Brain Dead

I used to travel fairly regularly between Boston and DC, and spent a lot of time at Logan Airport waiting for the USAir shuttle.   One such day, as the gate was closing for the previous flight, an oddly proportioned young man came storming up to the gate, and began berating the woman behind the counter.  “I must get on that plane!  It’s very important that I get to Washington immediately!”  The woman quietly explained that airline rules forbade her from letting anybody onto the jetway after the gate was closed.   This sent the man into what appeared to be a steroid-induced rage (I said he was oddly proportioned).  Incoherent threats about jobs and lawsuits were made, but eventually the man stormed off.   I was sitting close enough to the counter to hear the woman’s comment to her co-worker: “Those Kennedys think they can get away with anything!”.   At the time, I didn’t know which Kennedy they were talking about. But I remembered the man’s face, and finally connected it with the older version that has been in the news of late:  It was Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

There are a lot of fools and incompetents in the Trump administration, but RFK Jr. is the most immediately dangerous one.   He just cut $500M for contracts and funding supporting mRNA vaccines being developed to fight such diseases as bird flu (H5N1) and new COVID variants.  I once commented in this blog that the COVID mRNA vaccine was a modern miracle, and I stand by that judgement.  mRNA vaccines were the fruit of dogged research by a few brave scientists, but their rapid availability and distribution was the result of an unprecedented cooperation between the federal and state governments and the pharmaceutical industry.   Moderna, the company that first brought the mRNA technology from the bench to a working vaccine, is now laying off 10% of its workforce. 

Our collective memory has grown dangerously short.  “Well, it’s just COVID”.  Do you remember the refrigerated morgues lined up outside of hospitals just five years ago?  People were dying of COVID faster than they could be buried.  As a parent and teacher, I can attest to the damage done to an entire generation of youths who spent much of their formative years in enforced isolation.  The chaos surrounding the 2020 election, from anti-mask sentiment to January 6^th, can in large measure be attributed to the pandemic.  And now, RFK Jr. is castrating our most effective tools against the next pandemic in service to his own blind prejudices.   

“A lie travels around the world while Truth is still putting its boots on”.  The Trump regime has empowered liars and conspiracy theorists such as RFK Jr. with the means to bury the truth.  But the truth is that what comes will come.   Denial will not be an effective strategy when it does.