Just An Earth-Bound Misfit, I
(No Kings, Ever!)

The sudden decision by United States President Donald Trump to halt and review all foreign aid for 90 days could be devastating for HIV programmes in African countries. After Trump’s inauguration on 20 January, he signed numerous executive orders. One of these suspends aid to “foreign countries and implementing non-governmental organisations, international organisations, and contractors” pending review for whether it aligns with “American interests and … values”.

The order said, “no further [US] foreign assistance shall be disbursed in a manner that is not fully aligned with the foreign policy of the President of the United States”.

Foreign aid includes the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, known as PEPFAR. PEPFAR has saved millions of lives since it was launched by former president George W. Bush in 2003.

PEPFAR statistics show that at the end of 2024, it was providing life-saving antiretroviral treatment to nearly 21-million people across 55 countries, many of them in sub-Saharan Africa. PEPFAR is also delivering pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) — which stops people from contracting HIV — to about 2.5 million people. In 2024, PEPFAR provided HIV testing to about 84-million people. It funds HIV treatment and intervention in Uganda, Namibia, Botswana, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and many others.

He simply doesn't give a shit. In point of fact, the deaths of lots of people in sub-Saharan Africa because foreign aid has been stopped will be a good thing in the eyes of that demented old racist. And you can bet that his buddy, the World's Richest Nazi, is cheering him on for this issue.

A group of high-level managers at the Louisiana Department of Health walked into a Nov. 14 meeting in Baton Rouge expecting to talk about outreach and community events.

Instead, they were told by an assistant secretary in the department and another official that department leadership had a new policy: Advertising or otherwise promoting the COVID, influenza or mpox vaccines, an established practice there — a nd at most other public health entities in the U.S. — must stop.
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According to the employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they fear losing their jobs or other forms of retaliation, the policy would be implemented quietly and would not be put in writing.

Staffers were also told that it applies to every aspect of the health department's work: Employees could not send out press releases, give interviews, hold vaccine events, give presentations or create social media posts encouraging the public to get the vaccines. They also could not put up signs at the department's clinics that COVID, flu or mpox vaccines were available on site.

So go ahead, live in Louisiana, and let the good times roll. Maybe you won't die fron an infectious disease. Hell, those idiots will probably discontinue food safety indpections because Bobby Brainworm might conclude they're based too heavily on science.

And all illnesses in that shithole of a state will be treated by blood-letting and prayer, no doubt.

Republicans in the second quarter of the 21st Century are morons.

His asshole buddy, Dilbert Stark, is already working on a new design for iron lungs. One that will be leased, so either you pay or you die. And of course, Trump will get a piece of the action.

Charlie Stross has laid out the entire evil plan.

Bobby Brainworm's lawyer is asking the FDA to revoke approval of polio vaccines. He also has his eye on vaccines for heaptitus and tetanus.

Let's be clear: These clowns are dangerous and, if they get their way, people will die.

Will the Luigi Doctrine apply to them?

Since Brainworm Bobby and his team are going to gut food inspections, stand by for a lot of this:

After bird flu was detected in a retail sample of raw milk produced and packaged by Raw Farm, LLC, the California Department of Public Health warned consumers on Sunday to avoid consuming any from the same lot.

This should not come as a surprise to anyone. The warning signs were there.

More than half of cats around the first Texas dairy farm to test positive for bird flu this spring died after drinking raw milk from the infected cows, scientists reported this week, offering a window into a toll the virus has taken during its unprecedented spread through the cattle industry.
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Cats at the Texas farm had been fed raw milk from cows that turned out to be infected with highly pathogenic avian influenza, or HPAI H5N1. A day after the farm first started noticing cows were getting sick, the cats started getting sick too. By the end, more than half of the cats had died.

Pasturised milk was one of the greatest advancements in food safety, but idiots like Bobby Brainworm and the rest of the "natural food" crowd have told themselves otherwise.

If you buy into his garbage pseudo-science and someone in your family becomes seriously ill or dies, look to the dictionary if you seek sympathy. You'll find it listed between shit and syphilis.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told supporters on Monday that former President Donald Trump has promised to give him “control” of several public health agencies, including the US Department of Health and Human Services and the US Department of Agriculture, if he wins a second term in November.

