Friday, March 22, 2019

What a country...

Sometimes, you have to wonder why there isn't an immigration crisis involving people wanting to get out of the USA, when you read stories like this:

Antivaxxers used to mainly be hippies, but put a dumb Wingnut President in charge, and you get governors happy to announce they gave their kids chickenpox:
Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin (R) turned heads this week after saying on a radio show that he had intentionally tried to get his children infected with chickenpox and that he did not support the state’s mandatory chickenpox vaccine.

Bevin, appearing on a radio station in the state, Talk 104.1, said that every one of his nine children had come down with chickenpox — on purpose.

“We found a neighbor that had it,” the first-term governor said. “And I went and made sure every one of my kids was exposed to it and they got it. And they had it as children, they were miserable for a few days, and they all turned out fine.”
As many in comments say, his kids will really thank him when they come down with shingles later in life.  

Then guns.   The figures here for the number of kids killed by them are just extraordinary:
Results of the study, just published in the American Journal of Medicine, show that from 1999 to 2017, 38,942 firearm-related deaths occurred in 5 to 18 year olds. These included 6,464 deaths in children between the ages of 5 to 14 years old (average of 340 deaths per year), and 32,478 deaths in children between the ages of 15 to 18 years old (average of 2,050 deaths per year).

"It is sobering that in 2017, there were 144 police officers who died in the line of duty and about 1,000 active duty military throughout the world who died, whereas 2,462 school-age children were killed by firearms," said Charles H. Hennekens, M.D., senior author, first Sir Richard Doll Professor, and senior academic advisor in FAU's Schmidt College of Medicine.

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