COVID exists. COVID vaccines worked. COVID vaccines did not kill any one and are not linkable to myocardial infarction. Some people had negative reactions to the vaccine, like other vaccines, but the chances of those negative impacts were far less than they would have been had if the recipient contracted COVID. Turbo cancer doesn’t exist. Ivermectin doesn’t work for COVID. Vaccines don’t cause autism.
Republicans held a Senate hearing for Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, at this time because: The midterms are very close. They can not run on the Iran war. They can not run on inflation. They cannot run on the economy. They can no longer run on immigration.
This was completely political and intended to divert attention away from the colossal mismanagement of the nation’s affairs. It’s a shame we have to continue to confuse the public, erode faith in science and obfuscate the facts about this disease to detract attention away from what President Donald Trump hath wrought.
Anthony Bruner, Chesapeake
In shambles
Recently, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth appeared before a Senate committee to address the White House’s supplemental funding request for the ongoing Iran war. He was grilled at length, mostly by Democrats who questioned his leadership and said the Trump administration did not have a strategy to win the war.
They also questioned him about the inconsistencies and fluctuations in President Donald Trump’s statements about the war. An NBC News review found dozens of instances where Trump said the war was won or almost won — comments that were often followed by more military action. According to ABC News as of July 22 at least 18 service members have been killed and about 500 wounded since the war began. Hegseth accused Michigan Sen. Gary Peters and the Democrats of having “Trump Derangement Syndrome” (TDS) for not funding the war. TDS? Really?
The right-leaning National Review reported on July 21 that “two U.S. service members who were killed in an Iranian missile attack on an American base in Jordan were reportedly victims of Iran’s battlefield adaptations, some of which are attributable to … Russia and China.”
Trump’s handling of the war and foreign policy in general is in shambles. Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, the diplomatic envoys to Iran, had been former businessmen and investors with no foreign policy experience. Just as I’m writing this letter, NBC News reports, “House votes to end Iran war, but Senate Republicans vote to let Trump continue waging it.”
George DeRise, Newport News
Privatizing USPS
Re “Postal Service” (Your Views, July 28): As a business owner, I can attest that the government-run postal service is not self sufficient. I went to the post office recently in Chesapeake to send a package for next day delivery and was informed that it would not be there the next day and that I should go to FedEx, which I did. The U.S. Postal Service has become inefficient and a costly business that is backed up by taxpayers.
I grew up in the United Kingdom, where the delivery and pick up from all of the post offices is done by the Royal Mail. However, all the local post offices were sold to entrepreneurs and most post offices there have a retail component. This achieved a better service and it saved the UK government huge sums in workers’ costs and reduced inefficiencies.
By comparison, FedEx was founded in 1971 and offers dependable time-definite delivery windows with money-back guarantees on express and ground services plus robust tracking infrastructure. Our government-funded USPS, on the other hand, has transit times that are less predictable and priority mail are estimates rather than strict guarantees.
Sell off every post office and let private people run them.
Ray Patel, Chesapeake