[llamaimperative]

This is the type of thing that'd normally show up on CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report which has been published weekly since 1960 (my understanding is this is without fail).

But unfortunately the current administration has decided an ideological purification is more important than keeping the American public apprised of threats to their health.

So it wasn't published last week, and probably won't be this week either. "Politics don't matter" though ;) Bummer!

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/

[giantg2]

Wouldn't this have showed up in the reports last year when the numbers were actively happening? There's been 1 case this year it says.

If the ideology was what you're saying, then wouldn't they want to spread the info and blame it on the "dirty illegals" or whatever?

[weaksauce]

> then wouldn't they want to spread the info and blame it on the "dirty illegals" or whatever?

pretty sure the ideology is to remove every social safety net and service to "prove" government doesn't work and then the robber barons can swoop in and make it a paid service... and make it so the capital class gets to make and save more money as they can afford to buy any of those services that were cut. it's basically vulture economics but at the nation scale. it's not great.

[kevin_thibedeau]

> it's not great.

Supply side Jesus is just alright.

[llamaimperative]

This isn't really an urgent "alert" system per se, more of a knowledge dissemination system. Security postmortems more so than critical security patches.

We have good reason to believe it'd show up here given that Kansas's TB situation has had multiple bulletins over the years

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/wr/mm7235a4.htm

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/73/ss/ss7304a1.htm

[enkid]

The analogy breaks down in that rate of infection of a disease is historical but very much informs ongoing public health measures that should be taken.

[dartos]

One might conclude, given how closely the current administration has been following the project 2025 plan that was floating around, that the administration paused functions pending ideological purity checks on key personnel.

Ofc, one may conclude anything one wants,

[chairmansteve]

32 active cases actually. 1 new case since January 1st.

[bannable]

"Since 2024" means from the beginning of 2025, not "during 2024".

[giantg2]

"There has been one so far in 2025."

[SideQuark]

Read the data. There are many more latent cases recorded, and current new cases are not all recorded as the tally lags people sick right now.

You keep quoting that part and ignoring the rest of the article and the live data sources linked to it. The text of the article likely wasn’t from yesterday, as the reporter likely went around a week or two, gathered quotes, interviews, then spent some time in editorial revisions.

[giantg2]

Maybe you can link to whatever data you're looking at. The article says one new active case and that the overall number of cases, including latent, are trending down. This is still consistent with this being a bigger deal last year than this year. The KS health data still shows 1 active for this year.

[aliasxneo]

This year has been a rough start for HN. The political commentary is infecting every thread.

[foobarchu]

That's because it's an extremely big deal and affects many things discussed here.

[ty6853]

As the federal government expands the stakes get ever higher. What could be overlooked before now becomes fierce debate.

[llm_trw]

It's because people now treat parties like they used to treat football teams.

[johnnyanmac]

I don't care if Jesus himself froze the CDC. It was an o srly hasty action at best and it will unnecessarily cost some lives.

[mindslight]

If you mean avoiding the Party so you don't get beat up for being different, then the analogy checks out.

[foobarchu]

This goes way past teams bud. If you don't realize the kind of existential threat trump is posing to millions of people, you haven't paid attention to a single thing he's done since taking office.

[windexh8er]

Maybe the political climate is impacting a higher number of topical points that are being discussed on HN. When governments are changing, interfering, and impacting technology you're going to see it crop up more.

It's not a "rough start for HN", it's the current climate of the world through the lens of the US.

[stouset]

It’s almost as if politics impacts many things in the world around us.

[matwood]

> The political commentary is infecting every thread.

Unfortunately politics has infected areas of our lives we took for granted. The stopping of reporting coming out of the CDC/NIH/HHS makes discussing health science articles more challenging. And this is a direct result of the new administration. While this article may not be vaccine related, the new administration wants a known anti-vaxxer to lead the HHS.

[bayarearefugee]

I would argue that being rabidly apolitical while a dangerous threat to western democracy has been growing in America for years is the rough part.

I'm an old person. I have a leftist bent. I used to get along with many conservatives, I just had different policy viewpoints than they did. What we are seeing now is a completely different political landscape where one of the parties is actively setting up a dynastic plutocracy in the open.

FWIW I have a ton of criticism for the "other" party too as an ineffective mess sucking the corporate teet almost as hard, just without the actual proto fascism.

