[gift link]In the future, they’re going to call 2024 the Heaven’s Gate Election.
www.nytimes.com/2025/05/29/h…— Radley Balko (@radleybalko.bsky.social) May 29, 2025 at 1:42 PM
The Trump administration has delivered its latest blow to vaccines, canceling a nearly $600-million contract to the drugmaker Moderna that was intended to develop a shot for humans against bird flu.
The decision also forfeited the U.S. government’s right to purchase doses ahead of a pandemic, and canceled an agreement set up by the Biden administration in January to prepare the nation for a potential bird flu pandemic. The Moderna contract built on a previous government investment of $175 million last year.
The move was not entirely unexpected. The Department of Health and Human Services said earlier this year that it was reviewing the contract. And Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has repeatedly questioned the safety of mRNA technology, which is used in Moderna’s Covid vaccine…
Andrew Nixon, a Health and Human Services spokesman, said: “After a rigorous review, we concluded that continued investment in Moderna’s H5N1 mRNA vaccine was not scientifically or ethically justifiable.”
Moderna said it would explore alternatives for developing the vaccines covered by the contract, which were to be designed for several types of flu viruses that have the potential to cause a pandemic.
Christopher Ridley, a spokesman for Moderna, defended the mRNA technology. “Results during the pandemic speak for themselves, including demonstrated efficacy and a safety profile established in over a billion people worldwide,” he said in a statement on Thursday.
For several years, a type of avian flu known as H5N1 has circulated around the world, killing wild birds and domestic flocks, and spreading to a range of other species including bears and sea mammals.
It arrived in the United States in 2022, and has resulted in the culling of more than 173 million birds, frequently devastating commercial poultry flocks.
Last year, bird flu also spread to dairy cattle. It has since struck more than 1,000 herds in 17 states and sickened 70 people, most of them dairy or cattle workers. In January, Louisiana reported the death of an older adult who had interacted with sick backyard birds, the first such fatality in the United States.
So far, the virus does not seem to spread easily among people. But scientists have long worried about a bird flu pandemic because flu viruses can rapidly mutate and acquire new abilities.
The national stockpile holds a few million doses of an existing H5N1 vaccine to protect humans. But it is unclear whether the shots would continue to protect Americans if the virus were to change significantly. The government has three other avian flu contracts, according to the health department.
Many scientists regard mRNA vaccines, which can be quickly altered to match the newest versions of virus, as the best option for protecting Americans in a fast-moving outbreak.
“When the next flu pandemic occurs, there is not going to be enough vaccine for everyone who wants it unless we invest to broaden the types of flu vaccines being made and the number of companies that make them,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health…
Mr. Kennedy’s ideas for containing bird flu are unorthodox. He has suggested that instead of culling birds when the infection is discovered, farmers should let the virus run through the flocks. Then, he has said, farmers should identify birds that survive the illness and study them to identify the source of their immunity. Many scientists assert that would be inhumane and dangerous.
Last week, Mr. Kennedy urged the Canadian authorities not to kill 400 ostriches that had been exposed to H5N1, and Dr. Mehmet Oz, who oversees Medicare and Medicaid, offered to relocate the birds to his ranch in Florida…
“Pandemic preparedness is about being proactive, fast and adaptable — the mRNA vaccine platform is all of that,” said Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease physician and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
“The rationale given is likely fabricated and more of a function of R.F.K. Jr.’s assault on vaccines, the value of which he evades,” he added. “Canceling this contract makes the world less safe.”
Reuters:
… Moderna in January was awarded $590 million by the Biden administration to advance the development of its bird flu vaccine, and support the expansion of clinical studies for up to five additional subtypes of pandemic influenza.
This was in addition to $176 million awarded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) last year to complete the late-stage development and testing of a pre-pandemic mRNA-based vaccine against the H5N1 avian influenza.
HHS told Reuters earlier this year that it was reviewing agreements made by the Biden administration for vaccine production.
“The cancellation means that the government is discarding what could be one of the most effective and rapid tools to combat an avian influenza outbreak,” said Amesh Adalja, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, adding that it is the opposite approach Trump took with Operation Warp Speed to combat COVID-19…Moderna said it plans to explore alternatives for late-stage development and manufacturing of the vaccine.
The company has been banking on revenue from newer mRNA shots, including its bird flu vaccine and experimental COVID-flu combination vaccine, to make up for waning post-pandemic demand for its COVID vaccine.
Moderna also said on Wednesday that it had received positive interim data from a mid-stage trial set up to test the safety and immunogenicity of its bird flu vaccine targeting the H5 avian influenza virus subtype.
VeniceRiley
*HEADDESK
WaterGirl
I don’t get this “cancelling” contracts. I thought contracts were legally binding.
Scout211
This is so sad. I hope Moderna has a good legal team because that seems to be the only way to fight back right now.
I’m so old I remember TACO, in his first term, proud as punch with himself as he spent many millions to fast track immunizations for COVID. He bragged about it for months until he was confronted with the right wing conspiracy machine against immunizations and COVID measures. And then he went silent and joined the anti-immunization team.
