Governments and medicine tend to track deaths as the only bad outcome from events like 9/11 or Covid. But typically there are a lot more people injured who suffer for the rest of their lives with the consequences, damage and chronic conditions that these events have left them with. We do need to put a lot more research into understanding and improving the quality of life of those with chronic conditions, Historically they have been ignored and are currently highly stigmatised by governments, the press and the populace.
Diseases that lead to death have had substantially better funding over the past 100s of years and chronic conditions are often rarely diagnosed, properly recognised let alone treated. The disabled is a club almost everyone joins at some point in there life and everyone is one accident or infection away from joining it for the the rest of their life. At the moment societies recognition and treatment of those with these conditions is really bad. The 9/11 survivors will be suffering for the rest of their lives. Medicine is something we all want, but at the moment the amount invested by governments is quite low compared to the upside impact on humanity of finding real answers.
I totally agree with you, it is important for people to understand that a medical doctor does not really care if you can walk a mile without pain, but it is way too nuanced to track quality of life changes across a large population. We would need to change the insurance landscape and make it easier for other medical practitioners to get insurance money and let it naturally change.
If even a little bit of the insurance money could start funneling into things like physical therapy (actual physical therapy not the BS artists at big hospitals who print you out a sheet of generic exercises) people could see practitioners who actually care about you being functional.
I tore my achilles and saw a string of doctors, podiatrists, physical therapists, chiropractors, etc. before finally finding someone that doesn't take insurance but who had me running again within a few months. He was cheap compared to the amount my insurance was being billed for a chiropractor to try and sell me $500 custom insoles. The money is there it is just being funneled in all the wrong ways.
I'm sure the cost to give every ground zero worker clean-room level suits with a built in filter would have been 1/100000th the total cost compared to the medical expense of treating them over the next 25 years.
Clean room equipment is kind of the opposite of what was needed. Clean room equipment protects the room from the people.
What’s was needed was likely pretty basic PPE: P100 respirators along with outer clothing that would be kept out of people’s homes and showers when leaving the site. (PAPRs would have been even better, but they wouldn’t have been cheap or available in large numbers on short notice.) Unfortunately, if you watch modern construction workers, you’ll find that PPE is almost universally ignored when performing common but dangerous tasks like cutting concrete or lead-painted surfaces.
I've been well served by just using a P100 respirator when I'm doing anything dirty or dusty. There have been a few times that it's reduced exposure to something bad that I didn't know about, among them removing old shingles from my attic (asbestos composite material) or sanding paint that I had tested negative for lead (transparent varnish underneath had lead).
but importantly, the down-the-line costs can be obfuscated and spread across the private and public sectors just enough that the government can claim deniability and therefore is no longer on the hook for the costs.
The funny thing to me about this is how driven by (ignorant) public demand that led to premature re-openings. People have agency, and it’s always a little depressing to see people acting like they’re robots being led by a shadowy power.
People bitches about masks, about everything and politicians tend to give in to that.
The politicians (and more directly, their corporate sponsors) stoked that opinion. It didn't come from nowhere. From day 1 of the pandemic the reactionary media ecosystem would not shut the fuck up for even a MOMENT about the unnecessary "draconian" "authoritarian" lockdowns and how bad they were. Why? Because said corporate masters were losing shitloads of money because it was dangerous for customers to go shopping, and it was even more dangerous for people to go to work. But we can't possibly pump the brakes on the economy, even for a moment! Lines have to go up, no matter how many millions of lives it costed.
Yes, the people demanded it, but that demand itself was a created thing. Sure we would've had our vaccine deniers and other assorted cranks, we always have and will, but we had an entire sector of the mass media pouring gasoline on that fire as fast as they fucking could to manage exactly what fucking happened.
And like, even if you want to say the above is tinfoil hat shit: Okay, then the Governments job in this situation would be to defer to experts and figure out public policies that would keep people safe. Which we did, kind of, for awhile. But like if public opinion is screeching so loud for lockdowns to end, the government should fucking say NO. That's their JOB.
Agency occurs in individuals who operate within systems and Americans are some of the most propagandized people on the face of the Earth, and some of the worst educated in the global north. Average reading level is 6th grade. Critical thinking is in the shitter. "I did my own research" is specifically a cultural meme describing how piss poor Americans and many other overseas in the same global north are at both obtaining rigorous sourced information and using it to make decisions. COVID was a demonstration of all of these issues brought to a scale where it became impossible to ignore.
