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Risk Compensation considered harmful
HPV vaccines, N95s, seatbelts, helmets and the Chicago Boys.
The politicization of covid started early, with the “noble lie” that masks wouldn’t prevent the spread of the disease, a lie told in a bid to prevent panic-shoppers buying up all the N95s that health workers needed.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-face-masks.html
Safety talk is often a pretext: sometimes paternalistic, sometimes authoritarian and sometimes (ironically) anti-regulatory.
The British “health and safety gone mad” panic of the 1990s is a perfect microcosm of how this works. After a revolution in evidence-based public safety measures improved the daily lives of millions of people, puny authoritarians and grifters of every stripe realized that safety talk was a powerful weapon for bossing people around while lining their pockets.
In their 2014 book “In the Interest of Safety,” Sense About Science’s Tracey Brown and Michael Hanlon document the way that bosses, consultants and cranks used “health and safety” as an unquestionable justification to make other people do their bidding.
