REMINDER: Egg prices went up because of mass die-offs of laying hens infected with Avian Flu.
This was not a result of any gov't policy or action, or even inaction. It was a virus, which various gov't depts have made great efforts to track and contain, so as to *minimize* its impact.
The dullards of our country just voted in a Leader-In-Name-Only who did absolutely nothing to prevent the spread of a HUMAN-lethal contagious disease. Do you really think he's going to do anything about a virus that kills BIRDS ???
Oh, and there have already been some cases of humans getting Avian Flu. Many variants of the flu emerge from mainland China, because viruses in ducks are transmitted to pigs through contaminated pond water, which ducks, birds, and people all come into contact with. Given enough repeated exposures, sooner or later any given strain of flu will produce that "lucky" variant which is more effective at infecting pigs, whose immunochemistry is closer to humans than birds (we're both mammals, after all). From there it's a shorter hop to a human-infective variant, and so every few years we have a new flu pandemic -- sometimes mild, sometimes (inevitably) not.
The big difference next time will be that the pandemic will be met by gutted gov't agencies like the CDC and Dept. of Agriculture staffed to the gills w/GOP minions who consider gov't regulation a violation of their "freedom" (specifically, their freedom to be irresponsible morons) and will parrot the official line that the new pandemic is no worse than the usual winter flu and any argument to the contrary is all a big hoax and that vaccines are a plot to implant computer chips that take over people's brains (no one on earth has the ability to produce such chips, which would actually improve some people, anyway) and the Sec. of HHS says so, so officially we can't disagree. We face the very real possibility of seeing a pandemic just as bad as COVID-19 (I'll call it COVID-47, or the Trump Plague, regardless of the official name).
DUers and Dems are bracing for a disastrous maladministration under tsf, certain to be much worse than his first. We must keep in mind that this could very well include the loss of friends, family, and loved ones to a disease that could have been contained by a prompt, well-organized response but wasn't because, well, FREEDOM!! as well as a near-shutdown of society (again) as people who know better than their "leaders" self-quarantine because they learned the first time that THAT WORKS. Well, except for the MAGAts, who will once again be begging ICU nurses to please "give them the vaccine now" because they didn't learn a damned thing from the last time. Of course, we could be saved by a vaccine developed in other countries -- maybe less likely if RWNJs take over in Europe as well. Perhaps we'll find ourselves totally dependent on vaccines imported from ... China. Probably with a 200% tariff.
The worst part is that, although there was some speculation that wonderlands of FREEDOM!! ruled by autocrats like DeSantis might lose enough ignorant anti-maskers to (more or less) natural selection to shift the balance in the next election, in actual fact it turned out that MAGAts, being largely uncontrolled breeders, actually increased their margins since the last election. So the chance that the average voter will learn anything from successive pandemics will actually decrease as time goes on -- a seemingly unstoppable tragedy that follows from the premise of "Idiocracy", but without any humorous aspect at all.
Just something to look forward to. Not eagerly, but expect it to happen.
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