Call it Covid Karma. Republican governors of several states who have pooh-poohed the pandemic and refused to address it aggressively are now seeing their states turn into vast petri dishes for cultivating the Delta Variant.
GOP governors implored their residents on Sunday to get vaccinated against the coronavirus, as polling shows that vaccine hesitancy has been driven by Republicans and as the virus’s new, more contagious delta variant has caused recent upticks in covid-19 cases in areas with low vaccination rates.
Here is Missouri, the utterly worthless governor Mike Parson has all along refused to issue any sort of mandate to wear masks in public. For a short time last spring there were limits on the number of people who could be inside a business, but that didn’t last long. Througout the pandemic there has been tension between the cities, Kansas City and St. Louis, and the Parson administration over Covid restrictions. Our excessively worthless attorney general Eric Schmitt at one point filed a lawsuit against St. Louis County for its “overreach” on mask mandates and limits on social gatherings, all of which followed CDC guidelines. On June 15 Parson himself signed a law that put limits on the ability of county health agencies to enforce any kind of pandemic restriction unless the governor has declared a state of emergency. He also has banned any publicly funded entity from using vaccine passports or requiring proof of vaccination.
But now I see the state has asked the White House for help with the Delta variant.
The state reached out to the Biden Administration only hours after the White House announced that it was creating “surge response teams” to help states contain outbreaks fueled by the new variant and low inoculation rates.
In the past two weeks, the daily number of reported cases in Missouri has more than doubled, and hospitalizations have increased 20 percent, though the figures remain a fraction of their November peak, according to a New York Times database.
The spike has been especially pronounced in the southwestern part of the state, which is home to tourist destinations like Branson and the Lake of the Ozarks, and where several hospitals recently had to move about a dozen Covid patients to other facilities because of staffing and capacity issues. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates based on genomic testing put the prevalence of Delta cases in the state at nearly 30 percent.
The Branson/Lake of the Ozarks area is some distance from where I’m living. It’s an area set up for tourism because it’s not much good for anything else. It’s some distance from cities and you can’t farm it, but you can book, um, entertainment. It’s like redneck Las Vegas, but with no gambling. And as I wrote last year, Branson closed briefly but, with the governor’s encouragement, reopened in May 2020 and stayed open.
And now it’s a Delta variant hotspot. Big surprise.
At the New York Times, Giovanni Russonello writes that Republican governors all along have been more concerned about “enshrining the right to refuse a vaccine” than in public safety. In some cases, governors have just been plain ridiculous; for example, Gov. DeSantis of Florida won’t let the cruise industry require proof of vaccinations for passengers. The cruise industry, not unreasonably, believes that will make it harder to get passengers back on their boats. Ironically, in carrying out his opposition to government interference in business, DeSantis is interfering in business.
So we’ve got parts of the country — mostly Republican, mostly rural — lagging way behind in vaccination rates, and it’s expected there will be dense outbreaks of the Delta variant in those parts in the weeks and months to come. Thanks, wingnuts. We could be pretty much done with the bleeping pandemic were it not for you.
I'm finding it more and more difficult to feel any empathy for the people in this country who despise empathy – and hate the people who have empathy, and who actually show it.
People like me: A guy whose girlfriends refused to watch an opera or "chick-flick" with, because I cry at the opening credits (or the overture in opera's).
But you know, I believe this old adage applies: "You reap what you sow."
I'm not feeling sorry for the anti-vax gang.
And I'm not sorry about not feeling the least bit sorry.
Does this make me a bad person?
If it does, I can live with it.
NO!
They reap what they sow.
They deserve pity not empathy.
This is so symptomatic of how antisocial and ignorant we as a nation have become.
In Jacobson v. Massachusetts, a decision from 1905, the Supreme Court recognized what any damn fool knew if they thought for two seconds: When there is a public health emergency, local and state governments have not only the right but the duty to demand compliance with measures put in place to protect the citizenry. In Jacobson, the issue was the state's right to require mandatory vaccination. The Court had no difficulty finding this to be well within the scope of the government's powers. Because who wants to die, right?
