The Lies We Tell

 Of all the lies being told in our country, the worst are the ones we tell ourselves.

When the Coronavirus began to sweep across the nation, a lot of people were telling themselves that it was just a problem in big cities.

Some even told their friends it was only a problem in those Eastern cities run by Democrats and full of immigrants and other foreigners.

Their plan, fully supported by the President, was not to do much of anything. Which worked for a while, until people started getting sick in every state in the union.

Then we looked at the death rates, which - compared to the total number of illnesses - were relatively small. Again, our President told us that even if you get it, it wouldn’t matter much. Then he did contract Coronavirus and he seemed fine. See, he was right.

Ask any of the people running around without a mask, and they will tell you the same thing. The disease is a fraud, or it’s only media hype. Of course, we’re just beginning to learn about the  after-effects of Coronavirus, which are likely to cause health problems years after the initial infection.

The good news is that vaccines are coming on line, and much of the population should have gotten immunization shots by Summer. There is only one more big lie to wring out of the process.

The Trump administration brags that vaccines will be shipped all across the country at warp speed, flying off production lines as it is produced. The lie is that the problems have all been solved.

Just how vaccines get from those airports to where it is needed is being left to each individual state. Every state is supposed to develop its own distribution plan. Of course there is no federal money to pay for that work. And, it mostly hasn’t been done.

Some of us still nod and say it will work out. Every pharmacy will have the vaccine in stock, and we just have to go and get it. And you don’t even need special refrigeration units - just pack it in dry ice.

Which sounds good, until you learn that once you open the box the vaccine starts to warm up. And there isn’t a distribution network to keep every pharmacy in America stocked up with dry ice 24 hours a day. And a pharmacist who spends 10 minutes to give the vaccine to one patient won’t be able to handle more than six an hour, or 50 or 60 people if they work 10 hours a day.

Anyone who has picked up medicine from a pharmacy knows it often takes five or 10 minutes just to get to the front of the line. That’s before the pharmacist has to spend all their time giving shots.

So, just add more people. More pharmacists to fill the prescriptions for everyone not getting vaccinated. Clerks to record who got a shot and make appointments for them to come back in two weeks for the second shot.  And contact people to be sure they come in for the second vaccination shot. And check ID’s for the people getting vaccinated. And lots of other things.

We also have to deal with the problem of getting people from rural areas to the hospitals. Just how bad could it be?

Well, the data keeps changing, but the Alabama Rural Health Association recently said eight of the state’s rural counties have no hospitals at all. One didn’t have a single physician.

Hampshire, Mass. has one hospital for its 161,000 people and Chittenden, Vermont has one for 162,000. There is no good data on how long it takes to get to a hospital if you live in rural Texas or in the vast empty spaces in the heart of Oklahoma or Kansas. 

Then there’s the question of what to do when lots of people drive  three or four hours just to get to that hospital or university and find it will take another four or five hours to treat the people already waiting on line.

It’s a shame we don’t have a couple of thousand pharmacists and nurses just sitting on a shelf, waiting to go out to work in whatever mass vaccination clinics are being set up. 

At least those big cities on the East Coast already have a big medical infrastructure in place, and are used to handling a lot of people.

But, that’s not the biggest lie a lot of people are telling themselves. I just started with vaccinations to show how easy it is to believe something that isn’t true.

The real lie is in the political arena. It is the lie that lots of Republican office holders are telling themselves. They’re pretending that things will go back to normal for them after Trump is out of office.

They may be afraid to disagree with the President in public about things like his losing the election, because his followers will vote against them in a primary. Ah, but they need those Trump supporters to vote for them in their next election.

So, don’t get them mad. They haven’t factored in the desire of Donald Trump to run for President again, and demand absolute loyalty from them for the next four years. Loyalty as in put all the money you raise in my fundraising pak, and I’ll give you back what you need to win.

Which will work fine, until they end up as the next target of his wrath, for not fully supporting him. Unlikely? Do you really need the list?

After all, the President who never made a mistake had to have been betrayed by those Republicans who let the election results go through. So, think of the next four years, as he hunts those traitors down, one by one.

Hey, if he makes a mistake and gets a new person into Congress that he doesn’t like, Trump can just get rid of them too. After all, the Republican Senate has given him the authority to do anything he wants.

Or, what if all those Trump Republicans simply leave the party. Now the Republicans left in Congress will be free to speak their mind, to tell the truth. To face the public in their next election with half the supporters they had when Trump was in office.

Like Thomas Wolfe said, you can’t go home again.