FDRLincoln
Trump and his administration are already guilty of mass murder with the elimination of food and medical aid through USAID. Thousands have already died and this could be millions soon enough.
RFK Jr. is a bit behind Rubio on the Murder Scoreboard, but he will catch up quickly.
Omnes Omnibus
@WaterGirl:
You can always cancel a contract. You just may be liable for damages if you do so.
Wag
The only thing that saved TACO from complete political collapse was that the COVID pandemic came near the end of his first term, allowing him to duck blame for his utterly botched approach to the crisis. If there is another pandemic during this term I hope that it starts sooner so that TACO’s gross incompetence will be on full display and he will get all of the blame that he so richly deserves.
Spanky
Paging Bill Gates. Bill Gates to the white courtesy phone…
Matt McIrvin
@Scout211: Trump wanted to be known as the father of the COVID vaccine, but Pfizer announced the first publicly available vaccine (developed by a German company, so not one of his) immediately *after* he lost the 2020 election, so he couldn’t claim it as a win, and Trump’s love of vaccines never recovered. When former and future Presidents of both parties lined up to endorse the shot, he wouldn’t do it. He was too busy trying to mount a coup.
Matt McIrvin
@FDRLincoln: Or, he might get lucky and not have a mass human outbreak of bird flu, and all this will be a historical footnote. That’s the thing about dumbass governance: sometimes dumb luck just obscures cause and effect, or effects are delayed for long enough that they can be blamed on somebody else. (Viz. the people who think Biden overturned Roe v. Wade).
Professor Bigfoot
@Omnes Omnibus: Assuming that such damages were written into the contract in the first place…
Lyrebird
@FDRLincoln: Can we please please pretty please switch back to a timeline where what you just wrote would be hyperbole, not plan facts? No?
GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH
PS: If anyone wants more reasons to want to bang their heads against a desk, or start another lawsuit or movement, more scapegoating of minors who happen to be trans and like to do sports is going on even in Calif.
jonas
Florida poultry farmers have to be *thrilled* about that.
artem1s
Government contracts, like contracts with private organization, include terms for cancellation, though I doubt Orangemandius or Brainwormtongue adhered to those.
As for Moderna, I believe they have been funded by the DoD for decades. The Biden/birdflu contract was separate. I’m sure they have lots of venture capitalist money since COVID too. So basically other countries and maybe the DoD will continue to fund their vaccine development division. But the real upshot is when they do find a vaccine for the next threat, the rest of world will benefit and the US will lag behind for purely political reasons just like we did for HIV/AIDS research in the 90s and 00s.
RaflW
I’m not going to dig back thru my Bsky timeline, but several moments last year I said “No one ever promised that the Enlightenment would last forever.” I hate being able to snarkily semi-predict the near future.
What I don’t know (OK, a lot, frankly, but anyway…) is wether the US going Pol-Pot-insane drags down humanity, or if we just become a very large version of North Korea. If it’s that, then humanity will just have a moderately harder time.
ie: Moderna is probably going to find European funders who will foot the bill of developing a bird flu jab. If we Americans can get our shit together in elections — as we have already a few times since Nov. — and can effect a pretty convincing House sweep in 2026, we can start to claw our way back into at least joining the semi-normal world.
No other country should trust us, mind. Not after the triple experiences of the 2004, 2016 and 2024 elections. But they’d be capitalist enough to let us buy Moderna shots or reimport the technology.
Apply that to broad swathes of the economy and global social integrations. OTOH, if the US is a harbinger of insanity (and oligarchy) getting the upper hand globally, then my glum prediction up top becomes more salient.
eta: The string of stinging election losses for Trumpism abroad suggests that other nation’s populations are teachable.
lowtechcyclist
@artem1s:
Not to mention, we won’t have hundreds of millions of doses lined up and ready to go when the next pandemic comes along.
lowtechcyclist
@RaflW:
I keep thinking back to when Obama got the Nobel basically for not being George W. Bush. Who knew that our right wing was gonna say “hold my beer” and leave Bush way behind. But they’ve figured us out now.
Shalimar
@RaflW: The US definitely drags down humanity this time, possibly all the way to another great depression. You can see this in the way every recession spreads around the globe. The US is too big not to have a huge effect on everyone else. But hopefully the rest of the world is learning their lesson and this is the last time they will be so dependent on the US. It’s time to figure out what the future global economic system is going to look like.
Seanly
@WaterGirl:
They are but they contain clauses that allow them to be canceled. It doesn’t generally happen>
I wanted to comment about the idiotic MAHA report. Apparently it contains a lot of incorrect data, a self-reference as a citation, and even fictitious references. How stupid is the Trump admin that they thought no one would look into the references or call the cited authors? I know it seems like it won’t matter but I think it does. We just keep adding straw to the camel of media’s back and sooner or later it’s gonna break.
