Amidst right-wing fury over a state official’s memo about vaccinating children, Tennessee public health officials have been ordered to cease all communications with young people about vaccines — a move that experts told TPM will exacerbate the impact of COVID-19 and other communicable diseases.
There’s a straight line from McCain’s desperate, stupid, characteristically reckless decision to pick Palin and this moment.
“Why would you want to stop something that prevents cancer?” Benjamin asked. “That’s the most idiotic thing I’ve ever heard.”
Second most idiotic thing. By far the most idiotic thing I’ve ever heard is that, if we don’t do things to (supposedly) enable teenage sex, like HPV vaccines or sex ed, then teenagers won’t have sex.
Has anyone tried reverse psychology on these people? They already think that there’s a complicated plan in place working against them. Play into that. No vaccine and…
You get Covid and die? - Great, that just plays into the libs’ hand of helping shore up Social Security since you won’t be needing your contributions anymore.
You get Covid and live? - Great, you’ll be relying on Obamacare now that you have a pre-existing condition.
Your family member or neighbor gets Covid and dies? - Great, an immigrant can now move in to their old house. And not the white kind.
That would still require some level of logical reasoning on their part and they’ve clearly abandoned logic wholly and completely. I doubt you would get the desired or expected reaction. It might turn them into full-on preppers or go postal or who knows what.
> Without the Tennessee Department of Health providing much-needed education on vaccines, “these kids will die,” Dr. Georges Benjamin, the executive director of the American Public Health Association (APHA), told TPM in a phone interview. “Too many Tennessean kids will die.”
I wish I could say I was shocked or even a bit surprised, but conservatives already worship at the altar of guns and ammunition at the expense of their own children, so this is just par for the course. Their ideology is a disease that’s infected far too many Americans, and unlike Covid, has no known vaccine or cure.
Mom regrets not getting her 13-year-old vaccinated
Excerpt:
She said the hardest part about watching her child suffer is that the entire thing was preventable.
“It’s very hard to see her in this situation. It’s very hard not knowing if she’s really going to come home anymore or not,” Morris said. “It’s heartbreaking. I wish I would’ve made better choices for her.”
I used to work with a guy who got his daughter on the pill at 14, and some of the people we worked with were aghast and told him How Dare You, now she’s going to have SEX. He replied that he married his daughter’s mother when he was 17 and she was 16 because she got pregnant, and he wanted his daughter to choose her husband and not be forced to marry just because she got knocked up.
There most certainly is. I don’t think we talk about it enough.
I will, and often do, assert that this line also passes right through the 2010 midterms, when petulant lefties decided to stay home because Obamacare wasn’t single payer.
Or as someone said in response to fear-mongering about condoms making teenage boys think about sex:
“If you show a socket wrench to a teenage boy, it’ll make him think about sex.”
Time to tell the Reichwing Nazi Rethuglickers to fuck off! Do your job and protect the children. The crazy shit has gone way to far.
Enough!
Sometimes I wonder who votes for these people, but then I read the comments online, and I understand.
The next step is to criminalize informing a minor about the vaccine.
Just forbid them vaccine. Only blue states get vaccine. They will crawl through the broken doorglass of the Capitol to get a shot.
Two boys were talking about their sex education class and one said he couldn’t believe that 12 out of 16 hours of a teenage boys thoughts were about sex. The other boy said, “I wonder what we think about the other 4 hours?”
You can’t blame petulant lefties when no attempt by the party was made to sell it to them. The Obama WH made the conscious decision to be above politics to all of our detriment. The party passed healthcare reform and then immediately ran away from it like it was a mistake. I don’t think he’d make that mistake in hindsight.
One of the things that has caught me a bit by surprise is how much GQP antics have radicalized the basically apolitical workers and experts who make up the bulk of the everyday civil society that makes our country function. Everybody from poll workers to state health directors have faced the irrational wrath of the conservative rage machine for basically doing their jobs helping their fellow Americans regardless of political persuasion. After four years of Trump and 1.5 years of the pandemic, these workers are no longer withholding their criticism. Case in point:
Without the Tennessee Department of Health providing much-needed education on vaccines, “these kids will die,” Dr. Georges Benjamin, the executive director of the American Public Health Association (APHA), told TPM in a phone interview. “Too many Tennessean kids will die.”
I don’t think you would hear this stated so bluntly by the APHA before Trump. However, it needs to be stated this way if we are to escape from our national GQP nightmare.
Oh, I don’t know, aside from her inability to form a complete sentence, was she really that much dumber than Quayle? What I found more appalling was the accomodations made for her in the media. No professional stood up and loudly said “English, motherfucker. Do you speak it?”
Eye-opening to see how second-rate politicians are willing to sacrifice the children of Tennessee on the altar of the GOP.
Shutting down outreach to minors? Hell in TX if you are not 18 you can’t get the vaccine without the parents consent.