Like Trump, polio now poised to make a comeback. Are you exhausted yet? | Opinion
My grandfather was born in 1908 in Leicestershire, England, and as a small boy, he contracted polio.
He was lucky because back then, almost 1,000 people a year died of polio in England, many of them children. Paralysis left him with one leg that was shorter and weaker than the other.
He came to the United States in the 1920s (yes, we are a nation of immigrants) and lived a long, good life. But in his 80s, he suffered from post-polio syndrome: His strong leg had worked so hard for so many years that it atrophied. He ended up in a wheelchair.
In 1953, Dr. Jonas Salk invented a vaccine, and one of the most-feared diseases in the world just about disappeared.
I’ve been thinking about my grandfather, obviously, since the New York Times headline on Friday about how Robert Kennedy Jr.’s lawyer and sidekick had asked the Food and Drug Administration to revoke approval of the polio vaccine.
President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Kennedy to be the Secretary of Health and Human Services, which includes the Federal Drug Administration.
Kennedy and his lawyer, Aaron Siri, oppose all kinds of vaccines, including diptheria, which was the stuff of my childhood nightmares about a layer of phlegm covering your throat until you suffocated.
The other person I know of who had childhood polio was our own Sen. Mitch McConnell. In a statement to the Times, he said: “Efforts to undermine public confidence in proven cures are not just uninformed — they’re dangerous.
“Anyone seeking the Senate’s consent to serve in the incoming administration would do well to steer clear of even the appearance of association with such efforts.”
We’ll see just how far this warning goes.
To be fair, Trump, who, at 78. is just a few years younger than McConnell, clearly remembers the bad old days of polio and at one point called the vaccine “the greatest thing.” Also, McConnell, who could have voted in favor of Trump’s second impeachment, has a habit of stopping just short of making a difference.
And after all, Kennedy seems less objectionable to some of the other nominees, such as FOX News anchor Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard. And McConnell often talks a big game about opposing Trump policies while not actually opposing them.
But what this really reminds me is of 2016. Remember how the pop, pop, pop of just terrible unbelievable news from Trump and his minions every single day wore us down into apathy and compliance.
Hegseth allegedly ran two veterans organizations into the ground and is accused of sexual assault, but he’s still in the running to lead the Department of Defense.
Matt Gaetz, well, he was so bad he actually had to drop out of contention to be confirmed as Attorney General.
It turns out that Trump’s new Middle East adviser, who happens to be daughter Tiffany’ Trump’s father-in-law, is not a billionaire, but a truck salesman in Africa, but that’s not precedent setting.
Our likely next ambassador to France is Ivanka Trump’s father-in-law, a convicted felon then pardoned by Trump. (Yes, thanks to despicable pardons by both Biden and Trump, it’s definitely time to get rid of this presidential power.)
Linda McMahon, the nominee to lead and then eliminate the Department of Education, is the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment. She’s also been accused of enabling the sexual exploitation of children.
Kash Patel, nominated to run the FBI, has his own enemies list that he published in a book. And so on.
It’s just a constant drip of disgust until you hear that Trump is pressuring Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to name his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, to the Senate if Sen. Marco Rubio is confirmed as Secretary of State.
And you just shrug.
It’s hard to know how we should react, and in Kentucky, it’s not like writing your Congressmen is going to do any good, since they’ve made it very clear just how compliant they will be to the Great Leader.
Inviting polio back to the party was a trigger for me. Yours might be something even worse, like inviting Putin to take over Ukraine.
Or, maybe you’re one of the lucky ones who has amnesia about Trump’s first term and thinks the latest parade of nepotism, corruption and incompetence is fine, just fine.
The rest of us will have to save our energy for worse to come.
What is it?
Or...will all this craziness have become so normalized by then that we won’t even know?
This story was originally published December 16, 2024 at 12:41 PM.
