|
Top-level
 But just as health-and-safety panic served a useful purpose, so does risk compensation fraud: it serves as an unassailable justification for both big-business-freindly deregulation and authoritarian sex-negativity. Risk compensation helps corporations that want to avoid retooling to comply with safety measures, such as fight child safety caps on medicine: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.7556/jaoa.2006.106.7.405/html 11/ 4 comments
Risk compensation is also the excuse of choice to fight drug-related harm reduction, especially needle exchanges ("if we give addicts clean needles, they'll shoot up more"): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3936850/ Risk compensation and health-and-safety panic are both part of a safety nihilism campaign that serves big business's deregulatory agenda, and the cruel moralizing of right wing religious maniacs, the traditional turkeys-voting-for-Christmas coalition. 13/ But risk compensation is especially salient in these covid days, where it's being used to fight rapid testing ("encourages risky behavior"). The problem isn't the difficulty of formulating good health and safety policy, though that difficulty is real. The problem is that, having ruled health policy to be above question or scrutiny, we invite paternalism and authoritarianism. 14/ Whether it's a noble lie, a grift, a moral panic, or a deregulatory fraud, abuse of safety rhetoric always comes to light. When it does, it discredits the whole project of evidence-based safety. And *that* is truly an unsafe situation. eof/ |
Gregory's Server
More prominently, it's empirical facewash for blue-nose moralizing. Risk compensation was used to fight the Pill ("it'll make women promiscuous"):
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/wellness/1995/05/16/what-the-pill-did/65d876af-0274-4200-b60b-96d04828b33a/
HPV vaccines ("they'll make kids promiscuous"):
https://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1206813,00.html
Syphilis treatment ("they'll make everyone promiscuous"):
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/4626515/
PrEP ("it'll make gay/bisexual men promiscuous"):
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jia2.25351
The morning-after pill ("it will encourage unprotected sex"):
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/nov/24/gender.lifeandhealth
12/
More prominently, it's empirical facewash for blue-nose moralizing. Risk compensation was used to fight the Pill ("it'll make women promiscuous"):
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/wellness/1995/05/16/what-the-pill-did/65d876af-0274-4200-b60b-96d04828b33a/
HPV vaccines ("they'll make kids promiscuous"):