The MAGA Plague
Trump voters would prefer to take their chances with a deadly virus than with a highly safe vaccine.
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This time last year, the Trump Virus was spreading like wildfire in the wake of Trump’s reckless “super spreader” rallies, which had resumed June 20 in Tulsa, Oklahoma at the humiliating fiasco attended by the late Herman Cain.
At the time of Trump’s June 2020 rally, there were 10,000 confirmed Covid-19 cases in Oklahoma. By the end of July 2020, there were nearly four times as many, 36,607. Today, there have been nearly half a million.
In July 2021, Trump Virus 2.0 (a.k.a. “The Delta Variant”) is causing a similar surge across Trump-loving America, creating what CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky, calls, “a pandemic of the unvaccinated.”
As NPR reported on July 16:
The death rate from COVID-19 in the U.S. is rising steadily for the first time in months… More than 99% of recent deaths were among the unvaccinated… unvaccinated people accounted for over 97% of hospitalizations.
About 56% of the U.S. population has received at least one dose of the vaccine, but in many counties — especially in rural America — that number is under 20% despite the widespread availability of the vaccine.
Other countries would kill for the vaccine. In Trump-loving America, MAGA morons would rather die than take it.
Catching Covid to own the libs.
In state after state, Trump voters are seeking the miracles of modern medicine only after they or their loved ones have caught Covid-19 and require hospitalization. A year-and-a-half into the pandemic, too many parents of ventilated teenagers are still telling reporters they wish they had taken the virus more seriously and gotten the vaccine for themselves and their kids when they could have.
The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reports: “As of Friday afternoon, of the seven patients at Arkansas Children’s in Little Rock who were covid-positive, two were on ventilators.”
Also in Arkansas, Linda Marion, a 68-year-old widow with chronic pulmonary disease refused the vaccine because she was scared it would give her Covid. She caught Covid anyway and, as The New York Times reports, “at one point, she felt so sick and frightened that she wanted to give up. ‘It was just terrible,’ she said. ‘I felt like I couldn’t take it.’”
Despite that, she and two other Arkansas women, ages 62 and 74, who were also hospitalized are still going to refuse the vaccine because, “it’s just too new.” (Note: The Delta Variant is even newer.)
If Arkansas is getting a lot of attention lately, it’s because it’s truly gone the extra mile to spread the “MAGA plague.”
According to The Wall Street Journal, it’s one of at least three states that have outlawed masks in schools.
And as The New York Times also points out, Republicans are also making sure that everyone who visits an Arkansas hospital this summer wins a free chance to catch Covid-19:
In April, the state legislature added yet another roadblock, making it essentially illegal for any state or local entity, including public hospitals, to require coronavirus vaccination as a condition of education or employment until two years after the Food and Drug Administration fully licenses a shot.
As a result, only about 40% of healthcare workers in the state are currently vaccinated.
The economic recovery? MAGA Governors are killing it
As readers of this newsletter already know, there’s a reason Florida is powering ahead of the rest of the country in new Covid deaths. His name is Ron… Ron DeSantis. This MAGA serial killer is now so full of himself that he’s selling anti-Fauci merchandise on his website, even as his failed leadership has resulted in Florida now accounting for 20% of all new US infections.
DeSantis’s Florida and Greg Abbott’s Texas, two states which long ago overtook New York in total cases, are now consistently ranking first and second in new cases and deaths.
Their fellow MAGA Governors are also doing their utmost to spread Trump-like death and despair among their constituents.
In Missouri, Springfield Mayor Ken McClure told Face the Nation on Sunday that his hospitals are swamped with Covid patients and a statewide surge is coming: “The Delta variant will be there. It is going to spread, it is already spreading throughout Missouri.”
In Tennessee, Republicans are so desperate to kill kids and spread disease, they’ve not only fired the health official who was trying to get teens vaccinated against Covid, they’ve gone the extra step of halting all adolescent vaccine outreach, not just for coronavirus, but all diseases, including flu, measles, mumps, rubella and human papillomavirus, or HPV, among others.
Trump is celebrating the death he’s causing
For months, GOP politicians and Fox News anchors have hidden their vaccinated status from Trump voters because, of course, trusting science is anathema to the MAGA base right up to the moment they need a ventilator or a $1-million ECMO blood replacement treatment.
This month, CPAC attendees cheered the fact that America had not achieved President Biden’s 70% vaccination goal by July 4th. And this past weekend, Dr. Anthony Fauci told CNN’s Jim Acosta that if America had been plagued by the current levels of misinformation decades ago, polio would never have been eradicated.
A Sunday statement from “the desk of Donald Trump” on July 18th blew trillions more SARS-CoV-2 droplets onto the mucus membranes of the vaccine-resistant MAGA faithful, with Trump telling his poorly educateds that the vaccine was only as trustworthy as the election results.
Trump wants all the credit for a vaccine he’s telling his supporters not to trust. While trying to reinfect America and crash the economy so he can “save” it again.
So far, the plan is working. The “MAGA Plague” has now infected Wall Street. The Dow closed down more than 700 points today on fears that, “the Delta coronavirus variant could threaten the US economic recovery.”