- Which leads to a simple question: But for the Games, would anyone recommend sending an extra half a million visitors into Brazil right now? Of course not: mass migration into the heart of an outbreak is a public health no-brainer. And given the choice between accelerating a dangerous new disease or not—for it is impossible that Games will slow Zika down—the answer should be a no-brainer for the Olympic organizers too. Putting sentimentality aside, clearly the Rio 2016 Games must not proceed.
Not so. It's sexually transmitted. That means that the prostitution pipeline is potentially vulnerable, which means we can get the whole marvelous god-driven SinWagon rolling again.
Not at all. Zika is transmitted by mosquito, right? Rich people in areas where Zika is prevalent have anti-mosquito measures in place. Netting, zap lights, etc. Nobody influential gives a fuck if pregnant 15 year old slum girls give birth to micro-cephalic monsters.
Rich people get bit by mosquito's as well. Mosquito measures are effective like the pull out method is an effective form of birth control. West Nile was a poor people mosquito disease that's hit up anybody and everybody outside the third world. Zika can be sexually transmitted. Even if it is a poor persons disease pile a few thousand microcephaletic babies on the dole every year, make it endemic to your poor and dispossessed and see how well your local economy fairs. It could be Rio or it could Florida, doesn't matter, it's going to fuck shit up. Hopefully the influential will remember when Aids was a gay disease but now costs about 10 billion a year. The take away from every big disease outbreak is that the world didn't move fast enough. Hopefully the pictures of the messed up kids will push the world to act rapidly and responsibly. I don't expect that the Olympic committee will do the right thing but world leaders might.
Here's my non-shitty point. It must hurt them to not do something. They must suffer, and I choose that word specifically, consequences for NOT doing it. And not the moral consequence of causing harm to other people, but real, hard consequences. Like impeachment, or jail time, or a public flogging. I find that unlikely to happen because again, nobody making these decisions cares about poor people. As another example, the deaths of all of the workers constructing the Fifa stadiums in Qatar.but world leaders might.
I think there are two points here, both valid. 1) Rich people will be harmed in the long term as the Zika virus will end up hurting them by causing the society to overall be injured and less efficient in the long run, and while fewer rich people will be effected some will be. 2) Rich people are too shortsighted and self-absorbed to care, and won't care until the disease starts directly effecting them. By then it will be too late.