Do Books Save Lives?
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Imagine someone has written a report to tell you that carrying a book can save your life. Their research indicates that it’s necessary to carry a book to protect yourself, and in fact, the more books you carry the safer you will be. The first few paragraphs of the report will brag about the researcher’s organization, let’s call it O.R.G., and how the smart people at O.R.G. have encouraged people to carry more and more books and how many lives they have saved because of their efforts to get books into the hands of each and every person. O.R.G. has been doing this good work for such a long time, so they are the experts who know how to get as many books as possible into the hands of as many people as possible.
You may be surprised if you continue reading. When you get to the middle of the report, the tone changes. It feels more like a politician trying to drone on so you’ll tune out and miss the bombshell of the story. The report writer turned politician is probably hoping you will skim over this middle part with all the pesky details and facts that don’t support the claim that carrying books will protect you. In fact, if you look closely at the data that the writer has worked hard to obscure, the people who fared the worst are the people who carried the most books. The negative consequences were lowest for people who carried the fewest books. So the claim was completely wrong! The solution caused problems, it didn’t solve them!
The writer probably hoped you would skip over those unfortunate details, unfortunate for O.R.G. anyway, because for everyone else it is good news that you don’t need to carry around books in order to be safe. The writer and O.R.G. won’t earn any money if everyone knows that though, so the report ends with the shameless conclusion that O.R.G. is doing great work and will continue to get more books into more hands of more people.
Thank you for indulging me in that imaginary scenario. On a side note, here is a CDC report showing that when polio vaccination was interrupted in 2021 by the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, there were 93% fewer cases of polio compared to the same period in 2020. The CDC was unable to explain the decrease in polio despite lower vaccination rates.
Here’s another CDC report showing that children paralyzed by polio were carrying books on top of books of protection, if you read the middle part.