I blame systems more than people because systems should know better, and they largely did, but their ability to act has been hamstrung by one of our political parties holding the line on the notion that "Freedom" means ignorant dipshits with ignorant dipshit opinions should get to weigh in with equal credibility to people who actually understand things, which is a large part of why our government can no longer function apart from passing more fucking tax breaks for people who don't need them while our infrastructure rots and the wife of the owner of WWE dismantles the department of education.
And the fear was visible and public. We watched planes hit our tallest buildings live on TV and the horrors that ensued. It was publicly visceral in a way that an invisible virus, which has had people struggling in relative privacy and obscurity, hasn't been.
Now try to imagine the health impacts for the millions that were subjected for three years to the wholesale destruction of Gaza- at least twenty times the victims of 9/11 and hundreds of thousands of destroyed buildings- as well as to all the bombings that came before, all financed with US money and protected by US power.
I bet that happened for no reason at all, just like how the US went into Afghanistan for no reason in 2001.
(Sarcasm aside, there obviously are big problems for how these 2 nations responded to the massive terrorist attacks. But I kind of think it’s questionable to pretend there was no big terrorist attack that triggered the response...)
Yeah, and 9/11 happened for no reason either. Same with October 7th.
We are always downstream of a past violence. Let's stop with the simplistic "they started it, so we are allowed to kill thousands of them", and maybe then we can start building a better world.
Paywalled, and I'm not creating a 'free account'. But instead of it being related to 9/11, couldn't it just be related to other factors, e.g air pollution generally in NYC around turn of the millennium?
If that were the case, then everyone who lived/worked near Ground Zero in the months before 9/11 would have had these same health consequences.
Instead, it's clear that that isn't the case. Plenty of research, including studies on firefighters and other first responders on 9/11 and the days after (and plenty of anecdata from doctors around here) have borne out that the health effects from being around Ground Zero for the first couple of weeks after 9/11 was much deadlier than simply breathing in mild air pollution.
(In addition, while I didn't live here at the turn of the century... what air pollution? Manhattan doesn't have a collection of coal power plants near Wall Street. It doesn't have more ICE cars than most other cities; it probably had fewer ICE cars per square mile than an ordinary Wal-mart parking lot in the suburbs.)
When I lived there 15 years ago, many of the apartment buildings used heating oil furnaces for winter heat. These definitely contributed to lower air quality in the winter.
9/11 resulted in building collapse throwing something like 1-2 million tons of debris into the air, which then fell and was on fire in a huge pile for 100 days.
Concrete, drywall, glass, asbestos, you name it.
This is nothing like regular car/heating/power combustion exhaust which is well understood, regulated, and result of reasonably efficient conversion of mass to energy.. at least by comparison.
The first 40 floors of the WTC towers had steel beams coated in an asbestos insulating material. The regulations changed mid-construction but the lower floors remained.
About 400 tons of asbestos was thrown into the atmosphere around Manhattan when the towers fell.
It was not paywalled for me. To your other point, sure, but you can see the normal rate of cancer in a population over time and then see the spikes in the years directly after 2001.
The distinction is that the strongest evidence is among responders, workers, residents, and others who were directly exposed, rather than showing that cancer suddenly increased across all of NYC.
Gotcha, I guess that does point at more impact from the event itself. There is a login-wall for me (not technically paywall), asking me to create an account.
With an x at the top right… if you click it then it goes away and doesn’t bother you again.
Realistically if you want the level of professionalism and coverage a site like Stat produces you are going to have to pay for some of it. The alternative is the “free” internet which is increasingly worthless slop.
In NYC I used to live next door to a first responder who suffered from throat cancer. He was undoubtedly inhaling a ton of asbestos while he was there.
Of all the conspiracy theories around 9/11, “it didn’t really make anyone sick” is one of the weirder ones to me. The cause/effect is pretty well documented.
« first responder who suffered from throat cancer » – Did he receive money from the VCF?
Note that I didn't claim “it didn't make anyone sick.” It may well have done so. It may even have killed people, accidentally – not the alleged ~3000 victims of this travesty, but accidents do happen, as with any movie production involving stunts.
Was it worth it? I bet there are no hesitations whatsoever from the likes of Madeleine Albright (500,000 Iraqi kids “worth it”).
Diseases that lead to death have had substantially better funding over the past 100s of years and chronic conditions are often rarely diagnosed, properly recognised let alone treated. The disabled is a club almost everyone joins at some point in there life and everyone is one accident or infection away from joining it for the the rest of their life. At the moment societies recognition and treatment of those with these conditions is really bad. The 9/11 survivors will be suffering for the rest of their lives. Medicine is something we all want, but at the moment the amount invested by governments is quite low compared to the upside impact on humanity of finding real answers.
