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.
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.