Yahoo Finance Common Sense Has Left the Building
On the electric Twitter machine, the kidz have this “Shot…Chaser” meme thing that seems to be wildly popular. Last week, and you may have seen the video on the Intertoobz, a meeting of the county council of St. Louis County was set to discuss a new mask mandate for indoor public places and all public transportation. (As is the case generally in Missouri, Covid cases are spiking toward February levels again.) An obstreperous mob of ginned-up chronic cases made something of a shambles of the meeting, and it got even worse outside the meeting room. From the Washington Post:
When he made it through the door, the St. Louis County Department of Health’s acting director said things got worse. Khan was surrounded by an “angry mob,” he said, and called an expletive and a brown b-----d. Others mocked his accent. “It was the saddest, most bizarre and disgusting thing that I've ever witnessed in my 30 years in public health,” he told The Washington Post on Wednesday night. “I would hope that even the community members who were in attendance to speak out about and oppose the mask mandate would be shocked at the behavior of some people in the crowd.” Khan on Wednesday wrote a letter to Rita Days (D), the council chairwoman, describing the shock and disappointment he felt over the treatment he faced. “After being physically assaulted, called racist slurs, and surrounded by an angry mob, I expressed my displeasure by using my middle finger toward an individual who had physically threatened me and called me racist slurs,” he wrote.
I’m with him, actually. Anyway, as the kids would say, that’s the shot. This, inevitably is the chaser, also from the WaPo:
The City of St. Louis Department of Health said it is trying to identify anyone who had close contact with the infected person and urged everyone who attended the council meeting to quarantine for nine days and look out for possible COVID-19 symptoms. “The DOH is continuing its contact tracing investigation into this case and encourages those who have not received a COVID-19 vaccine to get vaccinated,” Fredrick Echols, acting director of health for the City of St. Louis, said in a statement on Saturday. “It is the best tool we have to prevent severe COVID-19 complications, including death.”
Yeah, good luck with that, although it may be finally dawning on these people that death is an unacceptable alternative to whatever they believe their newly acquired expertise in virology to be.
Vaccine hesitancy has been an entrenched problem in Missouri, where about 57 percent of the eligible population older than 12 has received at least one dose of the vaccine, according to an analysis from The Washington Post. But recent spikes in hospitalizations led to a 49 percent increase in people seeking the vaccine.
It’s a start, I guess, if death starts to scare people again.
I wonder, again, what it would be like if Covid were an even more serious contagious disease, one with a quick incubation period that came upon us all at once. What would our reaction be? The Ebola precedent from 2014 is not at all promising. Politicians started screaming about blocking immigration from anywhere except (possibly) the next block. Particularly hysterical were the prospective Republican candidates for president in 2016. Chris Christie, then the governor of New Jersey, took it upon himself to force a nurse from Maine into quarantine in the Newark airport because she’d been working in Sierra Leone. (The nurse, Kaci Hickok, sued Christie and won a settlement.) And a goofy vanity candidate from Manhattan was particularly, well, virulent. Curated here by Vox:
Trump’s first tweet about Ebola came on July 31, 2014 — the day before a State Department flying ambulance brought two American health workers back to Emory University, home of the CDC, from Monrovia, where they had contracted the virus. “Ebola patient will be brought to the U.S. in a few days - now I know for sure that our leaders are incompetent. KEEP THEM OUT OF HERE!” Trump wrote. Ebola patient will be brought to the U.S. in a few days - now I know for sure that our leaders are incompetent. KEEP THEM OUT OF HERE!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 1, 2014
The next day, Trump demanded that the health workers not be brought back to the US — “Stop the EBOLA patients from entering the U.S. Treat them, at the highest level, over there. THE UNITED STATES HAS ENOUGH PROBLEMS!” he wrote — and followed that up by insisting that they “must suffer the consequences” for going to Africa in the first place.The U.S. cannot allow EBOLA infected people back. People that go to far away places to help out are great-but must suffer the consequences!
This pandemic turns what has been the historical reaction of the country to epidemic disease squarely on its head. Previously, through the years, the panic has been driven by a fear of getting the disease. In 1873, during a massive yellow fever outbreak in Memphis, roadblocks were set up around the city to keep the residents in. Five years later, during another outbreak, the disease got loose from New Orleans and cut a huge swath through Memphis and the Mississippi Delta. In the town of Grenada, Mississippi, the mayor refused to engage a quarantine and the disease completely decapitated the city’s government, killing the sheriff, all the aldermen, and, yes, the mayor himself.
Now, though, we have a national panic over the cure, not the disease. And, yes, a lot of it has been energized for political reasons, especially in the U.S. House of Representatives, where the Republican caucus seems to be acting out a summer-stock production of The Masque of the Red Death. But it runs deeper than that. In those previous epidemics, there were quack cures and a distrust of conventional medicine, but it was nothing like this, if only because it’s not 18-goddamn-78 any more. We have more than a century of experience to draw on regarding the efficacy of vaccines. We have been a resolutely vaccinated population for decades. It has been part of our lives almost from birth. But there is in the country some sort of strange concept of individuality that has come to the surface to cripple not only our response to this pandemic, but also our collective common sense.
In related news, don’t take dewormers meant for livestock, OK? That’s just stupid. And, for the love of the living god, don’t listen to Senator Tom Cotton, the bobble-throated slapstick from Arkansas, because, if you do, you might hear something like this, from Fox News (via Mediaite):
Let me say, nobody elected the CDC. Nobody elected Tony Fauci to make these decisions. Advisers advise, elected officials decide. And the American people elected Joe Biden and the members of Congress and our governors and state legislatures to make these decisions for us. If you just turn these decisions over to a bunch of public health bureaucrats, of course the only thing they’re gonna consider is what they think is in the best interest of public health.
Bob’s right. It really is a wonder we can even feed ourselves.
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