Hey there, pop culture peeps, Trace here and I've been thinking about this tweet from one
of the biggest names in science today, Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson.
I did tweet at him and my tweet went mildly viral, which garnered me many responses about
how this is science!
These are facts, etc, etc.
But one they're not all facts as some of the points aren't even correct and be directly
comparing these statistics is called false equivalency, which makes sense in situations
like these when everyone's emotional and looking for a hot take.
Emotions are powerful things and my rebuttal is very simple.
If you want to know what a society values, see where it puts its resources.
So look, I'm not an astrophysicist.
I don't have a PhD.
I'm just a dude from Michigan who has a YouTube channel and knows his way around the internet.
But with a few simple searches, I can tell you why this is a false equivalency.
We spend billions to rein in regulator reduce all of these things on this list except one,
and let's talk about it.
Once again, hey, Trace here.
Thanks for watching.
We spend billions reducing medical errors 385 million on influence of research alone,
117 million on suicide prevention, billions on car safety and only 22 million on gun research.
In fact, unlike literally everything else, Dr. Tyson listed funding of gun violence research
is discouraged by law.
So let's take each of his points one at a time and talk about them because they're important.
Medical errors are a serious issue in any healthcare system.
It's almost as if in the US we needed to reevaluate how healthcare was structured and funded and
maybe, you know, add some kind of public oversight or something.
Anyway, so 2016 study from Johns Hopkins pegged medical errors as the third leading cause
of death after heart disease and cancer right now, it's not even on the CDC top 10 list.
Medical errors include medication errors, errors related to anesthesia, hospital acquired
infections, missed or delayed diagnoses avoidable delays and treatment, inadequate follow ups
after treatments, inadequate monitoring after procedures failure to act on test results,
failure to take proper precautions and technical medical errors.
If you look closely, some of these are false of doctors and some are of hospitals, Tyson
quotes 250 per day, but this study says it might be closer to 700 per day because there
are so many things that can go wrong in medicine.
That said in July of 2019, the Department of Health and Human Services the agency that
regulates hospitals, said that they were forming a quality summit to continue their 20 year
mission to reduce medical errors.
HHS has committed literally billions of dollars on quote, improving care for all patients
and to quote reduce preventable harm to hospital patients by 40%.
They cite medical errors as a problem amongst other things.
And those since most of the websites haven't actually been updated since the Obama administration.
I don't know how this project is actually progressing, calculating precise numbers to
limit all medical errors.
That's really hard.
I called the American Hospital Association they did not get back to me so I dug into
just one of these on my own ha eyes are hospital acquired infections.
HJ eyes can be infections acquired because you're sick and surrounded by other sick people.
It could be due to post surgery, infections or because of hospital cleanliness or negligence.
1.7 million people get an infection in the hospital every year.
The estimates of the cost are in the 10s of billions.
But the numbers related to prevention of HJ is their incalculably high because every hospital
state and agencies doing things to help but they don't work under one budget.
Simply knowing that HHS is spending billions on this project.
I felt like that was enough of an estimate.
So next step on Tyson's list is the flu. influenza research gets millions and millions of dollars
every year from the National Institutes of Health alone, I'm not even talking about the
CDC or private companies.
This is needed because scientists use a combination of medicine and statistics to understand which
of the thousands of influenza virus strains might spread over the next flu season.
The scientists then inform pharmaceutical manufacturers of their predictions and they
make the next season's vaccine scientists monitor the influenza virus worldwide all
year just to make sure the vaccinations are then effective, because we can't vaccinate
for every one of the strains of the virus all at once.
Yet a universal flu vaccine is on the horizon.
Actually, it was really cool.
I looked it up during this whole research.
This is a color eyes structure of a prototype for one.
The blue bits are hemagglutinin, a protein found on the flu strain h one and one also
known as the swine flu, but don't be afraid this hemagglutinin is the stem of the virus
the head has been cut off and the engineered nanoparticle that you see in the middle was
used to hold the stems in a specific formation.
And if approved, this little money could be injected into you float through the bloodstream
and act like a parade float attracting attention.
It's stimulating a crowd of antibodies.
The nano particle has binding points common to all strains of human influenza, so the
antibodies can attach to the real viruses if they show up defeating them.
It's actually rather genius.
And in recent animal studies, it is working but it's not ready for us yet again, hundreds
of millions of dollars every year on the flu.
Next on the list is suicides.
I just did a video about how suicide is it contagious behavior.
So I won't rehash everything here.
But suicide research and resources from the NIH cost millions of every year because it's
a serious concern.
