anti-vaxxers

RRNews 343: 2023 in Review | Happy New Year!

alayham — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 05:05:10 +0000

RRNews 343: 2023 in Review | Happy New Year! alayham Sat, 12/30/2023 - 06:05

Producers of RRNews 343: Intro Song courtesy of Witness the Light Music Danny – Medford, ORJeremy – Minneapolis, MNDorothy – Parts UnknownRisky Roberts – Kansas City, MORobin – Parts UnknownThe Garden City Ranchers – Garden City, …

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What We Are Not Allowed to Say

alayham — Sun, 03 Dec 2023 08:00:32 +0000

What We Are Not Allowed to Say alayham Sun, 12/03/2023 - 09:00

Christine E. Black Censorship imperils cultures and civilization. When governments and elites prohibit speaking or writing without threats, shaming, or epithets meant to shut down discussion, free thinking dies. People also die. A censorship industrial complex grew around Covid hysteria, which began as a war on a virus. New full-blown wars, with guns, bombs, tanks, …

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Spiked vs Bridgen: The Anti-Woke Civil War

alayham — Thu, 11 May 2023 16:11:29 +0000

Spiked vs Bridgen: The Anti-Woke Civil War alayham Thu, 05/11/2023 - 18:11

The Spiked vs Andrew Bridgen debate continues to rage, with labels and smears flying around every which way. Nick Dixon gives his take as someone with multiple dogs in the fight.
The post Spiked vs Bridgen: The Anti-Woke Civil War appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

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Lockdown Skeptics

Just As Trump's Great Corona Cover-Up Kicks Into High Gear, It Appears To Be Backfiring On Him

alayham — Fri, 08 May 2020 16:00:00 +0000

Just As Trump's Great Corona Cover-Up Kicks Into High Gear, It Appears To Be Backfiring On Him alayham Fri, 05/08/2020 - 18:00

On Thursday, Politico interviewed Melinda Gates, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and she set the Trump Regime on fire for their incompetent, dysfunctional and bungled response to the pandemic. Their over-all grade wasn't an "F"-- presumably because Trump hasn't fired Fauci yet-- but a D minus. One thing she cited was "a lack of a coordinated, national response," noting that governors were stepping up with '50 different homegrown state solutions,' instead of a national response coming from the top... You know, if we were doing the things that the exemplar countries are doing, like Germany, we would be testing. We would be testing, first, health care workers and then the most vulnerable, and you’d be doing contact tracing. And we would be able to start thinking about slowly, slowly reopening places in society in safe and healthy ways, but we have a lack of a coordinated effort. That’s just the truth, across the United States.'" That means things are going to get considerably worse.One of the states-- where the governor is an empty-headed and completely worthless Trumpist hack who has done everything to kill as many Iowans as she could, Kim Reynolds-- is experiencing a major pandemic surge. On Thursday, Iowa experienced 655 new cases and shot up to a horrifying 3,631 cases per million in its population, second only to Nebraska of any of the other states headed for the leadership roles in the state II summer catastrophe of those that have refused to take social distancing seriously. These were the newest numbers per million for the states begging coronavirus to come stay:

• Nebraska- 3,717• Iowa- 3,631• Indiana- 3,438• South Dakota- 3,361• Colorado- 3,190• Georgia- 3,020• Mississippi- 3,054• Virginia- 2,618• Tennessee- 2,064• Nevada- 1,973• Ohio- 1,894• Florida- 1,825• Utah- 1,880• Alabama- 1,874• North Dakota- 1,870• Missouri- 1,558• South Carolina- 1,441• Arizona- 1,446• Texas- 1,274

