SAY WHAT?-Amid rising COVID cases, falling vaccination rates and a persistent flood of crackpot hogwash a timid media terms "misinformation" - WE WILL NOT COMPLY! - its bone-headed perpetrators just keep spewing even when, as experts predict, by fall the surging Delta variant could kill 850 of their own irredeemable peeps a day in what has become "a pandemic of the unvaccinated."
In Alabama, which has the country's lowest vaccination rate, a doctor describes seeing young people dying. “One of the last things they do before they’re intubated is beg me for the vaccine," she says. "I hold their hand and tell them that I’m sorry, but it’s too late.” Still, the idiot masses head out to protest hospitals requiring vaccines for employees with balmy signs like "Medical Dictatorship," "I Call My Own Shots," "No to Socialism," and "Remember the Nuremberg Code." Umm.
They probably eat up Marjorie Taylor-Greene's online rants - COVID is a bio weapon, STOP MASKING CHILDREN!, Indict Pelosi! - or they did until she got suspended for saying vaccines don't work and COVID poses no threat to anyone under 65 and not obese, even as cases in Georgia are up 193%.
She was so mad at "COMMUNIST TWITTER" she held a presser where she refused to say if she'd been vaccinated, claimed the question "is a violation of my HIPAA rights" - not - and laughed, loudly braying like a demented horse, when a reporter noted kids have died of COVID. Actually, one just had, three days before, in her own district. His obituary said Wyatt, Gibson, five years old, liked to strum a toy guitar and sing, "I love donkeys and I love dogs." Declared his grieving father, "I feel like I've lost my best friend."
In the face of such daunting stupidity, we are here for eminent immunologist Dr. Fauci crushing, one more time, the obdurate grotesquerie known as Rand Paul, an uncertified ophthalmologist and well-documented moron who's refused to wear a mask or get a vaccine, called stay-at-home orders "a dictatorship," and is now evidently intent on proving that the good doctor who for 50 years has safeguarded the health of Americans is actually - as God is my witness - responsible for the global deaths of four million people.
At a hearing about the origins of COVID, Paul repeatedly hammered Fauci about research at the Wuhan lab on gain-of-function - the process of altering a pathogen to make it more transmissible - waving the study at him, arguing the NIH helped fund it, and thus confirming that Fauci personally, nefariously, sorta killed all those people; en route, he also accused him of lying about the research in earlier testimony with the portentous, "Dr. Fauci, are you aware it is a crime to lie to Congress?" By then, the ordinarily unflappable Fauci had had enough. His voice rising slightly, he noted that what Paul suggested "is molecularly impossible" before ripping him a new one. "Sen. Paul, you do not know what you are talking about, quite frankly, and I would like to say that officially. You do not know what you are talking about."Then he furiously added the money shot. “I have not lied before Congress. I have never lied. Certainly not before Congress. Case closed,” he said, pointing his finger at the vermin before him. "If anybody is lying here, Senator, it is you.” The next day, anti-mask sociopaths harassed and physically attacked a mask-wearing breast cancer patient at her clinic. She did a more explicit Fauci ouchy. “I get treated here," she snarled. "Get the fuck away.” Yes, please.
(Abby Zimet has written CD's Further column since 2008. A longtime, award-winning journalist, involved in women's, labor, anti-war, social justice and refugee rights issues. )