Old Man Shadow
Don’t know what to say or do about it.
It’s the end of medical science in America. This administration is the four horsemen of the apocalypse: propaganda and lies, disease and pollution, hunger, and death.
The book of Revelations was never meant to be a How-to manual.
Cheryl from Maryland
I weep at the ignorant rejection of MRNA vaccines. MRNA is such a leap forward – rather than developing a vaccine for each type of virus, MRNA is a well tested technology (work on it started in 1989, with human testing beginning in 2001) and universal delivery system to fight multiple viruses. Like an envelope, it safely transmits the viral genetic information as that information exists. Hence the rapid development of COVID boosters as the virus rapidly mutated. Rejection of MNRA means not only future danger for Bird and other types of flu, COVID, etc., but also the stoppage of research for vaccines to combat cancers. I know all of you jackals know this, but the stupidity of those now running HHS and their acceptance of quackery constantly tells me that they are eugenicists looking to kill off those they see as “unfit”. Actual health is not a concern for them.
Matt
I support using this approach to discover new treatments for Ebola. RFK should be the first test subject.
japa21
I consider most of the actions by this administration to be crimes against humanity. This is just number 145 (probably too low).
Harrison Wesley
Y’all can be as snooty as you like with your “vaccines” and “science” and whatnot. Us real Merkins just chug-a-lug some raw milk, take a quick dip in a sewer, and we’re right as rain.
japa21
@Matt: And Tom Levenson weeps. Reading his newest and it is so apropos right now.
JaneE
They really do want to bring back the Gilded Age. Life expectancy in the 50’s and all.
America turning its back on science is not good for America. Probably great for Europe, Asia, and any country that is still trying to catch up with the developed world. Not so long ago, developing nations could educate their citizens in the latest tech and scientific developments and send them out to developed nations who could make use of their skills and knowledge. It was easier to get remittances than to develop a big enough base to utilize them at home. As the US slides into 3rd world status, we won’t even be able to do that.
Boris Rasputin (The Evil Twin)
@RaflW:I’m not going to dig back thru my Bsky timeline, but several moments last year I said “No one ever promised that the Enlightenment would last forever.” I hate being able to snarkily semi-predict the near future.
I had a calendar once filled with “historical facts” One of them was,” On this day in history the Age of Reason ended.” It seems you had the same one.
randy khan
It’s hard to choose which of the many reasons that RFK, Jr. shouldn’t be allowed within 235,000 miles (or maybe 92 million miles, or pick the distance your own extremely inhospitable celestial body of choice) of anything resembling health care policies, but saying that mRNA technology is risky has to be pretty high on the list.
scav
@Matt:
So, given the birds that survive are to be studied, one must assume the dead infected ones are the ones actually sold to consumers. Saves on slaughtering costs: Win-Win!
Might also explain why Elon and the quiverfulls are so focused on increased baby production.
Jeffg166
I hope that TACO and all his supporters get bird flu and covid at the same time.
Eolirin
@Shalimar: Given our co2 emissions and the fact that all the other major players are finally starting to accelerate their energy conversion projects, we might just wipe the species out single handedly, never mind a depression level economic event.
Matt McIrvin
@Eolirin: Nah, while we’re resolutely refusing to think in terms of collective-action problems, I think we’re mostly hurting ourselves here by refusing to get on the train. The fact is, clean energy is now cheaper than our dirty energy, and it’ll be hard for ignoramuses to drag the market away from recognizing that.
Eolirin
@Matt McIrvin: They’re gonna try, increased costs be dammed. If we slide all the way to fascist, I can see them outright banning green tech. It’s just like with these vaccines. Literally no one except the anti-vaxx grifters benefit from this. The market does not and will not want this either, and yet here we are.
terraformer
Gawd, these fcking people
Matt McIrvin
@Eolirin: I suspect the TACO pattern is going to apply: note that Trump only chickens out when the sufficiently rich are affected. If you’re poor/marginalized, tough luck.
trollhattan
@Matt McIrvin:
In this case
Trump: “Chickens out!“
Harrison Wesley
@Jeffg166: “I’ll have the bird flu taco and a Covid mojito….”
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
That’s when the Republican Party has his back the most.
Old Man Shadow
I don’t suppose I can request a good news thread? Something with lots of happy news, of people being decent, of fluffy critters thriving, of cool science happening despites the political bullshit?
trollhattan
Yes, I’d like to order a comet. No, just one is fine. What’s that? No not my house, it’s a gift and I’ll give you the delivery address and also the exact time. That last detail is important.
NotMax
@Harrison Wesley
“Try the box o’ beaks value meal.”
After all, Parts is parts.
//
Baud
@trollhattan:
Also known as, Trump insiders who don’t like Musk working with their favorite publication to dish dirt.
azlib
My biggest fear during the Trump maladministration is Bird Flu jumps to humans and becomes a pandemic.
Steve in the ATL
@Professor Bigfoot: that’s not how it works.
