"480 Minutes" - COVID Boosters
By COVID "boosters" I am not referring to supplemental vaccination shots, I am talking about Republican governors, members of congress, Fox News, and everyone else seeding doubt about and opposition to vaccines, masking, or other pandemic mitigation strategies. Those people are objectively pro-virus and anti-public health.
Texas Senator Ted Cruz vehemently calls for zero mask and vaccine mandates at Texas schools while sending his own kids to a $30k a year private school which...wait for it...requires his kids to wear masks.
Meanwhile Texas governor Greg Asshat announced a ban on mask mandates while simultaneously admitting that the Texas healthcare system was overwhelmed with COVID patients by calling for federal assistance. Education officials from the largest school districts in Texas are issuing mandates in defiance of Asshat, and in retaliation against sanity, Asshat is threatening to take over those school districts. Doubling and tripling down on demonstrably bad policy contradicted by science, common sense, and what's actually happening right now in red states -- you go, Asshat!
Speaking of red states, a week into the school year neo Mississippi county has been forced to quarantine 40% of students because it decided to go "mask optional" so the school year would be "more normal."
University of Mississippi Medical Center official Dr. Alan Jones describes the situation this way: “Within the next five to seven to 10 days, I think we’re going to see failure of the hospital system in Mississippi.”
To get a sense of scale for this self-inflicted new crisis, consider that if Louisiana, Florida, and Mississippi were countries instead of states each would rank in the Top 5 for weekly COVID cases per capita.
The malevolent incompetents running these states continue to make indisputably deadly public health decisions affecting tens of millions. The idiotic attitudes they champion are killing people, spreading the virus, extending the pandemic, and keeping anything resembling "normalcy" ever on the horizon.
With more schools set to reopen without COVID mandates and the NOAA predicting another 'active' hurricane season that will likely result in evacuees jammed together into makeshift shelters, the low-vaccination rate states have likely not yet felt the worst pain borne of their refusal to do what's right for themselves and for the common good.
So...how's your week going?
Today we will debut new music by Guardian Singles (Auckland, NZ), Los Blancos (Carmarthen, Wales, @blancoslos502), Shannon and the Clams (Oakland, CA, @ShanAndTheClams), Waste Man (New Orleans, LA), and Wednesday (Asheville, NC, @Wednesday_Band_).
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