Health officials are making a renewed call for vigilance against bird flu, but some experts are puzzling over why reports of new human cases have stopped.
Has the search for cases been weakened by government cuts? Are immigrant farm workers, who have accounted for many of the U.S. cases, more afraid to come forward for testing amid the Trump administration’s deportation push? Is it just a natural ebb in infections?
“We just don’t know why there haven’t been cases,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University. “I think we should assume there are infections that are occurring in farmworkers that just aren’t being detected.”
Because the people who would receive and forward the reports of it have been fired? Just a wild guess.
Probably because Trump banned the NHS from external communications to the public and media on his second day in office.
“If we stopped testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any.”
Omg, I think of this a lot when thinking back at the Covid response in early 2020. I really believe that these people never mentally developed past that of a toddler. They have no object permanence, no self-control, and no emotional regulation. They aren’t satisfied with some of a thing, they need ALL of that thing.
We are being driven off a cliff by the dumbest, most immature humans to exist in the modern world.
When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same. The temperament is not that different.
Donald Trump, 2015.
https://theweek.com/speedreads/575962/donald-trump-tells-biographer-hes-same-now-first-grade
it makes me incredibly sad that these people are firing the smartest, most brilliant minds in this country, destroying their life’s work, with no apparent awareness of just how bad they’re fucking things up.
We got this guy, “Not Sure.” He’s gonna fix everything.
Are immigrant farm workers, who have accounted for many of the U.S. cases, more afraid to come forward for testing amid the Trump administration’s deportation push?
Bingo. Why bother getting treated, if it puts you on ICEs radar and you just end up dying in CECOT?
This is winning
This US administration is truly a danger to the entire world.
Could you please finally lock Drump and his henchmen up for all their crimes and put some halfway decent people in their place?
Could you please finally lock Drump and his henchmen up for all their crimes and put some halfway decent people in their place?
No, because that should have happened during Biden’s tenure. I still contend Trump should have been hanged for treason and his Jan 6th buddies got off too lite. Now they’re pardoned and emboldened and Trump thinks he has the mandate of “the people” even though over half of us that voted did not vote for him. Sets a pretty bad precedent when someone can get away with standing up and calling for violence and to disregard the results of an election. Trump should have been made an example of - instead he’s now president because we live in the dumbest timeline.
It’s probably going to get worse before it gets better. The next few years will be a key point in future history classes. We’re staring at an existential threat to our Republic and I’m not sure we will survive it.
At least we successfully prevented the justice department from having the appearance of pursuing partisan goals. That would have been the worst possible outcome.
Lol, the fact that people would consider it partisan to prosecute someone leading an attempt to violently change the results of an election in essentially a coup attempt is a great reminder of how fucked we truly are.
I completely agree with you except for one thing: I don’t think things will get better – at least not on their own. On the contrary, I think the situation will actually get much worse, because I believe that US institutions have long been infiltrated, as exemplified by the Supreme Court’s absurd ruling that the president is above the law. This has, in my opinion, nothing to do with democracy anymore.
Nevertheless, I wish you all the best and am keeping my fingers crossed for all the good and decent US citizens.
Edit: I’m from Germany and I post things like this because of our history, which is well known in the US too. Don’t do as we did back then, act while you still can!
I think things will eventually get better, but how long that eventually is and what it looks like is very unknown.
I agree that things will get worse. I’m fortunate to be of the privileged white dude class here so I am mostly insulated from the worst of things and live in my little suburban bubble.
It will be interesting to see how Trump’s supporters square the reality coming our way with what they’ve been told by that orange stain of a human. It’s basically a fact at this point that we will see rising prices on pretty much everything, stock will dwindle and store shelves will have some bare spots and we can’t easily replace a lot of the manufacturing and production of goods done overseas so a lot of stuff is going to get way more expensive because of it or just cease existing. Not to mention the problems that will manifest with our food supply when crops aren’t picked or farms/ranches and slaughterhouses are having labor shortages.
It’s just a recipe for disaster in 6 months or less.
I really hope I’m wrong about everything I said and I’ll eat crow and things will be fine. I want so desperately to be wrong.
All good points, but I’m not at all sure that will matter. These things are only relevant if there are still elections.
Here are a few points that suggest to me that Drump is planning to turn the US into a dictatorship where there will be no more elections.
- It is an open secret that Drump is preparing to declare himself president again or again be candidate in a mock-election (Putin regularly gets elected as well), which would be a violation of the Constitution.
- After his last term in office, he already attempted a coup, which, as you say, was not punished as such.
- He is building up a secret police force through (barely) hidden tax increases in the form of ubiquitous tariffs – namely the ICA, which he is staffing exclusively with loyal followers.
- He (and his followers, who cannot hope for impunity via the “the President is king” Supreme Court decision) are already disregarding applicable law and court decisions. It’s unlikely that they would do that in such a manner if they would fear to be prosecuted once a new administration comes along (they would be because what they do is so brazenly illegal).
- He is already persecuting political opponents (such as the judges who convicted the January 6 insurrectionists).
- He openly calls for the persecution of dissidents, including among the civilian population (most recently Bruce Springsteen, for example).
- He has already brought the media (both traditional and, in particular, social media) into line, as evidenced by the completely inadequate coverage of the massive 50501 protests, to name just one example among many.
- Even without the unlimited powers granted to the president by the Supreme Court, the US system is highly vulnerable to a coup by the incumbent government due to the concentration of power in the hands of the president (he is commander-in-chief of the army, can declare a state of emergency and is then also commander of the police and National Guard etc.).
The list goes on – even though Drump has only been in office for six months. If this continues, and I am convinced it will, the government will soon make civil resistance impossible – as in Russia, where by no means everyone is a Putin supporter, but his opponents have been silenced by force.
Of course, I don’t want to paint a picture of doom and gloom, but unfortunately I am honestly convinced that Drump wants to replace what little democracy still exists in the United States with a dictatorship. And he is not even doing it by himself - I think he is just a straw man for the guys pulling the strings (the one percent who all support him).
nah, there is no meaningful opposition to him at this point. the opposing party is bought and paid for by israel, and as long as the genocide goes on, they rake in the dough to keep their party apathetic.
Drump is even worse in that regard, or am I mistaken? I think he’s worse in every regard imaginable.
yeah, you are not wrong, but they are on the same payroll, the people writing the checks say who becomes president
I see, the land of the free. It’s really a a great democracy you’ve got going over there.
Land of the Free ™, *democracy not guaranteed, terms and conditions apply.
Not only by Israel. Israel is only one of a very long list of participants for the auction of who gets to dictate the DNC’s policy platform.
true, Jon Stewart pretty much identified that as the primary driver of the apathy towards to the Dem party in his podcasts since the election. Now they are fighting harder against the internal dnc people that advocate change than the republicans. Even if it is from the emergency room for a broken hip to get the chemo patient placed infront of AOC on a committee spots, they have no values when it comes to attacking their own party
Literally “bOtH sIdEs.”
I mean you gotta both sides when it’s both sides, unless you think Chuck “lay dead” Schumer is viable opposition.
It’s nice to know we still have some health officials remaining. Many are no longer employed.
You can’t find bird flu cases if you don’t monitor for them. Problem solved. Checkmate libruls!
Can’t get sick if I’m dead! Whadya say to that one, doc?!
They stopped testing?