Lord Fartdaddy (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
Making drug companies into the good guys is quite a feat, but damn if this administration doesn’t make it look easy.
Van Buren
@japa21: I’m up to chapter 10 myself.
RaflW
@Shalimar: I’m speaking beyond economics. We are — at least at the moment — purging science, research, health advances. We are wrecking ourselves. My question is wether this is contagious or containable self-inflicted.
I’m sort of scarred by Wm. Gibson’s Jackpot theory/fiction.
Gibson wrote the quoted passages inside the above block quote in 2014! Well before Covid. Certainly before we can know if bird flu will be pt. of some big shift.
FDRLincoln
How up to date is everyone on your vaccines?
I’m 57. Over the last year I’ve gotten boosters for MMR and Tdap, and I got the shingles and pneumonia vaccines. I stay up to date on flu and covid shots.
Last month I started the HepA/B series (two shots within a month, then a third six months from now).
I’d like to get a covid booster soon given that they may not be available much longer, but technically I’m not eligible again until October.
Professor Bigfoot
@RaflW: I just read The Peripheral a couple of months ago— I’d tried to read it a couple of times before, but I didn’t grok that we were in two different *times,* that Wilf lived in a future that Flynne’s timeline would NOT go to.
Once I understood that… well, it feels a whole lot like we’re headed directly for the jackpot, doesn’t it?
Gives me a stomach ache.
(gonna read it again before I go on to The Agent; right now I have plenty of Harry Turtledove to keep me occupied.😉)
Matt McIrvin
@JaneE: The Gilded Age, however, was a time of great scientific advancement–and also a time of paranormal woo and health quackery run amuck. The two uneasily coexisted.
What we didn’t have was the government actively trying to shut down scientific progress. What it reminds me of the most is Lysenkoism in Stalin’s USSR, the ideologically-motivated purges of the biology community to eliminate Mendelian genetics because the man on top liked the cut of Trofim Lysenko’s jib… which led to mass famine.
NotMax
@Steve in the ATL
Not a lot of choices in the musical oeuvre devoted to contracts but here’s a doozy.
;)
Geminid
@jonas: A Doctor “Oz” relocates 400 infected ostriches to his Florida ranch…but infected with what?
This sounds like beginning of a wild horror flick. Sort of like the The Birds meets The Night of the Living Dead.
RaflW
@Matt: I’m disappointed that RFK hasn’t been emboldened by his recent experiment in fecal bathing. He should splash around in that creek every single day! (But please don’t bring the grands again.)
Suzanne
@azlib: Yeah, me too.
I was discussing this with some colleagues yesterday. I think the pandemic remains an unprocessed trauma for many of us, and another one might break the country entirely.
I feel like we need some sort of Truth and Reconciliation exercise, but I don’t know if I can ever really reconcile anything. Maybe best to take the sweep-it-under-the-rug approach that my uptight WASP family takes.
Geo Wilcox
@azlib: If it does jump successfully, you won’t hear it from the CDC. They have been muzzled by RFK not to let out any info about it. NONE. Not even that farm workers continue to get infected some times more than once.
George
@WaterGirl:
Based on my knowledge of government contracts with a different federal department, every contract has a clause that allows for the government to cancel it.
trollhattan
@Geminid:
If I were Florida (if only) I’d tell him to fuck off but given Florida, DeSantis probably lends Oz Dickwad One for air transport. After all, what could possibly go wrong on an airplane stuffed with ostriches? Lovely birds, the best.
RaflW
@Professor Bigfoot: I read The Peripheral a few weeks into lockdown. My BF was seriously frustrated with me, because I’d be extra agitated for a few hours after each time I read a chapter or two. “Why are you reading about catastrophe and deeply cynical people right now!?!” he’d say.
I don’t like the horror movie genre, but I think my attraction to dystopian SF is a related urge — I’ve read that horror film consumption goes up during times when a society is in heightened struggle or difficulty
I haven’t read Agency yet. I have the notion that I already bought it, but casual looks around my strewn ‘library’ haven’t turned it up.
Matt McIrvin
@RaflW: Gibson got the idea from Robert Heinlein, a guy who would probably be a big-league MAGA fan today. (Elon Musk clearly sees himself as a Heinlein character, and you can even tell which character specifically.) The thing about science-fiction “the world goes crazy” scenarios is that you can always find something you don’t like to blame it on. I see people today comparing Trumpism to Heinlein’s “Crazy Years” and the rise of Nehemiah Scudder in his Future History, but Heinlein probably would have seen liberals and gay people and multiculturalism as all part of the crazy.
RaflW
@Matt McIrvin: I haven’t read a Heinlein book in over 40 years. I actually don’t read much SF any more, Gibson is a rare exception (I also just read the goofy John Scalzi book Red Shirts recently on a whim). Now days I mostly read queer YA books. I guess I took the BF’s gripe to heart!
