Not that deadly? 650k in year one and 550k in year two in the US alone. Everybody knew someone who died. I think the main issue with 'remembering' is that it culled a lot of older sick people from the population. That and denial thanks to right-wing propaganda.
But not the human-to-human strain. We need to import that. Meanwhile, we learned today that the administration is indeed capable of handling another serious outbreak. That's reassuring.
At $100K per study, a single day of war with Iran could fund 10,000 studies. At $1M per study, that same day could fund 1,000 studies. Trump administration cut funding to study hantavirus, the virus behind deadly cruise ship outbreak | Scientific American In 2025 the Trump administration eliminated funding for a group that had been running a pilot project aimed at studying the type of hantavirus that has been confirmed to be behind an ongoing outbreak on a cruise ship. The pilot project was designed to better understand how hantavirus passes from rodents to humans and was being conducted through the West African Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases (WAC-EID), one of 10 centers that comprised the Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases (CREID) network. All 10 centers were shuttered last year after the National Institutes of Health decided the research was “unsafe.” From 2021 WAC-EID was awarded a series of U.S. governmental grants, ranging between $521,027 and $1,702,711. Of that, Weaver says around $100,000 would likely have been dedicated to the Argentina study. According to records compiled by Grant Witness—a website dedicated to tracking eliminated federal agency grants, including from the NIH—of the more than $8.3 million that the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) originally outlaid for WAC-EID, almost $2.4 million had yet to be dispersed at the time that the funding was cut. Virologists working with CREID decried the move at the time, saying there was no evidence their work was unsafe—the cuts came amid a broader pullback of federal infectious disease funding and surveillance. The Department of Health and Human Services, which overseas the NIH and NIAID, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Argentina project almost certainly would not have prevented the outbreak onboard the Hondius. Weaver stresses, however, that funding cuts to this kind of research can make the U.S. and the world more vulnerable to viral pandemics. He points to the Zika virus outbreak of 2015 and 2016, during which thousands of Americans were exposed to a previously obscure pathogen. “We’re not in a good position to say [hantavirus], just because it’s never caused big outbreaks, doesn’t have the potential to do that one day,” he says.
The good news is we are now 176 days out when a vaccine will be announced. Please be sure to continue the campaign and make sure everyone knows the severity of the Hantavirus. If you're not sure, share anyways! Better safe than sorry! Also, get your mail in ballots ready! All polling stations will be closed.
#RichOrStupid The rich want the stupid to stay stupid so they can keep doing their bidding. It's a brilliant strategy because the stupid don't know the difference either way because they're....well, stupid. The stupid want everyone to be stupid so they can feel better about themselves. That's why they automatically discount facts from smart people i.e. experts.
There are not that many truly stupid people, but there are a ton of ignorant people, which is why there has been so much billionaire interest in TV stations, newspapers, and websites. Then there are also a bunch of willfully ignorant people, who cannot stand to have their ignorance recognized and do not want to put forth the effort to correct it.
this is reminiscent of Mao's Cultural Revoluation, in China, from 1966 to 1976. It was a period defined by widespread violence, persecution of the experts / intellectual class, humiliation, and the systematic decimation of human capital that left an indelible scar on the Chinese psyche.
