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?
I called it on election night, and i have only felt more and more confident about it since, the Trump biden years will be looked back on as the real hinge point for the end if US hegemony, imperial or otherwise. Like barring some radical left wing revolution of some sort the decline of the USA I’d baked in. Like liberalism dies not have answers and the room to maneuver within a liberal framework is gone. The only extant alternative, reaction aka fascism, has no solution because it inherently doesn’t it proposes a return that can’t be achieved, to a past that doesn’t exist. Reaction is incapable if dealing with the future the only question is how much damage it will do.
The irony of all of it is that the biden admin actually took some steps towards averting the disaster, but they were too timid and weak largely because they were liberals forced into it. And then they fucking torched any progress they made on the altar of “protecting israel” and Harris ran completely away from any of the tepid good things biden did.
I really think we will see china stepping onto the void the usa will leave over the next 2 to 3 decades, for good and bad.
@11. crimsonsage : “Harris ran completely away from any of the tepid good things Biden did.”
Wait, she did? For example?
I thought one of the things she was strongly criticised for was saying she wouldn’t change Biden’s policies and would continue doing as Biden had done?
Hope that killing those extra Palestinians was worth it, because that’s the trade the Democrats made, whether you like it or not.
Um, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet, Vicarish.
Come Jan20, all the stops are off.
No more Mr Nice Guy.
—
People like you, who advocated to not vote for the only credible opposition to the new and improved genocidal regime? You should own your failure.
(whether you like it or not!)
PS cf. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/11/17/what-have-trump-administration-nominees-said-about-israel-and-its-wars
(Basically, bad to worse, but the worse doesn’t register with Vicarian types)
Vicar is, weirdly, a perfect example of the horrible thoughts that sometimes run through my head. Basically, if this was a freaking world ending meteor hurling towards the Earth and we where in the “Don’t Look Up” movie, I would be vibrating rapidly between, “Why the F are we not doing something about this?”, and, “At least when it hits all the idiots will realize how badly they f-ed up, assuming anyone survives!” I am not sure which is better, in the long run, letting the coming disaster just happen, and thus making damn sure everyone that survives it knows just how badly they screwed themselves, and the rest of us, or do what is being tried, which is mitigate every possible thing that can be, to minimize the inevitable, and unavoidable damage, then, if/when its all over, still have to listen to people like Vicar, as well as an absolutely insane number of Trump voters, deny that it happened because of Trump and the crazies he is surrounding himself if, because its just easier for them to all keep lying to themselves that, “If only we had tried harder to do all the terrible things, or voted for the right fools, it would have totally worked!”
Heck, I even have moments of, “They are not entirely wrong, a huge mass of stuff in the government is screwed up, and the laws around all of them need to have a major change, or even reset.”, but the problem is, they don’t want to FIX anything, they want to reset it to some imaginary perfect state that never existed in the whole history of the country, and for which the closest equivalent might be the time of the Inquisition, complete with plagues, blaming the diseases on witches, and trying to cure everything using alchemy and prayer. I know, with absolute certainty, that, so long as things, after Trump, just stay the same, nothing that needs to change will, and the threat of it happening again will still be there, because little or nothing will actually be done to prevent it, and even if things are put in place, they will only protect against this “specific” threat, while still embracing every other stupid idea that lead up to it (including the truly insane one that utterly unrestrained “capitalism”, in which the rule is, “You can be as rich as you want, and we won’t do a damn thing to stop you from doing so on the poverty of others.”, is king, and any attempt to even the playing field, or actually guarantee the well being of all citizens, is defined as, “anti-American”, even if not doing so can be argued to be anti-constitution – with the only argument in favor of it being that some idiot decided to put “property” in it, as a thing to defend, but left out bodily autonomy, and/or not ending up starving, and homeless).
I can see a world in which a hard, and unrecoverable crash, would almost be better than constantly trying to duck tape a system that has so many damn holes that its almost 90% duck tape at this point, and the rich are just making more holes in it, because the tape is obstructing their view. But, I also know that 9 times out of 10, such a complete collapse of a government, and any attempt to restart things, with a new constitution, just end up, instead, with literally the rich installing another freaking Trump into office, until/unless the populous succeeds in ripping them from power.
But.. man.. its so hard to see a sane path forward, which will actually happen, even if what needs to change, to fix things, is glaringly obvious, but no politician will ever willingly give up power to do it, or take any from the rich, to achieve it.
PZ: “Let’s hope we don’t have another disease outbreak in the next few years.”
Ahem. We’re having one now, 7% of farmworkers in the US have antibodies for the bad birdflu, there is certainly at least mammal-to-mammal transmission going on (eg seals), and with that kid on life support in Canada they have no idea where he even got it from. A mRNA vaccine against it is currently not working out yet, the classic vaccine would take 900,000 eggs per day for 9 months to produce enough vaccines for the US alone.
So the cavallery isn’t coming, mortality of this thing will be 50%, and Trump will put the worst person for the job in charge of NIH.
I’d wear a mask, cook my eggs through and eat my steak well done in the near future if I were you.
Yeah, complete inexperience is how you defeat an entrenched bureaucracy.
How’d that end up working, Mr McNamara? Or, more to the point, how’d that end up working for The Orange One regarding the Departments of Defense and Justice the first time around?
So, they will make it the National Institute of Helplessness?
I hope all these nightcrawlers the magat said he is appointing are thwarted in their maniacal destructive desires or we are well and truly screwed. And, yes, we will find ourselves in the new Dark Ages.