The MAGA’s monstrousness, the “know-nothing” element, will only be fully absorbed when the MAGAs hold the country back from ever truly moving on from COVID, even post-vaccine.

We have often noted that had one dropped oneself into 1250 A.D. Europe with an 18-wheeler full of antibiotics, one could have dramatically altered world history, turning back a pandemic while also ending the only economic depression worse than “The Great Depression,” the Dark Ages, the depression that lasted 300 years. If one could embed oneself with George Washington’s army on the banks of the Potomac and said, “Here, let’s give everyone one of these little pokes and in one month, not a single one will have the pox,” Washington would’ve made us the first president. The people suffering from these diseases, watching loved ones die, they would have given anything to have access to what we now have.

But the Know-Nothing MAGAs would not have elected Trump had they known anything and the only way they’re getting Trump back is to continue to “know nothing.” We realize that the sentence makes no sense but that’s fine, neither do they.

Their actions, however, are not fine. They are endangering our financial well-being while also allowing a health threat to linger around those of us who do get vaccinated. They are refusing to be vaccinated, prohibiting herd immunity, and thus giving this smart little virus a chance to find a crack in our shield and bring us all down, vaccine or not. We cannot know how it will evolve, only that it will evolve if it continues to circulate.

It seems guaranteed to continue bopping around. From the Washington Post:

But unlike many at-risk Americans seeking safety and an end to the pandemic, Margaret refuses to get a coronavirus vaccine.

“There’s too many unanswered questions,” said Margaret, who agreed to be interviewed only if her last name was withheld because of concerns she might be harassed. Margaret also said she’s fearful of possible side effects, like the headaches that some people have gotten from the second shot. “I’d just as soon as not go through that,” she said.

One of COVID’s side effects is a headache, while also feeling like one has a weight room sitting on one’s chest, but whatever.

“I had a slight fever of 99.5 for a day and a half,” said Steven Rousey, a 43-year-old aircraft mechanic in Georgia who describes himself as a “Libertarian Republican,” and said tests confirmed that he caught the virus in September. “I don’t think it was the boogeyman they made it out to be.”

The dead were unavailable for comment. But here is where it gets horrific:

 A Kaiser Family Foundation poll released last month found that 28 percent of Republicans said they would “definitely not” get vaccinated, and another 18 percent said they would “wait and see” before getting a shot. As a result, millions of Republicans could remain unvaccinated, a potential roadblock to efforts to achieve the high levels of immunity needed to stop the virus in the United States — an irony that isn’t lost on Trump officials who worked to end the pandemic.

As we said, if we cannot get herd immunity, the virus continues to circle around, continues to evolve, and may develop its own immunity to our vaccines. Perhaps it gets more lethal, perhaps it gets more contagious (that’s already happened). But even if those of us who are vaccinated or getting vaccinated are not threatened by the virus, we’re still threatened by an economy that cannot come back if one-third of the population is too damned stupid to protect themselves and us.

We mentioned stupid?

One of those “definitely not” is Margaret, the Oklahoma retiree, who said that she needled her son over his vote for Biden so much that they didn’t speak for a few days. Yet for all her admiration of the former president, she drew no confidence in the vaccines developed under his administration.

“He didn’t develop the vaccine. Scientists did it,” she said. “I know one thing: Biden didn’t do it.”

Obviously, this all falls back on Trump, the original “know nothing.” He never once did the responsible thing with this disease because he couldn’t see how the “responsible thing” aligned with his political interests. He only knew that he would win if the economy was good and this disease would slow the economy down. Thus, ignore the disease. But one couldn’t ignore the disease without mocking it and mocking the people who cared about it.

Even now, Trump couldn’t care less about it. The article talks about how helpful it would be if Trump made a PSA. But if someone went to Trump and said, “You could save 250,000 lives if you simply made this 30 second PSA that we’ll film right in your place, taking 15 minutes,” we all know that he would almost surely say no. He would probably want to make things as bad for Biden as possible – because that benefits Trump. He will gladly trade 250,000 lives for a 2.5% advantage in 2024. We don’t know with certainty that Trump believes this, but we’ve yet to hear him really push for people to get vaccinated and we know his history.

Trump’s selfishness, and his past need to downplay and mock the science, now threaten to reverberate around our society in a way that would never have happened to those desperately poor people in Medieval Europe, or the continental army. To say nothing of the millions of polio victims.

It is all tragic and enough to enrage a person. “MAGA,” so ironic. #ETTD

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Peace, y’all
Jason
[email protected] and on Twitter @JasonMiciak