The deadly mix of disease and lies

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In case you wondered about those empty desks around you at work or why your regular checkout person at the supermarket is missing, we're going through the worst flu season in 15 years, according to A.P., NPR, the National Geographic, and NBC News. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) -- yes, amazingly, their doors are still open -- estimates that as many as 19,000 have died from the flu this season, with 86 of that number being children. There have been at least 900,000 hospitalizations from the flu. Both flu figures have been worse than COVID over this winter.

With flu hospitalizations and deaths at record numbers, it's reasonable to ask what's being done about it other than checking people into emergency rooms and preparing bodies for burial. You could find your answer yesterday in the White House, where Donald “I like my numbers low” Trump held his first cabinet meeting. Remember that one from the early days of COVID? A few cases had been logged on the West Coast, most of them coming in on flights from China, when it was reported that the deadly virus had broken out on a cruise ship. The number of cases that had been listed so far was something like 15, so Trump ordered the cruise ship to be held at the dock with nobody allowed to debark. “I like my numbers low,” Trump announced, as if keeping people from crossing a gangplank meant that they didn't have to be counted.

A reporter asked the new Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., about the outbreak of measles in western Texas entirely among unvaccinated children and adults. Kennedy proceeded to tell a string of lies about the number of cases, explaining away hospitalizations for reasons of quarantine, and telling an outright lie about the number who have been hospitalized. The question could have been about the recent outbreak in severe flu cases, and similar lies would have fallen out of Kennedy's mouth. He lied to the Senate when he was up for confirmation, telling them that he would abide by CDC vaccination guidelines. Two days after he took office, Kennedy ordered that the guidelines be “investigated.”

Today, Kennedy ordered the cancellation of an FDA meeting of a vaccine advisory panel, without explanation. The panel meets every January or February to recommend the flu strains that will be covered by next year's shot. Without the panel's recommendation, drug manufacturers can't start making the flu vaccine. Litjen Tan, co-chair of the flu shot advocacy group the National Adult and Influenza Immunization Summit, told NBC News that manufacturers can wait until late March for the FDA to pick the flu strain for next year, but no longer. Delaying the meeting of the vaccine advisory panel pretty much ensures that the flu vaccine for next fall’s season will not be ready by July or August as it usually is.

Convincing people to get vaccinated is always a struggle, especially after the entirely ginned up controversy over the COVID vaccine that has infected our politics for the last four years. The number of people vaccinated for the flu this season is seven percent lower than last year, reflecting the vaccine hesitancy that has grown recently. About 45 percent of Americans received the vaccine this season.

Tracy and I were two of them, and glad I was when I was taken to the emergency room in early January suffering the worst symptoms I had ever experienced. Lying in bed at home that night, I couldn't move my arms or legs and thought that I had suffered a stroke or even something worse. It wasn't until the EMT's got here and checked me that a stroke was ruled out. I was astonished when I was got to the emergency room and had a blood test to learn that I had this year's virulent strain of the flu. During my five day stay in the hospital, I learned that people my age with pre-existing conditions were much more likely to die when they hadn't been vaccinated.

More than a hundred cases of measles, a disease that had been all but eradicated before the anti-vaxxers started spreading their lies about the MMR vaccine. RFK Jr. and his misleadingly-named Children's Defense Fund were among the chief spreaders of the lies about the vaccine that had made measles a thing of the past until they came along. Now Kennedy has predictably started in on the flu vaccine, an entirely non-controversial yearly step taken by many to protect themselves from a seemingly ordinary disease that can kill adults and maim children with brain conditions like encephalitis.

We should have learned last time around what happens when you allow prevaricators and profiteers anywhere near the health of Americans. Remember when Trump put his son-in-law Jared Kushner in charge of the distribution of hospital scrubs, surgical masks, and even ventilators, and we learned that they were basically auctioning off lifesaving equipment to the highest bidder? Remember when Trump got behind Ivermectin, a veterinary heartworm drug, as a cure for COVID? Just wait. The next thing we're going to be hearing is that the CDC has ordered a study of Ivermectin to test its efficacy as a cure for measles and the flu.

People were dying in the flu ward in the hospital where I was being treated. I would say that I was lucky I wasn't one of them, but luck had nothing to do with it. I got vaccinated, and Tracy didn't listen to me when I told her that calling 911 wasn’t necessary. I spent five days in the hospital and the rest of the month of January recovering from the worst illness I contracted since I had pneumonia at age 18. I had never been hospitalized for anything other than surgery or a lesser invasive procedure like a stent since the two weeks I spent hospitalized with pneumonia more than five decades ago.

The one good thing that came out of Elon Musk bouncing around the White House cabinet room like a crazed Muppet and RFK Jr. being hit with a question about measles is that their lies were well covered. The news was packed with stories about Kennedy’s measles lies and Musk’s lies about the firings of USAID experts on Ebola during an ongoing outbreak in Africa. It's the one advantage to rule by knaves and buffoons: They're bound to take out their dicks and stomp on them often enough that their lies get noticed.

In the meantime, people will die, just as they did when Trump was driving this country into the ditch during COVID, and now he’s got help from the odious RFK Jr.

Here we go again.