"I Fear for My State" Dr. Michelle Fictus
Tennessee thrust itself to the forefront in the war with the Coronavirus, and stoutly declared its support for the killer microbes, despite us fighting for our lives, our families’, and our country’s--now and in the foreseeable future. Just as the Volunteer state fought against the Union in the first Civil War, they’ve gone rebel again. Taking a lesson from the Mideast, Tennessee now employs children as human shields to be sacrifices for exponentially more casualties. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend”.
70-80% of a vaccinated America will lead to a fully open country and possible herd immunity, something desperately called for by many during the worst months of the pandemic, in the spring through winter of 2020. The virus won’t go away, but the biological defenses will suppress new and more dangerous variants. For Republicans officials in Nashville, more important than conquering Covid is protecting the new Jefferson Davis and the central theme of today’s Republican Party, continuous control of the United States federal government in a post-Constitutional world. The South will rise again.
The new battleground does not bespeak Antietam , or Gettysburg or any other internecine 1860s battle. Tennessee has drafted children’s bodies and ordered them to the medical front. Sickened at a more frequent and severe rate, casualties rising, the youngest and younger lay in hospital ICU rooms, some on ventilators. Children are expendable, partisan politics trumps childhood health. Now in this biological war, Mother Nature reminds us once again of her fury and lethal power, gobbling up the offerings. She reminds us that her wrath comes not only in tsunamis and earthquakes and hurricanes, but in an army of microscopic invaders, a countless number more deadly than Genghis Khan sweeping across the Eurasian steppes.
Tennessee has never been known as a friend to rational science. In 1925 it hosted the Monkey Trial, a courtroom battle contesting a law making the teaching of evolution a criminal offense that was followed on US radio and drew world-wide attention. As a loyal Trump state voting twice for him at 60% in 2016 and 2020, Tennessee (and nation-wide) Republicans fear Democratic success against the pandemic might lead to higher approvals, more difficult GOP election prospects, and longer odds to restore Trump to the White House to fulfill the party’s mission statement.
Doing their part to maximize the COVID19 danger, the Volunteer State has fired its vaccine director of preventable diseases, Dr. Michelle Fiscus, for trying to vaccinate against a preventable disease. She advocated what our medical professionals urged the nation to do –vaccinate kids over 12. There was an outreach program to inform teens about vaccination, including a “mature minor” clause in state law allowing older teens to vaccinate without parental consent. This constituted way too much prevention and life-and-death health information. The state withdrew its teen outreach—not only for the Coronavirus, but for all vaccinations that protect children from once deadly diseases or a lifetime of chronic affliction. Welcome back polio, measles--longtime no see, hello again tuberculosis. Our kids are waiting for you.
Instead of uniting in a national crisis, we are being placed at ever higher risk to COVID19 because of partisan politics instead of true patriotism. Blue vs Grey may belong to the 19th century, but the new Blue vs Red iteration has evolved into a deadly fight costing adult lives and threatening America’s youth.
Tennessee, for rejecting science, exposing kids health and lives to the ravages of COVID19 and a multiplicity of vaccination-preventable diseases for a rogue party’s political goals, receives four stingers. And still not a shot fired.