[aliasxneo]

> I would argue that being rabidly apolitical while a dangerous threat to western democracy has been growing in America for years is the rough part.

Some of us are just here as technology professionals looking to learn and keep current on the latest trends. There's nothing wrong with that.

[_DeadFred_]

Some yes, but maybe not you? Because you used the following language yesterday:

"Only a few short months ago, I was under constant attack from various public members of the Democratic party for being a white male with center-right views. The vitriol was quite unhinged, really." when asked for specifics you went to '...on CNN for example'.

[dang]

Digging up people's comments from unrelated threads* starts to cross into personal attack. Please don't do that here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

* edit: I mean for use as ammunition in an argument. It's not that you're wrong—it's just that the cost (to the intended spirit of the site) outweighs the benefit (being right in an argument).

[aliasxneo]

Do I engage in politics on HN occasionally? Yes. Is it my primary motivation? No. I don't open up HN with the intention of having rigorous political discussions, even though I sometimes fall into them.

My comment history, which it seems you only partially perused, demonstrates this to be true. Especially if you go back a year ago before things became politically charged around here.

I also don't see what relevance my example has to this conversation. It sounds like you're trying to corner me into a specific label (Republican, maybe?). I guess thanks for proving my point about discussions around here?

[johnnyanmac]

Certainly. So what interested you on this story that is more about medicine on HN?

[johnnyanmac]

Yes. Becsuse this is an issue that will be slower to respond to because of political actions. Do we really want to skirt around the issue?

[shadowgovt]

It's hard to do technology when your staff and customers have TB.

[GeekyBear]

> This is the type of thing that'd normally show up on CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report

The resurgence of TB has been the big story in infectious diseases for a while now.

Globally:

> The World Health Organization (WHO) today published a new report on tuberculosis revealing that approximately 8.2 million people were newly diagnosed with TB in 2023 – the highest number recorded since WHO began global TB monitoring in 1995. This represents a notable increase from 7.5 million reported in 2022, placing TB again as the leading infectious disease killer in 2023, surpassing COVID-19.

https://www.who.int/news/item/29-10-2024-tuberculosis-resurg...

As well as in the US:

> After declining for three decades, tuberculosis (TB) rates in the U.S. have been increasing steadily since 2020, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It’s a disturbing trend given that 1.5 million die from TB every year, making it the world’s most infectious killer.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/us-tuberc...

[wahern]

> The resurgence of TB has been the big story in infectious diseases for a while now.

It's been a big story since the 1980s, IIRC. I remember in college in the 1990s a biologist friend explaining that TB was the greatest disease threat to public health and it was being completely ignored.

Frankly, it's hard to get worked up about it. Notwithstanding that it is a serious public health threat, there's a strong political rhetoric aspect to the discussion, both in the popular and professional spheres. It's unfortunate. In the 1980s and 1990s it was all about how Reagan decimated our public health infrastructure. The arguments aren't per se wrong, but it's difficult to gauge relevance and prioritization about the threat of TB given how part of the medical and scientific community seem to have been border-line crying wolf for 40 years. Discussion centers around absolute numbers. Tell me what the per capita relationship looks like, especially per capita among the populations most vulnerable to acquisition and disease, and what the long-term trends look like. I see this in a lot of other adjacent public health discussions tainted by political hand wringing, such as food insecurity, etc--lots of absolute numbers. But global populations are growing. The US, for example, grew by 80 million people, or 30%, between 1990 and 2020. That's not to deny that tuberculosis is a growing problem, but we have many problems. And the constant drum beat of alarm causes some parts of the community to (increasingly) react in counterproductive ways. From an individual moral standpoint, that's on them, but from an epidemiological and sociological perspective, maybe the professionals bear a little blame, too, at least in terms of communication. We could all do better.

[GeekyBear]

> Frankly, it's hard to get worked up about it.

A common bacteria with airborne spread and extremely drug resistant variants in the wild can hardly be characterized this way.

However, it's extremely fair to say that this is not a new issue that has only become apparent over the past week.

[lazyasciiart]

Rubbish, on all counts. Public health discussion constantly gives rates and percentages, not just numbers. And “they’ve been warning us so many times” - well, I hope you’ve also given up on applying security updates to any software or hardware you manage, since those have been getting issued forever, they must be crying wolf too.

