Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth rescinded the flu vaccine requirement in April, and in May influenza began spreading at Lackland, which is the hub of Air Force basic training, graduating 35,000 airmen every year.
Has anyone gotten to the bottom of whether Hegseth really does not wash his hands?
I mean, even if it was a “joke”, why would anyone take advice from this dumbass about their vaccination schedules?
The US military has long given all new recruits a whole lot of vaccines. Mostly because it keeps them alive, and because it takes away the incentive for potential adversaries to do things like release smallpox again. The politically-appointed leadership has long had the discretion to choose which vaccines. So he took away a requirement for a flu vaccine, even though the flu has a long history of killing more soldiers than combat.
Combine that with a whole lot of antivax propaganda kicking around, and a large fraction of soldiers didn’t get this vaccine.
If you’re curious why it’s hitting the AF extra hard, for decades an evangelical cult has been targeting our military with a focus on the AF.
The recruit in boot camps and move to AF town so their daughters can marry and convert members, then raise their kids to join or do the same.
That leads to a higher percentage who would refuse the vaccine, endangering everyone.
It gets written about every couple years, but no one does anything and now Erica Kirk is in charge of the AF academy
Because the air-force tends to be more of an indoors group… ;-) They don’t call it the “Air-Conditioned Force” for nothing. ;-)
It’s too bad there’s nothing that could have been done to prevent this.
The good thing about vaccine denial-ism is that it tends to kill people stupid enough to fall for vaccine denial-ism…
And their children…
And any vulnerable bystanders who can’t be vaccinated and depend on herd immunity.
Sounds like parents murdering children. That’s only bad if it’s an embryo.
I hate to say it, but yeah… I know this smells of eugenetics, but getting stupid out of the gene-pool is not necessarily a bad thing…
Watch the first 5 minutes of the movie “Idiocracy” for a great example of why…
Stupid isn’t genetic. Just like eugenics isn’t a real science.
It’s a hilarious premise for a movie, but a lot of ink has already been spilled to explain that it’s not really how intelligence works…
The thing is, stupid isn’t a gene thing. A set of intelligent parents can have moronic offspring and dumb ones can have intelligent kids. That’s why so many people break through the indoctrination despite their parents best efforts.
I thought there was a genetic component to intelligence.
I’d argue that allowing people to self-select for extinction isn’t eugenics, particularly if all they have to do to avoid it is accept they don’t know everything and listen to the advice of experts.
It is unfortunate that they take others with them.
“Stupid” definitely falls on the nurture side of “nature vs. nurture.” So, it’s not eugenics to want stupid people out of the gene pool. They will nurture stupidity into the next generation not pass on a gene. It is a failure of a society’s education system. The children of stupid people could be raised not-stupid.
100% Hegseth’s fault.
