[devwastaken]

Soap is great but requires people to go through the much more rigorous and unavailable method of washing hands. Hand sanitizers are much faster and easier, which makes sanitization available in areas where it wasn't previously. For example in the office, school, stores, anywhere you're handling materials, etc.

You should absolutely wash hands too, but there are a lot of reasons for portable hand sanitizers.

[clairity]

but sanitizer is egregiously overused by the public, and most of it is doing nothing but pressing adaptation in microbes rather than reducing infections. it's useful in certain food-handling, waste-handling and healthcare settings, but not in most common situations like (semi-)public spaces and handling ordinary materials.

the amount of friction presented by washing likely produces a more ideal balance between considerations like infection reduction, evolutionary pressure, and hypochondria/mysophobia inducement. the simple rule of thumb is to wash around waste, food prep/consumption, and illness. more than that, especially most sanitizer use because it's mostly outside of these situations, is likely a net-negative.

[lazide]

It is pretty unlikely microbes are going to be building up resistance to the microbial equivalent of getting doused in gasoline and set on fire.

It dissolves the lipid shell and denatures key proteins in the shell. This is not subtle.

In the evolutionary influence perspective for a microbe, it also still isn’t particularly common. Triclosan and the other problematic chemicals are much more targeted and more problematic from a resistance perspective because of it.