Health officials are urging vigilance as reports of bird flu cases in humans appear to have stopped.

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.”

  • DandomRude@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    19 hours ago

    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).