Medicine and transportation are roughly of the same age.
As soon as people had realized there was a difference between their bodies and the rest of the natural realm, they had started to take care of those bodies and to carry along various things – food, clothes, various implements, etc.

At some point, our ancestors had become ‘industrious’. And actively searched for ‘cures’ and for more efficient manners of transport.

To shorten a very long history, I’ll get directly to the point I’m trying to make.
There are two links between medicine and transportation. Two synergistic links, actually.
Both of them simultaneously increase the autonomy of the individual human being and the social ties between the members of the society. It is very hard to take care of your body when you are on your own and ‘transport’ might come handy when traveling alone but is way more useful in a social context.

Vaccines and automobiles are relative pinnacles in their specific domains.
Vaccines have eradicated or, at least, alleviated some very dangerous diseases. Small pox, rabies, polio, measles… Nowadays even some cancers have become susceptible to be treated with vaccine like treatments.
Automobiles… do I really need to tell you what automobiles did for us? How they have expanded our scope? Our ability to go places, taking with us almost everything we fancy?
And, like the rest of medicine and transport, vaccines and automobiles have not only increased our freedom – from disease and distance, but also the ties between us. Medicine has become even more social – most vaccines need a certain threshold in order to reach their full potential, and the transport infrastructure has become more complex. Thanks to both of them, each of us can go almost everywhere on the planet. For almost any place where a road can be found, there is a cocktail of vaccines to make that place safe for most of us.

Yet we don’t treat vaccines and automobiles in a similar manner.

We ask that all drivers pass certain exams and behave according to certain rules but some of us would like that parents who don’t want their children to be vaccinated to be able to ‘excuse’ them.

And all this just because a … (feel free to use your own words) ‘scientist’ had published a ‘study’ which purportedly established a link between autism and vaccines. Which study had long ago been refuted by the scientific establishment. For being fraudulent.

Furthermore, a few years ago it had become apparent that a major automobile producer had been blatantly and consistently lying  about the exhaust gases emitted by their Diesel engines. In a short time, we learned that many other automobile producers had been doing the same thing…

Then what drives most us to continue to trust those who lied about how ‘dirty’ their cars were  while some – but very vocal, of us continue to distrust those who produce life saving vaccines? Only because some drug producers have ‘inflated’ their prices?

Why do so many of us consider some lies as being worse/better than others?

 

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