If there is one thing that should feature 'bigly' in history's assessment of Donald Trump's legacy, it is the huge number of covidiot deaths of those who listened to him and his allies in the Talibangelical Christian cults, the QAnon conspiracists and the Repugnican politicians who prefer to allow this self-inflicted genocide to proceed rather than lose face and admit they were wrong about the pandemic, the measures to control it and then the efficacy and safety of the vaccines.
Here for example, is yet another case of two people who believed the anti-vaxxer fools and not the experts. They are, or rather were, Dusty and Tristan Graham, who styled themselves the "Alabama Pickers", popular YouTube/eBay resellers. According to their daughter, Windsor Graham, Dusty died of COVID-19 last Thursday after a three-week battle against the virus while Tristan died suddenly on August 20th from COVID-19-related complications.
A few days before falling ill, the couple posted a 90-minute video online declaring that they would never get vaccinated and outlining their stance on other COVID-19 measures (against them all).
Weirdly, and as if to show off their scientific ignorance, they declared that the vaccine was no technically a vaccine, but 'immunity therapy', apparently not realising that the point of a vaccination is to make you immune to infection. They even boasted that they had survived for a year alongside friends who had caught the virus (forgetting to add the word 'yet'), apparently believing this indicated some sort of super-human ability to prevent the virus infecting them.
They are far from unique in this respect. AlterNet also reports that Marc Bernier, a radio host with Florida's WNDB-AM/FM radio station, who called himself 'Mr Anti-Vaxx' and who had spent months campaigning against the vaccine, died last Saturday of COVID-19 after a three-week battle with the virus. He was 65 years old. Florida is currently in the throes of the worst surge in COVID-19 cases since the pandemic began and still the Trumpanzee Repugnican governor, Ron DeSantis, is holding out against mandatory wearing of face masks in schools and other public places.
Yet another anti-vaxxer death is that of another radio host, Phil Valentine, who made 'Vaxman', an anti-vaxx parody of the Beatles song, 'Taxman'. He died of COVID-19 last week.
Undeterred by these deaths, anti-vaxxers succeeded in closing down a vaccination facility in Georgia. According to the Georgia commissioner for health, Dr. Kathleen Toomey's office:
Local public health workers have been harassed, yelled at, threatened and demeaned by some of the very members of the public they were trying to help. And no surprise, when members of Congress have compared public health workers to Nazis. One north Georgia mobile vaccination event was cancelled when protesters showed up because, "Aside from feeling threatened themselves, staff realized no one would want to come to that location for a vaccination under those circumstances, so they packed up and left."
COVID-19 Cases, hospitalisations, hospital bed occupancy and deaths, UK, up to 22 Sep, 2021
Data source: GOV.UK Coronavirus (COVID-19) in the UK
At this time, more than 90% of all coronavirus-related hospitalizations are made up of unvaccinated individuals. While getting the COVID-19 vaccine does not prevent coronavirus, reports have indicated symptoms are less severe for those who are vaccinated.This last statistic is born out by the recent figures from the UK which is currently experiencing a δ variant surge of cases, far higher than the first wave of cases in March-April, 2020, when the number of seriously sick people threatened to overwhelm the health services and daily deaths toped 1,200. Now, with 82% of adults over 16 years old being double vaccinated and 89.5% having at least one dose, on cases some six times higher than in the first wave, hospitalizations and deaths are about a sixth of the first wave figure.
The public vaccination campaign has been a stunning success here in the UK. It is currently being rolled out to children aged 12 and over. When I asked my 14-year-old grandson if he was going to get it when offered, he replied, "Of course I am! I'm not stupid, am I?!"
If only more people living in the blue states in the USA, currently providing the virus with opportunities to produce even more deadly mutations, and filling their local ICU and mortuaries, could say the same.
Unfortunately, these are, generally speaking, the same idiots who thought Donald Trump was a good president who knew what he was talking about and not a scientifically illiterate, incompetent fool with a narcissistic personality disorder and the emotional maturity of a spoilt adolescent, who found it impossible to believe there really were experts who knew more than he did. The personality disorders and incompetence that sensible people booted him out of office for at the first opportunity.
Given their expressed resistance to COVID-19 control measures by the promoters and most of the speakers, and the naïve covidiocy of the likely attendees at the three-day event in Nashville, Tennessee, and given that the Repugnican governor of Tennessee, Bill Lee has not only refused to mandate mask-wearing but has banned local governments in the state from imposing such mandates, the QAnon/Trump/Quack medicine rally is likely to be yet another anti-vaxxer super-spreader event and a celebration of scientifically-illiterate covidiot gullibility. It remains to be seen how many new additions to the cull of right-wing, Repugnican anti-vaxxer covidiots the event will add to the growing list of victims as the self-inflicted genocide progresses relentlessly in the blue states.
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