Steve in the ATL
@NotMax: I will see that and raise you this: A Kiss Is Not A Contract
MrPug
When I thought that RFKjr was only going to support more “choice” to allow people to not get vaccinations for themselves and their children, I would make a joke along the lines of “well I just hope I can still get vaccinated” as a, well, joke. Not so sure that is a joke anymore. His HHS seems to be moving towards making mRNA vaccines illegal in this country. You know, because they are the freedom party! God help us if a strain of the bird flu becomes easily transmitted between humans. We will be well and truly fucked. Better ensure you have vitamin A and have a healthy diet so you won’t get sick.
RevRick
@Old Man Shadow: Ah, the stupid theology brought to us by John Nelson Darby known as Dispensationalism. Darby pieced together the weird imagery found in the books of Daniel and Revelation to spin out a supposed timeline of future events.
In modern lingo an apocalypse is some sort of looming disaster, but when the various books of the late Judaic and early Christian were written, it was a synonym for a revelation or an unveiling.
A modern scholar has said the book of Revelation is actually a reenactment of a Catholic mass. It begins with an opening of the Book/scroll, continues with prayers, hymns/chants and scripture readings and concludes with the sacrament of Holy Communion, which in the understanding of the day is heaven coming down to earth.
The fact that Jesus is referred to as the Lamb twenty eight times in Revelation indicates that far from being warlike the purposes of God are merciful. And this is underscored in chapter 21, where the kings of the earth, who had been portrayed as the worst of the worst humans prior to this, are now leading the victory parade into the New Jerusalem!
Oh, and the so-called Battle of Armageddon? There’s no battle, only a capitulation.
Matt McIrvin
@RaflW: Anyway, “the jackpot” comes specifically from Heinlein’s “The Year of the Jackpot”, in which all of the escalating social insanity (including “transvestism”, oh noes) turns out to be the effect of some kind of subtle solar radiation that is itself a sign that the sun is about to explode.
(Or, at least, that is the subtextual implication of the plot, which begins with an observation that general social craziness comes in cycles and all the cycles are peaking at once.)
Matt McIrvin
@RevRick: and then on the other side of the coin there are all those statements by Jesus that he “brings not peace but a sword” and that you’ve got to hate your mum and dad to follow him… which always read to me more as expressions of political frustration than anything else. “Yeah, social revolution ain’t beanbag, everyone’s gonna hate you and you’ll probably get killed, do it anyway.”
NotMax
Steve in the ATL
Also too, It’s a Business.
:)
Steve in the ATL
@NotMax: well now you’re just begging for Business Time
RevRick
@Matt McIrvin: Quite often the sword that cuts most deeply and affects the greatest transformations are the words, “ I love you,” and “ I forgive you.”
Elizabelle
@Suzanne: I think Trump is a worse trauma than the pandemic. The Return of Trump is so much worse than the first administration.
At least Covid was honest about trying to kill you and destroy your way of life.
NotMax
@Steve in the ATL
Forced me to slip in the commies.
:)
Elizabelle
I am very concerned about cancelling the temporary protected status of Haitians. They would genuinely be sent back to a dangerous, violent and destabilized environment.
Not a lawyer, so why would the Supreme Court allow resumption “for now” with so many lives at stake?
And, FWIW, I would treat Haitians in this country much different than Cubans, Venezuelans, and Nicaraguans, because of the demonstrated enhanced danger they face.
But. Trump. And Haitians are blackety black black, and speak French.
I hate Trump and what he is doing and enabling. Karma, come on!
Steve in the ATL
@Elizabelle:
Because they are politicians and only follow the law when it supports their desired political outcome. Otherwise, they just make shit up. (“The equal dignity of the states”? That’s not in my version of the Constitution.)
Professor Bigfoot
@Matt McIrvin: I don’t think so.
I think a lot of RAH’s work was exploring ideas; and of course he had the blinders every white man of his era had.
But my reading of his work starts with “Have Spacesuit, Will Travel” that taught young me that the good guys don’t always look like the good guys, and the bad guys don’t always look like the bad guys, either.
It was “Citizen of the Galaxy,” though, that I think hits the very core of how the man thought– that there was NOTHING lower than a slaver.
Some of “you cannot enslave a free man, you can only kill him” is rhetorical claptrap; but in that I came to understand that RAH would have DESPISED these neo-Confederate slavery apologists.
I think that cemented him in my mind– ’cause there’s very little I hate more than a slaver
EDITED TO ADD: then, I got to “Starship Troopers” and the starship captains were mostly women. Granted, I was a mere yout’ when I first read them all; but to me Heinlein was ALL “humans uber alles.” That his tribe was actually the sophonts of Sol III; even though, once again, he wore the blinders that EVERY white man wore in his day.
RaflW
OT, but I just saw that Pope Leo is heading* to Chicago and will give a talk on June 14. I get the sense that this American Pope has some fairly keen political instincts. Or, conversely, he and his staff are oblivious. But I think it’s the former.
*Sorry! He will join a youth event in the White Sox’s stadium via video. So, ok, maybe not the dealio I thought. Carry on.
