Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

Well, that’s something the hospitals may have to assess at some point. Or not assess. If three-shot, mask-wearing citizens get an asymptomatic case of BA2 before they go in for knee surgery, I guess it gets classified however it gets classified, and the hospitals do what they must.

 

If there is a new surge (I have no idea if there will be), those same Republicans will immediately switch to blaming Biden. They know damn well the voters have the collective memory of goldfish.

 

LOLOLOLOLOL

 

Democrats want to answer the White House’s call, though they’re divided on how to do it. Some members are a bit more closely aligned with Republicans, and would prefer to take an accounting of current COVID funds and redirect them to fulfill the White House’s needs. “There is a lot of money sloshing around,” Representative Elissa Slotkin of Michigan told me. “People understand the desire to sweep unspent funds; I just want that conversation to be fair.” Others, mainly progressives, support new spending, and even authorizing emergency funds for COVID relief. “We just put enormous amounts of money into defense spending” for Ukraine, Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, told me. “We’re literally asking for very little money here to deal with this global pandemic.”

Republicans, on the whole, believe that Congress has already spent enough money combatting COVID in the past two years. “Everybody obviously is tired of all this, and I don’t mean that in a dismissive way,” Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma told me. “The administration’s requests are legitimate, but we have the money; we don’t need to go deeper into debt.”

 

Yeah, those faux deficit hawks can bite my ass.

 

Sorry for the confusion, fellas.

This wasn't directed at any particular party or politician - it was simply confirming the post I quoted with it.

There's a panic/neglect cycle to epidemics.

We're eager to begin the neglect portion.

 

The Committee to Re-neglect

 

Does Ed Yong know how the currently allocated monies have been spent? Does he consider, at all, the possibility that the money is there, but nobody wants to work all that hard to find it, and thus won’t?

 

This week, Congress nixed $15 billion in coronavirus funding from a $1.5 trillion spending bill, which President Joe Biden then signed on Tuesday. The decision is catastrophic, and as the White House has noted, its consequences will unfurl quickly. Next week, the government will have to cut shipments of monoclonal-antibody treatments by a third. In April, it will no longer be able to reimburse health-care providers for testing, vaccinating, or treating millions of uninsured Americans, who are disproportionately likely to be unvaccinated and infected. Come June, it won’t be able to support domestic testing manufacturers. It can’t buy extra doses of antiviral pills or infection-preventing treatments that immunocompromised people are banking on but were already struggling to get. It will need to scale back its efforts to improve vaccination rates in poor countries, which increases the odds that dangerous new variants will arise. If such variants arise, they’ll likely catch the U.S. off guard, because surveillance networks will have to be scaled back too. Should people need further booster shots, the government won’t have enough for everyone.

To be clear, these facets of the pandemic response were already insufficient. The U.S. has never tested sufficiently, never vaccinated enough people, never made enough treatments accessible to its most vulnerable, and never adequately worked to flatten global vaccine inequities. These measures needed to be strengthened, not weakened even further. Abandoning them assumes that the U.S. will not need to respond to another large COVID surge, when such events are likely, in no small part because of the country’s earlier failures. And even if no such surge materializes, another infectious threat inevitably will. As I wrote last September, the U.S. was already barreling toward the next pandemic. Now it is sprinting there.

 

We're a nation of bug-chasers.