We had some insight into Iowa this morning from a Des Moines Register report by Donnelle Eller on a doubling of cases when a Tyson plant in Waterloo was prematurely forced to open. "More than 1,000 workers," wrote Eller, "at the Tyson Foods plant in Waterloo have tested positive for the coronavirus, a county public health leader said Thursday-- more than double the number Gov. Kim Reynolds had said were infected the day before." Reynolds reported 444 workers with COVID-19 on Wednesday and Black Hawk County officials reported 1,031 at the pg slaughtering facility with the disease on Thursday. Chris Schwartz, a Black Hawk County supervisor, said he was disappointed that Tyson officials, who were part of the briefing Thursday, didn't take responsibility for failing to act sooner to add more protections for employees. "It was incredibly shameful," he said. Black Hawk County Sheriff Tony Thompson expressed concern that some businesses and parks were reopening. "Malls are supposed to operate at 50%. How on Earth do you monitor that?... our numbers are not decreasing yet, have not yet hit a plateau," and that the number of deaths is increasing.On a national level, you've no doubt read by now that the U.S. jobless rate hit 14.7%, the worst since the Great Depression. Heather Long earlier today: "Over 20 million people lost their jobs in April, the Labor Department said Friday, wiping out a decade of job gains in a single month. The staggering losses are roughly double what the nation experienced during the 2007-09 crisis, which used to be described as the harshest economic situation most people ever confronted. Now that has been quickly dwarfed by the fallout from the global pandemic." The stock markets-- which reflexively hate workers, or at least hate the whole idea of companies paying workers-- moved higher on the news. Analysts are warning "it could take many years to return to the 3.5 percent unemployment rate the nation experienced in February. The sudden economic contraction has forced millions of Americans to turn to food banks and seek government aid for the first time or stop paying rent and other bills. As they go without paychecks for weeks, some have also lost health insurance and even put their homes up for sale. 'This is pretty scary,' said Lindsey Piegza, chief economist at Stifel. 'I’m fearful many of these jobs are not going to come back and we are going to have an unemployment rate well into 2021 of near 10 percent.'... As horrific as the April unemployment figure, economists say the official government rate almost certainly underestimates the extent of the job losses. The Labor Department said the unemployment rate would have been about 20 percent if workers who said they were absent from work for 'other reasons' had been classified as unemployed or furloughed."Worst hit are African-Americans, Latinos and low-wage workers in restaurants and retail. "Many of these workers," noted Long, "were already living paycheck-to-paycheck and had the least cushion before the pandemic hit... Women had a higher unemployment rate than men."Trump regime dysfunction and gross incompetence have resulted on millions of workers "still battling outdated websites and jammed phone lines to try to get unemployment aid and a relief check. Economists are urging Congress to act now to ensure aid does not end this summer when the unemployment rate is still likely to be at historic levels."

There’s a growing consensus that the economy is not going to bounce back quickly like Trump wants, even as more businesses re-open this month. Many restaurants, gyms, and other firms are only able to operate at limited capacities, and customers are proving to be slow to return as they are fearful of venturing out. Many businesses also won’t survive. All of this means the economy is going to need far fewer workers for months-- or possibly years-- to come.“We’re not going to go sharply down and sharply up. We went sharply down and we’ll go gradually up,” Thomas Barkin, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, said Thursday.

A new Ipsos poll for ABC News found that the vast majority of Americans think-- regardless of what politicians say-- it's too soon to reopen. Imagine that: ordinary citizens are smarter than the leaders who have wormed their way into top positions!64% of Americans say it's too soon to reopen. They includes 92% of Democrats. Only 35% of Republicans agree but what it says is that most of us believe the risk to human life of opening the country outweighs the economic toll of remaining under restrictive lockdowns. 65% of self-identified Republicans say that salvaging the economy is more important than the lives of the people who will die from a premature reopening.

Sill, when asked about the likelihood of agreeing to get a safe and effective vaccine, the new survey shows some skepticism about being inoculated. One-quarter of Americans said they were not likely to get vaccinated, even if a safe and effective vaccine was developed. About three-quarters said they would likely get the immunization.Those Americans who are opposed to getting a vaccine, experts say, often fall into one of two categories. But, unlike most things in American politics and concerning the coronavirus outbreak, those groups are not partisan in nature, with about equal proportions of Democrats and Republicans saying they were likely to get the vaccine."There's always been an anti-vaccine group of individuals that are going to refuse vaccines no matter what," said Dr. Carlos del Rio, an infectious disease expert, and a professor of medicine, epidemiology and global health at Emory University. "The question is, how do they impact other people."...More states, too, began easing restrictions this week, despite the number of confirmed cases continuing to climb. As more governors began lifting orders this week that were put in place to slow the spread of the coronavirus, Trump acknowledged in an exclusive interview with ABC News World News Tonight anchor David Muir that there might be more deaths from COVID-19 during the reopening process. "It's possible there will be some because you won't be locked into an apartment or a house or whatever it is," Trump said. "But at the same time, we're going to practice social distancing, we're going to be washing hands, we're going to be doing a lot of the things that we've learned to do over the last period of time."Trump's approval for the handling of the coronavirus pandemic continues to be underwater among Americans and sharply polarizing among political tribes.

