Politicizing Public Health

trend that is taking place now across the country. And no, I'm not just talking about COVID nineteen and the pandemic, but I'm talking about the reaction and response to doctors and health officials scientists that are taking part in meetings at school boards right in order to decide whether or not schools across the country should have a mask mandate. Now we know we've been talking about this for quite

some time. Ronda Satan's response to that is that he's going to find superintendence, He's going to doc pay of teachers, and they can see other financial retribution that he wants to have against them for trying to protect children in the classroom. The thing that I want folks to understand two right now is this, Ronda Santis, just like Donald fucking Trump, is not a goddamn doctor. He is not

a medical professional at all. And so the idea that we are in this place where his state is a hot zone where Republicans are totally okay that there is currently right now an increase of somewhere of twenty percent of infections of children, and that is before the school year actually kicks off. That we are having more and more conversations about how sick kids are getting, how young they are when they are getting sick, how prolonged the

sickness is. Is that essentially Republicans have said to the American people that your children are expendable. What I find laughable right now is how when we were talking about same sex marriage, let's say, back in twenty fifteen, when it passed and cleared the Supreme Court, everything with Republicans and white evangelical Christians was about what about the kids? And we can't talk about this in the schools, and

what about the kids? Right? But when it comes to you actually keeping your kids safe from illness, prolonged illness, or potential death, they're like, rip the masks off, liberate

your children. You're a socialist. So here's the thing. This is what is really troubling me right now, and I want to bring it to your attention because it is a story that I said I had to read twice and it is out of media, and it's this picture folks, when I tell you, if you look at this, it is video of angry parents harassing doctors and nurses that we're taking part in a school board meeting in Tennessee,

and this is what media reports. The school district of Franklin, Tennessee, was the site of major tension on Tuesday, when anti mask demonstrators concluded a day of protests by sending an ominous message to medical professionals encouraging mask mandates. The Williamson County School Board held a four hour meeting with doctors and parents to discuss the implementation of a requirement for students, staff and visitors to wear masks inside the elementary school

buildings and on buses. So, folks, I want to start with this, first of all, the fact that the media has decided that this is a two sided debate when it should not be. It's either you don't want to die and you don't want your children to die, or you do right. And what is frustrating to me about the same logic that these people, these anti maskers, anti vaxers are imposing on the rest of us, is that

here's the thing. These are the same type of tactics and bullshit and threatening and harassing that these people have had against abortion providers. Except here's a thing. My choice to get an abortion does not affect my neighbor. My choice not to get a vaccine for a incredibly contagious

virus puts everyone in my community at risk. Now, particularly elementary school children are under the age of the vaccine definition of those that are safe to get vaccinated twelve and up right, which is middle school and up so elementary school, while we have not during the first iteration of COVID nineteen, and I want people to understand that because when we were talking about infection rates for children and whether or not they get sick, we were talking

about the alpha variant of COVID nineteen. We are no longer there, folks. We have moved on in the Greek alphabet. We are now at delta plus, and so de Satan and Abbott and other stupid Republican governors are operating off of a set of also alternative facts because they're not actually facts, but they're basing their thoughts off of what

we knew with Alpha. Delta plus is also mutating, and there is Lambda that is also around and has been detected in the United States and so when you have elementary school administrators, teachers principles that are saying, we want to keep everyone safe. Whether or not you are vaccinated or not does not matter. What we know is that masks work, right. And so here we have these group

of people who are protesting folks. And if you pull up go to media, and if you pull up the pictures and the videos of this, the sea of white people screaming and spouting droplets from their mouth with no mask and don't mask my children, I felt scared. I feel scared for the people that are living in these red states. I feel scared for these doctors and these administrators that are just trying to do their jobs because you know what is going to happen, and we keep

talking about this with our friend doctor Jonathan Metzel. What is going to happen is that come mid October, a couple of weeks removed from the beginning of school, we are going to see mass hospitalizations and sickness of children that are ages twelve and below, if not all kids

