Tag Archives: vaccinations

Political Rants

The case for vaccinating everybody.

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Here we go again. Cases are rising, as are hospitalizations and deaths. This COVID-19 catastrophe – the Trump Plague, as I like to call it – is not going away anytime soon.

Why the hell is this happening? I think we all know the answer to that. From the beginning, Trump and his allies played down the seriousness of this illness. The Republican Party and the right more generally have made a political football out of vaccination and wearing PPE. As a result, only a little more than half of Americans are fully vaccinated.

The miracle that wasn’t

Cast your mind back to fourteen months ago. Everything shut down, people were panic-buying toilet paper, etc. – you remember the drill. If someone had told you then that there would be not one, not two, but three highly effective vaccines available within a year, would you have believed it? Perhaps. But what if they had told you that many millions of Americans would refuse to take it? I, myself, would have thought that was nuts.

Well, here we are. We literally have the means to end this pandemic, and we’re choosing not to do it. And mind you, this criticism goes beyond the reluctance of my fellow Americans to take the jab. There’s a whole world out there begging for these shots. It is well within our means to manufacture and distribute enough shots to save millions of lives in Asia, Africa, South America, etc. It is also well within the scope of what can reasonably be defined as our “national interest” to do so. But we’re not. What. The. Fuck.

The hard problem

Our COVID vaccine standoff reminds me of the politics around climate change. The right keeps working to force the issue into a cultural context. In their view, your position on the salient question becomes a marker for the type of American you are. So if you encourage people to get the COVID shot – literally, to save the nation from this plague – you’re a “woke” liberal forcing your views on others and squelching their freedom of speech/expression/choice.

The same dynamic is at work with climate change. It doesn’t matter how much evidence there may be of already-occurring global warming. Right-wingers despise the idea of doing anything about it because that’s what the other side wants. Even if the policy would help people on the right, it’s more important to them to “own the libs” than to flourish or even survive.

One way out

I tend to be an optimist. My feeling, generally, is that losing hope is basically surrendering to hopelessness. The only thing we have in our favor is that there are more of us than there are of them. Our only chance is to act boldly, take the initiative, and move forward, even if we have to drag them along with us, kicking and screaming.

With respect to COVID, that means requiring vaccines (or a legitimate exemption) to gain access to a wide range of services (short of essentials like nutrition, housing, etc.). It also means making the necessary investments to quickly implement a robust global vaccination program, so that we can not only save millions of lives but head off these variants.

If people are truly tired of masks and social distancing, that’s what we have to do – get at least 85% fully vaccinated. You can have the thing you want, but you need to do this first. Pretty simple, right? DO IT!

Cuba revisited

Just a brief call back to last week’s column. After posting that piece and its Strange Sound podcast companion episode, I commented on some vaguely related Tweet by Code Pink and incurred the dubious wrath of what I call the Mas Canosa chorus. A crowd of right-wingers from the Cuban exile community basically called me a hater of freedom, etc., because I dared criticize some of their number for yelling “Fuck You” at Code Pink.

I typically don’t engage in pissing wars on Twitter, but I looked into this a bit and it seems that the Cuban exile community has invested in some Twitter bots. Were my digital accusers non-human? Hard to say, though their grade-school level virtue signalling could well have been the product of automation. “If you side with the brutal Cuban dictatorship over the people of Cuba, yearning only for the right to speak freely, then you cannot claim to stand against the powerful,” I was told by someone who supports strangling the Cuban people to death with sanctions. Sure sounds like a bot to me.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Same old.

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It’s late February, nearly a year after the first cases of COVID-19 in the United States, and I and millions of people like me are still standing in the middle of a street, waiting for a truck to strike us down. For those of you who thought everything would change after we got rid of Trump and saw Biden take office, this is not an encouraging time. I know we’re little more than a month into the new administration, but for chrissake, the house is on fire … pull the damn alarm. They’re going to have to do a hell of a lot better than this, because this is pathetic. I’m hearing voices within the administration telling us that they’re ramping up production of everything COVID-related via executive order. That’s nice, but where’s the evidence of this? I live in a fairly rural community (a small city), and I notice no change whatsoever, aside from the rhetoric.

Yes, like many Americans, I have not had a COVID vaccine, as I am not yet eligible. I am not over 65 nor do I work in what’s considered a high-risk capacity. But the eligibility barrier is just another way of saying that they just don’t have enough shots. At this point, they should be flooding the zone with vaccines, trying to get as many shots as possible into people. I have heard whispers that they will be expanding eligibility to people in their mid fifties, but there’s no official statement regarding that on the CDC site, New York’s COVID page, nor my local Health Department’s site. And so we wait in this Kafkaesque way until someone tells us its our turn, but that day still seems pretty far off. And it’s not like I can shelter in place into perpetuity – I have to work, and that involves leaving my house on a daily basis (albeit not for the entire day); I have to go to the market from time to time, of course; I have medical appointments that can’t be done virtually. In short, I need the goddamn shot.

