In the NYT, Mike Baker and Danielle Ivory offer an in-depth report on how the insane right-wing response to the Covid-19 pandemic has decimated the nation's public health infrastructure. You really need to use one of your free reads on this, it's too much to summarize. But the keystone is this:
When the pandemic first hit the northern edge of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, Dr. Berry was a popular family physician and local health officer, trained in biostatistics and epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University. She processed Covid-19 test kits in her garage and delivered supplies to people in quarantine, leading a mobilization that kept her counties with some of the fewest deaths in the nation.
But this summer, as a Delta variant wave pushed case numbers to alarming levels, Dr. Berry announced a mask mandate. In September, she ordered vaccination requirements for indoor dining.
By then, to many in the community, the enemy was not the virus. It was her.
Dr. Berry should be attacked “on sight,” one resident wrote online. Someone else suggested bringing back public hangings. “Dr. Berry, we are coming for you,” a man warned at a public meeting. An angry crowd swarmed into the courthouse during a briefing on the Covid-19 response one day, looking for her, and protesters also showed up at her house, until they learned that Dr. Berry was no longer living there.
This has been going on all over the country, and the result is that public health officials are quitting their jobs, and public health agencies are understaffed. Meanwhile politicians have passed more than 100 laws restricting the powers of public health agencies, and some have lost funding. This doesn't just affect efforts to combat the coronavirus. It means that other public health functions, resulting in increases in sexually transmitted disease, opioid overdoses, and lead poisoning. The campaign against vaccination is resulting in more and more parents refusing other childhood vaccines, and even legislative proposals to eliminate existing requirements for childhood vaccines.
Not mentioned in the Times piece, but noted here, a disturbing trend is for elected officials and activists to compare mask and vaccine mandates to the Nazi holocaust, and officials who impose them to Adolf Hitler. This is a combination of idiocy and depravity that boggles the mind. Governor Lamont is not rounding up people into concentration camps and murdering them. He is trying to save lives by applying common sense measures that barely inconvenience anyone, for which there is ample precedent throughout American history. These people are deeply sick.
3 comments:
crazy people gonna be the death of us. what kind of rational response has any effect on the crazy and creepy.
I guess the next logical question is: why are there so many fucking crazy people in the United States of America? There are crazy people everywhere, but we are off the charts here. I don’t know the answer, but I know it has something to do with the modern Republican Party … which in turn has to do with genocide of Native Americans and a history of denial around millions of people brought here from Africa to become slaves and build the country, while enduring rape, torture and murder at the hands of the descendants of today’s crazy people.
If reality isn’t dealt with rationally and responsibly, the only thing to do is to get more crazy. It’s like a man who weighs 1200 pounds and knows he needs to lose weight or die, but instead, he makes the choice to eat another bag of Oreos and drink a gallon of Coca-Cola. We can’t stand still in life; you either get busy living, or get busy dying. Today’s Republicans have gotten real busy dying, while at the same time irrationally and moronically championing the rights of unborn fetuses over those of actual, living people — including themselves.
When a man is losing on one front his response, more often than not, is to open a new front where he can win. Several hundred years of Liberalism has taught americans that their individual pleasure is paramount. Two generations of declining material conditions have given us a sub-population radically alienated from traditional social authority. Now those people, whose only sense of pleasure comes from consumption and only sense of control from inane conspiracy theories, are pushing back.
It's stupid and short-sighted, individually and collectively destructive, but it's literally all they have left. No one has any right to be surprised.
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