When leaders make you sick
New York values are spreading, and they’re sickening — quite literally. Here was Donald Trump in 2014, as electioneering Republicans whipped up wild fears: “The U.S. cannot allow EBOLA infected people back. People that go to far away places to help out are great — but must suffer the consequences!”
Here was Trump in 2015, beating a hobby-horse: “I’ve known people with perfectly normal children and then they took the child to get a single massive dose of vaccine, and the children are now autistic at a very high level.”
And here is Trump now, in a year with 465 verified cases of measles so far, more than half of them in New York and New Jersey, in what the Centers for Disease Control says is already “the second-greatest number of cases reported in the U.S. since measles was eliminated in 2000”: “…” Maybe Trump realized he’d been spreading a conspiracy theory, and why it’s wrong to do that as president, as such “theories” help return a disease a vaccine had eradicated here. Or maybe
he just can’t find a way to blame Obama this time.
Fortunately, New York has responsible leaders working to protect us and resist this president.
Like Bill de Blasio, drooling for a presidential run of his own, who effectively signed off as mayor on the spread of herpes to infants in the ultra-Orthodox community as mohels put their lips on the penis of infant boys as part of the metzitzah b’peh circumcision ritual.
As the measles cases multiplied, de Blasio told yeshivas not to admit students who hadn’t been vaccinated. The schools taking those students are many of the same ones that collect public money on his “watch” while producing graduates who can’t read or in some cases speak English.
The city now concedes that — surprise! — the schools ignored that order, too. So this month, Blasio declared a public health emergency requiring vaccinations in four zip codes with large Jewish populations, with a fine for failure to comply.
The city is checking school records, and “disease detectives” are interviewing New Yorkers with symptoms to ensure everyone they’ve been in contact with has been immunized.
The health commissioner’s letter listed the wrong zip codes at two different points. The city tweeted about it just before sundown on a Friday, an odd time to communicate with observant Jews.
Replying to a question (“it’s not even like we have Ebola going on here”) about why he was requiring vaccinations instead of using quarantines on Friday, de Blasio, calling himself “the steward of this city,” replied that “You can’t see all the places where the cases are…You need something that gets to the root cause, not something that you address only when you find out it’s too late…“
We have an order and the only way we can enforce that order is with a fine, and it’s a substantial fine - it can be as much as a thousand dollars. But it is not arrest…”
I doubt the prospect of a ticket will deter moms having measles parties for their kids or schools willing to take those kids and with long experience keeping the city out. Or that “detectives” without police powers will convince parents to protect their kids. (I’m sure that this small group of ardent anti-vaxxers conspiracists and their enablers are helping inflame old and ugly talk about the much broader religious community.)
At least we’ve got Gov. Cuomo, still hoping to run for president himself if Joe Biden backs out.
Cuomo didn’t big-foot de Blasio this time, like he did during the 2014 Ebola scare and again in the 2015 legionnaires disease outbreak that killed ten New Yorkers. Finally remembering to first do no harm, the governor restrained himself to poking from the sidelines, calling the mayor’s approach “legally questionable” without offering one of his own.
Whatever else might get in our system, it appears we’ve developed an immunity to accountable leadership.