Hey Kids! Dr. Trump Has News for You!
I just finished up my series of Shingrix shots. As you might have guessed, it wasn’t super easy. The first round triggered my aversion to shots which, at 72-years-old, makes me the biggest weenie ever. The shot itself turned out to be no big deal, but I spent a couple of days with headaches and a sore shoulder. I thought I could control it with an analgesic, but I probably didn’t do enough, partly out of fear that it would somehow vitiate the injection. That was an element in the messaging around Covid: if you take the shot, try not to use a painkiller.
Part II was actually easier by far. I knew in advance that the injection wouldn’t hurt. The tech was extremely tender and attentive and the side effects were almost negligible. If there was a problem at all, it’s that I lost track of the schedule. Those who have done Shingrix probably remember that you have to schedule the second shot yourself. You have up to six months to come back for the injection, but it’s easy to forget or delay or lose the thread. And if the deadline goes by, there’s no one to blame but yourself. No one promises to call with a reminder, and I only managed to remember by a miracle.
Which brings me, quite obviously, to our bozo president. You probably screamed at Donald Trump this week when he made his asinine announcements about new standards for vaccination. With no special interest in science or policy he declared by fiat that the regime for children would change. Children will no longer get their vaccinations efficiently, but dribbled out over painful decades. If one shot hurts, think about six. Or seven or eight, or some other idiocy. President Drumpf has it all figured out because of his years in the lab and clinical practice. Not. But that never matters to the man in the wig. He will wake up one day thinking about mumps and decide that they really aren’t so bad. What was that thing again about herd immunity?
Does Donald Trump have the right to do this? In the trash heap that is now our federal government, it’s anybody’s guess what is true or false, legal or criminal. It’s all a pile of broken shards. Sometimes an executive order is a mere suggestion. Sometimes it’s a diktat with real consequences. Just ask the Haitians being loaded on to planes. What counts for Trump is the act, the exertion. He adores the feeling of projecting his will, even if involves flagrant falsehood. The barrel of the hypodermic is not the size of a Coke can, even if Trump delusionally says it is. The barrel of the hypodermic is the size of a hypodermic.
The real problem here is the nature of human beings and their capacity for attention. That’s true even when the stakes are high. When I saw that commercial from the Shingrix people about corkscrews drilling into my ruined flesh, I was highly motivated to get my shot. But in the ebb and flow of my godforsaken life, I almost missed the final deadline.
Parents, of course, will do exactly the same. With the best intentions, they will miss their deadlines and figure that their kids will be basically OK, even if they are not OK at all. Kids will begin dying of measles, exactly as they are dying now, thanks to the outbreak induced by RFK, Jr.. As I learned in a recent article in the Times, the delivery of health care, its timing and its efficiency, is a whole separate specialty in public medicine. In the context of these inevitable complexities, six is absolutely worse than one. The result is that little children will die, leaving blood on the hands of the pof both the lunatic and his enablers.
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I’ve noted before that none of the posts on this platform stem from artificial intelligence. They are all the work of a struggling human mind that occasionally succeeds and frequently fails. Members of my family have suggested that this note is a little bit snotty and condescending. Maybe self-congratulatory. I stand by my decision.