I hate to say it, but this is the same pathetic small-bore type of response to enormous problems that we saw in the Obama administration. We need a national mobilization on the scale of the Second World War, quite frankly, as we have lost many more Americans than died on the battlefields of Europe and the Pacific in the 1940s, but I have zero confidence that Biden and his administration have the bottle to follow through with anything of the sort. After forty years of right-wing assault against the very notion of government actively intervening on behalf of ordinary people, we are left with this dysfunctional husk of a federal bureaucracy, straining like a 100-year-old geezer as it attempts to squeeze out a COVID response package that’s months late and about 600 dollars short, per capita.

Let’s prove me wrong on this. Call your senators, your rep, your new President and Vice-President. Tell them to push harder to get this vaccination program moving – July is not nearly soon enough to get shots in everyone’s arms. Let’s do it like our lives depend on it, because they just might.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Who’s the client?

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As the Senate moves closer to a veto override vote on the $740 billion defense authorization act, I’ve been thinking about how eager our national legislators are to spend money when it comes to military hardware, consultants, logistics, etc, and yet how reluctant they seem to be to provide working people with the means to, I don’t know, feed themselves and their families, keep a roof over their heads, maybe see a medical professional if they need one, all in the midst of a once-in-a-century (up to now, at least) pandemic. Of course, this $740 billion doesn’t represent the full price tag of our national security posture – no, indeed, there are many billions more going into intelligence, covert operations, and of course the after-market costs of war, such as the Veteran’s administration and so on. All this money to “keep us safe”, and yet here we are – more people dying on a daily basis than in any previous armed conflict.

We have an administration that has dragged its feet on the Coronavirus since the very beginning. They are currently falling way behind on their vaccination campaign, having committed to 20 million Americans vaccinated by year’s end – it looks like they will struggle to achieve ten percent of that. When challenged on this, they shrug – it’s the states’ fault, you see. What a pathetic joke. Take the goddamn money you’re shoveling at the Pentagon and use it to get those fucking vaccines into people’s arms … now. COVID is the national security threat, fool, not a resurgent Russia or China. People are dropping dead all around us, like there’s been an invasion of invisible killer aliens, and fat boy is out golfing while his Coronavirus coordinator Veep is enjoying a skiing holiday. From the start, this phenomenal lack of urgency has been a reflection of the president’s priorities – there’s simply no perceived benefit to him in pursuing this virus, and so he pretends it doesn’t exist.

Someone on Facebook shared that photo of Trump in the oval office with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, going over the presentation of military hardware that the Prince was committing to purchase from U.S. arms manufacturers. It struck me that what I was looking at was an image of a vendor (Trump) with his client (MBS). Trump was using his office to broker a deal with Saudi Arabia – one that is currently being extended, by the way – so that they will continue to patronize him after he leaves office. How does this serve the interests of the American people? Saudi Arabia is a repressive, dictatorial regime that’s killing thousands of people in Yemen, using our weapon systems and our military’s logistical support. The jobs supported by these purchases are not worth the lives lost – far from it. The only benefit that comes from this relationship is realized by Trump, who has bragged about the money he earns from the kingdom. His entire presidency has been a branding exercise, and he’s ready to start cashing in his chips.

This is a level of cynicism beyond anything we’ve seen before. We are losing thousands of lives every day, and our leaders are too busy feathering their nests to even notice, let alone act.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Week that wasn’t.

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Just a few short takes on a variety of subjects. A lot to focus on, so I’ll try not to focus too much on anything.

Burning people alive, American styleISIS Killing. The so-called “Islamic State” burned a Jordanian captive alive this week. In retaliation, the Jordanian King executed some prisoners. Meanwhile, we dropped some bombs on some nameless people, some of which, quite possibly, were burned alive (though not in front of a camera). Your pick as to who is the biggest asshole here. On points of style, it’s a toss up. On volume, we win hands down.

Ukraine. The reporting on this crisis has been abysmal, though not surprising. Mainstream media, including left-leaning outlets like MSNBC, have been toeing the administration line by and large. When we hear from them about casualties on the Kiev side, it’s in graphic detail. Deaths on the separatist side are somehow authorless, with the persistent question of whether they might be the result of bad aim by the separatists. This is a tremendously dangerous conflict, resulting from nearly three decades of bad policy on the part of the U.S. and Europe. Instead of making promises in Kiev, Kerry should be in Moscow talking to the Russians about how to dial this mess back before it gets any hotter.

Vaccinations. Some substantial smoke-blowing over the question of whether or not parents should have the right to refuse vaccinations for their children. Governor Christie and Senator Paul both weighed in, then weighed out … somewhat … when they heard the reaction. Meanwhile, 100 kids in California have come down with measles, another smaller group in Illinois. These kids are, in part, victims of misinformation about the science behind (a) MMR vaccines and (b) the nature of disorders like autism. Misinformation fuels skepticism, particularly in an age when childhood diseases like measles and mumps have been brought under control and no one remembers the bad old days when 500 kids would die each year from measles.

I don’t have kids, so I can’t give advice. I just know that science and public health are on the side of vaccinating your kids. Seems like the right choice, folks.

Nuff said.

luv u,

jp