If even a little bit of the insurance money could start funneling into things like physical therapy (actual physical therapy not the BS artists at big hospitals who print you out a sheet of generic exercises) people could see practitioners who actually care about you being functional.
I tore my achilles and saw a string of doctors, podiatrists, physical therapists, chiropractors, etc. before finally finding someone that doesn't take insurance but who had me running again within a few months. He was cheap compared to the amount my insurance was being billed for a chiropractor to try and sell me $500 custom insoles. The money is there it is just being funneled in all the wrong ways.
What’s was needed was likely pretty basic PPE: P100 respirators along with outer clothing that would be kept out of people’s homes and showers when leaving the site. (PAPRs would have been even better, but they wouldn’t have been cheap or available in large numbers on short notice.) Unfortunately, if you watch modern construction workers, you’ll find that PPE is almost universally ignored when performing common but dangerous tasks like cutting concrete or lead-painted surfaces.
The people running this show don't give a flying fuck about the working class. They'll march us into the meat grinder no matter what.
People bitches about masks, about everything and politicians tend to give in to that.
Yes, the people demanded it, but that demand itself was a created thing. Sure we would've had our vaccine deniers and other assorted cranks, we always have and will, but we had an entire sector of the mass media pouring gasoline on that fire as fast as they fucking could to manage exactly what fucking happened.
And like, even if you want to say the above is tinfoil hat shit: Okay, then the Governments job in this situation would be to defer to experts and figure out public policies that would keep people safe. Which we did, kind of, for awhile. But like if public opinion is screeching so loud for lockdowns to end, the government should fucking say NO. That's their JOB.
I blame systems more than people because systems should know better, and they largely did, but their ability to act has been hamstrung by one of our political parties holding the line on the notion that "Freedom" means ignorant dipshits with ignorant dipshit opinions should get to weigh in with equal credibility to people who actually understand things, which is a large part of why our government can no longer function apart from passing more fucking tax breaks for people who don't need them while our infrastructure rots and the wife of the owner of WWE dismantles the department of education.
1.5 Million people died from Covid, not just died but SUFFERED and died from 2020-2024
there was a 9/11 every other day for years, sometimes every day
there are STILL in 2026 several hundred per month dying from Covid
there are still ten million people or more living the hell of long-covid and will never recover
but because Covid was spread out over years, not a single memorial, it will never be over
(Sarcasm aside, there obviously are big problems for how these 2 nations responded to the massive terrorist attacks. But I kind of think it’s questionable to pretend there was no big terrorist attack that triggered the response...)
We did go there for no reason since they weren't involved in 9/11.
We are always downstream of a past violence. Let's stop with the simplistic "they started it, so we are allowed to kill thousands of them", and maybe then we can start building a better world.
Instead, it's clear that that isn't the case. Plenty of research, including studies on firefighters and other first responders on 9/11 and the days after (and plenty of anecdata from doctors around here) have borne out that the health effects from being around Ground Zero for the first couple of weeks after 9/11 was much deadlier than simply breathing in mild air pollution.
(In addition, while I didn't live here at the turn of the century... what air pollution? Manhattan doesn't have a collection of coal power plants near Wall Street. It doesn't have more ICE cars than most other cities; it probably had fewer ICE cars per square mile than an ordinary Wal-mart parking lot in the suburbs.)
9/11 resulted in building collapse throwing something like 1-2 million tons of debris into the air, which then fell and was on fire in a huge pile for 100 days.
Concrete, drywall, glass, asbestos, you name it.
This is nothing like regular car/heating/power combustion exhaust which is well understood, regulated, and result of reasonably efficient conversion of mass to energy.. at least by comparison.
About 400 tons of asbestos was thrown into the atmosphere around Manhattan when the towers fell.
https://archive.ph/I6vOQ
The distinction is that the strongest evidence is among responders, workers, residents, and others who were directly exposed, rather than showing that cancer suddenly increased across all of NYC.
Realistically if you want the level of professionalism and coverage a site like Stat produces you are going to have to pay for some of it. The alternative is the “free” internet which is increasingly worthless slop.
Of all the conspiracy theories around 9/11, “it didn’t really make anyone sick” is one of the weirder ones to me. The cause/effect is pretty well documented.
Note that I didn't claim “it didn't make anyone sick.” It may well have done so. It may even have killed people, accidentally – not the alleged ~3000 victims of this travesty, but accidents do happen, as with any movie production involving stunts.
Was it worth it? I bet there are no hesitations whatsoever from the likes of Madeleine Albright (500,000 Iraqi kids “worth it”).