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You are right to press me on whether my corruption scenario has ever actually happened. My gut feeling is no, never. But the past few years have wrecked my world view, and I fear that I am old and have been left behind while the world changes.
Back in March 2021 I had the Astra-Zenaca mRNA vaccine for COVID. How dangerous could it be? I knew that the messenger RNA would cause my cells to produce the protein that the snippet coded for. Scary! But I knew that that is what happens in a viral infection, and what happens when you take a "weakened" vaccine. Indeed Edward Jenner's original cowpox vaccination for smallpox is doing the same thing; spoiling the host for the smallpox virus by getting host cells to produce a shared protein and getting the host to produce anti-bodies to it. I was a science enthusiast and marveled at the invention of mRNA vaccines.
I saw public health as a nerdy area, and took it for granted that traditional standards of safety and efficacy would be upheld. I was disappointed. The https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths dynamic had played out while I wasn't paying attention. The blot clots and myocarditis problems would have lead to the swift withdrawal of the vaccines when I was young; but the world had moved on.
My current understanding of how the world works goes something like this:
It is year N and Mr Blackpill has noticed that the incentives tend towards corruption. He claims that year N is already corrupt. It isn't. Mr Blackpill is undaunted; he claims that dynamics created by the incentives are fast acting and predicts that year N+10 will be corrupt. Nope. Mr Blackpill has complete faith in his reasoning and in human avarice. Year N+20 will definitely see a corruption scandal. Mr Blackpill is wrong again.
Eventually year N+30 arrives and with it a big corruption scandal. Mr Blackpill was right in the end. Worse, it turns out that the corruption is entrenched and hard to root out. It has been going on for fifteen years. Mr Blackpill was right about N+20. There are a variety of forces that tend to hide scandals and when they break out into the mainstream it turns out those in the know had been complaining, correctly, for many years.
Returning to adding versus topping up. I see the language here as one of those forces that tend to hide scandals. Ecbatic not telic. I don't know whether we are in year N, year N+10, or year N+20. Mostly I don't know because I'm not in the business. But I cannot know by reading the newspapers. People complain about fluoride being added to the water supply and I'm left to guess that they mean topping up. If there was a scandal of the kind that I speculate about, adding, not topping up the news reports would say much the same and the I wouldn't be any the wiser. It would be the year N+20 situation, where there is corruption but still ten years to go before the facts break into mainstream news.
At the end of the day, my guess is that there just isn't enough money in water treatment to attract the avaracious, and the potential for corruption goes unrealized. But the clumsy language, that stands ready to hide it if it ever happens, still give me the ick.
I'm aware that I completely lack the common touch, so it is best that I defer to your expertise here. I would be interested if you had any ideas on how to push back against the confusion of adding and topping up.
IMO the best thing to do to clear up fluoride confusion is to remind people that it is a naturally occurring mineral, and therefore many water sources naturally contain some, without any human intervention. I suspect most of the anti-flouride sentiment would go away if people understood that, and the language question of adding vs topping up wouldn't make much difference.
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