in general. But what Republicans are basically saying is that your children are expendable and that they are willing to accept a certain amount of death a certain amount of severe illness, so long as they can purport liberty, right, that's where they are. And so I wonder how far are we willing to go down this horribly dangerous, toxic

rabbit hole, because what did I report yesterday? Governor Abbott has now called for health professionals from around the country to come in to fucking Texas to help out with their surge of COVID that that motherfucker caused, right, And so people are like, well, it's not the people of Texas's fault, it's their governor. And I'm like, how did he become governor? They voted him in? And so if I'm a healthcare professional, no, no, no, I'm not going

to the front lines of your fuckery. You deal with it, right, you set this up, you deal with it. These are your constituents that are going to die. These are your families that are going to be broken apart and devastated, and they are going to look to you and say, why didn't you warn us, Why didn't you tell us? So after peddling this type of non science based political bullshit for the past year and a half, this is

where folks will end up. I don't know how you stay in office when your constituents are dead, But I guess we will find out. So at this meeting, continuing with the media, they say this. The chaos continued all the way into the evening, with footage showing that medical officials left the meeting and were harangued by the anti mass crowd in the parking lot. I don't like the word harangued. I think it's stupid. They were harassed, they were threatened, they were tormented, right, And do you know

what's worse, folks, let me tell you this. Fucking police were present. Police were present while these health professionals were being harassed and threatened, and they did nothing. Why because cops don't do shit when white people act up, they do absolutely fucking nothing. And so these people now they went to the school board because they want to try and reason with these people, because you went into a profession that is about health and healing and helping people.

So you think we used to right If you remember last year, at this time, we were clapping and applauding and playing violins and doing dances for healthcare professionals that were risking their lives to save us. This is what the fuck we have devolved into now a year later, Right,

this is what our politics has done. This is what media who wants to present the mask issue as an issue as if it is not basically, oh, I don't know, a kind of terrorist attack if you really think about it, right, if you really think about the way in which these people are operating, They're not operating like regular anti vax there's no They are becoming more organized, they are becoming angrier, they are becoming a lot more vicious, and they are

moving and operating like a lynching mob, right, like a group of domestic terrorists with cells all around the fucking country. That's how we need to be talking about these people, because where we are is serious. Now here's another article that folks, I am deeply concerned, deeply worried about, and have been asking this question for a while on this show. I'm not sure about whether or not what the CDC

is offering is actually one hundred percent the truth. And I say that not because I am obviously not a Trumper, and not because I don't believe in science, but I believe that things have become so politicized, right that we are so broken that the CDC as a way to ensure that more people get vaccinated, are not providing us with the kind of information that we need, Just as in June it was you're vaccinated, take your mask off. And I remember when that guidance came out and I said,

I think that this is a terrible idea. I think that people have gotten used to masks, that they are operating in a way that is keeping people safe, and that whether or not you're vaccinated should not have stopped people from wearing masks in public, in indoor facilities at all.

But when you tell people to take them off and then three weeks later tell them to put them back on because we have more information, that is dumb, right, because you allowed people to have this false sense of security that they were free and clear, knowing that you

needed actually to have more information. So we should have been working through our vaccinations with the same social distancing and masking as researchers were understanding and learning more about how these variants are moving and how the vaccination is moving. And so in another article, and this time in New York magazine, it is this, too many people are dying right now. It's hard to look at these indicators and feel at all optimistic, says scientists Eric Toppel. This article

is terrifying. And why is that? It is because Eric Toppel, scientist is stating that he believes that the breakthrough infection rate with the vaccine is a lot higher than what the CDC is offering to the public. Now, we can all say that in the climate that we are currently in, this type of information becomes readily available. The anti vaxxer, an anti mass, stupid fucking group of people will then use this to say, well, see, we knew that the vaccine wasn't going to work, so there's no reason to

