Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/10/25/trump-administration-ends-prog.html
The bizarre move worries public health experts
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Well, it’s not like ultra-wealthy people have to worry about epidemics. Microbes are famous for respecting the borders of gated communities and for heeding the warnings of doormen.
Between nihilist Know-Nothings like Biff and anti-vaxxers, I sometimes wonder if the endgame is to bring back smallpox and polio.
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$200 million over 15 years? In government dollars, that is a rounding error. But this is the money quote:
“Because USAID’s chief mission is economic aid, he added, some federal officials felt uncomfortable funding cutting-edge science like tracking exotic pathogens.”
Science is always the enemy. It has a habit of providing answers that do not comply with whatever the prevailing political bosses would like to hear. Like the many other US gov’t science programs that have been shut down. This asshole cannot be gone soon enough. I mean that literally. The damage being done may approach irreparable, if it is not already.
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Guessing Trump or one of his ilk heard “diseases like ebola” and felt that this was money being spent on an African problem, and not something that could effect Americans, or at least the investment class of Americans. Every day is a new level of WTF with these people.
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For a famous example, see the Masque of Red Death by Poe, E.A.
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“the ascension of risk-averse bureaucrats,”
I assume that means ‘risk-averse’ for money, not people.
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Agreed. If they were truly “risk averse,” monitoring the emergence of catastrophic zoonoses might just be the kind of thing they would approve of. Obviously this is not the case.
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What? Walls and moats filled with snakes and alligators will totally keep Ebola out.
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“There ain’t no cure for stupid.”
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I guess the question now for the administration is how much damage can the cram into the few months they have left.
I’m guessing quite a lot.
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I guess the Oligarchs who run our society have decided that they can get by in their isolated enclaves with just robot servants. No need to let in the lazy, stupid, disease-ridden Takers to serve them.
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Mr. Cynical thinks it may be part of the agri-biz juggernaut playing here.
They want to use antibiotics without restraint to fatten up thems Tyson chickens, et al, and that leads to resistant bacteria.
MUCH more profitable to find out after the epidemic that it was their chickens that ‘may’ have caused it. (let the media-spinners fix it)
Here’s but one article about CAFO’s and resistant bacteria.
See also the Roger Corman version starring Vincent Price. Some European critic dubbed it Bergmann without all the pretentsion.
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