What The Hell America!

Reminder: I’ll be doing an AMA over on r/thebulwark tonight at 8:00 p.m. in the East. Come hang with me and join the subreddit while you’re at it. If you’re into that sort of thing.

Link is here.

1. Booster Gold

Relatively speaking, it’s been a pretty good couple of weeks.

• Trump caved on tariffs with the U.K. and China.

• The bond market continued to deliver a beatdown to Trump’s economic program.

• Elon Musk was marginalized in the administration.

• The Supreme Court ruled definitively against Trump on due process and deportations.

Most of the bad stuff from the administration had to do with corruption. Which, if we’re being honest, is probably the best-case scenario for this timeline.

If you offered me a world in which Trump walks away from the White House with, I dunno, $250 billion in ill-gotten gains, but leaves the foundations of democracy basically intact? I’d take that deal in a heartbeat.

So the last couple of weeks left me vaguely hopeful that Trump might have tired of revolution and decided to focus on graft.

This week is a reminder that Trump’s revolution can continue even when the god-king’s gaze is elsewhere.

I hope you already got your COVID booster because the FDA is limiting access to them from now on.

In an amazing commentary article in the New England Journal of Medicine, two FDA functionaries announced the new policy and it’s a nearly perfect example of what happens when politics takes over science.

The FDA flunkies say that their organization will now take an “evidence-based approach” to COVID boosters—before talking in contradictory generalities about the will of the Volk.

For instance, they begin by saying that U.S. policy which recommends—but does not require—COVID boosters for most of the population is based on paternalism:

The U.S. policy has sometimes been justified by arguing that the American people are not sophisticated enough to understand age- and risk-based recommendations. We reject this view.

But a moment later they say that one of the ill effects of recommending COVID boosters for everyone is that it has caused the general public to distrust all vaccines:

There may even be a ripple effect: public trust in vaccination in general has declined, resulting in a reluctance to vaccinate that is affecting even vital immunization programs such as that for measles–mumps–rubella (MMR) vaccination, which has been clearly established as safe and highly effective.

So which is it? The general public is smart enough to understand age- and risk-based factors? Or people are so stupid that they reject MMR vaccines because the FDA made COVID booster shots available to everyone?

The entire piece goes on in that manner: Robert Kennedy’s mouthpieces claim that COVID boosters must be withheld from the majority of Americans because so many Americans are skeptical of vaccines—when that skepticism has been caused in large part by their boss’s conspiracy theories.1

It’s the arsonist disbanding the Fire Department and justifying it by saying, “Look how many buildings are burning!”

Except that it’s worse than that.

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Great Job Jonathan V. Last & the Team @ The Bulwark Source link for sharing this story.