Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jakelazaroff 2 hours ago
You're putting words in my mouth. "Public health" deals with social problems regarding health, but it's a subset of "health" which also includes problems that are not social in nature.

There are absolutely social issues around vaccines — how do we fund their development? how do we distribute them? how do we convince people to use them? — but as a technology I would say they solve a problem that is mostly independent of human relationships.*

* Obviously, you could say that vaccines actually do solve a social problem because pathogens are often passed between humans, but I think then the definition of "social problems" becomes so broad as to be meaningless.

1 comments

>You're putting words in my mouth.

"how do we stop dying from pathogens" is like, the textbook public health problem. it's pretty much the question which the entire concept of public health spawned from.

so, if you specifically wanted to talk about the technology of vaccines or whatever instead of general pathogen prevention, you should just say that instead. i cant read your mind.

Maybe read a couple ancestor comments to figure out the context of what I'm responding to?