[wahern]

The 2023 incidence rate per 100k is 2.9. That's an increase from 2019, but also the same rate as 2014 and 2016. https://www.cdc.gov/tb-surveillance-report-2023/tables/table... (via https://www.cdc.gov/tb-surveillance-report-2023/summary/nati...)

My point isn't that agencies don't report incidence; my point is about when the discussion surfaces how it's discussed in the popular press, including editorializations in professional outlet. Were incidence rate flat or down between convenient points of comparison, but absolute numbers up, and an outbreak like Kansas happen, we'd be discussion absolute numbers. And even when incidence is up, the absolute numbers always headline. It's a subtle criticism I'm making, but I think an important one.

Nonetheless, while for 40 years TB has been discussed as a grace looming threat, note how absolute cases and incidence dropped steeply over most of that time. And while the drop has largely stopped, the US now has one of the lowest incidence rates in the world. But my takeaway is supposed to be that the US' TB measures are woefully broken because the drop has stopped?

[adgjlsfhk1]

The point is that if we'd put in a bit more effort 40 and 30 years ago, there would be 0 cases today (and if we put a bunch more effort in now, there will be 0 cases in 20 years). TB is awful, but it is curable and preventable. It's current existence in the world is a policy choice of the past few decades, and eradicating it is a choice we can make today.

[gonzobonzo]

> This is the type of thing that'd normally show up on CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report which has been published weekly since 1960 (my understanding is this is without fail).

> But unfortunately the current administration has decided an ideological purification is more important than keeping the American public apprised of threats to their health.

Looking at the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, this doesn't actually appear to be true. Going by that link you can read past MMWR reports, and they aren't (from everything I can see) doing weekly tracking of outbreaks, but rather publishing various articles about diseases the way a science journal would. I couldn't find anything about the Kansas tuberculosis outbreak in the most recent reports, so I wouldn't be surprised if we don't see anything about it in the next few MMRW reports.

[avs733]

[flagged]

[intermerda]

[flagged]

[_yb2s]

I’m an academic scientist part of a really large government funded research grant that employs hundreds of people. Last time, we had to fire half our staff immediately right up front because they said they were cutting our funding. They ended up not cutting our funding at all, but we had already fired everyone so it was lose lose- the Government spent the money but the research couldn’t be done. Just plain bad leadership.

[Fomite]

I've had two grants in a row get killed for political reasons, and a third is on the chopping block. What really kills me is that we get through the unpleasant, unproductive scaling up part, are about to hit our stride, and then...gone.

[aikinai]

Where did the money go then?

[_yb2s]

We hired new people with less experience and restarted the projects, but in a lot of cases the projects were set back years with no reduction in the cost.

[ceejayoz]

At the very least, some went to unemployment benefits, I’d expect.

[mulmen]

Sounds like bad leadership on the part of your project. To outsiders that don’t understand the details why fire people before the actual budget cuts?

[_yb2s]

It was the policy of the granting federal agency- it was not our choice, we had to immediately start operating on the president's proposed low budget in case it were to pass, rather than spend money that might never exist.

This happened because Trump's administration essentially copy and pasted Heritage Foundation materials rather than carefully think through a realistic budget.

[llamaimperative]

Here’s another example: would you start building a house today knowing the price of every input material might jump 20% to 200%?

[_yb2s]

It's even worse than that: it's more like buying unrefundable materials to build a house today on an account/invoice, knowing you will likely be unemployed before the bill comes due, but after the materials are delivered. You're spending money up front that you don't have, and may never have.

If you spend full budget for the first half of the fiscal year, but a final budget gets passed later that cuts your budget in half- you get no remaining money for the year, and then end up firing everyone, instead of half. This is why the federal agencies have the policy of immediately acting on the lowest proposed budget, instead of waiting to see what happens.

[johnnyanmac]

How is it that Trump is so timely at cutting medical resources right before the moment it is most needed? Or perhaps such outbreaks are more common than you'd expect and it's the equivalent of leaving a firewall down for a day?

And yeah, I'm aware a bigger factor in this freeze was hiding the very obvious Bird Flu pandemic. Can't hide the eggs getting more expensive though.

[llamaimperative]

> Or perhaps such outbreaks are more common than you'd expect and it's the equivalent of leaving a firewall down for a day?

I think this + bad luck, really.