Too long for so early on a Friday morning? Tell me about it! But this post wouldn't be complete without a quick look at how Trump is trying to tightens grip on pandemic information. The Washington Post's Tolouse Olorunnipa reported Señor Trumpanzee "has sought to block or downplay information about the severity of the coronavirus pandemic as he urges a return to normalcy and the rekindling of an economy that has been devastated by public health restrictions aimed at mitigating the outbreak." The criminal regime "has sidelined or replaced officials not seen as loyal, rebuffed congressional requests for testimony, dismissed jarring statistics and models, praised states for reopening without meeting White House guidelines and, briefly, pushed to disband a task force created to combat the virus and communicate about the public health crisis. Several Republican governors are following Trump’s lead as an effort takes shape to control the narrative about a pandemic that has continued to rage throughout a quickly reopening country. With polls showing most consumers still afraid to venture out of their homes, the Trump administration has intensified its efforts to soothe some of those fears through a messaging campaign that relies on tightly controlling information about a virus that has proven stubbornly difficult to contain."So far, the Trumpist attempts to rewrite reality are failing. "If the message were to go out with complete objectivity, it would be disastrous for Trump," said Max Skidmore, a political science professor at the University of Missouri at Kansas City and the author of a book on presidential responses to pandemics. 'So he is doing his best to prevent experts from speaking out or using their expertise, and he’s simply trying to divert attention."

