I’m Here for My Gynecologist Appointment

Why I’ll Only be Watching Barbie for the Next Few Weeks

When our older daughter was about 12, my husband created a list of what he called “foundational movies.” It includes classics like The Godfather, Lawrence of Arabia, and Jaws; personal favorites like Aliens, Amelie, and To Catch A Thief, all of Hyao Miyazaki animation; and some cult films like Buckaroo Banzai, The Big Lebowski, and John Carpenter’s version of The Thing. There are 78 movies in total, and he joked that she would have to finish all of them before he’d allow her to get a driver’s license.

For the record, he was never going to hold her to the threats of no license, but it certainly served his purpose which—while he may have cited loftier goals of making her cinema literate—was really about getting her to hang out and watch movies with him. While she likely recognized his threats as hollow, in the few weeks leading up to the recent 8-AM-on-her-17^th-birthday-appointment with the MVC, they watched a lot of movies.

Some of the movies that played in our living room this summer included 2001: A Space Odyssey, Terminator 2, Contagion, and The Andromeda Strain (that one wasn’t on the must-see list, but they both love movies with biohazard suits). You don’t have to be a movie buff like my husband to know what these movies have in common: they all focus on the end of civilization brought about by sentient computers and/or deadly viruses. Both potentialities are keeping me up at night as everyone talks about AI and the CDC warns of a summer Covid surge.  

My news feed isn’t helping me stay calm, and it’s not just the possibility mentioned below that if elected, Ron DeSantis would hire Robert Kennedy, Jr. to run the FDA or the CDC. An even scarier article this week mentioned a warehouse in California that had been turned into a makeshift medical lab complete with homemade pregnancy tests, vials of bodily fluids, and hundreds of lab mice kept it unsanitary conditions. Court documents said, “Fresno County Public Health staff also observed blood, tissue and other bodily fluid samples and serums; and thousands of vials of unlabeled fluids and suspected biological material." CDC tests later revealed at least 20 infectious agents including Covid-19, HIV, hepatitis, and herpes.

It’s unclear who is responsible for the warehouse and its contents. The tenant is Prestige BioTech, which is registered in Nevada and not licensed to do business in California. Xiuquin Yao, the president of that company, told officials that they had inherited the warehouse and its contents because another company, Universal Meditech, Inc. (UMI), had gone out of business, and Prestige Biotech was a creditor. No authorized agents of UMI could be located—the other addresses provided for them were either empty offices or addresses in China.

Tell me this is not the beginning of a movie about a has-been investigative reporter who no one believes until it’s almost too late but ultimately ends up saving the world with the reluctant help of his ex-wife who just happens to be the preeminent expert on Hantavirus?

We don’t know what they were working on in the California warehouse, whether they had nefarious purposes, or if they had any way to spread the contagions they were storing. Still, I’m once again left feeling that we haven’t learned anything from science fiction and that the robot uprising in which they infect us all with a deadly virus can’t be too far off.

I’m also left feeling like I need a vacation from newsfeeds and politics and maybe even sci-fi. So after the next grim story about vaccines, I will be away trying to bury my head—or at least my feet—blissfully in the sand and watching nothing but The Barbie Movie. I hope you are all getting away from doomscrolling this summer, too, and I will see you in a few weeks.

More Stuff of Nightmares:
DeSantis Would Consider RFK, Jr. to head the FDA or CDC

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis spent the last few weeks shoving his head up his own ass, arguing that slavery was some kind of benevolent job training program. This abhorrent idea that he wants to teach to school children in the Sunshine State (many of whom are descendants of slaves) is far too asinine and offensive to a reply with that’s not it f**king works. It gets a full-on f**k you, you ignorant, racist turd.

