SEATTLE (AP) — The Democratic governors of Washington, Oregon and California announced Wednesday that they created an alliance to safeguard health policies, believing the Trump administration is putting Americans’ health and safety at risk by politicizing the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The move comes with COVID-19 cases rising and as Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has restructured and downsized the CDC and attempted to advance anti-vaccine policies that are contradicted by decades of scientific research. Concerns about staffing and budget cuts were heightened after the White House sought to oust the agency’s director and some top CDC leaders resigned in protest.
“The CDC has become a political tool that increasingly peddles ideology instead of science, ideology that will lead to severe health consequences,” the governors said in a joint statement.
“The dismantling of public health and dismissal of experienced and respected health leaders and advisers, along with the lack of using science, data, and evidence to improve our nation’s health are placing lives at risk,” California State Health Officer Erica Pan said in the news release.
The Westcoast shoukdnjust break off and do their own thing.
I wish! And use the cascadia flag too!
That’s one good looking flag.
We need to figure out the mechanism for not sending taxes to the federal government to then give to the regressive states holding us back. Let them live in their Libertarian dystopia.
Either that or become part of Canada.
Canada is still technically a constitutional monarchy. They should leave the crown first.
Viva Cascadia!!!
Now this is the united west that I like to see.
I like my neighbors.
The northeast should follow suit, honestly.
The governor of MA just said:
“No matter what happens with Robert Kennedy and the federal government, we are going to make sure vaccines remain available in Massachusetts,” Healey’s statement said. “At my direction, our Commissioner of Public Health issued an order on Friday to allow pharmacies to continue to provide COVID vaccines to Massachusetts residents.”
Should have done this thirty years ago. But I guess the second best time is now.
There was no need to because in the 90s being anti vaccine meant that you were insane
Antivax hysterics have been around a lot longer than that.
Yes but very few people took them seriously (in recent history) until Andrew Wakefield published his (now widely discredited and retracted) paper on links between vaccines and autism.
Not according to the Wikipedia’s worth of citations. Particularly early on in its development and distribution, it was significantly more controversial (and not nearly as effective).
Wakefield created a resurgence of skepticism fit for early '00s Oprah TV. But there was plenty of it in generations prior, particularly with regard to resistance to the Smallpox vaccine.
They didn’t get much traction. Smallpox was completely eradicated worldwide, and polio had been eliminated in the US. They used to be a bunch of wackjobs in the corner and nobody listened to them.
They didn’t get much traction.
Early on, they got plenty. It was just restricted to the tight media networks of the surburban UK and US. Most of the work eliminating smallpox was international - Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Africa. By the time you had mass media inundating the public with glowing coverage of these efforts, mandatory smallpox vaccinations had ended and the enthusiasm for both promoting and resisting smallpox had waned. Virtually nobody gets smallpox shots in the modern day. But, more critically, mandatory vaccinations have fallen away in favor of “opt-out” rules for school attendance and military enlistment.
They used to be a bunch of wackjobs in the corner
Really depended on which corner you were standing in. You had lots of crunchy suburban granola moms forgoing measles vaccines for their kids back in the 90s - a thing you could get away with largely because measles outbreaks had become so rare. Then California got hit with a number of nasty measles outbreaks and the media got into the practice of calling anti-vaxers wackjobs. But this, in turn, created a market for right-wing contrarianism to say they were against Big Government California Mandates (despite saying they were against stupid hippie parents not vaxing their kids ten years earlier).
There’s an ebb and flow to this. Anti-vax sentiment was not always the norm, but neither was it always taboo. A lot of it boiled down to people being contrary on opposite ends of the liberal/conservative dichotomy.
What the fuck Polis? I want Colorado in all the cool shit too. We’ll just pretend Nevada and Utah don’t exist.
Balkanize already
