Original photo by Tony Gambone
The Virginia General Assembly is a treasure trove of weird, sometimes disgusting stories, but it’s usually for the legislation it attempts to pass. Well, now the Virginia Senate is just plain gross, and Old Dominion residents would be well-advised to avoid their state senators at all costs.
The flu is sweeping through the upper chamber of the statehouse, The Washington Post reports, and senators, obligated to work during the current 45-day legislative session, are as busy trading germs as they are votes:
The worried lobbyist whisked him to the hospital Friday night, where doctors diagnosed double pneumonia and prescribed two things: antibiotics and bed rest. Come Monday, Stanley (R-Franklin) was taking his medicine, but taking it at his desk in the Senate, afraid to miss a vote in the evenly divided chamber as the 45-day General Assembly session entered its last week.
The flu clobbered the commonwealth this year, and glad-handing, germ-swapping politicians have turned Mr. Jefferson’s Capitol into a stately petri dish, where midwinter contagion has sickened scores of legislators. Yet even the most peaked lawmakers say they can’t afford to miss a single vote in the frenzied homestretch.
That means working through fevers, sneezing, hacking and coughing, and all the other nasty symptoms that come with a flu outbreak.
It’s unclear which senator played the role of patient zero, but the outbreak was at its worst in early January, when Republican senators caught their Democratic colleagues off-guard by attempting to redraw Senate districts.
However, a chamber full of sick senators hasn’t been all bad. If, anything, it’s fostered a culture of medical bipartisanship—and probably some bacterial cultures, too—with members of the Senate and House of Delegates who hold medical degrees offering to treat their sick colleagues.
That’s nice. But in the mean time, members of the Virginia State Senate have been exposed to the flu, so if you see one on the street, run in the opposite direction. Actually, that’s not any different from our normal advice when encountering a Virginia elected official.
