▪️This meme presents a cartoonish version of the history of child mortality, as you can see from the attached chart. Child mortality rates plummeted most sharply in the 1800s and early 1900s, it wasn’t as if the 1950s was the starting point of the phenomenon.
▪️Vaccines were a component of lowering child mortality, but a fairly minor one. It was industrialization and the resulting dramatic increase in wealth that turned the world from a place where ~1/2 of children didn’t reach adulthood into one where child mortality is extremely rare.
▪️Most of the decrease comes from advancements like abundant and reliable food supplies, sewers, clean drinking water, central heating, cheap clothing, understanding germs and bacteria, antibiotics and access to hospitals.
▪️Pretending vaccines were singularly responsible for lowering child mortality is white washing the main reason for the improvement; the dramatic increase in wealth and advancements from the Industrial Revolution. Indeed, the places where child mortality is still a big problem are the least industrialized areas.
It’s bizarre to see them seesaw back and forth that Trump is totally clueless and aloof, just golfing all day, then all of a sudden he’s a dangerous king/dictator who’s diligently plotting to seize absolute power.
▪️This one is frustrating because, while it’s nice to see the vigor and speed that DOGE is acting with, they’re also sloppy with some of their findings. This is not some bombshell, millions of dead people’s SS numbers aren’t being paid out to fraudsters.
▪️This problem has been known for some time, you can read an inspector general’s report from 2015 about millions of names on the SS “numident” not being correctly annotated for deaths, even though they were older than 112 (the oldest known American at the time).
https://oig-files.ssa.gov/audits/full/A-06-14-34030_0.pdf
▪️There are innocent explanations for some of these. Expatriates that died outside the country, for example. Or immigrants given temporary work permit who returned to their country, people issued new numbers for various reasons, etc. However, most are simply due to the govt not diligently keeping track of deaths.
▪️It’s embarrassing that the govt has millions of numbers on the numident that are ...