Steve in the ATL
@RaflW: White Sox not Cubs? No wonder Henry VIII dumped the Catholic Church.
tobie
@Elizabelle: I’m worried too…for Haitians, Venezuelans, and everyone else given TPS. We’re at full friggin’ employment in the US. Far from draining the economy, immigrants are contributing to it. But immigrants have become the group on which FOX News viewers vent their grievances.
raven
@Steve in the ATL: He’s from da soutside
lee
I’ve got a college buddy who served 20 years in the Air Force that is absolutely convinced that people who got the Covid vaccine are dying in droves and the life insurance companies know the truth but are hiding it.
oldgold
This would seem to qualify as “More Bad Healthcare News.”
Yesterday, at a town hall meeting Iowa Senator Joni Ernst, while moronically answering a question about cuts to SNAP and Medicaid, was interrupted by someone in the audience yelling, “People are going to die!”
“Well, we all are going to die,” Ernst responded.
Audience members gasped and booed the Senator.
trollhattan
If you’re considering that summer vaycay in Bakersfield. Or Fresno.
Pro tip: do not “get” valley fever. Just don’t.
gvg
@Cheryl from Maryland: It has become “conventional” popular opinion that no GMO is safer, with almost no discussion.
I am not that scientifically educated but my understanding was that GMO was a whole host of new techniques for speeding up mostly the same kinds of things we had always been doing with improving plants and animals. Moving specific genes instead of making lots of crosses in hopes that we would finally get the ones we wanted to cross, or removing wones we knew were deadly dangerous.
The ethical and spin off effects that needed serious discussion weren’t happening omong the public, who went Ooooh ooga booga they can do really weird stuff, it must be all horrible. Well some of it was really weird. Some of it did need to be thought about before it was done and released because it could negatively impact people who weren’t even going to profit from it.
For instance, I am still skeptical of putting roundup in the genes of plants, especially plants that are wind or insect pollinated because that means they impact the populations around them of other farmers or wild populations and we immediately lose control of the gene before we can study it enough IMO. But normal type cow improvement? or beans? That could be fine-except be careful with patents and abuse of copy rights. Various things needed discussion and working out. Panic, and freakouts were a waste of time.
Rules against too much use/reliance on the same genetics might be wise because of past experience with things like the potato blight.
In some ways people fears are being coddled too much. I suppose politicians are not in a good position to tell citizens this…but we need to grow up.
RaflW
@trollhattan: I just read a synopsis of Heinlein’s Year of the Jackpot. Maybe @Matt McIrvin is on to something.
RaflW
@oldgold: The “pro-life” party really, really isn’t.
lowtechcyclist
@Old Man Shadow:
Now if only the people who believe it’s a guide to the End Times could get Raptured out of here tout suite…
evodevo
@Eolirin:
They’re already trying in TX. Their insane Repub lege has been trying to pass anti-renewable bills for awhile. Luckily there are still people there with a brain…
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/5321895-anti-renewable-bills-die-quietly-in-gop-controlled-texas-legislature/
gvg
@Matt McIrvin: Um no. Heinlan was a reactionary liberal. Not quite sure how to describe him but he was VERY atheist, a nudist, did not like anything about the current type of conservative except he was pro gun rights because he saw that as a defense against government that I think he assumed would always be of a conservative sober type, which in his time was a valid assumption. Too much faith in individual gumption, not enough recognition to the value of peoples systems.
He made a bunch of mistakes. I think that is because certain events we have lived through hadn’t happened yet. He also was mentally less sharp when he wrote the last few books and it showed.
But he was pretty anti Christian religion all through. Not totally anti military, but there were stories about heros who died to prevent a military coup.
Harrison Wesley
@trollhattan: You have a problem with invasive species? It’s not like they’re illegal immigrants or some shit.
Matt McIrvin
@Professor Bigfoot: I think his thinking evolved over time and he went from a liberal/social-democrat to a Cold War-obsessed right-libertarian, influenced in part by his third wife Virginia. But he did always have this anti-establishmentarian streak.
I love a lot of his writing, though it got worse as he got too famous to edit.
lowtechcyclist
@NotMax:
If we’re gonna talk contracts, let’s bring Groucho and Chico into the chat:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6u8AgUXPpLM
evodevo
@gvg: Yes. This. As someone who taught college-level intro genetics and evolution for years, I cringe at some of the “popular” writing now, and also at all the craziness on the internets. People have NO idea how genetics works, or evolution, and the religious/New Age faction don’t want to know. All the GMO hysteria and the misinformation about RNA vaccines has overwhelmed sane discourse. Even my sister, who is conservative but not crazy, was going on about how the mRNA vaxxes “had been developed too quickly”. I had to get a grip and explain slowly that this stuff was old hat and had been researched out the yinyang for 25 years before covid hit, and we were damn lucky NIH and others had funded this research all that time, giving Moderna and Pfizer a leg up to develop the vaxxes, or we would mostly be dead now. She shut up about it, but I don’t know how well it seeped in…it doesn’t register at all on the crazy faction of our populace, which is why there’s not a huge outcry about BrainWorm’s depredations. I fear for my country…
Eyeroller
@gvg: Old-fashioned selective breeding yields what could be called a genetically-modified organism. Cross-breeding even more so, such as attempts to breed disease-resistant American chestnut trees by cross-breeding with Chinese chestnuts, which are immune, while working hard to isolate the gene transfer just to that one area of the genome so it could still be considered an American chestnut.
