All Quiet on the Vaccine Front

Posted on by Thor

With vaccines slowly rolling out there is light at the end of the tunnel. My great great grandfather Augustus Arthur Thorspecken served in WWI and his army camp in Kansas was where Spanish flu broke out in America. I started to wonder what it must have been like for him at the end of the war as he hoped to avoid the flu and the final days of battle. Knowing the war was ending some soldiers let their guard down and that resulted in death.

All Quiet on the Western Front featured a soldier who was an artist and on the final day of battle he saw a butterfly. As he was distracted by the butterfly’s beauty he stood and was shot dead by a sniper from the enemy trenches.

As vaccines become available some state mayors have lost patience with mask mandates and trying to keep constituents safe. With only about 6% of people vaccinated there is no herd immunity. Only after about 70 to 95% or more of the population is vaccinated will it become safer to reopen state economies fully. Texas and Mississippi have decided to fully open which is a death sentence for people who will be subjected to new strains of the virus which will go unchecked. I had hoped that stupidity would end when the ex-president left office but there is plenty of stupid to go around.

We are all experiencing some form of pandemic fatigue but the solution is not to run into a machine gun firing line. Texas Governor Greg Abbott ignored the advice of health experts as he lifted his state’s mask mandates. Texas has had COVID deaths so far. Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves announced March 22, 2021 that he’s lifting all state-imposed mask mandates and removing COVID-19 related restrictions on business operations. Mississippi has had COVID deaths so far. Of course I live in Florida and it is up to individuals to try and protect themselves from ignorant state leadership. Florida has had COVID deaths so far. Wear a mask, social distance and wash your hand often. State governors are trying to kill you.

100 Day Patriots

Posted on by Thor

President-elect Joe Biden on Thursday December 3, 2020 said he plans to ask the nation to wear masks for his first 100 days in office. He also said he’ll issue a standing order mandating masks in certain places. “Just 100 days to mask. Not forever — 100 days,” Mr. Biden said. “I think we’ll see a significant reduction if that occurs with vaccinations and masking, to drive down the numbers considerably.”

In researching my great grandfather Augustus Arthur Thorspecken, I found that he registered for the WWI draft  in June of 1917. I then found a newspaper clipping that showed that he was on leave from Camp Funston in January of 1918. Camp Funston in Kansas was the place where the first cases of Spanish flu first appeared and within a few weeks 1100 were sick. Since army training was 6 weeks in length, Augustus was likely at ground zero for the start of the Spanish Flu before he was shipped over to France. Because of the war, the flu spread to 24 of 36 U.S. army bases and then to Europe. The tight quarters of the camps were a perfect incubator to ignite the spread of the disease that resulted in an estimated  50 million deaths worldwide with about 675,000 deaths in the United States. My grandfather survived the pandemic and the war only to die of pneumonia 25 years later at the start of WWII.

Because there was a war going on, politicians on both sides of the Atlantic downplayed the spread of the virus. They did not want to appear weak. The first wave of the virus was like a tsunami that initially pulls water away from the shore, only to return in a towering, second wave. As the influenza spread across America, public health officials, determined to keep morale up, began to lie. U.S. Surgeon General Rupert Blue said, “There is no cause for alarm if precautions are observed.” As the disease accelerated newspapers assured readers that influenza posed no danger.

People knew that this was no common flu. The numbers were too staggering. There were not enough coffins for the dead. Mass graves had to be dug. They could not trust what politicians said. Society began to disintegrate. In 1918, without leadership, without the truth, trust evaporated. And people could only look after themselves. The most important lesson from 1918 is that politicians need to to tell the truth. This is a lesson that was not learned by the 2020 POTUS who lost. Joe Biden wants to start working to mitigate the damage already done with the simple request to wear a mask. Patriots who care about fellow Americans will pitch in.