Tag: Martin Luther King Day

Another Trump Nail in the Coffin of the CDC?

The advisory committee on vaccinations to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were hand-picked by notorious vaccine-denier Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. He just happens to be Trump’s pick for U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services. He received the blessings of and confirmation by the U.S. Senate to serve in that capacity.

Photo of gloved hands holding a hypodermic needle
Photo by Mufid Majnun on Unsplash

There are things I would like to say to and about the Senators who voted to approve Kennedy for that Cabinet position, but I will temper my remarks here. To give a person who for decades has promoted conspiracy theories about vaccines to Secretary of Health and Human Services was a travesty.

When the U.S. Senate approved the likes of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services, Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense, and Kristi Noem as Secretary of Homeland Security… we get what they voted for: dangerous incompetence.

When people held their noses and voted for the likes of Donald J. Trump for U.S. President, we got what they voted for: dangerous incompetence and a colossal hatred for anyone who isn’t a rich, white male.

What we have now is a growing avalanche of physicians and other medical professions telling us not to trust anything that comes out of the CDC, the Federal Drug Administration, or Health and Human Services. Let that sink in!

On December 5, Trump said he supported the recommendations of the CDC vaccine advisory committee (many of whom are known vaccine deniers) in their recommendation that we abandon the 1991 CDC recommendation that all newborn babies in the U.S. receive the hepatitis B vaccine.

Apparently, Trump knows just as much about immunology as the quacks and Republicans on the advisory committee. Having a medical or any level of a health degree was not a prerequisite to be on the committee. Let’s just let any person off the street who supports Trump form new vaccinations policies and schedules for all Americans. What could possibly go wrong?

The hepatitis B vaccine decision flies in the face of medical data. In 1990, approximately 20,000 infants in the U.S. got hepatitis B. In 2020, twenty infants in the U.S. got hepatitis B. The vaccine not only prevents the liver damage caused by hepatitis B. It also prevents the liver cancer that can result from that liver damage.

It remains to be seen how this ill-advised new CDC policy will play out over the coming years. Will pharmaceutical companies limit production of the hepatitis B vaccine? Will parents who want their newborns to be protected from this highly-contagious disease be able to get the vaccine for their children? No one knows the answers to those questions.

A memo that Trump signed on Friday praised the new CDC recommendation and went on to endorse the new policy that instead of leading the world in health science, the CDC will now follow the lead of “peer, developed countries.”

I guess it’s fortunate that Trump’s children and grandchildren were all vaccinated as newborns before this 34-year-old mandate got scrapped last week. His future grandchildren and great-grandchildren might not be so fortunate.

When Trump promised to “drain the swamp,” we didn’t know he thought the CDC was part of the swamp.

We are left to wonder if the CDC will survive three more years of attacks by Trump and Kennedy.

Meanwhile, in Washington, DC last week…

In a move that is so blatantly racist and narcissistic, the Trump Administration removed Martin Luther King Day and Juneteenth as days that all our national parks could be visited for free and replaced them with… you are not going to believe this… Trump’s Birthday!

This is not a joke. This is the truth. You can’t make this stuff up!

Janet

#OnThisDay: Camcorder? Not.

Martin Luther King Day is celebrated today in the United States. It is one of our movable holidays, meaning it doesn’t always fall on January 20. It is celebrated on the third Monday of January.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was born on January 15, 1929. This holiday in Dr. King’s memory and honor is a day on which Americans are encouraged to make a difference, just as Dr. King demonstrated through his life and example that one person can indeed make a difference.

Countless blog posts will be written today about Martin Luther King Day. Not being an expert on Dr. King, I chose to shine a light today on something well off the beaten path. I came to today’s topic in an unusual way.

Camcorders

I read that it was on January 20, 1982 that five corporations agreed to work together to develop the camcorder. When I planned my blog’s editorial calendar for 2020, I thought I might be able to work something out about that for today’s blog post; however, when it came time to expound on that, I found conflicting information. Since my main interest was the era of 8mm home movies and not the camcorder, it really didn’t matter.

Home Movies

Thinking about the advent of the camcorder brought back some warm and special memories of the days before that piece of photographic equipment arrived on the scene. I’d already committed to write about home movies in conjunction with the camcorder topic, so I’m going with that today.

When I was a child in the 1950s, my father had a movie camera that used 8mm film. The film came in round tin containers. It wasn’t cheap to buy the film and get it developed, so Daddy was extremely frugal in taking movies. It wasn’t unusual for him to start a roll of movie film with the January birthdays of my sister and myself and finish the roll on Christmas Day the following December.

By the time the roll of film was developed and we gathered round at night with all the lights off to watch this new “home movie” on the large and heavy projector which showed the movie on a grainy  screen affixed to a tripod, it was like taking a step back in history because a year had passed since the opening scenes of the movie had been taken. 

Occasionally, something would go awry with the film or the projector. The film would stop moving through its various sprockets and within a couple of seconds the heat of the projector’s light would burn a hole in the film if Daddy didn’t get it turned off fast enough.

Photo by Brandi Ibrao on Unsplash

Daddy isn’t in any of our home movies because he took all the movies. It’s a wonder the rest of us weren’t permanently blinded by the rack of lights he bought in order to make movies inside the house. Like with the flashbulbs on a still camera, we’d see spots for a fminutes after the movie camera lights were turned off.

That was life in the 1950s and 1960s. Technology gradually progressed so that a rack of four or five blinding lights was no longer necessary to take home movies.

In this day and time, when we can take videos on the spur of the moment with our cell phones, it seems like ancient history to recall the excitement cause by the old home movies and the invention of the camcorder

Until my next blog post

I hope you have a good book to read. I finished listening to The Devil in the White City:  Murder, Magic and Madness and the Fair that Changed America, by Erik Larson. It’s about the World’s Fair:  Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in 1893. I highly recommend the book to anyone who is interested in the progression of inventions and the engineering aspect of how things work.

If you’re a writer, I hope you have productive writing time.

Thank you for reading my blog post. You have many things vying for your attention and your time, so I appreciated the fact that you took time to read my blog today.

Let’s continue the conversation

Did you grow up with the blinding lights of home movies? Don’t tell me I’m the only one!

Janet