Trump’s information-control tactics are being replicated in states across the country, where governors are lifting stay-at-home orders against the advice of public health officials.In Arizona, where Gov. Doug Ducey (R) is pushing businesses to reopen, the state health department abruptly halted the work of a team of experts who predicted the outbreak’s peak was still about two weeks away. The department reversed the decision amid an outcry after it became public.Governors in Georgia, Texas, Iowa and elsewhere have been praised by Trump as they ignored recommendations from doctors and health officials in their states to begin phased reopenings. States such as Florida have limited or redacted public information about their coronavirus deaths.Administration officials say the moves reflect a shift, driven by Trump, away from focusing on the health challenges caused by the pandemic and toward restarting economic activity and pulling the country out of recession. The evolution is being driven in part by the political calendar, with just six months before voters decide the president’s fate....One senior administration official said the public-health experts are scaring people, and their dire warnings have often been at odds with the president’s call to “open up our country.”...The administration also has not released guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that have been in the works for weeks and offered advice on how to reopen certain businesses and facilities.In a sharply worded statement Thursday, the White House blasted the guidelines.“Issuing overly specific instructions-- that CDC leadership never cleared-- for how various types of businesses open up would be overly prescriptive and broad for the various circumstances States are experiencing throughout the country,” the unnamed task force official said in a statement released by the White House press office following an Associated Press report that the guidelines had been shelved. “Guidance in rural Tennessee shouldn’t be the same guidance for urban New York City.”The CDC, which has seen its public role significantly downsized since the early days of the crisis, continues to play a more limited part in the coronavirus response than it has in previous viral outbreaks, according to experts and administration officials. That has unnerved some lawmakers and public health experts.“Irony around CDC not issuing it’s reopen guidance, whatever the reason, is a lot of business literally can’t reopen without it because CDC is a de facto regulator in a public health crisis,” Scott Gottlieb, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, wrote Thursday on Twitter. “CDC must publish its umbrella document to publish more detailed industry specific guidance.”The limits of Trump’s ability to shape the public’s understanding of his coronavirus response could be tested next week, as major congressional hearings featuring career government health officials are set to take place. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-disease expert and a member of Trump’s task force, is one of several officials scheduled to testify before a Senate committee on May 12.Fauci has regularly contradicted Trump’s sunny descriptions of the crisis and described the administration’s early testing efforts as “a failing.”While the White House blocked Fauci from testifying before the Democratic-controlled House, its blanket policy of limiting congressional testimony has not stopped the oversight process. A senior government scientist who filed a whistleblower complaint alleging that the Department of Health and Human Services made critical mistakes in the weeks before the outbreaks ramped up into a pandemic is expected to testify before a House committee next week.Rick Bright, former director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, said in his complaint that his early efforts to take proactive measures against the virus “encountered resistance from HHS leadership, including Secretary [Alex] Azar, who appeared intent on downplaying this catastrophic event.”Trump has tried to dismiss Bright-- who was demoted from his position after his warnings-- as a “disgruntled” employee.White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany attacked House Democrats for trying to stage a “publicity stunt” with their requests for hearings, including with Fauci. Trump called the House “a bunch of Trump haters” as he defended his decision to block testimony before the congressional body.But the White House’s effort to tightly control which officials are allowed to testify before Congress has been criticized by Democrats and some Republicans.Rep. Tom Cole (OK), the top Republican on a House panel that requested Fauci’s appearance, said Wednesday that it would have been “useful to this country” to hear from the high-profile member of the president’s coronavirus task force.Democrats have been more forceful in their criticism.“President Trump should learn that by muzzling science and the truth, it will only prolong this health and economic crisis,” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-NY) said in a statement Monday. “The president’s failure to accept the truth, and then his desire to hide it, is one of the chief reasons we are lagging behind so many other countries in beating this scourge.”Trump’s shift toward message-control comes as he has been frustrated with scientific experts, data and models that have failed to support his desire for a quick solution to the crisis.“These models have been so wrong from day one, both on the low side and the upside,” Trump said Tuesday in an interview with ABC News. “They’ve been so wrong, they’ve been so out of whack. And they keep making new models, new models and they’re wrong.”The administration released multiple statements this week disavowing a draft report that projected as many as 3,000 daily coronavirus deaths beginning on June 1. The report, which carried a CDC logo and was featured in a Federal Emergency Management Agency briefing, had not been vetted by the White House, McEnany said.On Tuesday, a day after the White House attacked the report, the United States recorded more than 2,400 coronavirus deaths....The steadily high number of coronavirus cases and the growing death count have stood in sharp contrast to Trump’s cheerful language about reopening the economy. The president has encouraged several states to begin relaxing stay-at-home orders even though they have failed to meet benchmarks from the White House’s own guidelines. Those guidelines encourage states to wait to see a decline in cases over a two-week period before relaxing social distancing measures.Skidmore, whose 2016 book Presidents, Pandemics and Politics describes presidential leadership during health crises as critical, said Trump’s push to turn the battle against the coronavirus into a form of information warfare will ultimately fail.“It will work for some people, but he can’t get over the fact that many, many people are dying-- and they’re dying on his watch,” Skidmore said. “Too many people are dying, and that’s the fact that he can’t cover up however much he tries.”

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Trump Is Responsible For Death Threats To Women Members Of Congress Who Oppose His Fascism

alayham — Fri, 19 Jul 2019 12:00:00 +0000

Trump Is Responsible For Death Threats To Women Members Of Congress Who Oppose His Fascism alayham Fri, 07/19/2019 - 14:00

