Life as I know it

And who helped me with that? Not people calling for some nebulous revolution. Not people telling me that the system was useless. Not people preaching at me to grow my own food. It was a church food bank partially funded by the state of Texas that some southern hippies donated a bunch of Whole Foods nonsense to.

And you know what? I’m sick and tired of defeatism. What can we get done right now, huh? Are you gonna accept something a bit better to help people right now or are you waiting for your perfect utopia to come to you?

On May 8th, 1980, smallpox was declared eradicated. Meaning there is no natural spread of smallpox anywhere in the world.

Smallpox infections date back at least 3,000 years. There are smallpox scars on the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses V.

The last documented person to have naturally contracted smallpox was 23-year-old hospital cook Ali Maow Maalin, who survived the disease in October of 1977.

The last person to die of the disease was 40-year-old medical photographer Janet Parker, infected in a lab accident in the summer of 1978.

Smallpox was a terrifying disease. It was horrifically painful and killed 1/3 of the people it infected, leaving the rest badly scarred.

We got lucky with smallpox. It had no animal reservoir. Being that it only infected humans we were able to vaccinate our way to eradication.

Today variola major, the virus that causes smallpox, officially exists in 2 places: the CDC in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, and the Vector Institute, Koltsovo, Russia. It is likely that many other countries have samples as well.

Deliberate infection with cowpox to prevent smallpox was the first effective vaccine. We owe every other vaccine to this one breakthrough.

The smallpox vaccine causes a scar at the injection site. You probably know someone with a smallpox vaccine scar. Routine childhood vaccination for smallpox ended in 1972 in the USA.

We used the smallpox vaccine to vaccinate against mpox in 2022. Because of this, I have given the smallpox vaccine. We also vaccinate researchers and others at high risk.

it’s going to be 420

for a whole month

1. You sound like a bot

2. You don't give anything to respond to

Remember Inigo Montoya

Just an extremely Normal thing to say

Reminder they want to increase the budget for ICE from 3.5 to 45 billion dollars.

Reminder the majority of that will be for building new detention centers.

Reminder ICE are *currently* detaining tourists who can pay for a plane ticket home and people with visa issues that were already resolved, because they have to make quota so Trump can brag about the numbers going up.

Reminder most of these people were already in the immigration system - that's why they were easy to detain.

Reminder this is all at taxpayer expense.