People want to prevent it and they want to understand the reasoning behind it.
So we can head off any problems before they happen, especially since many suicides are
done with firearms, which, by the way, wasn't even referenced in the original tweet and
is problematic when you compare suicide to gun violence and you don't recognize the link
regarding the 200 who die allegedly because of car crashes.
I called the American Automobile Association or AAA Tamar Johnson told me via email that
there is no set dollar amount nationwide for traffic safety or for public education.
But that crashes cost 870 billion every year, which got me thinking literally everything
we do related to highways, traffic, cop speed limit, seatbelt laws, car inspections, even
filling potholes, is just promote safe and proper operation of cars.
The US Department of Transportation has the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
And they had a budget request which you can look up online the fiscal year 2017 request
was $1.2 trillion, with 250 million for Vehicle Safety alone, and 146 million for behavioral
safety IE trading humans to suck at driving less sidebars, someone who drives a car around
y'all.
I think we can spend a little more on that, don't you?
So we spend billions to reduce and restrict, regulate and make safer all of the things
on the list.
But we haven't gotten that last one yet.
Gun research in the US is lacking.
We don't spend much money on it relative to these other problems.
Literally every organization that looks at gun violence, research political or not, wants
to better understand our gun violence problem.
And they all say that we should be spending more to understand it in a 2017 statistical
regression analysis, which is a way to find relationships between multiple variables.
Researchers compared the expected funding for gun violence research compared to the
actual money spent on gun violence research based on the number of deaths in the United
States annually.
So statistically speaking, the paper said we should be spending about $1.4 billion researching
gun violence instead, according to their observed totals were spending about 22 million.
Earlier this year, the US House did pass a bill granting 25 million each to the CDC and
NIH to study gun violence.
But it has not yet been voted on in the Senate.
The only thing we study less than gun violence is literally false, like falling as a cause
of death.
Obviously, now we know why the original tweet went viral because the message is so emotional,
and the timing was maybe bad.
It gives the appearance of straight comparison of data to data.
But it's not actually good data.
Only a few 10s of thousands of people do die if gun violence every year, just a few 10s
of thousands.
Lots of people die from lots of other things.
Of course, the difference is we're working really hard to reduce most of those numbers.
Hundreds of thousands of people are working really hard to make sure that you don't die
in a car fatality die by suicide or die of a medical mistake.
Even if that mistake is your own.
What we're not spending billions to reduce his gun violence.
So hey, let's wrap this up.
It's just not worth bashing the point home, right?
If you're a hater, you have left your comment already.
And if you're not a hater, you have left your comment already.
If you want to know what a society values, see where it puts its resources.
I don't just think Tyson's tweet was cold and a bit tone deaf.
It was also just plain wrong.
Dr. Tyson is signaling to everyone that we shouldn't care about gun violence because
there are people dying of diseases, mistakes or car crashes.
And we should care about those things.
And of course we do.
But we also commit a lot of resources in order to fix them.
And the news can't cover them all.
The media should never tell you what to think only what to think about.
And the hope is that their spotlight will help you, us the citizenry understand the
problem and decide to commit research dollars to fixing it.
taxpayer money.
And we can do that with every problem.
We can do more than one thing at a time as a group.
We as a society can protect people from the flu and study the effects of gun violence
and go back to Mars, all while shopping for groceries in our underwear.
Using publicly funded networks.
We are legion.
There are millions of us.
I have redrafted a better tweet.
I do say so myself.
Dr. Tyson wants to update his info.
Or you can tweet it if you want.
I put the text in the description.
We lose 100 people a day to gun violence.
Each year we spend billions researching medical errors 385 million on the flu 117 million
on suicide many billions on car safety, and 2 million on gun violence.
Often emotions respond more to spectacle than data.
But we should all agree more research is needed.
Let's make the data.
The spectacle.
I don't know Dr. Tyson.
So I can't say but everyone gets caught up in the moment.
Sometimes emotions are powerful things.
And my rebuttal in the end is very simple.
With every other thing on this list, we spend millions or billions recognizing that our
efforts will save lives if we can reduce, repair, rectify, restrain, right, delete or
remove these problems.
We spend billions on all of these things except one.
Something
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So thanks.
Thanks for watching everyone.
I hope that you learned something from this video.
I know that I did while researching it.
I hope that you enjoyed it.
Feel free to send that tweet, it's down in the description.
I definitely sent it so you could also just retweet me.
But thanks again for watching.
I really appreciate it and I will see you in the future.