Sad Paragraphs of the Shutdown

From the Associated Press:

Commissaries in the U.S. where military families can buy inexpensive groceries tax-free are shutting doors Wednesday due to the shutdown. And that could create a financial hardship for those who depend on the stores’ steeply discounted prices to make ends meet — particularly young service members with families to feed or retired veterans on fixed incomes.

From KSL Utah:

Roughly 65,000 Utahns who use the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, more commonly known as WIC, will lose that assistance. Many say they did not see it coming.

From WSJ, via The Atlantic:

At the National Institutes of Health, nearly three-quarters of the staff was furloughed. One result: director Francis Collins said about 200 patients who otherwise would be admitted to the NIH Clinical Center into clinical trials each week will be turned away. This includes about 30 children, most of them cancer patients, he said.

This last paragraph has been picked up by several news outlets as probably being the saddest paragraph you’ll read about the shutdown so far (are any of us really sad about that panda cam that made it into a bunch of lists yesterday?). But really, these are all unfortunate, and there are, of course, many more — these are just three that hit my newsfeed in the last hour.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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