Kennedy, who suspended his independent presidential campaign in August and endorsed Trump, said during a livestreamed organizing event that Trump told him he’d oversee a vast public health portfolio if the former president returns to the White House, and added that he’d prioritize his agenda for “making America healthy.”

“The key that I think I’m – you know, that President Trump has promised me is – is control of the public health agencies, which are HHS and its sub-agencies, CDC, FDA, NIH and a few others, and then also the USDA, which is – which, you know, is key to making America healthy. Because we’ve got to get off of seed oils, and we’ve got to get off of pesticide intensive agriculture,” Kennedy said, according to video of the event obtained by CNN.

Right, Good Ol' Bobby Brainworm is going to oversee health researchers. That will end well. He's been floating around the Felonious Celeb for seven years.

Meanwhile, Widdle Elon is promising hard times for most Americans if Trump wins, but you can bet the contracts for SpaceX won't feel a tremor.

RFK, Jr., a nasty piece of work, antivaxxer and addle-pated conspiracy theorist, who now blames COVID-19 on the Jews.

Scratch a COVID conspiracy theorist and you'll find a Nazi.

H/T

Several years ago, I stood at my stainless steel autopsy table staring at a tiny bundle swaddled in white cotton. I had never performed an autopsy on a baby before.

Medical records indicated the 4-month-old died after 30 hours of fever and excruciating abdominal pain. She had vomited continuously, curled her knees up and screamed. Hers was not the impatient cry of hunger, discomfort, loneliness or fatigue. It was a howl of distress.
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I found the cause of her desperate cries: pancreatitis.

The condition was caused by a bacterium known as Haemophilus, type B (HiB), once a common threat to children. The epidemic stopped abruptly after 1985, when two American physicians patented an immunization for HiB. By 1987, the HiB vaccine was approved for use in all age groups. Cases of Haemophilus infection in children in the United States dropped precipitously in just a few years, from more than 20,000 cases before the vaccine to just 29 cases in 2006. Deaths now occur almost exclusively among unvaccinated children.
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The loving parents of the baby on my table, well-educated and well-meaning, had chosen not to immunize her. Had they succumbed to the Internet hype that immunizations cause autism? Had they ever heard of Haemophilus?

Many parents are too young to remember when young children died from measles, polio, smallpox, strep throat and influenza. They don’t remember when there was nothing that anyone could do about it except sit and watch. When the polio vaccine first appeared, mothers dragged their children to the public health clinic and stood in lines around the block to get them immunized. Before the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, pregnant women infected with rubella would invariably deliver horribly disabled and disfigured babies. Many children still die from measles; they are almost exclusively unvaccinated.

The death of that child is the moral responsibility of all of those idiots who have been banging the antivaxx drum.



One might also ask if the self-styled "pro-life" crowd is going to weigh in on the importance of having children vaccinated. But I'll bet not. Their concern about life ends when the subjects of their concerns begin breathing air.

“Death rates are so high in the States — eye-wateringly high,” said Devi Sridhar, head of the global public health program at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, who has supported loosening coronavirus rules in parts of Britain. “The United States is lagging.”

Some of the reasons for America’s difficulties are well known. Despite having one of the world’s most powerful arsenals of vaccines, the country has failed to vaccinate as many people as other large, wealthy nations. Crucially, vaccination rates in older people also lag behind certain European nations.

The United States has fallen even further behind in administering booster shots, leaving large numbers of vulnerable people with fading protection as Omicron sweeps across the country.
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The only large European countries to exceed America’s Covid death rates this winter have been Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Greece and the Czech Republic, poorer nations where the best Covid treatments are relatively scarce.

The article goes on to point out that, in the U.S., 12% of Americans over 65 are not vaccinated and 43% have not had a booster shot. In England, those percentages are 4% and 9%, respectively.

