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the culture war over the vaccine stuff and the just rank dishonesty that chart pundit dudes are throwing out there about the process and how definitive a few slides might have been have made me want to hard exit this industry.
while Silver and Yglesias were stroking their chins during the spring and discussing the virus in the broadest terms, actual MPHs, epidemiologists and doctors were finding the virus where it actually was. To do this, they needed to draw upon understanding of communities...
that understanding was driven by people those dudes would dismiss as "woke" or "addled with wokeism." Just as test-and-trace was laughable without thinking about how undocumented/minority populations might not want to give their names to govt. databases...
which was a particularly bad problem given that the first wave was so heavily concentrated amongst those same populations, every epidemiological problem requires a level of nuance, outreach, and community understanding. These get bulldozed by the chart pundits.
a few out of context slides are used to discredit hundreds of people whose job it is to think about inequality and uneven distributions and how to communicate with different communities. There's ZERO serious epidemiologists who think these efforts aren't vital to stopping spread
for example, here in the East Bay, the Mam-speaking population in Fruitvale has been particularly hard hit by the virus while places as different as Rockridge and Deep East have not. Containing the virus requires you to a) know this b) ask why c) strategize w that community.
the doctors, MPHs and epidemiologists whose job it is to do this vital job are not braindead woke bots who engage in "racecraft" (I find it hilarious that these dudes just discovered this term and now use it in every fucking post). They are doing shoe leather work.
by broadly bashing this part of a public health response, you're effectively hampering the on-the-ground ability for ppl to effectively map and deal with the virus. The conflation between this task and whatever slides isn't one I made. It's what they're spouting off every day now
anyway I have an article about all this coming out soon that I've been working on for 9 months and I apologize for stepping on it but good lord this has driven me absoultely insane. The victory lap was particularly humiliating for everyone in our industry.
