Reality Check

     I'm linking to a fact- and link-heavy newsletter from The Bulwark, which addresses in detail how Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s HHS has screwed the future by yanking Federal funding for MRNA vaccine research.

     Those vaccines are our best hope to fight future pandemics, as well as go after illnesses that have no good preventative, treatment or cure.  And now -- well, here's hoping the drug companies see them as potentially lucrative, or other governments with deep pockets want to pursue them, because the Feds are out of the game.  EU, I'm looking at you; Red China's not real big on sharing unless the price is right, and used low-tech methods as their first-line response to the COVID pandemic.

     Political disagreements are one thing, issues for debate.  Hamstringing medical research on something we already know works well against deadly illness is not a matter of opinion: it's the eventual mass murder of people by the dozens, thousands or millions.  How many is too many?  How many, do you suppose, does it take before the total becomes what the USSR's Stalin called "just a statistic?"

     Government by unbridled fantasy isn't a good idea.  The lesson will, in time, hammer itself home.  I fear we'll have to be hit very hard indeed before enough of us take it to heart.