Fresh off that assholery and waiting for his education department to release its miles- long list of banned books, DeSantis tried to rescue his flailing Presidential campaign by saying he might even hire a Democrat to run the FDA or the CDC. Before you give Ron a pat on the back for his bipartisanship, you should know that said Democrat would be none other than Robert Kennedy, Jr. who has been performing similar head-up-own-ass kundalini yoga moves for years arguing that vaccines are dangerous.   

Junior was recently slammed for suggesting that Covid-19 was engineered to target Caucasians and Black people and spare Ashkenazi Jews and the Chinese. (Tell that to the 99 + million Chinese citizens who have been infected with the Covid since the pandemic started?) RFK, Jr. has since said his remarks were taken out of context and he didn’t mean that Covid-19 was genetically engineered, he just wanted us to know that the U.S. government and other countries are developing bioweapons that could target ethnic groups. Covid was just a proof of concept. Thanks for clearing that up Bob, but that’s not how it f**king works.

This isn’t the only idiotic thing that RFK Jr.—who is running in the Democratic primary against a sitting president—has said over the years. He firmly believes that vaccines cause Autism despite decades of proof to the contrary and a full retraction of the only study ever to find that link. He has called the Covid-19 vaccine the most dangerous vaccine ever made, thinks gender dysphoria is linked to chemicals in the drinking water, and has blamed anti-depressants for school shootings.

This is not the man I want to run the major health infrastructure in our country, but Ron DeSantis thinks it could be good. In a recent interview he said he wouldn’t consider Kennedy as a VP because they disagreed on too many issues, but added, “If you’re president, sic him on the FDA if he’d be willing to serve. Or sic him on CDC.” This should terrify all of us and not just because the Governor of Florida seems to think a member of the Kennedy family is a German Shepard.

Recent research quantified just how much political rhetoric can impact public health. The study, published in JAMA, looked at 538,149 deaths of people 25 and over in Florida and Ohio between January 2018 and December 2021. Excess death rate is a public health term used during a crisis to describe the difference between the expected number of deaths and the actual number of deaths.

When researchers looked at the pandemic era as a whole (March 2020 to December 2021), excess death rates were 15% higher for Republican voters compared with Democratic voters. But when they drilled down and looked just at the period between April 2021 and December 2021—the time after vaccines were made available to the general public when Covid was still surging—this gap widened significantly. During that time, the excess death rates for Republican voters in Florida and Ohio were 43% higher than for Democrats.

And no, RFK, Jr., it wasn’t because the government sicced Covid on Republicans; it’s because a lot of Republicans listened to people like you and refused the vaccine. The study authors explain it this way: “These findings suggest that differences in vaccination attitudes and reported uptake between Republican and Democratic voters may have been factors in the severity and trajectory of the pandemic in the US.” The gap in excess death rates between Republican and Democratic voters was larger in counties with lower vaccination rates and was primarily noted in voters residing in Ohio.

Interestingly, Governor Mike DeWine of Ohio temporarily renounced his membership in the Secret Society of Douchey GOP Governors and worked hard to promote vaccines in his state. He got a lot of attention for the Vax-a-Million program which incentivized vaccines by entering late adopters who got the shot into a lottery with five chances to win $1 million. Young people ages 12-17 were entered into a similar lottery that offered full-ride scholarships to state schools. DeWine’s thoughtfully explained his approach to governing during a pandemic in this New York Times op-ed.

DeWine is not running for president against DeSantis and Kennedy, but Mike Pence—who as the former Governor of Indiana and a noted douchebag has permanent membership in the Secret Society—is. He wasted no time chastising DeSantis for this remark, but not because he thinks RFK, Jr. is an anti-vaxxing, conspiracy-theorizing windbag. He’s upset at Kennedy’s support for abortion. On the platform-formerly-known-as-Twitter, Pence promised, “When I am President, I will only consider Pro-Life Americans to lead FDA, CDC, or HHS. To be clear, pro-abortion Democrats like RFK, Jr. would not even make the list.”

Thanks Mike, but that’s not at all reassuring. I definitely need that vacation.