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Thousands of students and educators are demanding tighter Covid-19 safety measures in response to campus deaths, widespread outbreaks and growing fears of both.
If you are a student in certain red states, your GOP governor and legislature would rather see you die than risk offending the Dear Leader. And yes, people are dying on campus because of COVID-19.
Kirstyn Katherine Ahuero, a 20-year-old Texas A&M student from Fort Worth, died on Sept. 8 from complications related to Covid-19.
A few days later, about 50 A&M students gathered on campus to read her obituary out loud: she studied biomedical science, volunteered for the National Suicide Hotline, aspired to be a psychiatric nurse and left behind parents, siblings, grandparents and great grandparents.
Some states in particular are doing everything possible to make sure your state university gives you COVID-19: Texas (of course), Georgia, Tennessee, Iowa, and Utah quickly come to mind.
Not only are these states fucking over current students, but their actions are letting prospective students from out-of-state know that these states are undesirable and unsafe places to study.
It’s also having an impact on faculty members.
Some professors talked about protecting their children or other more vulnerable family members when pleading with students to wear masks in class, Boedy said. At least four University of Georgia instructors have quit or retired over lax mask-wearing policies — one longtime professor retiring mid-class when a student refused to wear a mask properly.
Who wants to teach in a Petri dish full of deadly viruses?
In all fairness, some red states have adopted public health norms on campus. A vaccine mandate at Indiana University was upheld after a legal challenge.
But if the Republicans who run your state are hell-bent on appeasing Donald Trump and Fox News, there’s not much you can do to protect yourself at state universities they run. They don’t care about your protests because they control all the levers of power in the state and they don’t need to pay attention to you. You can still decide to attend a college in a different state which does respect public health.
If you can afford to, take a year off and work to break the deadly stranglehold which Republicans have on some states. Help Democrats destroy the GOP monopoly of power which has created a zone of death across the South, the western Midwest, and the Rocky Mountain states.
Start by checking to see who represents you in the state legislature.
Find Your Legislators Look your legislators up by address or use your current location.
If you have Republican varmints representing your district then “do the research” and look up in local media or by contacting the state Democratic Party who is likely to run against these pro-disease Trumpsters. Volunteer your help to these candidates. Boots on the ground do a lot more to win local elections than posting memes on Twitter.
If you are stuck at a state university in a pro-disease state with nowhere else to go, there are still some things you can do which may be useful further down the road. Document instances where university administrators or staff are stifling anti-pandemic measures with more eagerness than is absolutely necessary. Take names, date the instances, and note the circumstances. In the future you can make these hardliners regret their actions.
omg i just had a thought
so if the kid of an anti-vaxx (pro-disease) parent gets bitten by say, a dog, raccoon, skunk, a bat, or some other critter known to carry rabies....
then that kid is dead. Absolutely fucked. And the incubation period of rabies in humans is roughly a month. Virtually undetectable for a month.
A MONTH
What could the rate of infection be?
Real doctors and healthcare professionals support vaccines to stave off potentially deadly infections.
What everyone gets wrong about anti-vaccine parents
What everyone gets wrong about anti-vaccine parents | The Skeptical OB
This is relevant. Some of our friends are anti-vaxxers, and while I haven't really talked about this with them, here's the thing that we've gleaned--they're not all about "vaccines cause autism," like everyone thinks. So while we pro-vaxxers are like, "Geez, those anti-vaxxers are so silly and irresponsible, thinking that vaccines cause autism!" that's not necessarily the case. And therefore, our criticism of them may need to change, too.
For instance, some of the anti-vax parents think that actually getting a disease like chicken pox provides better long-term immunity than a vaccine shot would.
Or they think they're actually being a benefit to society--and I think this is their reasoning: continual, low-level exposure of everyone to the chicken pox virus (for example) means that we're all constantly updating our antibodies to it and similar diseases. For example, I had chicken pox when I was young. I should be immune to it. But there's a chance as I get older, I might get the related disease shingles. Now, if I were regularly coming into contact with the chicken pox virus, my body would reinforce and update its immunity to that family of viruses, and I would be fine the rest of my life. But since so many people have the vaccine and don't get chicken pox, I'm not ever re-exposed to the virus. And sure, I had chicken pox--but that was thirty years ago, and the antibodies I have in my body never get updated or reinforced. The anti-vaxxers see the rise in the number of cases of shingles as "proof" of this.
Again, R. and I don't want to bring it up with these friends, because mostly we like them, and it's such a hot-button issue, and we're worried that debating it might just cause a rift. I dunno, maybe that wouldn't be bad, but for now, it's Rocky's call. I would be really curious, though, to find out what their thinking is. Do they have arguments against vaccination beyond the "vaccines cause autism" one? Or are they really still clinging to that one? Do they see it as causing a problem when their kids grow up and want to travel to somewhere where things like polio are still endemic? Or at that point, do they assume their kids will have such great immune systems, they'll never catch anything?
Anyway, my point is, just about everything I've seen shows parents not vaccinating because of the "vaccines cause autism" argument. And some of them may not be making that argument at all, in which case, any "vaccines don't cause autism, duh" counter-arguments are moot.
The linked article also makes really good points about the anti-vaxxers and their way of thinking, beyond the science or autism claims...
