I’m not exactly sure which year this memory is from, but at some point when I was in the 7th or 8th grade, which was 1956, my entire class was taken into the school gymnasium, lined up and given the Salk polio vaccine.
I also recall at the same time that once a week on my way home from school, I had to stop at the home of another kid and drop off his homework assignments for the next week and pick up the assignments that he had completed the previous week. On one occasion I was let into his home and there he was lying in an iron lung which made a lot of noise.
If anyone objected to the polio vaccine, it sure didn’t make any media waves back then. Now we have a national political party whose Presidential candidate has announced that he will not tolerate mandated vaccines in schools and we have a possible third-party candidate who has created a national image for himself (other than his last name) by repeating every anti-vaccination bullshit deal that he can find.
What the fuck is going on here? Does the GOP actually believe that they can score points in November by coming out against a basic public health strategy which has been SOP in this country for more than seventy years?
And by the way, the POS who may wind up as the guy who needs an extra-large cell at Butner to have room for the Resolute desk, isn’t just coming out against a mandate for Covid-19 vaccines; he’s talking about preventing the mandated delivery of all vaccines.
Actually, all Trump is really doing is trying to find some way to keep his so-called ‘base’ interested in his campaign, even though virtually everyone who voted for this asshole in 2020 received the standard immunizations as a kid, and never thought about the issue again until Trump needed to say something – anything – about yet another reason why Biden was pushing the country down the drain.
We have a guy in my state – Massachusetts – who ran for Senate as an Independent candidate against Liz Warren in 2018. This so-called ‘entrepreneur,’ who claimed he invented email, had gone around meeting with state residents who opted to school their children at home and were therefore receptive to his anti-vaccination stance.
He got 3% of the statewide vote in 2018, and when he announced that he was running again in 2020, the state Republic(an) party was so embarrassed that they dug up another candidate to run against him in the primary, which the nut-job (whose name is Shiva Ayyadurai) lost by two-to-one. He then sued the state GOP for allegedly ‘stealing’ the primary election, but the court quickly told him to get lost.
According to the latest data, slightly less than 7% of all school-age children in America are taught the Three Rs at home. The states with the most home-schooled kids are of course three of the dumb states – Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina. Add in South Carolina and Virginia and you have 5 of the top 10 home-schooling states located in the Confederacy, or what we now politely refer to as the South.
All 50 states require that children be vaccinated against polio, chickenpox, MMR and DTaP or they can’t attend a public school. So, it figures that Trump would get up at a rally in Virginia and promise to end vaccination mandates after he resumes his Presidency next year.
I am increasingly convinced that the reason Trump makes endless announcements at his rallies which have absolutely no basis in truth is because: a) nobody’s listening to what he says anyway; and b) as long as those MAGA hats and t-shirts keep selling, why does anything he says have to be true?
Surveys seem to indicate that there are still maybe 15% of the American population who have not received Covid-19 vaccines, and probably two-thirds of this population has opted out because they don’t like vaccines. But, and it’s an important but , the surveys also indicate that the vaccine refuseniks are twice the number of men (18%) as opposed to women (9%).
So once again, we have Trump pandering to all those schmucks who drive around in a truck with a MAGA banner, but when it comes to November, it’s not those male votes which will count.
I just looked at Trump’s campaign website, and he’s got a picture of an alleged campaign rally but not a single future campaign event is listed as of today.
My friends in the public health industry should stop worrying about how Trump will put them out of business if he moves back into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue next year and spend a little more time pushing vaccine mandates for both the Chinese and the regular winter flu.
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