[throwup238]

Luck is the intersection of preparation and opportunity. In this case lots of opportunity and zero preparation.

[llamaimperative]

Well said!

[nejsjsjsbsb]

Trump is not acting in people's best interests. Wait, just rumaging around looking for my shocked face mask.

Eggs more expensive doesn't matter any more.

[johnnyanmac]

Indeed. I'm just also find it interesting how timely some of his actions can immediately blow up on us.

And yes. It really doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things but was such a common rationale for those who voted Trump. I'm shocked that he did not in fact keep a promise thst would have benefitted the working class.

[hedora]

Cutting resources often is the root cause for an outbreak.

- SARSv2 (aka Covid-19) happened after Trump disbanded the team that contained SARSv1.

- During COVID, the west suspended polio vaccination programs in developing regions, so now polio outbreaks are a thing again.

- Antivaxxers in NYC caused a massive measles outbreak a few years ago.

Etc, etc.

[nradov]

I won't attempt to defend the administration's actions, but no team ever really contained SARS. That outbreak burned out largely for natural reasons.

[rounce]

I think they’ve muddled a few things together and are in part referring to the disbanding of the NSC’s Directorate of Global Health Security and Biodefense as part of John Bolton’s NSC reorg.

[umanwizard]

Covid was spreading in many countries before the US. Off the top of my head I remember China, Korea, Italy and Spain.

And no country of significant size avoided it, regardless of whether they were led by Trump or not.

[tzs]

I don't know if any of these would count as being significantly sized, but Japan, Australia, and South Korea handled it a lot better than the US [1] when it comes to deaths per 100k. Interestingly, Australia and South Korea did have more cases per 100k than the US[2].

[1] https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countr...

[2] https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countr...

[rsynnott]

The Australian cases would largely have been after the vaccine was available, I think (though Australia did screw up the rollout; they could’ve done better there) so you’d expect a lower death rate.

[userbinator]

Also worth looking at Denmark, France, Hungary, Romania, and the UK.

[ars]

So basically it's good to be an island?

[rounce]

An interesting thing to look at is the differences between European countries differing responses and how that worked out for them given many are connected via land borders.

[userbinator]

People strongly recommended closing the US borders in the early stages of the pandemic, but they were dismissed as racists.

[cheaprentalyeti]

I can show multiple videos up to the end of Feb 2020 where Anthony Fauci said this wasn’t something to be too worried about, it was going to probably remain under control…

[hyeonwho4]

I went skiing in Korea during the next to last weekend of Feb 2020. Best skiing of my time there, because the mountain was already empty of people due to public concern. By that time we were already wearing N95 masks: I remember discovering it was very hard to talk with both a ski mask and an N95 on.

By mid Feb, Korea was already covertly acquiring mask materials and preparing a ramp up in testing. I believe we had working PCR tests in my local hospital by mid March, and mask rationing in April. This made me very skeptical of the competence of the US public health establishment.

Edit: Skiing was Feb 21 to 23, just before Daegu locked down. The Mask rationing started early March: https://m.koreatimes.co.kr/pages/article.asp?newsIdx=292662

[zzzeek]

The US pandemic response team that Trump fired included a significant presence working onsite in China

https://www.reuters.com/article/world/exclusive-us-slashed-c...

[blackeyeblitzar]

I hit the paywall. But if this is about the same thing I’m thinking of, one reason to be careful about the work China’s CDC was doing (at times with visiting staff from the US) is they were one (among many) source of lab leaks of SARSv1:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7096887/

[hedora]

This was the US working in China, with the government’s permission. It was an international task force that was operated by the US govt.

Also, if look up biological weapons research papers from Wuhan, you’ll find that many were done in collaboration with the US, and with US funding.

[o11c]

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. No country avoided it entirely, but a lot of them managed to get rid of at least half the deaths (keep in mind that that's with still with individuals people being rebellious), sometimes more.

Excess mortality per capita is the useful number to look at, since it's immune to scaling problems and the "but diagnosis!" argument. Although it may include "too scared to go to the doctor", that can't be too much of a contribution since that contribution shouldn't spike so much. Let's look at some numbers, smearing the spikes:

* in 2020-2021, South Korea's and Japan's excess death rate hovers below 5%

* in 2020-2021, Canada's, France's, and Germany's excess death rate hovers around 10%

* in 2020-2021, the US's excess death rate hovers around 20%

* in 2020-2021, Spain and the UK have spikes so high (but narrow) that I'm not even going to try to average it out. I would guess they're somewhere near the US for 2020 but better in 2021.