My main concern about GMO is what you mentioned, the environmental consequences, which can be considerable. I am not concerned about consuming “GMO” food per se. But “Roundup Ready” crops are an environment time bomb.
Professor Bigfoot
For example, Jim Crow was just the way things are in his day; and while I do believe he did not approve of it, as a white man it simply did not affect him directly and therefore just wasn’t much thought or talked about.
But as I said above, that man HATED slavers, and that’s a “come sit by me” situation.
Matt McIrvin
@gvg: Heinlein really admired and valorized the military, but it was specifically the constitutionally-constrained US military of the mid-20th century.
In “If This Goes On…” (aka “Revolt in 2100”), the military is the core of a liberal revolt against a religious-fundamentalist dictatorship.
In “Starship Troopers”, rule by veterans, who have proven their willingness to sacrifice for the greater good, ends up as the only thing holding global society together–but he specifies that the active military itself can’t vote, just the veterans who provide civilian rule. (I think experience has proven this scheme too clever by half, but I appreciate the sentiment to some degree.)
In “The Long Watch,” yeah, the moonbase where the world’s nuclear weapons are kept in storage under international control becomes bait for a mad General Ripper type plotting to use them as leverage to take over the world, and one of his underlings has to make the ultimate sacrifice to stop him.
Professor Bigfoot
@Matt McIrvin: There’s the thing– he was able to learn and grow because he actually did see other people as human, and he was as pro-human as anyone you might imagine.
I said once that the Democratic Party is the one focused on enlarging the tribe, eventually to include ALL humans, and I sincerely believe RAH would have thoroughly approved of that.
Spanky
@oldgold:
“You first! ” someone should have shouted, but probably didn’t. Too bad.
Baud
@oldgold:
They’ll vote for her with a heavier heart next time.
Professor Bigfoot
That’s what I mean when I say RAH was playing with ideas.
Yep, this idea was, indeed, “too clever by half” (I do love that expression!), but I think of it as an extended thought experiment.
The core thing I got from Starship Troopers was that it was humans against the universe. That the humans need to stick together and watch each others’ backs because it’s a difficult and challenging universe out there and it’s always trying to kill you, one way or t’other.
Matt McIrvin
@oldgold: Oh, Lord, it’s the old joke. “Is there a doctor in the house?”
“I’m a doctor!”
“This man is having a heart attack!”
“I’m a doctor of philosophy.”
“He’s going to die!”
“We’re all going to die.”
Steve in the ATL
@Matt McIrvin:
See also JK Rowling and her CB Strike books.
Steve in the ATL
@raven: we all have childhood trauma to overcome!
lowtechcyclist
@oldgold:
If she would be so kind as to get hers over with…
ETA: Beaten to it by Spanky.
Matt McIrvin
@evodevo: Indeed, the overwhelming evidence is that mRNA vaccines are *safer* than traditional ones that involve killed or inactivated or weakened viruses.
One of the things that pissed me off the most was people calling them “the Clot Shot” when the one that had the (very rare) clotting side effect was not even an mRNA vaccine but a more traditional formulation.
oldgold
@Baud: Not necessarily so. In ’26 the GOP is likely to lose the the Iowa Governor’s race and is no better than even money in re-electing Ernst. Plus, in the Iowa House and Senate the GOP is going to lose their super majorities. And, lose 1, possibly 2, US House of Representative seats.
Across the board the GOP is in well earned trouble in Iowa.
Baud
@oldgold:
Glad to hear it. I hope it comes to pass.
Gretchen
People in China who have caught the new variant are calling it « razor blade throat ». I think I’ll order more masks.
ExPatExDem
@WaterGirl: The Federal Government is a different beast when it comes to breach of contract actions, because Uncle Sam can generally assert sovereign immunity as a complete defense to breach of contract suits from private parties.
Such suits are a niche area of contract law and subject to the Contract Disputes Act.
Matt McIrvin
@Professor Bigfoot: Heinlein was incensed by the Civil Rights Act because he thought that restrictions on private discrimination were an unlawful infringement of freedom of association. (He says so in a letter to F. M. Busby if I recall correctly.) So, basically the Goldwater position.
I think he thought the invisible hand of the market would end segregation, like a lot of libertarians.
Trivia Man
@Professor Bigfoot: the core thing i took from Starship Troopers was to question WHY society organizes itself the way it does. And never assume “this is the best and only way because its the way WE do it”.
