspect that’s what I received as a child in India but it was also originally used here in the US. It had a small risk of causing paralytic polio. Until the ‘90s the US still had single digit cases of this. Would those people have gotten polio without being vaccinated? Since they lived in a mostly polio-free society probably not.

So “free rider” antivaxxers would find themselves at lower risk in that society because herd immunity would protect them.

My understanding (limited as it is) is that OPV was sold as a “we’re all in this together” thing while simultaneously there were far fewer sources of information and so governments were on a different scale of information distribution than individuals.

But trust in those who speak for science isn’t automatic. Most people could look out and see that claims from these institutions were calibrated to create outcomes and not strictly speak the truth. I sympathize with the institutions because many of the people present inherit a memory of a time when these institutions controlled information spread in a more systemic way.

As an example, it’s pretty well-established (from first person views) that the HHS and their governed orgs claimed that masks don’t work expressly in order to ensure that masks were available for healthcare providers. One could imagine they came from a tradition which praises allowing Coventry to be bombed for the greater good of hiding that we’d broken the German code.

But “we lied to you for the greater good” lands poorly these days because information spreads easier and from multiple sources.

Take the case of COVID-19. Some jurisdictions interpreted restrictions to disallow people from hanging out in groups in public. In Dolores Park (I think, but in some park in SF), we had these little circles you were supposed to stay in. Meanwhile, scientists signed letters endorsing large scale protests.

Stories like this abound. A scientist who wants to stop a dam finds an endangered species that would be destroyed and blocks the dam. Years later it is found to be not a distinct species but genetically identical to another species that is not at threat.

In the past, information control permitted suppression of these things or reframing of them in a different way - the people of Coventry were heroes, even if they were volunteered as sacrifice unknowingly. Today, I think that wouldn’t work so well.

Today, people see scientists as individuals as well. If you believe in disparate impact being the standard of discrimination, it is now worthwhile to ask whether the guys who vote a certain way would vote to sacrifice you for their people.

Anyway, as an aside, GCHQ says today that the Coventry story as told is a myth. Pretty interesting read: https://www.gchq.gov.uk/information/the-bombing-of-coventry-...