solarbird | A pitch I did not expect to have to make on this final day

For years now, I have been railing against the Republican Party as a literal – literal – Party of Plague. In these closing days of the campaign, they have quadrupled back down on this in ways that will kill millions of Americans.

Not “might.” Will.

Appointing RFK, Jr. as czar of public health and letting him “go wild” will kill millions. Not might: will. Not immediately, no, but over time. Trump himself is utterly refusing to promise he and his party won’t ban vaccines and said on Sunday that RFK Jr.’s pledge to eliminate fluoridation of water on day one “sounds OK to me.”

If they do this and make it stick, millions will die. And an outsized number of them will be children.

Courtesy McNadoMD on Mastodon, here are a few of the diseases mass vaccination eliminated from American life, and which banning vaccination will bring back, along with some of their symptoms and progression paths.

Lockjaw and rabies:

Howdy folks! Friendly neighborhood ER doc here. Did you know that Trump’s folks want to take vaccines off of the market? That means you can’t get a shot even if you want one. Did you know that the tetanus shot is a vaccine? If you want your kids to be safe from lockjaw (caused by tetanus), you want vaccines to be available. You know what else is a vaccine? Rabies shots. If a rabid dog or bat bites your kid, do you want your kid to be able to be treated before they die of rabies?

Diphtheria:

Imagine your child wakes up with a sore throat. Two days later they are having high fevers, bloody pus coming from their nose, and the back of their throat is a gray mess of dead tissue. Soon their legs swell, their lungs fill with fluid, and they end up on life support in the ICU for months.That is diptheria. It is a common bacterium that killed kids before vaccines. The “d” in the DTaP shot is for this disease, and the shot prevents it. RFK and Donald Trump want to ban that shot.

Whooping cough:

You’re home with your newborn baby. They start with a runny nose. Next they are tired, coughing, not eating. In a few days they can hardly keep up with the coughing, and after a short few days in the hospital, they die. This is what whooping cough (pertussis) does. We have a good vaccine for it. Keeps it from killing babies, grandparents, and people with asthma. Trump and RFK want to ban that vaccine.

Polio:

Your teen goes to the pool for a fun day out. A week later they have a little summer flu. You don’t think much of it until they text you from bed saying they can’t stand up. Within days they are paralyzed, on a breathing machine. A decade later you are changing their diapers while they sit in bed on a ventilator.That’s polio folks. It’s only been gone in the US for a few decades, and only because of a vaccine. RFK and Trump want to ban that vaccine and bring back paralyzed kids.

You get the idea, right?

These aren’t the only ones. These are just a few of those less often mentioned in these modern times, because people have forgot they exist.

When I say the Republican Party is a Party of Plague, when I say it is a goddamn death cult, I mean every single one of those words in every way you might think.

They are promising economic ruin and they are promising ethnic purges and now they are promising mass death of children.

All while killing pregnant people for their vile sense of domination, of course. Let us never forget that, since their families certainly won’t.

One of the things their apologists keep saying is that “Trump doesn’t mean it” and “Trump won’t do it,” and “That’s just Trump being Trump,” and they talk about “Trump derangement syndrome,” and say that we’re stupid for believing what their candidate fucking says he’ll do, and meanwhile, they get enraged about shit they completely make up about us and the candidates who are with us.

We react to things their candidates promise. They react to shit they make up wholesale about us. We are not the fucking same.

If only the political press would catch on to that fact.

The very last day of a campaign is a pretty lousy time to bring up another topic, even if it’s not really new. But this is, again, so murderously psychotic that I can’t not bring it back up.

Maybe you can bring it up, too, on this final day of this hellish and evil campaign, this Monday, November 4th, 2024.

Zero days remain.

It is Lastday.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.