I believe RAH said, “a wise man knows the difference between a custom and a law of nature.”
Matt McIrvin
@Gretchen: That symptom sounds a lot like what I felt for about a day the first time I caught COVID (Omicron). It’s no fun, no fun at all.
Professor Bigfoot
@Matt McIrvin: Yep. I think he’d have thought differently if he’d lived long enough, but, yep
ETA I never lose sight of the fact that he was a white man of his era.
White men of the current era are generally untrustable, and they were even more so back then.
Elizabelle
@Steve in the ATL: re Too Famous to Edit: or poster child Patricia Cornwall.
Her first novels were tightly written and edited. And then …. Do not even pick her books up when they are on a library table. Burned by a few truly awful books years ago.
ExPatExDem
@Matt McIrvin: I’ve never understood the childlike belief that “rational self-interest” will always win the day. The whole of human history shows us that people can be and are moved by irrational reasons all the time.
Professor Bigfoot
@ExPatExDem: Because they just don’t think.
It was absolutely irrational for white shop owners to refuse to accept the patronage of Black people during Jim Crow, but they did.
They don’t understand that not everyone is motivated by money– some are more moved by hate.
After all, as long as the people in the next box over don’t have a sparrow or a curtain rod to cook it on…
Iron city
@WaterGirl: Comment 2 Contracts are binding?
Kind of. U.S. Federal government contracts generally have a clause in them called Termination. Terminations are generally either for cause or for convenience of the government. Cause is if the contactor is not performing and is not likely to be able to perform so the government terminates the contract. Termination for convenience is like there is a contract for 500,000 humanitarian meals ready to eat and we have decided that we don’t care whether anybody gets fed so we terminate the contract. In that case the contractor is entitled to be paid for the work they have done already and any other costs that are allowable, allocable, and reasonable. The amounts are determined in negotiation with the government contracting officer. Don’t ask me how I know this stuff.
Iron City
@Professor Bigfoot: If it is a U.S. Federal contract and they have a halfway competent contracting officer I guarantee there is a Terminations clause in the contract.
Trivia Man
@Elizabelle: get the 2A fanatics to donate weapons to the haitians headed back?
Trivia Man
@gvg: my position is that GMO needs extensive and public safety protocols. A corn plant that turns out to kill all oak trees for example. Or some bug that helps recycle plastic… but gets loose and destroys anything plastic anywhere on earth and coats all in a carcinogenic sludge. We are messing with things that COULD get out of control to an extinction event and just winging it.
Gretchen
Here’s the problem with having someone in charge whose last biology class was in high school in the 1970s. He thinks we can let the disease run through the bird population, select out those who survive, and breed them for a resistant bird population, which of course would take years to get as many birds as you started with. In his ignorance he doesn’t realize that the virus would use that time to busily mutate to be able to infect his « resistant » flock and would wipe them all out before he got them. The stupidity, it burns.
And the confidence that keeps him from understanding how far he is from understanding!
Professor Bigfoot
@Gretchen: “The arrogance of ignorance.”
Matt McIrvin
@Professor Bigfoot: From Heinlein’s general ideological trajectory, I think he’d have become more and more reactionary. It happened to a lot of guys of his generation.
Professor Bigfoot
@Matt McIrvin: Yeah, I should say “I’d like to think…” but, well… yeah, there’s a real strong chance that you’re absolutely right.
But then, I loved the Harry Potter books too when I read ’em, and before that woman showed her ass, so maybe I just have poor taste in literature. 😉
jimmiraybob
@Old Man Shadow: “It’s the end of medical science in America.”
But that’s OK. All the money that he steals from science programs he will use to build trade schools all across this big beautiful land. If I know one thing, it’s that plumbers and mechanics will find cures for all diseases. Et voila!!
Gretchen
@Iron city: What happens if the government contracting officer is a DOGE guy who says we don’t care if we get paid?
Kayla Rudbek
@RaflW: they are “pro-life” until disabled people want to have children, then they show their eugenicist colors (I know this from experience, I can count the number of the entire Notre Dame community that has ever encouraged my husband and I to have children on the fingers of one hand).
Ruckus
@Shalimar:
Not sure about this at all. The rest of the world does a lot of manufacturing for the US, and yes we do a fair bit of it our selves but so much of what we buy now is made off shore. The labor is often cheaper, the companies depended on to make a lot of the parts to modern day stuff are off shore. I use to manufacture tooling for making a lot of stuff for consumers. If I listed some of the stuff our tooling made most people would know of it or at least products like it. I’ve been out of the business for a while so I’m not up on today’s concept of this stuff. But we get a hell of a lot of stuff shipped from other countries, on huge container ships. Far more than we used to get 2-3 decades ago. Now some of that is in response to a bigger population but it wouldn’t get shipped it here if it didn’t sell. Look on the products you buy for where they are made, I’d bet a lot is over seas. Where is your cell phone made? Where was your car made? Your shoes? And on and on and on.