Reshaping the GOP by Nancy OhanianLast night, while Trump, was encouraging a chant-- "Send her home"-- at one of his trade-marked hate rallies, this one in North Carolina, Bernie was at dinner with Ilhan Omar and her daughter, at whom Trump's vitriol was aimed. A few hours later Bernie wrote that it was at the dinner that he and Ilhan first heard the news that thousands of people at a Donald Trump rally were chanting "send her back." Thursday, after Trump's advisors warned him that if he keeps up that kind of televised extremism, he would lose in 2020, Trump decided to throw his racist supporters under the bus. He told the White House reporters Thursday morning that the "send her back" chant Wednesday night-- which he could have easily stopped, instead of encouraging-- was not something he agrees with. "I was not happy with it. I disagree with it." What a liar!Bernie's note continued that to his surprise, "Ilhan was pretty unfazed. Sadly, as she told me, she has been dealing with this kind of hatred and racism for a long time. And she knows, as we do, that Trump is a demagogue doing what he does best: dividing and conquering through hate. No; Trump won't talk about trying to throw 32 million Americans off their health care. He won't talk about his massive tax breaks for billionaires. He won't talk about his budget which called for huge cuts to Medicaid and Medicare. And he certainly won't talk about how climate change is destroying the planet. But he will try to divide the country up based on the color of our skin, our religion, where we were born or our sexual orientation. Brothers and sisters: Now is the time, more than at any other moment in our lifetimes, to say NO to racism, NO to divisiveness, NO to the hatred that Trump is trying to foment. Ilhan Omar is a leader with strength and courage. She won’t back down to Trump’s racism and hate, and neither will we.Some congressional Republicans are starting to get frightened about Trump's pivot to extremism-- whether to take people's minds off his ties to child rapist Jeffrey Epstein or because he is determined to run on this as an actual platform. The none-too-bright new head of the NRCC, Tom Emmer-- their version of Cheri Bustos-- was mortified that the Trump crowd chants could lose the GOP dozens of seats next year. He told the media that he "didn’t watch the rally last night, but there’s no place for that kind of talk. I don’t agree with it."Michael Krause, reporting for Politico, noted that hours before Trump arrived, his Greenville crowd "was ready for it and ready to ramp it up. More than three days after President Donald Trump triggered national outrage with tweets telling four Democratic congresswomen of color to 'go back' to the countries 'from which they came,' the feeling among the throng mustering in the sweltering heat at East Carolina University was that the president had ample rope before he even came close to offending them."

The best-selling MAGA merchandise, perfectly parroting and even amplifying his taunts on Twitter, indicated just how much latitude he enjoyed.
“LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT.”“LET ME HELP YOU PACK!”“BUILD THE WALL DEPORT THEM ALL.”

...Inside, barely 15 minutes into his hour-and-a-half stemwinder, Trump gave the people what they wanted: “The four congresswomen,” he said. The capacity crowd in the venue of 8,000 seats booed on cue. And then Trump named the women, starting with the only one of them not born in this country. “Representative Ilhan Omar,” he enunciated. He talked about the Minnesota lawmaker originally from Somalia, and only her, for the better part of five minutes, portraying her, a U.S. citizen since she was 17, as an anti-Semitic, America-hating sympathizer of terrorists.“Traitor!” someone shouted from high up in the crowd.“Treason!” someone else yelled.And then the chanting started.“Send her back! Send her back! Send her back!”If there had been any doubt about how Trump’s latest political gambit would be received-- had it inspired his supporters as much as it had enraged his opponents?-- it disappeared here. Earlier in the week, when Trump defended himself against charges of racism, insisting “many people agree with me,” it was crowds like these he almost certainly had in mind. But until right then and there, he hadn’t heard directly from them-- a live audience feeding back direct proof that this was something he could keep running on.This is and always has been the engine of Trump’s political ascent and appeal-- not just perpetual, calculated conflict, but particularly and specifically race-laced foils and feuds. His proto-candidacy was birtherism. The crux of the announcement of his 2016 candidacy: Mexican rapists. The ongoing battle cry: “Build that wall!” And while he filed for reelection the day of his inauguration, and his first official 2020 rally was a month ago in Orlando, Florida, this past half-week capped by Wednesday night felt like the truer, more telling start....And he had to hear what I heard, seated in the press pen. Trump stood at the center of the stage, under a giant American flag, and that blunt chant, unscripted and spontaneous, rained down, a newfangled three-syllable shiv. Television clips fail to convey its intensity. It was, by far, the most visceral, guttural sound of the night....The longer he talked, the more he told mostly uncheckable tales in which people called him sir. A smattering of policy squeezed between much more rousing personal asides and attacks, the speech was a sine wave of energy peaks and troughs. It was the extemporaneous product of an attention-seeking, room-reading savant, an instinctual gauger and tweaker and torquer of crowds, who understands the ebb and flow of their appetites, always aware of what line will get the biggest reaction.Oddly for a campaign rally, one of those troughs came when he finally mentioned the Democrats who might be his actual opponent come next November. His invocations were brief, halfhearted, practically parenthetical. He called Joe Biden “Sleepy Joe.” He called Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas.” He called Bernie Sanders “desperate.” He called Kamala Harris “a new one that knocked the hell out of Biden during the debate.” He called Pete Buttigieg “a beauty” who “runs a failed city” before poking fun at his name (“Boot-edge-edge!”). He called all of them “sad.”The real takeaway, though, was some 20 minutes in. He spent far, far more time on the quartet of congresswomen he labeled “vicious” “extremists”-- first Omar, and then Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, and then Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, and then Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, a hard-to-miss chronology that prioritized the two Muslims before shifting to AOC (whom he pointedly called “Cortez”), and finally Pressley. He paused to listen to the chants about Omar and let others in the arena do the same.Vote for Trump next year, the president suggested, or vote for them.“The choice for every American,” he said, “has never been more clear.”

