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Politics eats science [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-12-30

They discover that a fungus has a catapult mechanism to launch its spores into the stratosphere. That’s science. Why? Because it does not affect your life.

They discover how to fly a person up through the air. First that’s science, then they figure out how to give him a gun and a bomb to drop on the heads of his enemies and that’s politics. Study aeronautics and you get a job in the defense industry

When DailyKos’s own Mark Sumner writes:

…children in nursery schools may be developing immune systems usually associated with nursing homes,

the time when that was science is long past. Go read his article. Getting covid over and over again, like you are doing, is going to kill you. Mr. Sumner chose the indirect, the political, way of saying that you, your children, your grandchildren will be dead or soon dying in a handful of years, because it isn’t easy to talk covid in scientific terms anymore. Covid is politics.

Step back a moment. Covid happened and then we got the vaccine and many thought the end of the pandemic was almost here. The vaccine works perfectly for what it was designed to do: stop severe disease (read hospitalization) or death (read acute respiratory distress from the pre-omicron variants) during the initial infection. Before omicron, covid caused an immune overreaction in the lungs and sometimes death. The vaccine was never designed to stop covid from infecting the rest of your body: heart, blood vessels, brain, pancreas, testicles, joints, eyes, everything. Clearing that infection causes a gigantic wave of inflammation body-wide. But if covid were like other viruses, say chicken pox or Epstein-Barr, once and done, then science might have had the comparative luxury of studying the long term consequences as a problem for your retirement years.

There is no enduring immunity to covid. You will get it repeatedly, two, four, six times per year, before your body has even cleared the last one out of the places it can clear it. A lot of times you won’t even know you got it. A current vaccine might stave off infection a little, but it is decades from once and done. This is the point Mr. Sumner made; well established science. An early indicator is RSV. It’s not a new virus; it’s been around forever. What’s new is that you are getting it hard enough for it to earn recognition, a name, because you got it long before your body was over your last covid infection.

Science is privileged to exist only when it does not affect your life. So politics have eaten covid. To those who say science will be years in studying this, that is not a responsible statement that we give science the space and time it needs, that is a political statement arguing for the status quo. To those who say this is fear-mongering: a political statement demanding the status quo. Shame on you. To those who say we need to wait for this reputable journal or that one to publish it, well more than enough facts have already been published, but do try to recognize you are demanding it be properly edited and filtered by various political interests and you support their political hope for the status quo. Shame on you.

Covid is politics. How about we talk some progressive politics? There are difficult problems, but it is possible to live your life and not get covid ever again.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/12/30/2214586/-Politics-eats-science?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

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