It’s that time of year again, to celebrate a lot of things I guess. Pillaging unknown lands and nonthreatening people on behalf of the queen—Columbus Day. If your company has a fiscal year ending 31Aug18, getting a new budget freed up. That conference season is drawing to a close. That 7,500 gigatons of ice has melted at the top of the Northern Hemisphere. Wait…WHAT? Did I just say 7,500 GIGATONS!

Some or all of the above have been circulated on Facebook and other social media, as well as the normal quantity of totally antiscientific nonsense about vaccinations and flu shots.

People believe crazy things, and generally the public doesn’t have the training nor the expertise to parse through statistical data—neither climatologic nor epidemiologic—to have any valuable input about almost anything, really.

This should scare you for a number of reasons:

1) in court, the expectation is that juries are comprised of ‘your peers,’ and these people are weighing available (i.e., presented) evidence for potential convictions. Please don’t be a defendant in your own court case where your future rests in the opinions of people who can’t interpret or synthesize data.

2) in social media (e.g., Facebook), stupid posts about the health benefits of turmeric or the overt dangers of vaccines have a real risk of influencing the public consciousness and harming many lives.

By the way, I purposely didn’t capitalize the header word in the above bullets, because they shouldn’t be. If you want to give yourself something to do to occupy your time tomorrow, look at any bullet list in a work document or PowerPoint presentation, and make a mental note of how many listed bullet points begin with capitalized words, when they don’t need to be.
You’re welcome.

The Flu Doesn’t Care Who You Are (Mostly)
Between about 5,000 – 45,000 people die in the U.S. every year due to seasonal influenza and its complications. For the recent reports on the 2017/2018 flu season, the CDC is suggesting that this number (mortality) may be closer to 80,000(!).

Now, the distribution of mortality isn’t playkurtic (flat), and so there are indeed groups who are more susceptible—the very young, the senescent, the infirmed, immunocompromised, etc. But even with a bimodal mortality distribution by age, it’s a tremendous risk to society. And people are very unconcerned. They worry more about whether their food has a gluten free or organic logo, when they’re not celiac or for some reason they hate carbon, or how many vaccinations they and their friends can avoid, than they do about a pernicious killer of decathousands annually.

The great democratization of opinion (i.e. social media), which gives everyone’s opinion equal weight and does away with expertise, is equivalent to erasing society’s memory of all the scientific advances we’ve developed over the last 570 years.*

Have a question about a medical condition? Check your Facebook feed, because I’m sure that somebody’s dumb friend has written an anecdotal post about how eating a dozen limes has cured some sort of chronic disease. Or juicing has. Or turmeric.

Don’t believe that man has walked on the Moon? There are posts to support that notion.

Think the Earth is flat? Oh, let me tell you—there’s a whole new cohort of ‘Flat-Earthers’ online who type gigabytes of nonsense about how the spherical Earth is a lie.

For The Non Flat-Earthers Reading This
If you’ve made it this far, the takeaway is this: Trust data and evidence, not stupid online posts from the uneducated and uninitiated.

And get immunized against this season’s flu strains—as you know it’s not perfect, but it represents the best possible probability of either preventing an overt infection with the virus, or of reducing its severity should you contract a similar strain.

If you have been vaccinated and survive this flu season, you owe a nonzero percentage of your survival to heeding this advice. Because science works. 

*From a timeline that I not-quite arbitrarily picked to start from Johann Gutenberg’s moveable type printing press in c. 1440.

Reference

• Chapman University. (2017). Paranormal America 2017. Chapman University Survey of American Fears 2017. https://blogs.chapman.edu/wilkinson/2017/10/11/paranormal-america-2017/

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Ben Locwin
Ben Locwin, PhD, MBA, MS, MBB, is a healthcare futurist, award-winning published author, and has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Forbes, and many books and magazine publications. He serves on several industry advisory boards and boards of directors. He was the Keynote for Contract Pharma’s 2018 Annual Conference.