Today, outraged RWNJs claim "constitutional" rights found nowhere in that document. And Republican-rigged courts rule that attendance at in-person religious services, normally and uncontroversially protected activity under the First Amendment, trumps protection of human life during an epidemic. This is selfishness run amok under the guise of "precious constitutional liberty". This is rule by babies.
This is how a nation can die. By suicide.
This is rule by babies.
Indeed it is:
Isaiah 3:4-5 And I will give children to be their princes, and babes shall rule over them. And the people shall be oppressed, every one by another, and every one by his neighbour: the child shall behave himself proudly against the ancient, and the base against the honourable.
'Tis our lot.
Ok, maybe I do feel a bit of empathy for…
NO! Stop it! I won't do it!!!
Even the poorest and dumbest can reach out to find out THE truth – and not fall in line behind their group's "truth."
Sounds like the Kool Aide is starting to wear off…
Or as Bart Simpson said: "Homer says Branson is like Vegas if it was run by Ned Flanders."
Full disclosure: I live about 90 miles from Branson. It is a seriously weird place. Even the sainted Dolly Parton has an attraction there; it's a dinner theater called the Stampede, but it used to be called Dixie Stampede and referred to the Civil War as "a misunderstanding among family". The theaters are cheesy, but they do allow a lot of great musicians to make a living playing music whilst having time for their own projects. Friend of mine said Mickey Gilley was the best boss he ever had; show up on time, know your part, and don't be drunk or high and you were gold with Gilley.
The state reached out to the Biden Administration only hours after the White House announced that it was creating “surge response teams” to help states contain outbreaks fueled by the new variant and low inoculation rates.
Having cast themselves as patriots for their willful disregard of recommendations and just plain common sense when it comes to controlling the spread of the virus, I wonder what form they expect help from the deep-state response teams to take. Funds with no strings attached? Providing funding to a state wherein the governor has thus far not only just refused to issue mask mandates, but has also mandated that its citizens not be required to wear them, while discouraging business not require customers/employees show proof of vaccination. They've also turned the vaccine into yet another own the libs opportunity rather than promote it as a solution to a public health issue. Masks and social distancing have proven to be effective in slowing spread of the virus, but given the deep hole of stupid on masks and the virus the governor has plunged into, how can he plausibly reverse course and require masks?
Giving these states funding would essentially be throwing good money after bad, without requiring them to issue mask mandates as a condition.
Interesting how disaster with political ramifications hitting close to home has a way of bringing the willfully delusional back to reality.
Empathy shempathy. The fewer the Repuglicans the better.
It always come down to The Grasshopper and The Ant, and every god damned time the Democrats have to clean up the Republicans' mess. I never understood why The Ant never invited The Grasshopper in and had roast grasshopper and to hell with him the loser next year.
According to an article I read today, 99% of Covid fatalities are non-vaxed patients.
That's just a start. There's no evidence that people who contracted Covid once are immune. (There's some evidence to the contrary, but not enough info to make a statistical projection.) There's some evidence that the new variants are more dangerous than the first version. There's EVERY reason to expect more variants because the fools insist on rejecting medical facts.
In the early days of AIDS, it was called the 'gay disease' because it targeted homosexual males – at first. The variant that leaped to women changed some minds about developing treatments. I'm not sure ANY event will change a lot of minds among true believers.
Here's where the future of Covid diverges from the history of AIDS. Covid won't be brought under control except by Darwinian herd immunity. When the survivors develop natural resistance from repeated exposure that doesn't kill them, they'll stamp out Covid 'naturally' with the same degree of effectiveness as the rest of us achieved with a shot. NOBODY knows what percent of the GOP herd will be sacrificed for the survivors to say to us, "We told you so."
And any person who refuses the vax can die on a ventilator screaming for the vax retroactively when it will not save their life. I don't have any sympathy for them. Denying reality has a price.