cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/50685494
Louisiana Surgeon General Ralph Abraham, who rolled back government vaccine distribution as the state’s top public health official, has been appointed to the second highest position at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Abraham, a 71-year-old medical doctor, lives in rural Richland Parish and served as a Republican congressman representing Northeast Louisiana from 2015 until 2021. He could not be reached for comment Tuesday.
Abraham has espoused skepticism about vaccines for years. After becoming surgeon general in 2024, he scuttled Louisiana’s longstanding vaccine promotion program, shutting down its advertising campaign and eliminating mass vaccination events the state has conducted for at least two decades for the flu and other diseases.
Recently, Abraham also drew criticism from other public health experts for waiting several weeks to make a public statement and offer guidance on whooping cough after two babies in Louisiana died from the illness earlier this year.
Gov. Jeff Landry, who has also expressed skepticism about vaccines, praised Abraham’s appointment to help lead the nation’s leading public health organization.
“While we are certainly sad to lose Dr. Abraham here in Louisiana, we are thrilled to see the CDC gain a selfless leader,” Landry said in a prepared statement Tuesday. “There is no better advocate for health freedom than Ralph Abraham.”
Prior to his government roles, Abraham worked as a veterinarian treating animals for a decade and then returned to school and earned his medical degree in 1994 at age 40. He operated a general practice and still treats patients on a part-time basis at a rural health clinic in Louisiana’s Mississippi Delta region, one of the poorest sections of the country.
Gov. Jeff Landry tapped Abraham to be Louisiana’s health secretary for the first several months of Landry’s administration in 2024. The governor and state lawmakers then created the position of state surgeon general specifically for Abraham last year.
Democracy is broken.
It worked when everybody had the same information and we worked from the same facts (and only people who looked and peed like me could vote…but that’s besides the point).
But when the majority is uninformed or misinformed, the whole thing breaks down.
We are amidst an actual information war, where objective facts are in the crosshairs, and our wonderful media institutions have determined that only sharing part of the facts and filling in the gaps with strongly-worded and thinly-veiled opinions yields the most clicks/views/whatever, and in return, more money.
Society is fucked at this point.
I think that’s just the attack on democracy playing out in real time.
If we just accept that it’s a fault of democracy and not the people attacking it, I honestly think we play right into their hands.
I don’t think that’s really besides the point. I think it’s actually right on point.
Everybody had the same information, but change only happened when people woke up to the fact that the information they were being fed didn’t line up with reality.
How can a country call itself a democracy when only certain people have rights? Democracy has always been the goal since the begining, but it’s never been truly obtained and it’s always been under attack by the people who don’t support the voice of the many over the voice of the few.
We’ve come closer and closer with time, but we keep making the mistake of getting too comfortable and believing the fight for democracy was ever over. Little by little the oligarchs will take and take until it’s impossible to ignore.
America’s unending struggle between Oligarchy and Democracy