Yes, once the anti-vax anti-mask folks got their footing, it was pretty much guaranteed that we’d see a lot of deaths.
The debate has had a remarkably slight impact on public opinion to date. It’s not clear that it’ll shift things in any kind of meaningful way.
There are things we could have done better; the US isn’t some island of perfection, but it was on the whole, a decent response after Biden took office.
Smallpox is a disease where vaccination once protects you for life.
The current round of vaccines for COVID protect you for several months.
There’s a difference in outcomes because of that. I’ll also note that a big chunk of China didn’t get vaccinated either, and that we have a really active anti-vax contingent in the US with the support of Trump and the other Republicans.
It’s not the end; it’s not something that ever ends, in the same way that influenza still kills people.
But vaccines got us from a disease that was killing an awful lot more people to one where it’s one that kills a few.
Yes actually — he started sabotaging pandemic response as soon as it became known that in the absence of vaccines, the disease would disproportionately harm minority communities which have less access to care.
If you’re in the US, the basic answer looks like this:
It means his team arranged for actual delivery, federal payments, and not just dumping it on the system, which weren’t prepared
What he did do was get vaccine distribution working. That made a world of difference in fatality rates
Not sure anything like that is put together, but a good start is to call your rep and senators and ask them to close the various loopholes that the courts have put in US bribery law, both the after-the-fact-gratuity one and the explicit (instead of implicit) quid-pro-quo one.
Historically, the answer on this has involved charging very different amounts in different countries. This both enables some level of access by the poor and maximizes profits.
I wonder how much of a gratuity the Republican justices are going to get for this ruling.
For a lot of people “Democracy” means “rule by rich white men” and not “a system where elections determine who will hold power”
The system was set up using statewide election of 5 commissioners 1907, when the Georgia State Legislature was doing things like passing things like the Felder-Williams Disenfranchisement Act to strip African-Americans of the right to vote. In 2000, they set up districts, but preserved the statewide-election thing.
People understand, and they’re angry about it.
This isn’t even a version from their book club. it’s pulled from a court case and not the Bible.
You can do more than that:
It’s also worth paying attention to races further down the ballot; There are lists of close house and close senate races as well as a ton of competitive seats in state legislatures.
None of that means much of anything if the Supreme Court feels like saying otherwise.
And here I was thinking “crime” in public surveys meant “I see people with darker skin than me sometimes” rather than any kind of actual criminal behavior.