A pro-science, pro-progress, techno-optimistic health textbook from 1929

Attitudes Toward Vaccines and Medicine

• Many posts ask why vaccines trigger more hostility than other drugs.
• Proposed reasons: fear of needles; taking a drug while not sick; mandates (especially for children); perception of doing it “for others” not oneself; and minimal individualized explanation compared to prescribed meds.
• Several emphasize risk–benefit tradeoffs: being pro-MMR, polio, yellow fever, COVID, but skipping annual flu shots or new vaccines with unclear personal benefit.
• Complaints that “anti-vaxxer” is overused, lumping together extremists and cautious skeptics, especially during COVID.
• Salience bias: people rarely see the diseases vaccines prevent, but notice side effects and rare failures.

Trust, Authority, and Government

• Strong thread linking vaccine resistance to distrust of government, big pharma, and institutions, not of “science” per se.
• COVID-era restrictions (movement limits, arbitrary-seeming rules) are cited as having deeply eroded trust.
• Debate: one side stresses that vaccine refusal endangers others and justifies mandates; the other views mandates and shaming as coercive and counterproductive.

Science, Anti-Science, and Education

• Discussion over whether some claims (e.g., “vaccines cause autism”) are decisively settled vs. whether “science is never established.”
• Retracted studies are seen by some as fraud correction, by others as politically or financially driven suppression.
• Concern that low literacy and numeracy make large portions of the public unable to evaluate scientific claims, fostering conspiracy thinking; counterpoint that “intelligent” people also self-deceive and shouldn’t be smug.

Psychology, Risk Perception, and Modern Life

• Several argue humans are poorly adapted to abundance, continually scanning for threats, which can fuel doomerism despite historically high living standards.
• Others note real stressors (housing costs, inequality, precarious work) make “just be grateful vs. ancient Rome” arguments unpersuasive.
• People are highly sensitive to short-term declines and social comparison, not long-term historical gains.

Culture Wars and Science

• Thread contrasts current imagined backlash from “social justice warriors” with ongoing, concrete attacks on evolution and climate science by religious conservatives.
• Some worry about anti-science currents both from the right (creationism, curriculum fights) and the left (framing Western science as oppressive, diversity litmus tests).
• Several note that science and public health always operate within political and power structures, so both real progress and real harm can result.