The National Institutes of Health is a hugely successful organization behind modern biomedical research in the USA — among their many goals was establishing policy for dealing with infectious disease, as well as funding research in vaccines.
You already know what the know-nothings and anti-intellectuals of the MAGA movement think of the NIH. They’ve been opposing rational responses to the pandemic for years now, and one of the big names in the anti-NIH, anti-Fauci, anti-masking, anti-vaccine mob was Jay Bhattacharya. So guess what’s going to happen?
Bhattacharya, who holds a medical degree and PhD from Stanford, has never held a senior government position, nor any role overseeing a large bureaucratic organization. While that might have stymied his candidacy in prior administrations, Kennedy and his allies view his inexperience as a positive, saying they are seeking reformers willing to battle the bureaucracy.
Inexperience is a positive with these people.
Let’s hope we don’t have another disease outbreak in the next few years. We already know that Kennedy wants to starve infectious disease research, and with a MAGA ideologue running the NIH…people are going to die that wouldn’t need to.
Are there any remotely sane repubs in congress willing to stand up to this obvious nonsense?
The one faint hope is that the first to die will be the MAGAts that don’t believe in science.
Of course it is. Having expertise means you were indoctrinated by (((THEM))).
Well, cross that off your list of faint hopes.
That is what is already happening.
They don’t care if MAGAts die.
.1. The number of antivaxxers who died in the last US pandemic from the Covid-19 virus was 330,000. Mostly in Red states.
In a lot of cases they blamed the docs and hospitals with claims that hospitals got paid for every person who died of the supposedly imaginary Covid-19 virus.
They then attacked the hospital staff. Every hospital ended up with a high level of security that they called on often to remove mostly the relatives of patients dead from their own ideological delusions.
.2. The Red states have notably shorter average life spans than the Blue states.
The reasons for this are somewhat known. Lower access to health care and higher rates of risk factors like obesity and drug/alcohol use,
.3. The Covid-19 virus pandemic death rate ended up higher in Red states.
The GOP in particular and the Red states in general have shorter average life spans.
They die younger.
They don’t care about this though.
The effects of their policies may not cause enough damage in the years before the next election (if there is one). Five, ten or fifteen years may be needed to reach the full monte.
There is a huge amount of hypocrisy among the leadership of the GOP.
These guys, mostly cis het white males, are mostly well educated with degrees from good universities.
They have money. They get paid well and a lot of them run grifts on the side.
They have power.
They also have really high end health insurance plans and access to the best health care in the world.
They have education and good lives and want to keep them. You know they are all vaccinated and get high end health care whenever they want.
During the last pandemic, the politicians were vaccinated first and more or less all of the GOP congress people were…vaccinated against the Covid-19 virus.
They were bright enough to know that dying in the ICU on a vent from a novel virus was a dumb idea and something to be avoided.
@ ^ raven : .. and unethical enough to not care at all that dying in the ICU on a vent from a novel virus was something they inflicted on thousands (or more) other people who weren’t bright enough to see through them.
As one who remembers Vietnam, from their internal docs, members of the Johnson administration had a very realistic, that is to say pessimistic view of the war, and their chances of sucess. In plain English: they knew the war would be a disaster, but they did it anyway!
Why? Because they judged it to be politically expedient, they knew that otherwise the GOP would lead with the charge that “the Dems lost Vietnam,” and it would resonate with the “heartland.” Or as Nixonites said: “It would play in Peoria.”
Vietnam was an unmitigated disaster, as was COVID, Trump’s denial actually killed far more Americans than Vietnam did. But in either case, Vietnam or COVID, were those responsible actually punished? As long as murderous nonsense goes unpunished, both in the courts and at the ballot box, expect more of the same!
The number of Americans killed in Vietnam was 58,000.
The number of Americans who died unnecessarily due to Trump and the GOP’s policies and responses is estimated at 400,000.
It was not even close.
The Covid-19 virus GOP casualties are 6.9 times higher than the Vietnam war’s.
The voters did know this at one time.
The Trump regime’s mishandling of the Covid-19 virus pandemic had a lot to do with why he lost his first reelection.
PZ wrote: Let’s hope we don’t have another disease outbreak in the next few years.
But, PZ, you know we are already facing an outbreak of a number of deadly diseases: Anti-intellectual stupidity, Greed, Superstitious religion, etc. When will they create a vaccine against those deadly pandemics?