The GOP's Race to the Crazy, Contagious Bottom
Everything might have changed when the FDA finally granted full approval to the Pfizer vaccine. Our disappointing rate of vaccination could have surged sharply upwards and new cases would recede. We would approach the numbers of other countries where ordinary life has resumed. Peace between the vaxxed and unvaxxed would be at hand.
Or would it? At the same time the FDA was moving from emergency use authorization to the full Monty, it also tweeted out a statement reminding the public, “You are not a horse,” an alert that shouldn’t be needed by anyone not gobbling oats from a feed bag. But it’s clearly needed. An Ohio judge ordered a hospital to overrule a physician and treat an unvaccinated COVID patient in the ICU with a dewormer, even as the Department of Health in hard-hit Mississippi warned that 70 percent of the calls to its poison center were about the same livestock med.
Thanks to a Republican ruling class that’s concluded rising death tolls are preferable to the political risk of supporting coronavirus mandates, we are no longer the country that stood in line for Jonas Salk’s vaccine, even though, in its early days, it caused death and paralysis. Although Republicans cling to the 1950s on certain matters, like voting and Black people knowing their place, they’ve let doing what’s best for kids, and the neighbors’ kids, go the way of poodle skirts and Howdy Doody. The GOP elite has fallen in with the resisters.
Kristi Noem, South Dakota governor and rising GOP star, thought it would help her presidential prospects to wave an American flat atop a horse to promote a half-million bikers coming to this summer’s Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, as if that were a beacon of liberty rather than a potential superspreader. She’s not alone in believing that’s the way to the Oval Office. On Tuesday, Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis made good on his threat to withhold money from school districts who ignored his anti-school mask mandate without any data to support his edict. He asserts that the level of COVID exposure of unvaccinated children returning to school is no more than that of someone going to Home Depot to pick up a gallon of paint on Aisle Three, ignoring that—in his analogy—a child, whose natural state is to be socially un-distanced, is shopping for six straight hours.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/stop-gop-race-crazy-contagious-083150104.html