The Tennessee Department of Health will end its vaccine outreach efforts to teens for all vaccines, not just for the COVID-19 shots, as state Republicans attack those programs and threaten to shut down the department entirely.
The only good thing is that they don’t know when to leave well enough alone and there will reach a point at which even most of the sleepy uninformed folks wake up and say, whaaaa???
Because children dying of preventable diseases is preferable to vaccinating them? Children die as a result of measles, meningitis, pertussis and polio. Politicians in Tennessee have lost their minds. This is insanity.
So, Tennessee’s GQP is in a hurry to make their state into a colonial possession from the 1920s: polio, smallpox, pellagra and, for the exotic flavor, they’ll import Guinea worm (“Take that, Jimmy Carter!”)
I suppose it’s to create a favorable business climate.
How many days or weeks until the TN state lege puts a gag order on doctors, nurses and other staff that work in Community Health Centers from discussing vaccines, all of them?
Is anybody else getting a whiff of anti-choice tactics bubbling up?
Also how many of the legislators have a medical degree?
Lemme guess – these GOPers probably would have nominated her for some kind of prize if her initiative had been to give free guns to every teenager in the state.
After the ACA was enacted, Republicans-led states played politics with the health of their citizens by refusing to expand Medicaid or establish their marketplaces.
Nationally, they urged young adults to “burn their Obamacare cards” in protest, and killed funding for nonprofit insurers.
Then Trump cut funding for ACA advertising by 90 percent, shortened the open enrollment period, sabotaged the program in multiples ways, and joined a lawsuit to repeal the law.
And last year, after downplaying and politicizing the coronavirus threat, Trump took to hijacking daily press conferences to contradict recognized medical experts, insult journalists and political opponents, and hawk unproven and dangerous “miracle cures” like some deranged late-night infomercial pitchman as a dangerous pandemic mercilessly raged on to kill hundreds of thousands of Americans.
“The GOP lawmakers have been attacking the department’s push to get minors vaccinated recently, with state Rep. Scott Cepicky ® even suggesting during a hearing last month that the entire agency be dissolved.”
So defund the health department is their campaign slogan?
Let’s face it…healthcare in America has been politicized since the inception of Medicare…but it started taking steroids when Hillary proposed her healthcare program back in the 90s.
ETA: We are just living through the result of decades of the GOP infection.
Back in 2016, a couple of days after the election, I remember some pundit said that the election of Trump would accelerate the differentiation between the blue states and the red states. The blue states would become increasingly better places to live, and the red states would race to the bottom.
I’ve seen no evidence he was wrong.
Further case in point: VT and SD currently have about the same COVID infection rates, a low number. But SD got to this point by having a mortality rate per capita 5x as high as Vermont’s.