I would imagine that Pelosi has requested Secret Service protection for Ilhan by now, perhaps all four of them. Bobby Rush (D-IL): "It’s crystal clear to me that her life is in imminent danger. He has threatened the safety of a member of Congress. That takes this to a whole different level." Rush is a phony. If he gave a damn he would have voted for impeachment. He didn't. Neither did Ben Ray Lujan, a Pelosi lap dog who said blithely, "It’s bad enough that the president didn’t stop the chant last night. But he started it. It’s instilling fear, it’s going to instill violence."Yesterday the Daily Beast's Lachlan Markay reported that crackpot ant-vaxxer Trumpist Darryl Varnum threatened to kill Frederica Wilson (D-FL), who has been a Trump target for years. Varnum is a Pentagon cybersecurity contractor and has been charged with threatening to kill a member of Congress over the introduction of a bill that would require public schools to vaccinate children. He called her on June 28 and left a voicemail threatening to kill her if she introduced the bill.

“I’m gonna kill your ass if you do that bill. I swear,” Varnum’s voicemail began. “I will fucking come down and kill your fucking ass. And you’re a Congressperson, that’s fine. I hope the fucking FBI, CIA and everybody else hears this shit.”“This is the United States of America, bitch. Get the fuck out,” the voicemail continued. “I’ll tell you what I’ll come down to Miami bitch. I’ll fuck you up. Like the Cubans don’t even know.” ...On his Facebook page, Varnum compared The Vaccinate All Children Act to the Holocaust-- a common trope used by vaccine skeptics. “I’m done with this bullshit. Time to step up or ship out,” he wrote. In a comment on that post, Varnum added, “All of our guns are next. Been trying for years!”According to the complaint, Varnum’s wife previously told police that he owns “numerous guns.” He has registered just one: a .45 caliber Ruger pistol. His wife’s statement came in the course of another law enforcement encounter in 2015. Carroll County sheriff's deputies responded to a call from Varnum’s wife, who reported that her husband was having “behavioral issues.” When police arrived, an intoxicated Varnum had holed up in his garage with a rifle and a bottle of vodka, insisting that Taliban militants were en route to his house.Police said Varnum was “cooperative and non-violent” during that interaction, and he was transported to a hospital for a mental health evaluation.

But even after that, he was still employed by the Pentagon-- through the Defense Information Systems Agency-- as a "a senior cyber systems engineer." Trump has been a lunatic fringe vocal anti-vaxxer:

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Anti-Vaxxers Banned from Raising Money on GoFundMe

alayham — Mon, 22 Apr 2019 08:59:42 +0000

Anti-Vaxxers Banned from Raising Money on GoFundMe alayham Mon, 04/22/2019 - 10:59

YouTube has demonetized anti-vaxxer videos, Pinterest has blocked search results for the term and Facebook claims to have reduced the prominence of posts spreading misleading information.

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Can The Republican War On Science Actually Kill Us?

alayham — Fri, 19 Apr 2019 20:00:00 +0000

Can The Republican War On Science Actually Kill Us? alayham Fri, 04/19/2019 - 22:00

Tara Haelle's new book, Vaccination investigation made her a natural for the TED talk above, which focuses on the vaccine hesitancy and vaccine refusal that has been increasingly erupting into unpredictable disease outbreaks that are difficult to contain. her goal was to explain what underlies the irrational fear, that is being adopted by the anti-Science Party (AKA- the Republicans). Trump, for example, likes to carry on in public about crazy and disproven conspiracy theories linking vaccinations to autism.Can we really blame this new threat on the GOP? You better believe it! Arthur Allen reported for Politico yesterday evening that "most Republicans are rejecting Democrat-led state bills to tighten childhood immunization laws in the midst of the worst measles outbreak in two decades, alarming public health experts who fear the nation could become as divided over vaccines as it is over global warming. Democrats in six states-- Colorado, Arizona, New Jersey, Washington, New York and Maine-- have authored or co-sponsored bills to make it harder for parents to avoid vaccinating their school-age children, and mostly faced GOP opposition. Meanwhile in West Virginia and Mississippi, states with some of the nation’s strictest vaccination laws, Republican lawmakers have introduced measures to expand vaccine exemptions, although it’s not yet clear how much traction they have." A handful of Republican physicians are trying to combat this lunacy-- including Bill Cassidy (LA), Phil Roe (TN) Michael Burgess (TX) and Brad Wenstrup (OH), but they're not getting anywhere.

