The New GOP Badge of Courage – Blaming Inoculations for Disease

Portable morgues required during the COVOD pandemic

We live in a strange new world where the man who declared he’d be a dictator on day one of his tenure if reelected and promised to arrest his opponents, use the military to round up undocumented aliens was labeling Democrats as mirroring the Nazi secret police, the Gestapo. A man who tells the world he will bring down prices while promising highly inflationary increases in tariffs against one of major sources of cheap goods, China, and purging cheap labor from our shores. A politician who has never accepted responsibility for any of his acts, while taking credit for anything good no matter where that “good” came from. The master of massive policy shifts, re-explaining plain meanings and results, out-and-out lying that calms down into mere explosive exaggeration, mis- and dis-information on steroids, the leader of the double-down with unlimited blame for anyone but himself. With an unshakeable cult that believes his every word.

The highly indicted Donald John Trump is happy to take credit for the control of the COVID 19 pandemic – and yes, he actually did accelerate the mRNA vaccine research – although he failed to deploy that preventative inoculation, leaving it to states, wiped out from the pandemic’s economic impact who had no means to implement that directive. Biden did. In time, Trump embraced the growing GOP mantra that vaccination was an individual choice (but reproductive care wasn’t?) and that keeping everything open with no masks, no social distancing and no restrictions on any business or government body was the American way.

Meanwhile, as climate change reduces agricultural capacity, puts severe strains on major population centers around the world, incenting desperate migration of impoverished people whose once productive land lies arid and incapable of food production, nature seems to need to add increasing pandemics and resulting conflicts over resources to cull the human herd. We’re now watching avian flu infecting poultry here… and beef (??) as well. Under the leadership of Florida MAGA-man, Governor Ron DeSantis, vaccinations have become the enemy, imposing any restrictions on businesses the very definition of government excess, even as Florida had one of the highest COVID mortality rates in the nation. DeSantis’ policy is now red state doctrine.

The tradition of mandatory public-school inoculations was eviscerated by red state exceptions, sometimes by dropping the decades-old mandate entirely – a new MAGA plus Robert Kennedy, Jr value – forcing parents to send their children to mingle in unvaccinated classrooms. And yes, this antivaxx movement has exaggerated the number of those inoculated who have had severe aftereffects from the vaccine, beyond the initial days of discomfort. It is true that some suffered from cardiac issues, allergies, vaccine induced immune thrombocytopenia and thrombosis (severe or usual headaches, easy bruising or bleeding, shortness of breath, leg swelling or persistent abdominal pain), etc., literally numbering in the thousands as against the nearly 200 million individuals who were successfully inoculated with approved vaccines; millions of people were literally spared COVID-related death or material permanent disability, creating one of the most effective, low-risk vaccination programs in history.

No, autism is not caused by CDC approved vaccines. And no, you cannot get COVID from these new vaccines; they innocuously mimic the “shape” of the virus to trigger your own body’s immune response. Enter our conspiracy theory driven MAGA controlled House of Representatives, uninterested in facts, even interrupting their own expert witnesses from answering questions and instead inserting their own “answers” to the questions they asked as Michael Hiltzik tells on in his May 5th Los Angeles Times column:

“We’ve all come to recognize that committee hearings conducted by the Republican House majority are almost invariably clown shows featuring spittle-flecked posturing by members intent on displaying their ignorance to an appreciative crowd… [The May 1st] hearing by the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic was a crystalline example of the genre. It was designed around the grilling of Peter Daszak, the head of EcoHealth Alliance, which oversees international virus research funded by federal agencies.

“The members scraped along rock bottom, but the most telling moment may have been this exchange between Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.) and Daszak. Asked to explain an apparent (but not real) discrepancy in a progress report EcoHealth submitted to the government, Daszak started to answer, but a theatrically fulminating Griffith cut him off… ‘I can give you the answer to your question,’ Daszak said… ‘I’m going to answer it for you!’ Griffith shot back, then outrageously accused Daszak of lying. Daszak didn’t get a chance to reply.

“The whole session, more than three hours, went that way. The members kept peppering Daszak with questions about abstruse matters of science and the grant-making process, only to rudely cut him off when he tried to respond. They misquoted him to his face, misrepresented his work, and spouted cocksure inanities showing with every word that, scientifically speaking, they have no idea what they’re talking about.

“Ideally, congressional hearings should be fact-finding efforts. This was nothing of the kind. It was an opportunity for posturing by politicians intent only on smearing Daszak and EcoHealth on the pretext of getting to the bottom of the pandemic’s cause… How do we know this? From the fact that hours before the hearing even began, the subcommittee released a report calling on the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Health and Human Services to “immediately commence suspension and debarment proceedings against both EcoHealth and Dr. Daszak” — in other words, permanently cut them off from federal funding…

“The attacks on EcoHealth appall scientists and public health experts who know that the organization’s work in identifying potential pandemic sources and crafting responses has never been more important. Agricultural authorities are dealing with the spread of a bird flu virus into cattle herds, another case of species-to-species, or zoonotic, viral transmission.

“Given the bipartisan attacks against it, whether EcoHealth can avoid being cut off from all government funding is an open question. But that only underscores the supine irresponsibility with which Democrats have bought into the right wing’s attack on the organization and its crucial work… ‘We now have zoonotic threats emerging at an accelerating cadence,’ says Peter Hotez, a molecular virologist who is dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston… ‘This is a time when we need to be doubling down and expanding our global virus surveillance networks,’ Hotez told me. ‘By making up allegations, they’re undermining the work of EcoHealth and other organizations committed to understanding how viruses are jumping from animals to humans. We’re creating incredible vulnerability for ourselves. They’re damaging our national security. That to me is unforgivable — that they’re willing to jeopardize national security for political expedience.’”

If the January 6th attack on the US Capitol was a simple constitutionally protected political statement, then I suspect it is perfectly acceptable to claim that we would have been better off had there been no wide deployment of COVID vaccines. After all, we have too many people anyway… and we would have taken out a whole lot more citizens, particularly those living in crowded cities… who tend to vote blue anyway.

I’m Peter Dekom, and if ignorance and stupidity are the new American values for a huge segment of our population and the mantra of a major American party, then indeed we can “make America great again” in that vein.