Alright, folks, gather around, because today’s a big freaking day in history. March 14, 1942—remember that date, because it’s the day a woman named Anne Miller got saved from a raging infection, thanks to the miracle of penicillin. Yeah, you heard me. Before this, a paper cut could kill you faster than a mob hit.
Let’s set the scene: poor Anne had a miscarriage, and in the pre-antibiotic era, that basically meant your doctor would pat you on the back and say, “Welp, hope you like fevers and dying.” But lucky for her, Dr. Orvan Hess and Dr. John Bumstead (yes, Bumstead—try saying that with a straight face) got their hands on an experimental batch of penicillin. And boom! In 24 hours, her fever dropped, and she went on to live another 57 years. That’s right, she outlived disco.
Now, this wasn’t just some one-off miracle cure. This was the beginning of the antibiotic era. Before penicillin, people were dropping dead from things like scratches and bad teeth. Seriously, bar fights were more deadly than the actual wars. Then along came penicillin, and suddenly, infections weren’t a death sentence anymore. It saved lives, it made surgery safer, and it helped doctors do more than just shrug and say, “Eh, guess you’re gonna die.”
And get this: the military jumped on it real quick. By the time D-Day rolled around in 1944, they had enough penicillin to keep Allied soldiers from dying of gangrene. Because nothing ruins a war like your entire army smelling like rotting flesh.
Now, let’s fast forward to today. Picture all that medical progress—decades of research, lives saved, infections defeated. Now, imagine some absolute dingbats flushing it all down the toilet. Enter Trump and RFK Jr., the dream team of “Let’s See How Fast We Can Screw This Up.”
Trump—who probably thinks doctors are just fancy bartenders—and RFK Jr.—who believes vaccines are the devil’s juice—have been taking a wrecking ball to public health. Kennedy, the same guy who once said WiFi causes cancer (no, really, look it up), is now running the freaking Department of Health and Human Services. This is like putting a flat-earther in charge of NASA.
And boy, is he making an impact. He’s cutting funding for vital health programs, spreading medical conspiracy theories like they’re TikTok challenges, and gutting the agencies that are supposed to protect us. He’s even put the CDC on pause for investigating vaccine safety because, hey, who needs science when you’ve got a gut feeling and a Facebook group?
So, here we are, people. We live in a country where a woman in 1942 had better odds of getting lifesaving medical treatment than some of us do today. We had a golden age of medicine, and now we’re watching it unravel because a bunch of morons decided science is the real enemy.
Anne Miller was saved because doctors, researchers, and the government worked together to make penicillin a reality. Today, we’ve got people in power trying to undo a century’s worth of medical progress because they read some nonsense on Reddit.
So yeah, happy anniversary to penicillin, the drug that kicked bacteria’s ass. And to our healthcare system? Well, if it were a patient, I’d say it’s running a fever of 104 and sweating bullets. Someone get it some damn antibiotics—before these clowns ban those too.
