The World Health Organization reported earlier this month that the 59-year-old man in Mexico, who had comorbidities and died from the virus in late April, had no known contact with poultry or other animals. (Article)

Trump infamously called Covid-19 the China virus and China wasn’t a county he was demonizing for allowing migrants to trek across their country to our border and anti-Asian prejudice wasnt prevalent among his MAGA cult.

His doing this caused immediate backlash but this didn’t deter him from continuing to use the term.

Excerpt from above:

Casting the virus “foreign” was not a simple rhetorical flourish. According to the database website Factbase, the president used the expression “Chinese virus” more than 20 times between March 16 and March 30. The deliberateness of the wording was made clear when a photographer captured the script of his speech wherein Trump had crossed out the word “Corona” and replaced it with “Chinese.”

Trump also called Covid-19 the Wuhan virus. I suspect he preferred to call it the China virus because he thought his base wouldn’t know that Wuhan was in China.

Bird, or avian, flu probably won’t make it to the United States where if will infect a significant number of people, if it infects any, at least not prior to the election. If it does and infects or worse yet, kills, one or more Americans, I have no doubt that Trump will call it the Mexican virus. Politically it would benefit him with his MAGA base if the first person infected with it was White.

While Mexican nationals aren’t the only undocumented people trying to enter the country illegally across the border Trump knows that his MAGA base doesn’t draw a distinction between Latinos whether they come from Mexico or from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and other Central American countries.

I wrote in a similar vein yesterday (here) hoping that an undocumented person wouldn’t commit a horrible crime lest Trump make them into his version of Willie Horton. That could have cost Michael Dukakis the election. (read article)

One could speculate that if Horton had looked like any of these serial killers the GOP using this against Dukakis would have been nearly as effective:

Here’s a new story about a daring and heroic woman who caught a rape suspect who was a 25-year-old unauthorized Ecuadorian immigrant. I hope that Trump doesn’t take a story like this, use the woman who caught him in his rallies, and turn the perp into another Willy Horton.

Trump and his minions are already trying to do this. Consider: ‘Vile smears’: Trump’s MAGA allies fact-checked for tying Biden policy to brutal murders.

Excerpt:

Trump and his allies, though, responded by trying to tie Biden’s policy to brutal rapes and murders allegedly committed by migrants — including the killing of a young woman in Maryland. The former president and sympathetic presenters doubled down on these attacks at a garbled rally in Racine, Wisconsin on Monday evening.

But these “truly vile smears” are nonsense, wrote Sargent.

“There’s a key tell in the Fox/MAGA attacks on Biden’s policy: They all try to change the subject back to *the border.* Yet this policy is all about immigrants who have lived here for a decade or more,” wrote Sargent. “This is ugly stuff. Fox/MAGA personalities are linking Biden’s policy to a horrific murder. RNC says the killing was done by a ‘BIDEN ILLEGAL.’ Fox is juxtaposing the new policy with footage of hordes swarming the border and even migrant mug shots.”

Addendum:

The U.S. has two vaccines ready should the strain of bird flu circulating in dairy cows begin spreading easily to people, federal health officials said Wednesday. They could begin shipping doses widely within weeks, if needed.

So far, there’s no evidence that H5N1 is spreading person-to-person, although one dairy worker in Texas who worked closely with infected cattle had a mild infection and developed conjunctivitis, or pinkeye, in April. Read more here.

You can read this and previous blogs on two websites. One may look better than the other because of how the platforms present the page.

Read on the WordPress Stressline.orgor….Read on the Google Blogger platform HalBrown.org This version has a Disquis comment section which makes it easy to post links and images.