@barney@mas.to @augieray @danvanmoll

I don't disagree with any of that except the "gaffe" was massive. I tend to think he thought that out and said it very purposefully because he didn't want voters scared off of in person voting in the mid-terms, but, that aside, it literally killed and disabled people who trusted Biden to tell them the truth. I promise you that it did.

But what do you do in a situation where you make rules and people don't want to follow them? Give up? How about the IBCC just quit making building codes. Builders don't like them. Or, as @augieray says(sorry for blowing up your thread) how about no more drunk driving laws? A lot of people ignore those.

I'm saying you can't capitulate when lives are at stake, and Democrats did. That's all.

That capitulation is going to continue killing and disabling people, too. The vaccination rate in my county has dropped under 90% overall. More than 1 out of every 10 kids entering the school system aren't vaccinated for *anything* anymore. It's a slippery slope issue and Democrats chose to give up on public health rather than fighting for it and even if they reversed course now I'm afraid it's too late. As a scientist and a citizen who has to live and work here I find that awful.

To be 100% clear, at the same time I can also agree that it would be way worse if Republicans ran everything.

We're mostly saying the same thing, but I just can't bring myself to say that abandoning public health after other people tried to destroy it is OK just because they didn't join in on actively destroying it. There was a window in which the CDC and the administration could have made bold choices for public health and chose not to.