My partner and I work with animals (and insects, like our bees).
We have been a steward of many.
Even the domesticated animals we work with, and share indoor and outdoor spaces with, have these things in common:
- ability to parse my body language;
- ability to smell my pheromones (including various flavors of stress, such as fear);
- ability to parse my tone when I speak; and
- fantastic situational awareness [when awake].
I really have yet to meet an animal, wild or tame, whose instincts are not more or less intact.
They draw their own conclusions, which often successfully support their survival.
Unsuccessful understanderers of humans do not usually live to reproduce.
I think humans are unique in our ability to come at facts–real, honest, verifiable facts–from an emotional place, and then, with all fantastic computing power our brains have, turn our backs on the facts, and stay in our emotional comfort zone.
As I write this, I have three dear older friends with cancer, some with very advanced stages of it. They are hoping against the odds, they are pushing themselves through all the modern western medicine can throw at them, to see if they can turn things around. They want to live. That is their emotional comfort zone… facts (and prognoses) be damned. They–heck, I–want medical miracles.
To come at closely held convictions from an emotional place is to be human.
Staying there, despite all evidence to the contrary, is understandable.
It’s probably even an evolutionary advantage, some days.
And… some days… not.
My guess is that the programming that started with the Christ kernel, with its various IRL instantiated, organized applications religious sects, is running its Book of Revelation subroutine, having been infected (suborned?) for the umpteenth time by The Greed Community. My guess is that all true believers of all stripes do not want to hear or believe they have been sold out (please do not construe my guess as a wall-to-wall indictment of all Christians; it is not).
Tennessee health official says she was fired after outreach efforts to vaccinate teens
July 14, 2021 / 6:49 AM / CBS/AP
Tennessee’s former top vaccinations official said Tuesday that she couldn’t stay silent after she was fired this week amid scrutiny from Republican state lawmakers over her department’s outreach efforts to vaccinate teenagers against COVID-19.
Dr. Michelle Fiscus, who was the medical director for vaccine-preventable diseases and immunization programs at the Tennessee Department of Health, said the state’s elected leaders put politics over the health of children by firing her for her efforts to get more Tennesseans vaccinated.
She said the agency presented her with a letter of resignation and a letter of termination Monday, but no reason for why she was being let go.
After choosing the termination letter, Fiscus penned a blistering 1,200-word response published in The Tennessean in which she said she is ashamed of Tennessee’s leaders, afraid for her state, and “angry for the amazing people of the Tennessee Department of Health who have been mistreated by an uneducated public and leaders who have only their own interests in mind.”
“I am not a political operative, I am a physician who was, until today, charged with protecting the people of Tennessee, including its children, against preventable diseases like COVID-19,” she said.
The changes to Tennessee’s vaccination strategy will impact the majority of the Volunteer State, which lags behind most of the nation in the race to immunity. Only 38% of Tennesseans are fully vaccinated, and at the current pace the state won’t be 50% vaccinated until March, according to health department estimates. The agency holds responsibility for public health in 89 of Tennessee’s 95 counties, excluding major metropolitan areas where local agencies wield more authority.
‘No proactive outreach regarding routine vaccines’
After the health department’s internal COVID-19 report was circulated on Friday, the rollback of vaccine outreach was further detailed in a Monday email from agency Chief Medical Officer Dr. Tim Jones.
Jones told staff they should conduct “no proactive outreach regarding routine vaccines” and “no outreach whatsoever regarding the HPV vaccine.”
Staff were also told not to do any “pre-planning” for flu shots events at schools. Any information released about back-to-school vaccinations should come from the Tennessee Department of Education, not the Tennessee Department of Health, Jones wrote.
“Any kinds of informational sheets or other materials that we make available for dissemination should have the TDH logo removed,” Jones wrote.
