dChan
Anonymous ID: b5ebbb June 7, 2024, 7:17 p.m. No.20986581   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>6601 >>6609 >>6682 >>6691

If Only People Actually Believed These Trump-as-Jesus Memes

Those who can see the good in the former president should look harder at everyone else.

 

After Donald Trump’s recent guilty verdict, the internet has seen a meme deluge analogizing Trump to Christ on the grounds that they both experienced trial, conviction, and criminality. This meme template actually dates back to Trump’s civil fraud trial last year, when Trump himself shared courtroom-sketch-style fan art of Jesus seated next to him. Another meme, this time referring to Trump’s guilty verdict, features Jesus standing behind a seated Trump with his hands on the president’s shoulders above loopy script reading “It’s okay. They called me guilty too.” Another captions a diptych of Trump’s mug shot and the portrait Christ Crucified by the Spanish painter Diego Velázquez with the text: “If you don’t think you can vote for a convicted criminal, remember that you worship one.”

 

It would be simple to dispose of the matter this way: The meme makers are wrong because Trump is guilty and Jesus was innocent. (In that case, all that the meme makers are saying is that Trump is innocent.) Or maybe they’re saying that Trump is factually guilty of what is only a pretextual crime, meaning he did nothing morally wrong even though he’s technically classed as a convicted criminal. Maybe the whole thing is no more than trolling and nobody really cares about the implications of conflating Trump and Jesus.

 

PAYWALL!

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/06/trump-conviction-evangelical-memes-jesus/678617/

Anonymous ID: b5ebbb June 7, 2024, 7:19 p.m. No.20986594   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>6604 >>6607 >>6618

Updated at 12:05 p.m. ET on June 7, 2024

How Much Worse Would a Bird-Flu Pandemic Be?

The world has been through multiple flu pandemics. That doesn’t mean it’s any more prepared.

 

Our most recent flu pandemic—2009’s H1N1 “swine flu”—was, in absolute terms, a public-health crisis. By scientists’ best estimates, roughly 200,000 to 300,000 people around the world died; countless more fell sick. Kids, younger adults, and pregnant people were hit especially hard.

 

That said, it could have been far worse. Of the known flu pandemics, 2009’s took the fewest lives; during the H1N1 pandemic that preceded it, which began in 1918, a flu virus infected an estimated 500 million people worldwide, at least 50 million of whom died. Even some recent seasonal flus have killed more people than swine flu did. With swine flu, “we got lucky,” Seema Lakdawala, a virologist at Emory University, told me. H5N1 avian flu, which has been transmitting wildly among animals, has not yet spread in earnest among humans. Should that change, though, the world’s next flu pandemic might not afford us the same break.

 

Read: Cows have almost certainly infected more than two people with bird flu

 

Swine flu caught scientists by surprise. At the time, many researchers were dead certain that an H5N1, erupting out of somewhere in Asia, would be the next Big Bad Flu. Their focus was on birds; hardly anyone was watching the pigs. But the virus, a descendant of the devastating flu strain that caused the 1918 pandemic, found its way into swine and rapidly gained the ability to hack into human airway cells. It was also great at traveling airborne—features that made it well positioned to wreak global havoc, Lakdawala said. By the time experts caught on to swine flu’s true threat, “we were already seeing a ton of human cases,” Nahid Bhadelia, the founding director of the Boston University Center on Emerging Infectious Diseases, told me. Researchers had to scramble to catch up. But testing was intermittent, and reporting of cases was inconsistent, making it difficult for scientists to get a handle on the virus’s spread. Months passed before the rollout of a new vaccine began, and uptake was meager. Even in well-resourced countries such as the U.S., few protections hindered the virus’s initial onslaught.

 

PAYWALL!

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/06/bird-flu-swine-flu-2009-which-is-worse/678620/

Anonymous ID: b5ebbb June 7, 2024, 7:25 p.m. No.20986618   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>6631 >>6633 >>6640 >>6658

>>20986594

>Read:

Cows Have Almost Certainly Infected More Than Two People With Bird Flu

Protecting dairy workers from further spread will be crucial to containing the outbreak.

 

It was bound to happen again. For the second time in two months, the United States has confirmed a case of bird flu in a dairy worker employed by a farm with H5N1-infected cows. “The only thing I’m surprised about is that it’s taken this long to get another confirmed case,” Steve Valeika, a veterinarian and an epidemiologist based in North Carolina, told me.

 

The true case count is almost certainly higher. For weeks, anecdotal reports of sick farmworkers have been trickling in from around the nation, where H5N1 has been detected in dozens of herds in nine states, according to federal counts. Testing among humans and animals remains limited, and buy-in from farms is still spotty. The gap between reality and what the government can measure is hindering the world from realizing the full scope of the outbreak. And it may hamper experts’ ability to detect human-to-human spread, should that someday occur. “I wouldn’t be surprised if there have been dozens of cases at this point,” Valeika said.

 

The risk to most of the public is still low, as federal guidelines continue to emphasize. But that assurance feels tenuous when “the threat to farmworkers remains high,” Jennifer Nuzzo, the director of the pandemic center at the Brown University School of Public Health, told me. Too often, infectious disease most affects a society’s most vulnerable people; now the future of this virus depends on America’s ability to protect a community whose health and safety are routinely discounted.

 

PAYWALL!

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/05/bird-flu-infections-cows-farmworkers/678463/