A couple of days after the election this year I wrote that I thought a lot of the anti-incumbent movement these past couple of years had to do with unprocessed trauma from the global pandemic. Here in America, we lost over 1.2 million people in a very short time from a deadly disease that humans had never seen before. Within just a few weeks in the spring of 2020, New York City alone had lost more than 15,000 people. All of our medical systems were strained, supplies were unavailable and the whole country, the whole world, was in a state of barely suppressed panic. I don't think we've ever really dealt with exactly what happened. And now we are in danger of doing it all over again.
Donald Trump failed miserably at the most important thing he was tasked with doing at the time: reassuring the public. He instead lied, complained, pushed snake oil cures and worried more about the effects of the pandemic on his re-election prospects than the health of the American people. Bob Woodward's book "Rage" lays out a terrifying narrative, from taped interviews with Trump himself, of just how inept and dishonest he was.
It appears that Trump is intent on stacking the nation's most important health agencies with people who are hostile to modern public health science and vaccines.
Mother Jones's David Corn reported on the findings of The Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis which found that senior Trump officials tried to block CDC scientists from warning the public and barred them from holding press conferences as would be the usual protocol, substituting those demented Trump TV briefings instead. The White House listened to conspiracy theorists and unorthodox quacks with little experience in the field and leaned on the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to change its recommendations. The result of Trump's mismanagement of the crisis is estimated to have resulted in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths in the days before the vaccines became widely available.
We all recall Trump's cult followers' reaction to the government guidelines to try to save as many lives as possible. They rebelled like wild-eyed teenagers, burning facemasks, staging protests and indulging in conspiracy theories. Trump soon followed their lead since it dovetailed with his own political needs to get out on the campaign trail. The consequences were grave. Vaccine refusal caused over 200,000 more unnecessary deaths.
Trump has not forgotten about any of that even if the rest of us have tried to suppress the sense of insecurity and chaos that crisis left us with. He is a man who bears grudges and the scientific community that disagreed with him is now in his crosshairs. He cannot accept that they were right and that he was wrong so he's going to make them pay.
He's found the perfect instrument for his revenge in Robert F. Kennedy Jr, a conspiracy theorist with a whole lot of crackpot ideas but who, like Trump, believes that he knows better than scientists. He apparently was responsible for some of the funding for the dangerous documentary called "Plandemic" which likely contributed to many deaths.
His left field theories about vaccines and other standard life-saving medical treatments are well documented. And despite his alleged commitment to changing the food Americans eat to make them healthier (good luck with that), it's fair to assume that his lack of ability to be anything but a gadfly will likely result in chaos rather than reform. His previous efforts have been deadly.
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To the extent there are any scientists RFK Jr. or Trump respect they are all heretical and eccentric. Trump named a group of those very scientists this week to top posts at the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers For Disease Control. They were all opponents of the standard COVID guidelines and are all opponents of mainstream medical science, notably in opposition to vaccines.
Trump has nominated Dr. David Weldon an internist and former GOP congressman from Florida to head the CDC. Weldon is best known for pushing the thoroughly discredited theory that thimerosal, a preservative compound in some vaccines, causes autism. He's a fanatic who tried as a congressman to pass a “vaccine safety bill” in 2007 to create a separate agency for vaccines within the Department of Health and Human Services.
Dr. Martin Makary, a pancreatic surgeon at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, is Trump's choice to head the Food and Drug Administration. He questions some of the vaccines routinely given to children and in his Fox News appearances he's made it clear that he opposed the COVID policies. He wrote in the Wall Street Journal that it would be gone by April of 2021 due to natural immunity and vaccines. He was very wrong. More than 450,000 people died in 2021.
For Surgeon General, Trump has named Dr. Janette Nesheiwat a former Fox News contributor and supplement salesperson who also happens to be married to his new National Security Adviser, Florida Rep. Michael Walz. She has a book coming out called, “Beyond the Stethoscope: Miracles in Medicine,” which shows the “transformative power of prayer." The good news is that she doesn't seem to be hostile to vaccines which makes her an island in a sea of anti-vaxxers.
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Trump hasn't formally nominated anyone to the National Institute of Health but the smart money is on Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford University-trained physician and economist. Apparently RFK Jr vetted him this week and really liked the cut of his jib. Of course, he would. Bhattacharya is one of the lead authors of the notorious Great Barrington Declaration, which argued against lockdowns during the pandemic. It was sponsored by the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), a libertarian free-market think tank associated with climate change denial, which gives you some idea of the kind of "scientific" analysis that went into it. The Washington Post reported plans to gut the NIH:
Bhattacharya has called for rolling back the power of some of the 27 institutes and centers that constitute NIH, saying that some career civil servants wrongly shaped national policies at the height of the pandemic and did not tolerate dissent. Bhattacharya and other critics have singled out Anthony S. Fauci, the infectious-disease expert who led one of NIH’s centers for 38 years and helped steer the nation’s coronavirus response before leaving the federal government in December 2022. [...]
Bhattacharya and Makary collaborated on a blueprint for a proposed commission to investigate the nation’s coronavirus response.
It appears that Trump is intent on stacking the nation's most important health agencies with people who are hostile to modern public health science and vaccines, which is exactly what you would expect from a vengeful megalomaniac who's put an anti-vaxx conspiracist in charge of them.
The pandemic did an immeasurable amount of damage and caused endless heartache for millions of families around the world. Here in America it was taken up as a political weapon by the right-wing and will be the catalyst for the destruction of our public health system. We may be through with COVID but it still isn't through with us.
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