During Grandpa Puddin' Brain's first term, he declared that COVID-19 wasn't a big deal. He asserted that he wouldn't close the country down for a flu, so COVID wasn't gonna lock the doors either. He scoffed at how dangerous the coronavirus was at the time, downplaying the danger that the pandemic represented and said that it would simply "go away."
That's the sort of thing that happens when you take your medical advice from Lou Dobbs. Shoot for herd immunity! Hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine! Anything but a vaccine! The scientists responsible for setting the Doomsday Clock estimated that Trump's bullshit during the pandemic was responsible for the death of between 100,000 and 460,000 American lives. As he said in an interview when he finally admitted that he knew folks were dying of the virus, "it is what it is".
That's what it was.
Fast forward to Trump's second term. There's still no cure for COVID-19. People are still dying of it every day. Trump hired the brain worm behind the wheel of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s corpse to keep the anti-vaccine rhetoric fresh. Very few folks are able to get vaccinated against the coronavirus. The Centers For Disease Control has been gagged against talking about vaccinations, not just for COVID-19 and damn near everything else.
The rest of the world knows that vaccinations are effective in preventing contagion or, if contracted, keeping a person infected with the coronavirus from dying of it. But the Trump Administration's lack of care for the American people keeps new data that supports this from being published by the CDC. This past spring, a paper containing fresh information on how well vaccines work at curb-stomping the disease were supposed to have been published in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. But it was nixed at the last second by CDC acting Director Jay Bhattacharya. It's a shame, because that report was full of great stuff.
So much so that JAMA Network Open, a free medical research publication written by experts in their field for practitioners and everyday schmoes like you and me, said 'fuck it, we'll publish the damn thing ourselves'. The TLDR version of the study, which used a test-negative design, looked at people with respiratory illnesses who were either admitted to hospital or who received care in an emergency room. Researchers confirmed whether or not the individuals had been vaccinated against COVID-19 and then did some fancy math to figure out what the odds were of that person testing positive for the coronavirus versus unvaccinated individuals who required treatment.
Conclusions and Relevance Receipt of the 2025-2026 COVID-19 vaccine was associated with additional protection beyond existing immunity against medically attended COVID-19, including ER visits and hospitalizations. Adults can reduce their likelihood of severe COVID-19 outcomes by getting a 2025-2026 COVID-19 vaccination.
So yeah: if you can bump into a COVID vaccination needle, do it. It could save your ass. This isn't news. Anyone with access to the Internet can find tons of credible evidence that says so. The takeaway here is that the people currently running the country care about its citizens about as much as they do the people who are dying from a lack of food aid in a third world nation. They don't want to keep people healthy. They don't want them to even know what could keep them healthy.
You don't need to make as many pairs of jackboots to kick the ass of a shrinking, sickly population.
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