Donald Trump will give you . . . Lyme disease??

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It takes only two things to keep people in chains: The ignorance of the oppressed and the treachery of their leaders..
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We cannot ignore our President’s astounding number of failings, for these failings deeply affect us, our children and indeed our entire nation.

As you undoubtedly know, scientifically illiterate Donald Trump has decided he and the Breitbart disinformation machine know far more about science than do the vast majority of scientists.

As a result, our President has become the vaccine-denier in chief.  The degree to which he will sicken and/or kill you, your children and America is only a matter of time and luck.

Here are excerpts from an article in the April 1, New Scientist Magazine, which presumably President Trump never has heard of, much less read.

New Scientist Magazine
Lyme disease is set to explode and we still don’t have a vaccine
A new prediction says 2017 and 2018 will see major Lyme disease outbreaks in new areas. This could lead to lifelong health consequences, so where’s the vaccine?

Lyme disease is the most common infection following an insect bite in the US: the Centers for Disease Control estimates that 300,000 Americans contract Lyme disease each year, calling it “a major US public health problem”. 

Not everyone gets the classic “bullseye” rash that is supposed to tip you off.

The flu-like symptoms that follow are also easy to misdiagnose. And because antibodies to Lyme disease take a few weeks to develop, early tests can miss it.

That’s when you get late-stage, untreated, supremely problematic Lyme disease.

The best approach would be to vaccinate people at risk. We used to have (a vaccine, but thanks to anti-vaccination activists, that is no longer the case.

In December 1998, the US Food and Drug Administration approved the release of Lymerix, developed by SmithKline Beecham, now GSK.

The company voluntarily withdrew the drug after only four years.

This followed a series of lawsuits influenced by now-discredited research purporting to show a link between the MMR vaccine and autism.

Thomas Lingelbach, CEO at Valneva, a biotech company that has a vaccine in early human trials, (says) it will act against all five strains of the disease instead of just the one most common in the US, and it will be suitable for children.

“It will be hard to convince anti-vax lobbyists,” he says. Any public roll-out is at least six years away.

What makes this wait especially galling for some is that there is a vaccine for your pet. “It’s ironic that you can vaccinate your animal and you can’t vaccinate yourself,” Plotkin says.

We tend to shake our heads at the medical quackery of previous centuries, yet it remains with us, even today.  In large measure, the success of quackery relies on public ignorance.

And surely there can be no greater ignorance than the belief that vaccination is more harmful than beneficial.

When I was young, we all were terrorized by polio and diphtheria. And we all suffered unnecessarily from measles, mumps, and chickenpox, so-called “childhood” diseases that sometimes had quite serious outcomes.

Thanks to vaccination, such scourges of human existence as chickenpox, diphtheria, hepatitis, papillomavirus, influenza, measles, mumps, pertussis, pneumonia, polio, rabies, rubella, shingles, tetanus, are uncommon in America, and in the instance of smallpox, eliminated worldwide.

Frighteningly, quackery has gained entrance to the White House:

Washington Post
Trump energizes the anti-vaccine movement in Texas

President Trump’s embrace of discredited theories linking vaccines to autism has energized the anti-vaccine movement.

Public health experts warn this growing movement is threatening one of the most successful medical innovations of modern times.

Globally, vaccines prevent the deaths of about 2.5 million children every year, but deadly diseases such as measles and whooping cough still circulate in populations where enough people are unvaccinated.

Vaccination protects not only the vaccinated, but also benefits the population by what is called “herd immunity.”

Herd Immunity And Measles: Why We Should Aim For 100% Vaccination Coverage

The basic idea is: The “herd” can avoid exposure to a disease by ensuring that enough people are immune so that no sustained chains of transmission can be established. This protects an entire population, especially those who are too young or too sick to be vaccinated.

However, as long as there are communities that harbor strong negative views about vaccination, there will be outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases in those communities. These outbreaks will happen even if the population as a whole has achieved the vaccination coverage considered sufficient for herd immunity.

Even if we achieve the 90%-95% vaccination rate often considered necessary to create herd immunity, some of us still will suffer from the disease and pass it on to others.

With each vaccination denier, who allows himself and his children to go unvaccinated, the chain of transmission is strengthened.

In short, if you have a vaccination denier as a friend, know this: He is endangering you and your family.

Increasing numbers of Texas parents are choosing not to immunize their children because of “personal beliefs.” Measles was eliminated in the United States more than 15 years ago, but the highly contagious disease has made a return in recent years, including in Texas, in part because of parents refusing to vaccinate their children.

In Texas, the number of school-age children who are not vaccinated has soared since 2003, when the state expanded its exemption criteria to include reasons of conscience.

Personal-belief exemptions increased from 2,314 in the 2003-2004 school year to 44,716 in 2015-2016.

A leading conspiracy theorist, Andrew Wakefield, is author of the (discredited) 1998 study that needlessly triggered the first fears. Trump has met with Wakefield, who attended an inaugural ball and told supporters afterward that he had received “tremendous support” for his efforts and hoped to have more meetings with the president.

(One wonders how such as Wakefield was invited to an inaugural ball.)

The Texans who don’t vaccinate their children claim they are exercising their freedom of choice. They and their children will pay the penalties for their ignorance.

And what of you who are not ignorant, but whose children are too young to vaccinate? Like many contagious diseases,  ignorance can penalize even the wise and the innocent.

As for Lyme disease, it currently can be cured with antibiotics, though that may change as antibiotics lose their effectiveness, and you still may have months of fatigue, pain, or joint and muscle aches.

You may not have voted for Trump, but you are paying for his ignorance and for the ignorance of his backers, every day, in many ways.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty

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THE RULES

•Ignorance is not benign. There are penalties for ignorance.

•Those, who do not understand the differences between Monetary Sovereignty and monetary non-sovereignty, do not understand economics.

•Any monetarily NON-sovereign government — be it city, county, state or nation — that runs an ongoing trade deficit, eventually will run out of money no matter how much it taxes its citizens.

•The more federal budgets are cut and taxes increased, the weaker an economy becomes..

•No nation can tax itself into prosperity, nor grow without money growth.

•Cutting federal deficits to grow the economy is like applying leeches to cure anemia.

•A growing economy requires a growing supply of money (GDP = Federal Spending + Non-federal Spending + Net Exports)

•Deficit spending grows the supply of money

•The limit to federal deficit spending is an inflation that cannot be cured with interest rate control. The limit to non-federal deficit spending is the ability to borrow.

•Until the 99% understand the need for federal deficits, the upper 1% will rule.

•Progressives think the purpose of government is to protect the poor and powerless from the rich and powerful. Conservatives think the purpose of government is to protect the rich and powerful from the poor and powerless.

•The single most important problem in economics is the Gap between the rich and the rest.

•Austerity is the government’s method for widening the Gap between the rich and the rest.

•Until the 99% understand the need for federal deficits, the upper 1% will rule.

•Everything in economics devolves to motive, and the motive is the Gap between the rich and the rest..

MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY