RFK Jr had stiff competition this week from the Florida surgeon general for worst decision making in public health. If you need to catch up on who RFK Jr is, check out this short piece from The Nation. You can also check out this piece from Vox that goes into detail about the intense and chaotic at the CDC in the last few weeks because of RFK Jr.

As for Joseph Ladapo, the Florida surgeon general, earlier this week he bumbled through the announcement of a plan to end vaccine legislation, including requirements for children attending public school. If the plan comes to pass, it Florida will likely become a global infectious disease hotspot, spreading infection around the world, one Disney World trip at a time. The announcement is hard to watch, but here it is, if you can stomach it. Ladapo compares vaccine requirements to slavery, and his messaging veers dramatically close to the pro-abortion slogan “my body, my choice.” All the while the crowd hoots and hollers for a measure that would certainly kill children.

The MAGA-republican party seems determined to operate under the creed that personal choice is better than government legislation, seen with both RFK Jr and Ladapo. Personal choice means “talking to your doctor” about childhood vaccinations with no legislative requirement for kids to be vaccinated before attending public school, but not talking to your doctor about receiving a lifesaving abortion. Good to know the party of “small” government wants to continue to rifle through our modern plethora of medical interventions and choose what to ban and what to shift onto you to have to decide for you and your kids.

What role does personal health play in your safety?

Seat belts are an intuitive form of safety. We know that seat belts can protect us in the event of a car crash, but sometimes a crash can be so severe the seat belt isn’t enough. Fastening your seat belt also doesn’t prevent another car from crashing into yours. You can choose to break the law¹ and not wear a seat belt, but you certainly can’t buy a new car that doesn’t have seat belts. Seat belts have saved countless lives, but simply wearing one isn’t a guarantee that you will be one of those saved lives. Most personal safety choices are just like the choice to wear a seat belt; they can lower your risks of bad outcomes, but they can’t completely prevent them.

Personal safety is not straightforward. The topic is usually flattened into debating which personal choices prevent which bad outcome. Safety, however, is not something we individually choose; it’s something we create. In 1967, the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 208 specified that cars must have seat belts, and has been amended over the years as technology improves. Again, this doesn’t prevent crashes, but it can help people survive crashes when they happen. And automakers automatically providing seat belts makes it easier for you to wear one—it’s always there, after all.

It’s not enough to require seat belts be present in a car, the seat belts must also actually perform well in crash testing. This requires data collection, analysis, and reporting. It also can’t take too long, since new cars hit the market every year. If a new car hits the market and is found to have a faulty seat belt, there needs to be quick investigations, recalls, and preventative measures put into place to prevent (further) injuries or deaths. This requires a lot of people working together in industry and in government to meet the legislated standards for vehicle safety.

Now, the truly libertarians out there may eschew all of this, saying they would rather there be no safety legislation. It’s more freedom to spend your time trying to assess the safety of a new vehicle. And you should just do this with everything: cars, homes, occupations, medical treatments, all the food you eat, the air you breathe and the water you drink. No one person will ever have the time, money, or resources to genuinely assess the safety of each part of the world around them. Government agencies like the CDC, FDA, CPSC, EPA and so on work to reduce or eliminate unsafe choices, which essentially creates a systems of safety. Your best public health protections are granted by these systems of safety. They may have existed all our lives, but before these agencies existed, way more people died of preventable illness, injury and disease.

Right now, these agencies have essentially been high-jacked by haters that despise solutions based on systems created by the government. Every moment of chaos brought to the CDC by RFK Jr takes time away from CDC employees working to uphold the systems that watch and report on deadly disease outbreaks, prevent drowning deaths, assess vaccine safety and vaccine injury, and more. With budgets slashed, task forces eliminated, infectious disease monitoring reduced from 8 to 2 infectious agents, life is becoming riskier for Americans.

No personal choice or set of choices can save you from the loss or extensive damage to the system of safety created by the CDC (or any of the other important agencies working to protect American health). There is one personal choice that stands above all others as critical, and it’s likely the choice you want to do the least. Contacting your government representatives and demanding they stop the Trump admin’s attack on our systems of safety built by our public health agencies is the best step you can take toward trying to keep these systems here.

There are other choices you can make, akin to wearing a seat belt. Again, if the destruction at the CDC continues, and if states like Florida open the doors to infectious disease, there will be a crash. People will die, and we can’t stop that through individual choice outside of demanding legislators act to prevent these deaths. But you can buckle up for a crash (while you contact your reps!!). Here is an incomplete list of choices for you to consider.

The best personal choice you can make is to call your representatives. Go to their office. Write letters. Send emails. Red state or blue, make your voice heard. Do it at the local level, the state level, the federal level. Implementing systems that keep us safe requires government buy-in, laws and regulations, and appropriate budgets. Without independent agencies working to keep our society safe and improve public health, we will all suffer the effects of a sicker and more dangerous society, regardless of our individual choices.

