the worst part about the party of plague
Jan. 26th, 2022 03:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
solarbirdThe worst part of Republicans calling for COVID-19 vaccines to be banned - and what you have to understand - is that the @GOP don't need a majority to trainwreck blanket effects of vaccination for diseases like measles and polio.
They only need 10% - 20% tops - to monkeywrench everything and bring back recurring plagues.
With a 20% refusal rate, we will absolutely see waves of measles, polio, who knows what else, if they can pull it off.
They're trying, right now, in Florida, and probably other states. Dismantling childhood vaccination requirements for schools, in particular.
Vaccination will still protect the people who get polio and measles in these new outbreaks from severe disease, like COVID now. But there will be outbreaks, and breakthrough cases again.
Most of these breakthrough cases will be okay. Some won't be, because _literally no vaccines_ are 100% proof against disease, and they never have been.
Particularly but not exclusively amongst the unvaccinated, Long Polio will return.
What makes outbreaks end isn't vaccines stopping 100% of cases. What makes them end is vaccines reducing probability of disease, of case severity, of duration of sickness, and by doing so, reducing contagiousness windows.
With smallpox, we got the odds so far down it died out.
But the higher the unvaccinated rate - the larger number of people who let disease run free - the less possible it becomes to stop outbreaks.
Some anti-vax strongholds were already seeing measles outbreaks _before_ the GOP went all-in on being the Party of Plague.
That was with a much lower refusal rate, mostly of cranks. It wasn't even partisan, I've had my share of fights with anti-vax leftists, mostly trendy new-age assholes and the like.
But now it is partisan, made so entirely by the right.
The GOP are making vaccination denial part of their identity. This won't stop with COVID.
They only need 10-20% to bring back disease outbreaks. When they do, they'll declare vaccination doesn't work, and double down.
Just like Agent Tucker on Fox News, boosting a literal plague by sabotaging not just vaccination, but _every_ attempt to fight the disease.
Doubling down like they always do, every time.
The GOP have become a Party of Plague. They will not stop. Functionally, they can't.
If you give the GOP power, that's what they will do.
If you _don't_ give the GOP power, they'll sabotage to make sure we have plagues anyway, knowing you'll blame whoever _does_ have power..
Just like they've always done.
Just like they're doing right now, with COVID.
The only way out is to deny them the one thing they really want, which is power.
We can't stop the GOP from being the Party of Plague _except_ by starving them of power.
That's what it takes. _Sustained_ removal from power. Because that's really the only thing they care about.
That's their actual guiding light.
Well, that, and having someone to persecute while claiming they're being persecuted, as their cultural and religious beliefs demand.
(If that sounds fascist to you, that's because it is.)
But push comes to shove, it's about having power.
Know this now. Fight the primary fights you need to fight _now_ to get better Democrats.
But whether you win or lose in primaries... remember _all_ this, I beg you, in November.
Any vote for _any_ Republican is a vote for the return of plagues.
Like this one.
But _more_.
They only need 10% - 20% tops - to monkeywrench everything and bring back recurring plagues.
With a 20% refusal rate, we will absolutely see waves of measles, polio, who knows what else, if they can pull it off.
They're trying, right now, in Florida, and probably other states. Dismantling childhood vaccination requirements for schools, in particular.
Vaccination will still protect the people who get polio and measles in these new outbreaks from severe disease, like COVID now. But there will be outbreaks, and breakthrough cases again.
Most of these breakthrough cases will be okay. Some won't be, because _literally no vaccines_ are 100% proof against disease, and they never have been.
Particularly but not exclusively amongst the unvaccinated, Long Polio will return.
What makes outbreaks end isn't vaccines stopping 100% of cases. What makes them end is vaccines reducing probability of disease, of case severity, of duration of sickness, and by doing so, reducing contagiousness windows.
With smallpox, we got the odds so far down it died out.
But the higher the unvaccinated rate - the larger number of people who let disease run free - the less possible it becomes to stop outbreaks.
Some anti-vax strongholds were already seeing measles outbreaks _before_ the GOP went all-in on being the Party of Plague.
That was with a much lower refusal rate, mostly of cranks. It wasn't even partisan, I've had my share of fights with anti-vax leftists, mostly trendy new-age assholes and the like.
But now it is partisan, made so entirely by the right.
The GOP are making vaccination denial part of their identity. This won't stop with COVID.
They only need 10-20% to bring back disease outbreaks. When they do, they'll declare vaccination doesn't work, and double down.
Just like Agent Tucker on Fox News, boosting a literal plague by sabotaging not just vaccination, but _every_ attempt to fight the disease.
Doubling down like they always do, every time.
The GOP have become a Party of Plague. They will not stop. Functionally, they can't.
If you give the GOP power, that's what they will do.
If you _don't_ give the GOP power, they'll sabotage to make sure we have plagues anyway, knowing you'll blame whoever _does_ have power..
Just like they've always done.
Just like they're doing right now, with COVID.
The only way out is to deny them the one thing they really want, which is power.
We can't stop the GOP from being the Party of Plague _except_ by starving them of power.
That's what it takes. _Sustained_ removal from power. Because that's really the only thing they care about.
