The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently recommended that children between the ages of 5 and 11 get the COVID vaccine (starting with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, which is recommended for anyone older than 4). As part of a public education campaign, everybody’s favorite yellow bird and some of his Muppet friends took to the airwaves and Twitter to spread the word:
And boom! Conservatives cried fowl (see what I did there?) because it’s always smart politics to pick a fight with a giant beloved puppet.
(Cortes is a host on the irresponsible Newsmax, which operates as part of the Big Lie Network.) Then there’s this:
Boothe is a hired gasbag on Fox News. And then there’s this one (my favorite):
(Cruz is a human-shaped paperweight from Texas.)
Using popular children’s characters to spread important news is a bit of a tradition.
Here’s Big Bird advocating vaccinations in 1972.
But have at it, Republicans. This can only end spectacularly for you.
I think the GOP has things to offer! Two at least.
The first is poison. The poison of constant warfare, requiring the constant presence of Enemies. (I paused here to check-- yes, my mental image was from the fifth circle fo Dante's Inferno.) The poison of vapid self-righteousness. The poison of paranoid self-defense and the rejection of knowledge.
They don't want to offer that poison explicitly, because it's not that attractive. Rather, it founds their parades and keeps their troops marching.
And the second is sloth. I think that a major reason for Reagan's revolutionary success was his appeal to laziness. "Ah, everything's fine. We don't need to fix anything, change anything, plant the crops or mend the leaking roof! Let's just stretch out, eat the seed corn, and condescendingly diss our neighbors." A robust tradition that has us startlingly tapped-out, as a society.
Out of such treasure, moral indignation over Big Bird, the Murphy Brown of our times.
They don't understand the most basic aspects of epidemiology. I don't know why people listen to these idiots! Infection in anyone, regardless of age or how sick they get, provides opportunity for potentially another variant to develop. Variants come from someone who is infected (could be an asymptomatic 5 year old). While kids are less likely to end up hospitalized from COVID than adults, some do end up hospitalized. Ask the pediatricians in the hospitals/ICUs, especially in areas of the country where vaccination rates are low.
ALL kids who become infected provide opportunity for potentially a more virulent variant to develop, just as infected adults do. That could end up harming all of us.
Development of mutations during replication of viruses is a naturally occurring thing. Most mutations are harmless, some are not. The more the virus spreads, the higher the odds the virus will mutate into a more virulent variant.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhaseltine/2021/10/21/study-finds-children-to-be-vectors-of-covid-19-and-emerging-variants/