While there are a number of reasons for this to be so, one of the most glaringly obvious is that the Right has spent many decades posioning the well of common good. From Reagan and Norquist, through Gingrich and to almost every republican in Congress today, their constant mantra has been that gummint can do nothing. So when we get into a situation where a coordinated nationwide response is needed, conservatives just throw hissy fits, following the lead of Donnie Dorko and Fox News, or because they're consuming Russian propaganda on FB.

They spread their disinformation, their lies, and as a result, tens of thousands, if not more, Americans have died from a preventable disease. This pandemic has exposed the Right for what it is and has been for generations, a soulless, misanthropic, narcissistic ideology,[1] an ideology that turns its back from people in trouble and would stomp kittens if it could. If there was an elderly widow down the street who couldn't get out of her house because of a snowstorm, modern conservatives would say that it was her fault for not being able to hire a plowing company.

This clip was once comedic, but it embodies the modern Right:


The modern motto for conservatives is "Ubi Est Mea", essentially, "what's in it for me?" From vaccines to repairing roads and bridges, conservatives are of the "let them all die, it doesn't affect me" mindset. And G-d help them if they veer, even for a second, from the approved ideology of fealty to the Slob Father.
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[1] Their current push to protect the emotional fragility of white people has also exposed their foundations of a near-Nazi like belief in white supremacy.

A leading QAnon promoter who urged both her followers and strangers she passed on the street not to take the COVID vaccine died Thursday of the coronavirus, making her just the latest vaccine opponent killed by the disease.

Cirsten Weldon had amassed tens of thousands of followers across right-wing social media networks by promoting the pro-Trump QAnon conspiracy under the screenname “CirstenW.” She was prominent enough to become a sort of QAnon interpreter for comedian conspiracy theorist Roseanne Barr, and started recording videos about QAnon with her.

Weldon focused on attacking vaccines and other efforts to fight COVID-19, saying in one video that Dr. Anthony Fauci “needs to be hung from a rope.” She claimed the vaccine killed people, and even recorded herself yelling at people standing in line to receive vaccines.

“The vaccines kill, don’t get it!” Weldon warned the waiting vaccine recipients in an undated video posted to one of her online accounts. “This is how gullible these idiots are. They’re all getting vaccine!”

In late December, however, Weldon started showing symptoms of coronavirus infection. In her last video, posted on Dec. 28, Weldon struggled through her remarks about the coming overthrow of the United States government, coughing and complaining that she was exhausted.

Three days later, Weldon was hospitalized in Camarillo, California. She posted a picture of herself wearing an oxygen mask to Instagram and claimed she had “bacterial pneumonia.” Weldon wrote in a post on the social media network Telegram that she refused to take coronavirus treatment remdesivir, calling it “Dr Fauci’s Resmedervir (sic).”

As the article goes on to set out, a fair number of prominent QAnon idiots are dying of Covid and, of course, to those wet-brains, that's just proof of a conspiracy. Those fuckers are threatening violence against the doctors and nurses for not giving their patients the Q-approved crackpot treatment du jour. The relevant authorities need to be keeping an eye on these morons and administer treatments of sedatives or lead, as needed.

Royal Caribbean International said Wednesday that 55 passengers and crew tested positive for the coronavirus on a cruise, just days after revealing 48 people on another ship were involved in an outbreak.

The latest ship, Odyssey of the Seas, will skip its scheduled stops in Curaçao and Aruba on the eight-night Christmas voyage.

There's no telling if any of the "fully vaccinated" passengers or crew had forged vaccine cards, or if these are all breaktrough infections.

Anyway, it should be clear by now that even if you are so done with Covid-19, the virus isn't quite done with you. Going into a somewhat confined environment with a few thousand other people for days on end is a fairly foolish thing to do.

State Senator Doug Ericksen, a Republican who had led efforts to oppose Washington State’s Covid-19 emergency orders and vaccine mandates, has died after his own battle with the illness. He was 52.

There's no word as to whether or not he was vaccinated, but the signs point to "no".

Meanwhile, the Orange Demi-God that he worshipped has gotten his booster shot, much to the displeasure of his adherents. Of course, he got it off-camera, because he's a vain douchebag (and because it'd upset his base of QAnon-espousing dimwits).