Readers Write: Metro Transit, the president’s rhetoric, vaccines

Opinion editor’s note: Strib Voices publishes letters from readers online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

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Since the Metro Transit E Line opened on Dec. 6, my wife and I have taken over a dozen trips. Although we have lived in our southwest Minneapolis home for over 30 years, we have never taken a bus until now.

The E Line buses are new, clean and comfortable and run every 12 or so minutes. We have gone shopping, to movies, to the State Theatre and to Surly Brewing all without a transfer. I’m a senior, so it cost only $1.

Our holiday plans include taking the E Line to downtown on Christmas Eve and to the Ordway later in the month to see “Jesus Christ Superstar.” The latter will require a downtown transfer to the 94 bus (oh my), but I think we’re up to the challenge. The bus lets us off at the Ordway door.

Talk about virtue-signaling! I show my “Go To” card and win hands down ... and I don’t even need to buy an electric vehicle!

Sidebar to Metro Transit: If you keep the system clean, safe and reliable, you got me. If you screw it up, I’m gone.

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As an avid bike rider, I was pleased to read the recent article on extending the Gateway State Trail (“Long in the making, new extension of popular Gateway State Trail gets green light,” Dec. 18). The more miles the better for getting more individuals outside, active and enjoying our state! What was not mentioned is that many, many sections of the current Gateway Trail are long overdue for repaving. There are literally thousands of bone-jarring pavement cracks and tire-popping potholes along these 18 miles. Readers can even see a few of them in the article’s photo.

Riders, walkers and skaters have been avoiding this jewel of a trail for years, waiting for some maintenance. Let’s have some of these referenced associations and the state attend to our current trails as much as seeking out and funding new extensions.

Mike McAvoy, St. Paul

Following the death of Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele, President Donald Trump, for reasons known only to him, engaged in bizarre and gratuitous character assassination of the great director. This outrage clearly hit hard for members of the media and cultural commentators for whom Reiner rightly occupies an exalted status.

It’s anyone’s guess who Trump’s next target will be. In a week’s time we will have already moved on to a new outrage, a new ghoulish, cruel or childish provocation or insult by the president or someone in his orbit. Trump’s debasement of our politics, public discourse and culture will continue, but we should never get used to it.

We do, however, need to retire the term “a new low.” In the era of Trump, there will never be one.

Ted Sherman, St. Paul

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Just when you think this president can’t debase himself and the office of the presidency any further, he finds a way. The latest vindictive action is “A presidential walk of blame” in the Dec. 18 paper. Under photos of past presidents who he considers his enemies he has authored descriptive and derogatory language that is totally unfit for that building and for the people’s house and beneath the dignity of the person and the office. I’ve read the complete descriptions on another news source, and they are despicable.

I had written in a previous letter to the editor that it must be a heavy burden to have an ego so fragile and to be so insecure that he must resort to stunts like this. That description is amplified further by this latest fiasco. It’s unfortunate that the people around him can’t mitigate his basest desires. But he has surrounded himself with sycophants who are only too eager to do his bidding.

Ron Bender, Richfield

In the recent commentary “Children deserve the life that vaccines allow” (Strib Voices, Dec. 14), Richard Young recreated the feelings of dread that parents felt in the 1950s polio epidemic. Minnesota led the nation in polio cases, and our hospital wards were filled with children in iron lungs cared for by nurses coming in from other states. The epidemic ended only with the arrival of the Salk polio vaccine in 1955. Parents, including mine, were overjoyed.

How soon we forget! What message has convinced a small number of parents to flip from fearing the disease to fearing the vaccine that prevents it? Logic and math tell us that the minuscule risk of a tried-and-tested vaccine is insignificant compared to the well-known risks of illness and death from vaccine-preventable diseases.

Vaccine critics speak loudly, but health care providers and grandparents with lived experience need to speak louder still.

The writer is a retired pediatrician.

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It seems like not too many days go by until another headline about Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s attempts to remake current vaccine policies. Obviously, navigating the delicate balance between protecting public health and protecting personal freedoms is a challenge. But is RFK Jr. utilizing the methodology that has brought about huge successes with past vaccines?

To help answer this question: If we go back to 1777, when George Washington mandated that all Continental soldiers be inoculated against the deadly smallpox virus, there was also a large number of colonialists who resisted this very first mass inoculation order. However, the fatality rate of those who had been inoculated was between 1% to 2%, or about 15 times lower than those who had not been inoculated. Consequently, most historians would now agree that without this mandate, the patriots would not have won the Revolutionary War.

And about 200 years later, in 1980, the World Health Organization declared smallpox, one of the most contagious and devastating diseases in the world, to be completely eradicated. This occurred primarily because of the extensive worldwide smallpox vaccine requirements that were issued, alongside rigorous vaccine research that also took place.

Moreover, RFK Jr. frequently downplays evidenced-based medical science that has shown the effectiveness of many vaccines. Not all vaccines, of course, are going to be as completely effective as the smallpox vaccine. However, over the past 50 years, vaccines have remarkably saved over 150 million lives worldwide.

So to answer the question, then, is our nation doing all it can to take full advantage of lifesaving vaccines? Given RFK Jr.’s current approach to public health, the answer, I think, should be obvious.