A Pox on Both Your Houses 🤡 🤮 ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️ 🤮

Ethics Are So Yesterday: The House Ethics Committee is scheduled to meet tomorrow.  The make-up of the ten-member committee is evenly split with five Republicans and five Democrats. As of yesterday, all the members of the committee and likely lots of their staff members have seen a copy of Attorney General nominee Matt Gaetz ethics report.  According to a lawyer representing two of the young women who testified under oath in response to subpoenas, Gaetz was observed having sex with a minor something that’s counts as statutory rape in Florida.  He also “allegedly” paid women for sex.  Speaker Mike Johnson, who holds himself out as holier than thou said that it would be inappropriate to release the Gaetz ethics report but apparently there’s more than one precedent for similar reports being released even after the subject of those reports steps out of Congress. Trump has been calling around pressing members of the Senate to commit to voting for Gaetz’s confirmation in January, assuming he can’t put the kibosh on those hearings ever taking place.  No doubt Trump is threatening to ruin the lives of vulnerable Senators, it’s worked before and as outgoing Senator Mitt Romney noted, hiring protection for one’s family is very expensive and most Senators don’t have the financial resources that he has. More dirt has come out about Trump’s Department of Defense nominee the multiply cheating, thrice married Fox guy Pete Hegseth.  Apparently, the woman who he “allegedly” raped was working for a conservative group and was responsible for making sure that Hegseth turned up when and where he was scheduled to turn up. He was harassing two women in a bar; to defuse the situation she walked him back to his room, after that her memories grew murky, likely because she was drugged.  After realizing that she’d been raped,  she went to the emergency room where her bruises were noted, and a sperm sample turned up positive. He paid her off, she signed a non-disclosure agreement.  In the before times when candidates like Zoe Baird who President Clinton nominated to serve as his Attorney General were disqualified for mundane things like failing to pay social security taxes for a nanny and a driver, he’d have been kicked to the curb but now rape accusations are just one of those okay things, because, well we all know why.  Last night Trump announced the nomination of another Fox guy/former Wisconsin Republican Congressman Sean Duffy to serve as Transportation Secretary.  As far as we know, Duffy isn’t guilty of any sex crimes but it’s not like the Trump transition team, which has outsourced the minimal amount of vetting they’re doing to an outside source, as in not the FBI, is looking all that hard for any.      

Not Going Back, Pox Edition:  Starting with the good news, the World Health Organization declared Variola more commonly known as smallpox eradicated in 1980, US residents stopped being inoculated for the disease in 1972.  Varicella Zoster more commonly known as chickenpox has not been eradicated but in the US, there’s been an effective vaccine for it since 1995.  Before the vaccine, just about everyone contracted chickenpox.  For most the symptoms included a fever with a rash and blisters, however some ended up with pneumonia or another serious infection which is why before the introduction of the vaccine in the US 10,500 to 13,000 of the infected ended up in the hospital during outbreaks and 100 to 150, mostly children, died.  Also, babies born to women who contract chickenpox during the first 20 weeks of pregnancy can be born with Congenital Varicella Syndrome, which includes brain, eye, muscle, limb, and bone defects and blindness and intellectual disabilities.  Though for most the symptoms of chickenpox typically go away in under a week, the Varicella Zoster virus is sneaky, it hangs around in the body forever, reappearing as shingles in one of three adults who had chickenpox, even in those whose initial cases of chickenpox were so mild that they didn’t know they were infected.  Shingles attacks, and they can feel like brutal, sometimes endless attacks, generally occur after the age of 50 but can happen earlier to those with suppressed immune systems, a group that includes those taking medication for autoimmune diseases. You can’t catch shingles from someone with shingles but anyone who hasn’t had chickenpox or the vaccine, including young not yet vaccinated children, can catch chickenpox from a shingles sufferer with blisters.  The first shingles vaccine was released in the US in 2006, in 2016, Shingrix a more effective vaccine became available replacing the earlier one. Then there’s monkeypox, now known as Mpox, it’s caused by the Orthopox virus, a member of the Variola family.  It first appeared in humans sometime in the 1970s. There was an outbreak in 2022, and it appears to be out and about again. To date Mpox is not as widespread or contagious as the other pox viruses.  There’s an effective vaccine for it but the current Mpox strain appears to have developed one of those gain of function mutations that may be making the available vaccine less effective, just another reason that vaccine research and development, another one of those things that RFK Jr opposes, because he’d rather we all be able to drink raw milk, is very important.                   

#BringThemAllHomeNow