cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/50685494
Louisiana Surgeon General Ralph Abraham, who rolled back government vaccine distribution as the state’s top public health official, has been appointed to the second highest position at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Abraham, a 71-year-old medical doctor, lives in rural Richland Parish and served as a Republican congressman representing Northeast Louisiana from 2015 until 2021. He could not be reached for comment Tuesday.
Abraham has espoused skepticism about vaccines for years. After becoming surgeon general in 2024, he scuttled Louisiana’s longstanding vaccine promotion program, shutting down its advertising campaign and eliminating mass vaccination events the state has conducted for at least two decades for the flu and other diseases.
Recently, Abraham also drew criticism from other public health experts for waiting several weeks to make a public statement and offer guidance on whooping cough after two babies in Louisiana died from the illness earlier this year.
Gov. Jeff Landry, who has also expressed skepticism about vaccines, praised Abraham’s appointment to help lead the nation’s leading public health organization.
“While we are certainly sad to lose Dr. Abraham here in Louisiana, we are thrilled to see the CDC gain a selfless leader,” Landry said in a prepared statement Tuesday. “There is no better advocate for health freedom than Ralph Abraham.”
Prior to his government roles, Abraham worked as a veterinarian treating animals for a decade and then returned to school and earned his medical degree in 1994 at age 40. He operated a general practice and still treats patients on a part-time basis at a rural health clinic in Louisiana’s Mississippi Delta region, one of the poorest sections of the country.
Gov. Jeff Landry tapped Abraham to be Louisiana’s health secretary for the first several months of Landry’s administration in 2024. The governor and state lawmakers then created the position of state surgeon general specifically for Abraham last year.
A healthy, broadly educated population which feels safe and secure is incompatible with, and toxic to, conservative and authoritarian ideologies.
They need you to be sick, stupid, and scared.
This characterization harms actual skeptics.
If it was up to me to pick the headline, I would have gone with
“Antivax oligarch leaving No. 1 post at LDH following Whooping cough epidemic, and failed cover up of infant deaths. Promoted to No. 2 at C.D.C. as reward for job well done.”
As a reward for creating a whooping cough epidemic, and then attempting to cover up the death of two unvaccinated babies, you’re going from #1 in charge of Louisiana health to #2 in charge of health for the whole fucking country.
Only logical move for a government that places such a strong emphasis on “meritocracy.”
The goal is to kill children. The goal is to “cause chaos” so they can capitalize on the fear. It’s not a very smart plan that really makes anyone safer or happier, but it might help a few shitty people have a bit more power over others, so the fascists eat it right up.
He’s not a skeptic. He’s a crank.
Presenting him with evidence won’t change his position.
Compounding the problem. America is so fucked.
On the bright side, I think all of humanity might be fucked. I guess we can all (or at least a significant chunk of us) can all go out together.
I love how we’re teaching the rest of the world that the best weapons against the most powerful nation in the history of the human species is propaganda and viruses.
Hasn’t that always been true for all of history and any powerful nation though? That’s why the biological weapons convention was created.
Exposing your enemy to a disease their immune system has never been exposed to will help weaken and wipe out a nation very quickly.
You bringing that up though does make me realize something even more concerning about these bastards calling for privation of government. They love a good loophole, and even if our government/military signed a treaty agreeing not to develop and stockpile new bioweapons private corporations in the U.S. didn’t sign it. Kinda wonder if that actually applies to most u.s. treaties.
If we’ve learned anything in the last ten years it’s that everything has been made out of Popsicle sticks and chewing gum the whole time. The boomers created a fiction that no one questioned. Now their dying gasp is to tear it all down and lock the doors behind them.
The non privatized aspects of Operation Warp Speed and the creation of the COVID vaccine should tell you it wasn’t all popsicles sticks and bubble gum.
There were problems within the NIH, but it was an incredible institution and one of our greatest assets. The Trump administration is currently determined to make it into a ratchet shell of its former self though. The Heritage Foundation also helped do this to a lot of American institutions during the Reagan administration.
I don’t think most things in n the U.S. were always popsicle sticks and bubble gum, until a bunch of jackasses gained too much power and started demanding the government be run like a business, and efficiency and bottom dollar be the only considerations for how departments should be run.
That’s how manipulative oligarchs work. They take over something that’s working ok, intentionally remove people who know what they’re doing and fill it with their personal army of incompetent but loyal morons who destroy it. Then they rely on people being convinced it never did anything worthwhile anyway and we won’t miss it once it’s gone. Once it’s gone they’re free to redirect that money to some evil bullshit that only benefits a handful of individuals.