get it. But here's the thing, folks, you're not going to die. I have known right now, and I know I was feeling this until I saw this report that the breakthrough is higher than it's being reported. And I will state this. Why is that Because a majority, I would say, ninety eight percent of my friends and family are all vaccinated. However, three of my small circle of friends contracted COVID after being one hundred percent vaccinated outside of the two week window of the second shot they

caught COVID. Two of them were completely fine, no symptoms at all. One of them actually had a really bad cold, Like he indicated to me a really bad flu that knocked him out. But did he end up in the hospital. No? Is he attached to the ventilator? No is he able to now like continue on with work after a couple of days of being sick. Yeah. Absolutely, So the vaccine does work. The vaccine does not stop us from getting COVID. The vaccine does not stop us potentially from falling ill.

But what it is stopping is us from dying at the rates that we were dying pre vaccination. What it does stop is the anxiety that we may lose somebody that we love and care about. I would rather catch COVID now being fully vaccinated and have a really bad cold, right than the possibility of losing my life or somebody that I care about. And so in this article, it's important for us to understand what is being said. So

I will read this. The US numbers are a bit wobbly these days, and there are huge variations state to state, reflecting disparities in vaccination rates, among other things. But at the national level, at least for the moment, the reduction of mortality risks seemed to be considerably smaller. In the worst of this winter surge, the country was registering, remember this, two hundred and fifty thousand new cases per day. That is where we were at its peak. That surge was killing.

If you remember, three thousand Americans a day, we were having a nine eleven every single day last winter. Three thousand people died in nine to eleven, and we rallied as a fucking country against the quote unquote enemy. But here we are where we had three thousand people dying a day, and we were becoming more divided than ever because of the bullshit leadership that we had. He goes

on to write this. Today we have a bit more than a hundred thousand new cases each day, though the numbers are still rising as part of the delta wave. If we had reduced mortality risk by seventy five percent, that would mean about three hundred daily deaths. If we had reduced it by ninety percent, it would mean one hundred and twenty. Instead, in our seven day average, we just passed five hundred. Things may be even worse than that, though.

In general, epidemiologists expect a lag of a week or two, perhaps more between case peaks and death peaks. Essentially the time it takes for a new case to progress through

the full course of the disease. Early in the pandemic, the lag was a bit longer, though in the US during the winter surge, the gap between peaks was less than one week, and comparing case data from even one week ago with today's death data reveals an even grimmer pitcher folks listen to this about seventy five thousand cases per day, then, yielding the current average of five hundred deaths, suggesting the mortality rate had fallen by less than half

since winter. If you work from two week old data, it suggests that the mortality rate had hardly fallen at all. Applying the winter ratio to the caseload from July twenty fourth would predict an average of six hundred daily deaths. On Friday, they were seven hundred and sixty three. The picture that this article is painting and this scientist is painting is telling us this, folks, we are not at the end of this pandemic. We are not post COVID as the media so readily wanted to celebrate, as New

York's concert wanted to celebrate, Oh We're back. No, folks, we are not. We have been fed a false sense of security. The reality is this, people need to get vaccinated. Folks that are not vaccinated need to get vaccinated. Even with your vaccination, you need to be wearing a mask in public in an indoor spaces. Why, because we are mutating on top of ourselves. And what we are learning right, which is why I use the phrase needing to be

intellectually nimble. Right, what we are learning is that even if you are vaccinated, you can pass the virus through you to other people. Right. You may not even know because you may be one of the folks that is showing no symptoms. But the fact is is that if it is being passed on there means that there is still an ample amount of virus that is present, which means that it still has the ability to mutate on

top of itself. As soon as we heard about the delta variant a month or two, a month and a half ago, we are now at delta plus right, and it's becoming more and more rapid, right because the virus is getting smarter and smarter, while we hear humans are getting stupider and stupider. That is it for today's Woke, a f daily podcast to hear more from me including five full hour long shows every single week, exclusive guests, interviews, and more. Support me on Patreon at patreon dot com.

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