All states have mandatory vaccination laws, but they vary in how liberally they dispense exemptions on religious or philosophical grounds. That’s getting scrutiny as measles spreads.Democrats present bills tightening the loopholes as science-based and necessary to fight disease, while sometimes demeaning their foes as misguided or selfish “anti-vaxxers.“ Republicans portray themselves as equally enthusiastic about the life-saving virtues of vaccines, but many are loath to diminish the right of parental control over their children’s bodies, and yield that power to the government....Fed by major epidemics in Israel and in Europe, measles has punctured the U.S. barrier of immunity at multiple points of entry in what’s shaping up to be the worst year for the disease since 1993, with 555 cases through early April. Outbreaks in six states include hundreds of cases in ultra-Orthodox communities in Brooklyn and Rockland County, N.Y. And the numbers are growing.“What if God forbid someone dies?” said Jeff Dinowitz, a Bronx assemblyman whose bill to limit religious exemptions has nine Democratic co-sponsors-- but no Republican backers-- in the New York Assembly.Andrew Raia, ranking Republican on the New York Assembly’s health committee, said he wouldn't support the bill. While not totally convinced by constituents who link their children’s autism on vaccines, and unaware of any real religious injunction against vaccination, he said, “I’m not a religious leader, and I’m not a scientist either, so it’s my job to weigh both sides.”...Since becoming president, Trump has dropped the subject and scrapped a plan to create a commission led by Kennedy Jr. to investigate a supposed coverup of vaccine’s supposed harms by public health officials.But officials worry they are “three Trump tweets away” from an even more polarized situation, noted MIT political scientist Adam Berinsky, who has studied communication around politicized public health and scientific issues.In Texas, the Tea Party and related groups created an anti-vax PAC in 2015. It hasn’t yet gotten its chosen candidates elected, but the very existence of a vaccine-oriented political action committee shows the political salience is growing. Influential voices on the right, including Rush Limbaugh, Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones, have all raised suspicions about vaccines.“There’s a credulity gap between the parties in regard to science that wasn’t there 25 years ago,” Berinsky said. And Trump could easily inflame the vaccine skepticism, should he weigh in. For a large share of the highly polarized U.S. population, “at the end of the day it’s not the arguments people are making, but who is making them,” Berinksy said....A century of vaccination laws has shown that states with the strictest ones have lower burdens of vaccine-preventable disease. Scourges including smallpox, polio and diphtheria have been eliminated.Rules generally get tighter following big outbreaks of disease, and groups like the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics have used the measles outbreak to push for an end to state laws that allow people to refuse vaccination of their kids on religious or philosophical grounds.In 1972, during a measles epidemic in Los Angeles, public health authorities kept 50,000 children out of school until their parents could prove they were vaccinated. The success of that effort led to a nationwide push for stricter laws and more enforcement.After 89 people, mostly children, died in a 1990 measles epidemic, millions of dollars were poured into expanding vaccine availability for the poor, and in 2000, the disease stopped circulating in the United States. Since then, every case has been linked to visitors from overseas-- although the virus has then spread here among the growing pockets of vaccine shunners.

So obviously the Republican war against Science isn't just about vaccines and medicine. Please watch the incredible animated video above-- a message from the future by Grandma AOC. And... let me add a little random context from this morning's New York Times, written after the redacted Mueller report was finally released: "The White House that emerges from more than 400 pages of Mr. Mueller’s report is a hotbed of conflict infused by a culture of dishonesty-- defined by a president who lies to the public and his own staff, then tries to get his aides to lie for him."Weaponizing the Presidency by Nancy Ohanian

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