Funny that popsicles and bubblegum actually seems to been the case since day 1 for the CIA in terms of what they actually do, but they also don’t have to provide any accountability for their budget because it’s all top secret.
They have never accomplished anything except making shit so much worse than it was before the agency existed. They literally brought Nazi scientists into this country after WWII to help them hide from prosecution then kept that secret for decades. We have so many people ready to just write off the entire government, but why don’t we ever have Americans demanding we get rid of those useless bureaucrats and that entire agency?
I hear you. I worry how deep this rabbit hole goes. Is the balkinzation of the United States possible? It terrifies me when I hear people casually talk about civil war.
I’m surprisingly ok with the US reducing our international influence but I just can’t wrap my head around the concept that some people think we should polarize ourselves to the point of redrawing maps… Again. I hate that I have contingency plans.
I don’t like hearing people talk about redrawing maps either.
I think we’re already in a passive aggressive war, that most Americans don’t even want to be fighting. Like most wars, we’re being pitted against each other on behalf of a handful of very manipulative and wealthy individuals who need us to pick a side and carry out their dirty work for them.
I think if we make it out of this and survive as a country, we can’t go back to the way we were before Trump took office.
I know Bernie Sanders has made some really great suggestions for nonpartisan ways we could regain control of the government, and make it work for the people instead of big business.
Obviously, overturning Citizens United is a big one.
I would add to that:
•A bipartisan/non-partisan push for a constitutional amendment that provides public accountability for SCOTUS justices. Instead of having every new president use executive authority to one up the president before them by packing the court, how about term limits for SCOTUS justices?
An even better option might be giving the American people the opportunity to vote every 4-8 years on whether they believe individual justices are doing their duty to uphold the constitution and the will of the people. Should they remain in their lifelong appointments or be replaced by the next president?
You might actually end up with a supreme court full of awesome justices who are capable of fair and balanced decision making, and have an incentive not to just represent the interests of whichever party handed them a cushy lifelong position of power.
•Greatly reducing a president’s executive authority and unilateral decision making capabilities. Regardless of who is president, these fuckers and their cabinet are being given waaay too much power, and it seems to only be increasing over time.
•Similar to the changes to SCOTUS, finding ways to create more public accountability for all government agencies. And by public accountability, I mean accountability to the people, by the people. Not accountability to the partisan politicians who will always make decisions based on the interest of their shared political party.
Basically more direct democracy in just about every area of government. Stop treating Americans like they’re too dumb to think for themselves, and they need a paternalistic and biased faceless political machine to do the thinking for them.
When wealthy individuals try to use their money to influence elections, there needs to be some kind of accountability for this too. As in, somebody like Elon Musk should already have more than 3 strikes against him. If he or anyone else gets caught trying influence/buy elections again, fine them double the amount we know they injected into undermining democracy (because it’s almost certainly more than the amount we actually know about) and re-distribute every penny equally to the American people via a tax return or stimulus check.
Democracy is broken.
It worked when everybody had the same information and we worked from the same facts (and only people who looked and peed like me could vote…but that’s besides the point).
But when the majority is uninformed or misinformed, the whole thing breaks down.
We are amidst an actual information war, where objective facts are in the crosshairs, and our wonderful media institutions have determined that only sharing part of the facts and filling in the gaps with strongly-worded and thinly-veiled opinions yields the most clicks/views/whatever, and in return, more money.
Society is fucked at this point.
I think that’s just the attack on democracy playing out in real time.
If we just accept that it’s a fault of democracy and not the people attacking it, I honestly think we play right into their hands.
It worked when everybody had the same information and we worked from the same facts (and only people who looked and peed like me could vote…but that’s besides the point).
I don’t think that’s really besides the point. I think it’s actually right on point.
Everybody had the same information, but change only happened when people woke up to the fact that the information they were being fed didn’t line up with reality.
How can a country call itself a democracy when only certain people have rights? Democracy has always been the goal since the begining, but it’s never been truly obtained and it’s always been under attack by the people who don’t support the voice of the many over the voice of the few.
We’ve come closer and closer with time, but we keep making the mistake of getting too comfortable and believing the fight for democracy was ever over. Little by little the oligarchs will take and take until it’s impossible to ignore.
Well at least being a general we know he has leadership qualities
