That was my thought as well. No way this is what he meant. He’s almost definitely just saying whatever seems like a confusingly almost correct enough thing to cover for the fact that he’s completely hamstringing the FDA and CDC so they stop looking too hard at the things big pharma and big agriculture are doing (and even worse, what they’re doing together) but it wouldn’t strike that vague “something is kinda right about this” vibe if there wasn’t some truth to the fact that yeah we are drowning ourselves in plastic and cheap dopamine fixes. On the subject of fuckery they’re up to together, I remember reading a CEU on antimicrobial stewardship that said agriculture is a major contributor to the development of antimicrobial resistant pathogens.

It made me remember back to watching (I think it was) Food inc in highschool: there was a guy who owned an actual real deal free range chicken farm. His butcher shop was actually open air, which the bigger factory farm tried to report as unsanitary. When actual swabs were taken, his setup was cleaner just because he was sanitizing all of his tools between each butchering. If there first chicken over the factory belt has e. coli, now they all do. So instead of slowing down and doing things in a way that doesn’t spread pathogens as easily to begin with, they just feed the chickens a shitton of antibiotics. And overusing antibiotics leads to antimicrobial resistance.

unpopular opinion: it should be a human right (once it’s determined you don’t have a mental illness severe enough to prevent you from seeing other obvious solutions to your suffering) and a society that keeps people alive by force is authoritarian in and of itself.

Eh. Single use plastics are REALLY useful in certain areas of healthcare where sterility is important. Especially for vascular access devices. Nothing is going to beat the ability of plastic to:

1. stay sterile on a shelf for months to years at a time, so that it can safely be used to bypass 90% of a person’s immune system to give lifesaving medication and reliably produce quality samples for testing

2. do it while being flexible enough to not damage the vasculature permanently or in a way that causes enough damage / inflammation to render the access point unusable

3. Yet be resistant enough to breakdown that it’s unlikely to break off in a large enough chunk that could migrate and damage the brain heart or lungs.

And I suspect someone who works OR has a way longer and more interesting list than I do.

Now there are other areas in healthcare that plastics could be significantly reduced. The big one that occurs to me is hygiene supplies. We use a lot of single use wet wipes and bed pads with plastic backings. If we were willing to give direct care workers more time to spend with each patient they could make better use of washcloths, washable bed pads, etc.

But there are a select few use cases where I expect plastic to outperform all alternatives for the foreseeable future.