"If progressives truly want to bring the surge of polio deaths in the United States to an end they will have to learn to be nicer to our wealthy friends."
Seriously. I've said this before here, but travel somewhere the polio vaccine wasn't widely available. The amount of suffering via deformity and impacted development it causes is frightening.
Highly recommend watching the documentary "Benda Bilili!" about a group of street musicians in Kinshasa, DRC. They're mostly paralyzed due to childhood polio, but it's a very uplifting doc. They even sang a lovely song on their debut album about it called Polio.
My dads best friend had polio as a child. He still found a wife and had two wonderful children and a fulfilled life. Just because your legs are crippled, you need leg braces, special shoes and a wheelchair doesn't mean you can't have a great life!
You'd think they're already murdering enough of us with the expensive/delayed/denied healthcare, the starvation wages, the cruel for-profit prisons, the cops, and the refusal to give even emergency abortions...but nope...they want to murder more of us.
That industry will just buy out every room in every Trump hotel for a week and Trump will tell him to shut the fuck up or fire him and hire Joe Exotic.
He's already got dr Oz lined up in the same position for when he fires Kennedy. I'd bet real money it'll be on the order of 2 months, so mar 1 or so. He loves telling people they are fired, and he think episodically from 15 seasons of the Apprentice show.
Right. In that episode, Pakleds were snaring the Samaritans. Basically grifting their way through the universe by taking advantage of good Samaritans. OP is still not quite nailing it.
This is the kind of argument you see from the dipshit vaccine denialists, though. But typically, they like to credit modern septic systems/clean water for a lot of things.
I think it's really only maybe (younger) boomers and on down that could make the absolutely ridiculous arguments the vaccine denialists make, though. Most of the older people - esp Greatest Generation, but also older boomers, most likely - knew better from having seen children die/suffer from awful diseases.
But yeah, starting with Gen X and on down - the dumbassery around vaccines has slowly started taking off and seems to be getting worse as it goes...
Seriously. I'm going to be the most bitter and continuously angry person you've ever met by the end of this four years, and I'm not looking forward to it one bit.
Make no mistake though, I'm going to be so free with "aren't you glad this is what you voted for" to magas in my family and at work that the schadenfreude alone will be enough to power a small city.
Don't worry, they may only get two years, but the damage they can deal will probably last the rest of your life. And if you're transgender, the rest of your life might even be done before the two years are up.
I feel like my "being able to tolerate living in a nation led by imbeciles" meter had barely started refilling this past four years. I think I needed 16 or so for something close to a full recharge. I'm prepared to reach new lows.
Should we be making efforts to preserve guidance pages from cdc.gov, or do we trust that Internet Archive will survive through this administration to provide archived copies via wayback machine?
If there's a file of this somewhere for me to archive, I've likely got space.
I've already got Wikipedia, medwiki and a few others in local files as I expect any fascist to destroy information and replace it with whatever suits their narrative
Not sure / not that I'm aware of. I was going to see if anyone was working on crowdsourcing an archive via scraping or some similar method. Does Wayback Machine let you download archives, maybe?
This administration is going to ruin the lives of/kill so many people.
The upside of Covid is that we jump-started vaccine research and have seen so much stuff at scale, and quickly. It might hold huge promise for things like cancer treatment.
And these absolute fucking clowns are going to probably stall all that out. I sure hope other countries are not impacted in any way by this complete idiocy. The idea that complete morons would kill scientific progress like this is infuriating.
Bitch of it is that we almost drove that virus into irrelevant cycles. I think I read a couple of years ago that the UN believed we could declare victory on the disease by focusing on some suffering African areas. Who knew th at a western country of 300+ million would want to make iron lungs fashionable again? Sorry, Dr. Salk.
I once held a long-standing conviction to wish no harm on anyone, even on people doing harm to others. The reasoning was that it would be better if they were to start doing good instead, so that is what I should wish for them: That they fell compelled to undo their mistake. Their pain doesn't help anyone, so there's no reason to wish pain on them.
But more and more often, I find myself in your shoes.
My spanish teacher in middle school had a limp from polio in her childhood and kids would snicker about it behind her back. We have no concept of what polio is anymore
Kind of. Basically nobody remembers how bad it was when polio and smallpox and whatnot were killing people so they think getting a shot is worse than the alternative.
That's one of the big issues I'm having with this, people do remember. Both Mitch McConnell and Neil Young have experiences directly related to polio, and that's just off the top of my head.
That being said the last iron lung polio survivor passed away this year. (Last one so far.)
They know that when it comes down to it you won’t. They know that the older generations are too set in their ways and the younger generation is more concerned about Naughty Dog’s new game. It’s takes very little for Americans to piss and moan on social media but much much mote before mass uprising. There are trillions of dollars to be fleeced from the middle class before any significant resistance arises.
According to Wikipedia, wild and fully potent polio is still circulating in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In addition, many developing countries are using live vaccines (weakened strains of polio) which can sometimes regain their ability to spread, even if they don't do much damage.
Polio not gone, it's just waiting for fools to think so - and to prematurely drop their defenses.