* in 2022, South Korea finally had a bad spike, but averaged over the year it's still only maybe 20%.

* in 2022, in almost all countries it hovers around 10%, and the timing of the swings is very similar between countries

* in 2023, in all countries it hovers around 5%

Source: first chart of https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid ; I've done the calculus by eye with rounding since I don't want to look up billions of numbers to do the math the hard way.

(Frankly, Korea and Japan did even better than these numbers say, since their population is skewed elderly in the first place)

[timschmidt]

> During COVID, the west suspended polio vaccination programs in developing regions, so now polio outbreaks are a thing again.

There are cough other reasons for that as well:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-cia-fake-vacc...

[blackeyeblitzar]

The team that contained SARSv1? No one contained it successfully. In fact, there were many lab leaks of it. The outbreak itself was stopped by basic measures like masks and screening. But it also was far less infectious than SARSv2.

Blaming Trump for COVID-19 makes no sense for other reasons too. There are so many other people to blame first. Fauci for funding GoF research at WIV through EHA. The CCP for being secretive and denying there was an outbreak for a while and not allowing investigations in Wuhan for over a year. The WHO for repeating CCP propaganda like claiming there was no human to human transmission roughly fourth months after the first scientists fell ill at WIV. Do you remember Pelosi and democrats downplaying the pandemic and accusing those who wanted to close borders of racism? She apparently had no regrets about all that:

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/pelosi-no-regrets-initial-c...

With all of this how can blame be placed on Trump? If anything his Operation Warp Speed program bailed out the planet from pandemic (with great work from vaccine manufacturers of course).

[kevin_thibedeau]

You left out how conservative media was adamant that it was a politically motivated hoax and ensured their faithful were kept in the dark about the looming threat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifKbwDf51bA

[blackeyeblitzar]

Thanks for the find - I don’t follow conservative news usually, so I’m looking forward to learning how things were skewed on that side of media.

[vtashkov]

Last week it was still the job of the previous administration to publish it and it was the last administration which created the problem in the first place. Ideological purification was also what the previous administration has done quite a lot by hiring people based on their sexual preference, skin colour, gender and other irrelevant to the job characteristics.

[Waterluvian]

I wonder if we’d do better in discourse to stop pointing at an “administration.” It is a reflection of what a plurality, often majority, of people want.

[Trasmatta]

Democracy doesn't mean "accept what the current administration does with no criticism, because they were democratically elected"

[dmix]

It does make ones eyes glaze over when American politics is everywhere you look. In every thread, about every topic. And each comment thread has 50 highly emotional comments that you have to scroll through to find the 5 few thoughtful comments near the bottom discussing the article, without going off the rails.

[Trasmatta]

Why wouldn't American politics be discussed in a thread about tuberculosis in an American state?

[dmix]

Look at the top thread with 50 comments and count how many are discussing tuberculosis in America. It's just another starting off point for everyone to go in a hundred directions ranting about US politics and ignore the topic

[Dalewyn]

The thread is about a tuberculosis outbreak in the US. Subsequent comments include conversations about a US federal government department agency publishing (or not) data on that outbreak.

This is all taking place on an online forum hosted in the US and managed by US entities.

And you (and like minded individuals) expect to not see US politics?

I appreciate that the US has an outsized presence on the intertubez, but you also need to realize you're first of all talking in the midst of Americans.

[johnnyanmac]

This is about medicine. How many people are claiming to separate medicine from politics? And how is this off the rails?

[Waterluvian]

Oh, no that’s not my point. It’s that the administration is often used as a proxy when people should be angry at the diseased state of the population.

[SideQuark]

Around 20% of Americans voted Trump, and from polls most don’t like him, but always vote R. Die hard Trumpers are at best 10% of Americans. Trump didn’t even get 50% of the vote.

His views most certainly aren’t what a majority of people want, and he doesn’t try to expand by doing things the majority want. If anything he paints those not completely in his camp, which is the vast majority of Americans, as an enemy.

[hilux]

> His views most certainly aren’t what a majority of people want

I'm not sure what you gain by telling yourself that.

I could just as easily assert, without any evidence (i.e., like you), that every single person who didn't vote loves Trump and supports all his policies.