So how do you do this? There are tons of ways to get engaged:

Government doesn’t move quickly, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t act. If you’re only going to pick up one habit from this list, it should be this one. Don’t like the idea of using a script on the phone? Simply and quickly tell your reps any way you prefer:

Risky foods are going to get riskier with the cuts to CDC infectious disease monitoring. Safer foods are also going to get riskier, too. So what foods are better to avoid? Pregnant and immunocompromised people should already be aware of foods that increase their risk of foodborne illness. Here is a summary of riskier foods that anyone can choose to avoid to lower their risk of foodborne illness, regardless of their health status. Click those two links for full lists of risky foods. And for the love of god, don’t consume raw dairy.

To lower risks, always do the following:

Traffic enforcement and legislators have given up on phone use while driving, as far as I can tell. More people than ever are just scrolling their phones while barreling down highways, city avenues, parking lots, and small side streets. Only sweeping changes to our phones, laws, and traffic enforcement can truly stem the tide of this problem. Remember when I said to contact your reps in the government? Add this to the things you bring up to them.

In the meantime, don’t use your phone while driving. No text, no call, no social media post, no newsletter, or video, or song is worth risking your life and every life around you. Put your phone in the glove box. Put it in the back seat. Put it inside the center console. Silence it. Do anything you can to prevent yourself from taking your eyes off the road and putting them squarely on your phone. If you think this is impossible, I implore you to give up driving for good. Just take the damn bus if you don’t have the willpower to resist Zuckerberg and Musk’s hold on your mind.

Wearing your seat belt will prevent you going through the windshield when some other driver on their phone hits your car. If you’re texting while driving and thinking you are somehow safer and better than other idiot drivers on their phones, you are not any different from them. So buckle up and stop fucking around on your phone while driving.

If you own guns, storing them safely is a way you can prevent children from shooting themselves or each other by accident. Guns will not be going away any time soon, as we value gun ownership over safe schools, churches, grocery stores, streets, and public spaces. If you own a gun, you must lock it up.

Wearing a mask has been seen as a highly political act for a while, now. With so many in the United States not masking, it can be uncomfortable to mask up in public when it’s so much more visible than, say, handwashing. Make no mistake, masking protects you from infectious agents in the air. N95 and KN95 masks offer protection from small viral particles in the air.

The best mask is the one you wear properly and consistently. There are tons of styles, price points, and colors to choose from, at this point. If, for whatever reason, you can’t commit to masking full time in public, make an effort to mask at doctor’s appointments, in the pharmacy, in hospitals, on public transit. This is important everywhere, but doubly so if you live in an area where vaccine access is being restricted.

Proper handwashing takes longer than you think and is a bit annoying. Thanks to the power of the human psyche, this is enough to prevent most people from proper handwashing. Wash your hands before you eat. Wash your hands before you prep or cook any food. Wash your hands after changing a diaper, cleaning the litter box, picking up dog poop, or taking out the trash. Wash your hands after using the bathroom. Get it twisted: the fecal-oral route is real and can hurt you, so bust them germs by washing your hands correctly!

Vaccines are powerful technology that train your immune system before you face a threat, similar to training an army before a battle. Getting a vaccine is like buckling up before you hit the road. You can still get sick (or get in a car accident), but the vaccine works to keep you from severe illness and death (like a seat belt!). No healthcare intervention is perfect, but it’s worth the increased challenges this year to get your COVID and flu shots.

This is unfortunately going to look different, depending on where you live. Here’s an explainer by Defector to get you started. I crossed state lines to get both my shots this morning.

When was the last time you checked your smoke detectors or carbon monoxide alarms? Have the low battery chirps become something you no longer hear, constantly annoying your guests or neighbors? Do you have a fire extinguisher in an easy to reach place in your home?

The CPSC has a lot of great fire safety information on their website. This page can get you started. Check it out, they recommend annual smoke alarm battery replacement! They also say to replace alarms that are older than 10 years old! And so much more:

Here’s a video on fire extinguishers to get you started. It’s only 4 minutes long, but the basic information and reason to get a fire extinguisher are in the first two! Watch this and go buy a fire extinguisher!!

I don’t care how cute that animal is, rabies deaths are up this year. Get your pets vaccinated! Yes, including the indoor cat you swear would never leave your home. After all, bats are rabies carriers and they are known to bust into homes and threaten you and your pets with infections. Don’t play around and risk rabies just because you assume it could never happen to you! And if a bat does enter your home, everyone should get checked out by a doctor ASAP for a rabies vaccine. Bat bites and scratches can give you rabies, and you could have either and not know it, if it’s a small nick.

Your all purpose cleaner has instructions. If you don’t follow the instructions, it won’t work right. Read the labels of your cleaners and use them correctly to sanitize or disinfect surfaces like your kitchen sink, counters, and refrigerator. The same goes for any products you use to disinfect your bathroom. Seriously, it’s a waste of your money if you use these products wrong and they don’t end up disinfecting anything!

I don’t have the time this week to write every single risk mitigation strategy you can add to your arsenal, after you form the habit to contact your representatives (you did that, right?). Here’s some rapid fire additional options to better prepare you for the road ahead, as you continue to contact your representatives:

That’s a lot to get you started with. Hopefully, you already do several things on the list. You better get to contacting your reps! There’s gonna be a quiz next week about contacting your representatives, so study up!

Professor Batty