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TRUMP AND SCIENCE/TECH PART 2
YESTERDAY, WE EXAMINED AN ARTICLE IN SCIENCE addressing funding cuts and policy shifts likely with a second Trump administration. This continues today in Part 2.
“Go Wild” on Health, Medicines, and Food. Jocelyn Kaiser writes earlier in Science Online, November 6, 2024, (also appearing in print November 15), “For many U.S. scientists, one big question is whether the new administration will dramatically retool the world’s largest biomedical research agency, the $47 billion National Institutes of Health (NIH), which is responsible for roughly half of all federal spending on basic science.”
Kaiser continues, “Republicans had NIH in their sights even before the election, with proposals to restructure it and restrict some areas of research. Trump’s embrace of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic, has also unsettled researchers. Trump has said he will let Kennedy ‘go wild’ on health, medicines, and food policy.”
Once again, we can only hope that the stable genius continues to bully. (How long will this bromance last?)
Three Qs: Will Trump Upend Public Health? In a “Three Qs feature,” in November 15, 2024, Meredith Wadman writes of RFK Jr.’s proposed axing “entire departments” at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. She quotes Lawrence Gostin of Georgetown University, who has worked in public health for 40 years. He calls this “the darkest day for public health and science in my lifetime.”
Image by Alex Brandon/Associated Press from the Los Angeles Times.
Q: What Could an Unleashed Kennedy Do? “The U.S. does have guardrails likely to hold against most extreme policies,” Gostin says…. “Public health in the U.S. is quintessentially a state power. For example, states determine which vaccines will be offered, which will be mandated.”
I pause here to be thankful for being a Born-Again Californian.
Q: Could Trump Remake Vaccine Policy? Gostin writes that people “who have a certain skepticism toward vaccines… will affect the quality, accuracy, and reliability of its recommendations. That would really disrupt state public health departments in knowing what to trust and not to trust…. There will be a large, continued erosion of public trust that began during the first Trump administration.”
We all recall the Covid bleach conjecture—and staring directly at the sun during its eclipse.
Q: Can Science Agencies Resist Meddling? “It’s very unlikely that the Supreme Court would overturn an FDA drug or vaccine approval based on science…. A deep well of career scientists at the FDA, CDC, NIH, and others who have some whistleblower protections would fight back and really drag their feet or even refuse to be influenced politically when they know that public health is at stake.”
I surely hope these career scientists won’t be bullied. And thanks, AAAS, for offering insights on this interface of Sci-Tech and Furthermore/Politics here at SimanaitisSays. ds
© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2024
Simanaitis Says 
These potential changes are insane, out of contact with reality, effectively gravely damaging essential parts of the country (and the world.) They will usher in a new dark ages. Sigh. Thank you for simply and clearly writing about them.
Science, the concept and the AAAS magazine, provided the honest information. Thanks for your kind words, Tom.
The career scientists can be fired, or their working lives made sufficiently hellish that they quit (amounts to the same thing). Some, perhaps might move to Europe where things seem to still be semi-reasonable (depending on the country). In any of those cases, it’s a big loss for the US and, perhaps, the world. Thank you for writing about the situation clearly.
That a loudmouth daddy’s boy from Queens with a dopey hairdo wearing more make up than Dolly Parton, the reading and understanding ability of a fifth or, at very best, sixth grader, according to Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson and four-star Marine General Jim Mattison, both of whom spent hours with this poser one-on-one, a multiple convicted felon, rapist, suggesting people drink bleach and wanting to drop nuclear bombs on hurricanes,
could derail decades of hard-won knowledge is beyond belief, a situation Paddy Chayefsky and Rod Serling could not have envisioned, brought to you by the latest iteration of the KKK, the Republican party, for with the stock market soaring, unemployment low as it’s been in half a century, we producing more oil than at any time in our nation’s history, more than any other nation on earth,
there remains no other reason to be a GOPpie.
Remember, the Great Depression started under Herbert Hoover (R). Roosevelt (D) was elected among other things to fix it. Took a while and a war to do that.