> If anything he paints those not completely in his camp, which is the vast majority of Americans, as an enemy.

That has nothing to do with whether people support him. 20 or more (exact number varies on the reporting) women say that he sexually assaulted them, he was convicted of one sexual assault, and yet white women still voted for him.

[lazyasciiart]

Experiments consistently and repeatedly show that when given practical descriptions of policy actions and outcomes, the majority of Americans do not choose the ones that republicans promote. BUT when told that they are Republican policies, then about half of Americans do support those policies.

[hilux]

Well then, liberal politicians aren't doing a very good job, are they?

This is like a cliche from the chess world, where the guy who lost the game, then does a postmortem to convince everyone that he was actually winning the whole time. "Except for that one little blunder."

The Dems keep losing losing losing, but rather than figure out how to fight better, you instead try to convince yourself that people support you. And then you go back to debating Israel v Palestine or trans pronouns while our own country descends into tyranny. (Literally - many progressives I know.)

Meanwhile, Trump owns the White House, both houses of Congress, and the Supreme Court!

[johnnyanmac]

The only lesson I get is that the segregation of education over 40-50 years or so is finally showing its consequences (well it did so 20 years ago. But it's only more polarized now). A chess player at least has the knowledge and willingness to improve and learn from lost matches. The average American... Not so much.

And you didn't really offer much feedback here. Which is part of the problems. I don't really care to bicker over single issue details like this.

[lazyasciiart]

Straight from “you don’t have any evidence!” to “well who even cares that’s not important”.

[SideQuark]

If 80% of Americans didn't vote Trump, you're trying to claim they just as likely love him as those who did, even when polling of those voting for him show many dislike him?

Yeah, I'm not the one unable to read evidence.

Polls also repeatedly show people dislike a large amount of his policies.

And it's a fact he didn't even get 50% of voters to vote for him.

[SecretDreams]

> It is a reflection of what a plurality, often majority, of people want.

Maybe in countries with multiple parties, proportional representation (or the like), and mechanisms to encourage voting like a holiday for elections.

But, everywhere else? It's a crapshoot..low turnout also doesn't help.

[specialist]

Have you read Democracy for Realists?

TIL Most voters don't have well defined policy preferences. Nor can they correctly associate political parties with their stated policy positions.

[TylerE]

Less than 31% of people voted for this administration. So no, it isn't.

[behringer]

The majority of people don't want this. 36 percent of americans didn't vote.

That doesn't mean they don't want services, that means that in addition to 74 million that voted against trump, 90 million more also didn't want him.

[tbrownaw]

No, it means that over a third of people DGAF. They neither do want it nor don't want it.

(It's like NULL values in SQL, only much worse because it's in real life.)

[johnnyanmac]

An indifference implies that there was going to be no difference to their daily life regardless of who was in office.

If nothing else, I do hope this 2nd trump administration wakes those indifferent up. Yes your choice matters. And yes, choosing nothing is a choice.

[behringer]

Doesn't matter the reason. The fact is, if they wanted trump, they would have voted for him.

[khazhoux]

Nope, those people don't count. You may as well point out that 89.7M dogs didn't vote for Trump.

The majority of people wanted this.

[behringer]

They absolutely count. The fact that you don't think so, says more about you than about them.

[khazhoux]

How can someone who couldn't be bothered to vote possibly count in a discussion of how many people support this administration? Putting aside people who were unable to vote, everyone who chose not to, absolutely 100% gave up their relevance in terms of what the people want. They took themselves out of the equation.

[behringer]

It doesn't matter if they did or not. If they supported Trump they would have voted. Ergo the majority of people don't support him. Non voters are still people, last I checked.

[readthenotes1]

Interesting. So you were able to see these and reports last year and all the way through January 21st this year?

Because there's only been one reported car in 2025 in Kansas, I'd be surprised...

[roenxi]

> "Politics don't matter" though ;) Bummer!

1. Is there an argument here that the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report's unbroken publication record is so important it should switch votes?

2. They probably still filled the report in, so there is a chance it eventually gets published. No need to abandon hope yet.

[llamaimperative]

Yes there's an argument that "having vs not-having functional contagious disease surveillance, alerting, and learning systems" can change political outcomes.

[layer8]

It’s not exactly an outlier among the many arguments.