This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca!
Transcript:
Breaking news: I’ve just received word that there’s reason to believe that Pete Hegseth, Trump’s secretary of defense, may have actually learned something. Making this even more astounding is the news that what he may have learned, unintentionally, is that vaccines work. I might need a minute to fully process this.
Okay, so here’s what happened: back in April of this year, Hegseth drained a fifth of vodka and announced that effective immediately, the United States armed forces would no longer be required to get vaccinated against influenza. Here’s what he said.
It really never gets old, does it? Far right lunatics arguing in favor of bodily autonomy, but only when it comes to a safe and effective medicine that prevents sickness and death?
So, the vaccine mandate “weakened our fighting abilities.” How did eliminating it work out?
Well, in the weeks following Hegseth’s announcement, 60% of Air Force trainees chose to forgo the vaccine. By June, the Air Force trainees at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, were experiencing a flu outbreak that leveled 284 troops, hospitalized six, and killed one: 25-year old Airman First Class Keon McDaniel. The Air Force reported that he fell ill and died after being rushed to the hospital but they wouldn’t say that it was influenza that killed him–only that the “cause of the medical emergency is currently under investigation, and a comprehensive medical review is being conducted to determine the facts.” Representative Joaquin Castro, who also provided the updated numbers of service members who fell ill, claims that they did admit to him that it was the flu, but the Department of Defense has remained silent on the entire issue. They quietly forced all the troops at Lackland to get the flu vaccine and quarantine in order to stop the outbreak, but they’re hoping that everyone will just forget this ever happened. So, Castro joined together with seven other Congresscritters to petition Hegseth and demand to know not only what the fuck he was thinking when he ended the vaccine mandate, but also to know what investigation has gone into McDaniel’s death. Because I’ll tell you some people who probably aren’t moving on from this: that guy’s family.
After this humiliating series of events, this week the Navy announced that they would be reinstating the flu vaccine mandate. Has Hegseth actually seen the light, too? Okay, probably not, I think I was being a little too optimistic in the opening of this video. Sorry about that.
While all of this is the obvious end result that experts warned would happen, it is impressive how quickly it happened: flu is usually at its peak in the winter, not May and June. Like, look at this CDC chart: in the US since 1982, May has never been the peak flu month, and they don’t even bother to include June through September.
Also, the flu vaccine is one of our least effective vaccines: because there are various strains of the flu and it mutates every six months or so, scientists need to make an educated guess of how to formulate each year’s vaccine. That means that not only do you have to get it every year, but it ranges in effectiveness from as low as 10% up to 60%. Compare that to the effectiveness of the measles vaccine, which ranges from 67% to 100% effectiveness for two shots, which usually lasts a lifetime.
But this is the kind of real-world demonstration of the strength of herd immunity that you could never ethically do in a serious country: if you take 1,200 people and stick them in one residence with bunk beds and an open floor plan, make them eat all their meals together, and work and exercise and socialize together for several months, but you vaccinate every one of them with a vaccine that was only 36% effective last year, you don’t have a major outbreak of the flu.
If the following year you have a new batch of 1,200 people in the exact same situation but now only 480 of them are vaccinated, within a month you’ve leveled the building and killed a guy.
Perhaps the nuttiest part about all of this is that we have a perfect historical example of this, just in time for America’s 250th birthday celebration. You see, during the American Revolution, the continental army had a rather big handicap compared to the British forces. At the time, most of the soldiers came from rural areas where disease didn’t spread too quickly, and so they hadn’t ever been exposed to smallpox. Great Britain was much more densely packed, and so British soldiers HAD been exposed earlier in life and thus were immune.
Prior to the war, in the 1720s, Boston actually did experience a smallpox outbreak, which led Cotton Mather–yes, the guy you associate with the Salem Witch Trials–to launch a campaign to inoculate everyone in the town. Turns out that he got the idea from his West African slave, Onesimus. Onesimus, those assholes didn’t deserve your kindness.
Anyway, the inoculation campaign worked, but people were still a little distrustful of it. And so in comes the bumpkins to form the continental army, where smallpox took off in their close quarters, killing around 14% of those who contracted it. In 1775, the army lost a campaign to take Quebec because they didn’t have enough healthy soldiers to fight. Smallpox was killing so many soldiers that the remaining men started trying to inoculate themselves, but they didn’t know they had to quarantine, which led to smallpox getting even worse and the army actually forbidding inoculation. Major General John Thomas famously showed up to lead the forces in Canada and had never had smallpox but refused the inoculation in support of his troops who couldn’t get it. He died. Of smallpox.
George Washington saw all of this happening and said what the actual fuck are we doing, smallpox is “more destructive than the sword.” Because inoculation would take some soldiers out of commission, they completed it in stages. Some leaders refused to follow the order, leading to additional military losses that summer. But by 1777, the army was largely inoculated and the War turned around. And, well, today we’re Americans. I guess that IS a success, depending on how you look at it.
So yeah, it’s very fitting that the Trump Administration honor America’s founding 250 years ago by calling George Washington a woke libtard soy boy who restricted the bodily autonomy of his troops just to win a stupid war, and so we lifted the mandate that he first came up with while we lose a different war. It’s…it’s really just the stupidest timeline.