That's their actual guiding light.
Well, that, and having someone to persecute while claiming they're being persecuted, as their cultural and religious beliefs demand.
(If that sounds fascist to you, that's because it is.)
But push comes to shove, it's about having power.
Know this now. Fight the primary fights you need to fight _now_ to get better Democrats.
But whether you win or lose in primaries... remember _all_ this, I beg you, in November.
Any vote for _any_ Republican is a vote for the return of plagues.
Like this one.
But _more_.
no subject
Date: 2022-01-27 08:45 pm (UTC)===I will say that the new ager antivax are (at least in my experience) more right wing these days than even minimally image left.
===I have a salt cave in town....run by Anti-BLM/very QAnon folk, for example. The big guru before that was Ormus/infowars..info wars...
===The big "Awakened" group that brings in speakers? Big main speaker for years was Robert David Steele.
===The New Agers these days are a lot more out in front right wing with a light dusting of image progressive than they used to be....at least out on the East Coast...
no subject
Date: 2022-01-28 08:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-28 02:31 pm (UTC)===We really got hit with it when we moved out here, the level of shift. The shop that I now own was run by a recovering catholic Reagan Republican (to the point he had built an altar to Reagan in his house, without fully realizing it WAS, in fact and function, an altar.
===The guy who walked around dressed like Abraham Lincoln, (and looked a fair buit like him...developed the outfit for selling encyclopedias in Washington DC...)? Hard core infowars. Made and sold "ormusol" which was supposedly working because of the ormus in the healing springs...happened to also have a high level of colloidal silver..
===And, of course, The Arlington Institute..(https://arlingtoninstitute.org/ if you want to be horrified)
===Our area is definitely one if the places that introduced a fair number of new agers to awaken their right wing bent.
(Our shop pretty much repells the right wing new agers these days, and draws the more progressive folk, more pagan.)
no subject
Date: 2022-01-27 08:54 pm (UTC)===Our testing numbers are dropping fast.
===There is reason to believe it is due to folks thinking that the vaccine is on the swabs.
===I am not joking.
no subject
Date: 2022-01-28 08:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-28 09:55 pm (UTC)Now? Not so much.
Sorry.
no subject
Date: 2022-01-28 10:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-01-29 07:28 pm (UTC)Before the pandemic, the most vocal anti-vaxxers were the autism=mercury crowd, stirred up by Andrew Wakefield's attempt to taint the MMR vaccine (seriously, to hell with that guy).
Most of them aren't even right-leaning. They were lefties, for the most part. My sister even nibbled on that lure at one point, and she ain't no righty.
Now, things have gotten even more stupid. With the neolibs in charge of the national Dems——which, after the way Bernie was treated, has been completely discredited in the sunken eyes of the hollowed-out remains of the former middle-class; with the move of support from Bernie to that former asshole of a president nearly complete; and with the CDC putting out really, really questionable material in a blind rush to discredit OTC treatment, which has been the battle banner taken up by the asshole's still-entrenched followers: Stupid now reigns.
The folks in what the neolibs derisively call Flyover Country now won't listen to any expert with education, since that is now completely cemented in their eyes as aligned with forces to remove them from the face of the earth (and, if you look carefully at some neolib statements, isn't far from wrong). Faucci has said enough to discredit himself without the right-wing noise machine pointing it out.
IMO, to discredit the GOP, we need to pry the reigns of power out of neolib hands, and restore any and all New Deal Dems, which might lead to flattening out the only real curve that matters: the Gini Coefficient. Compressing income inequality might give the fentanyl-chasing overdosing Deaths of Despair crowd some reason to expect their lives might not remain completely shit.
Otherwise, having mere waves of debilitating disease ravage our population is going to be the least of our worries.
Sorry to rant. This has been gnawing at me for too many months now.
no subject
Date: 2022-02-01 02:02 am (UTC)Now's the time to be working that angle, then.
I mean, I'm not disagreeing about this path. It's a good path.
What I'm saying is right now is the time to be working that angle.
It's primary season. Now's the time.
no subject
Date: 2022-02-01 09:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-01 02:03 am (UTC)"with the CDC putting out really, really questionable material in a blind rush to discredit OTC treatment,"
...such as?
no subject
Date: 2022-02-01 09:49 pm (UTC)Last October, a friend texted me with a (and this is a quote) "neener neener." I had told him about an Israeli study demonstrating that previous infections seemed to provide more robust protection than non-infected but vaccinated status. He, in turn, saw a CNN story that put that into question, based on a CDC MMWR.
They even have added a nice graphic.
Here's the "value added" paragraph:
Thing is, I read through it, and in the tables we see the numbers. Unvaxxed, but previously sickened: 1,020 people. Vaxxed and infection naive: 6,328.
This seems to show me only that testing is pretty hit-and-miss. (Anecdata: co-worker is just recovering from long-term covid. She tells me she had 9 tests; all were negative. Seems supportive.)
Furthermore, I would hardly accuse the Israeli pre-print of being in any way "anti-vax." Just read the final sentence of the Conslusion:
This is hardly my only example of CDC ????, but it's the one I spent the most time reading, due to my friend's text.