The recent purge of several high-level members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent shock waves through the political establishment. And with political shock waves seeming to hit every few hours these days, that’s quite a feat.
The ouster of Dr. Susan Monarez, the CDC’s new director and an infectious disease expert who was just confirmed by 51 Republican senators in July, was unexpected. But it was her unwillingness to sign off on dubious new COVID-19 vaccine recommendations and the apparent pre-determined findings of the vaccine board, which Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has packed with his quack cronies, that likely did Monarez in.
That it immediately triggered the resignations of five other top CDC scientists in protest made it all the more astounding.
Kennedy is probably the world’s most famous vaccine skeptic, having spent years wallowing in the rabbit hole of dark conspiracy theories. A card-carrying practitioner of the woo-woo wellness movement, he was a known fanatic on this issue when he and Donald Trump apparently struck a backroom deal during the campaign to deliver his followers in exchange for a role in the new administration. Since the woo-woo and wingnut factions of the growing anti-vaccination movement merged in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic, that represented a fairly good-sized chunk of voters. Trump needed them, especially since he’d lost credibility with that crowd when he bragged about Operation Warp Speed, which produced and approved COVID vaccines in record time.
It was widely suspected that among Kennedy’s first orders of business would be to do away with vaccines. On Aug. 27, the Food and Drug Administration announced stringent restrictions on this season’s COVID vaccines. Besides limiting the updated shot to adults 65 and older and immunocompromised people, the agency has also cut research funding for the vaccine’s mRNA technology, which has shown tremendous promise for breakthroughs in cancer and other life-threatening diseases. Kennedy has also promised to provide the results of a new study, apparently thrown together in the last couple of months, that will reveal the cause of autism. Considering he recently demanded the retraction of a Danish study that found no correlation between aluminum — a component of vaccines for the last 100 years — and autism, it’s fair to suspect he has miraculously discovered that he was right all along and childhood vaccines are the culprit.
At the heart of Kennedy’s ideology is an apparent belief in eugenics, something he shares with the president, who has extolled the “racehorse theory” and expressed confidence in his own “good German genes.” Kennedy has signaled his own fidelity to eugenics by suggesting recently that people with autism are nonfunctional members of society…
At the heart of Kennedy’s ideology is an apparent belief in eugenics, something he shares with the president, who has extolled the “racehorse theory” and expressed confidence in his own “good German genes.” Kennedy has signaled his own fidelity to eugenics by suggesting recently that people with autism are nonfunctional members of society, a claim that echoes the 1920 essay “Permitting the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life,” which claimed that people with disabilities and mental illness are nothing more than “empty human husks” who “are a terrible, heavy burden upon their relatives and society as a whole.” He and TV Dr. Mehmet Oz, who serves as director of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, declared that “being healthy is your patriotic duty” and suggested that people who get sick or develop a disability are traitors — and probably don’t deserve medical care.
None of this, then, is as unprecedented as we might like to believe. It was really only after World War II that America came to a consensus view on the value of science and technology research. If you saw Christopher Nolan’s 2023 film “Oppenheimer,” you might remember the character of Vannevar Bush, one of the bosses who oversaw the Manhattan Project. Played by Matthew Modine, Bush was a key advisor to Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman during and after the war. Bush wrote a seminal report called “Science, The Endless Frontier,” which shaped how the federal government would fund research in the post-war world. The report set the idealistic agenda that drove American achievement in science and technology — and the prosperity that followed.
Presidents from Roosevelt onward supported that agenda. Some, like John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, pushed it very hard. But in the 1970s, scientific advances like the birth control pill challenged the business world and certain religious factions, which formed an unlikely alliance against that bipartisan consensus.
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In his 2005 book “The Republican War on Science,” political journalist and science writer Chris Mooney revealed how the GOP had worked to discredit climate change, stem cell research, the effects of smoking and pollution on public health, the benefits of alternative energy, evolution and educational standards. A year earlier, while Mooney was working on his book, 62 of the nation’s preeminent scientists signed a statement released by the Union of Concerned Scientists titled “Restoring Scientific Integrity in Policy Making,” which charged President George W. Bush’s administration with widespread “manipulation of the process through which science enters into its decisions.”
In an expanded follow-up report issued in 2008, the USC found:
- “[A] well established pattern of suppression and distortion of scientific findings by high-ranking Bush administration political appointees across numerous federal agencies. These actions have consequences for human health, public safety, and community well-being.”
- “[S]trong documentation of a wide-ranging effort to manipulate the government’s scientific advisory system to prevent the appearance of advice that might run counter to the administration’s political agenda.”
- “[E]vidence that the administration often imposes restrictions on what government scientists can say or write about ‘sensitive’ topics.”
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The report’s findings were serious and alarming. But what’s happening now is all that on steroids. The main difference is that in Kennedy’s HHS, the suppression is no longer grounded in ideology or even business interests. It’s in service of crank conspiracy theories, quack wellness influencers and weird dystopian visions of supermen doing pull-ups to demonstrate their patriotism.
So it shouldn’t surprise anyone to learn that Kennedy’s choice to be the CDC’s acting director has no medical or scientific training. A former biotechnology investor and executive, Jim O’Neill serves as Kennedy’s deputy at HHS, where he also worked during the Bush administration. He’s also closely associated with tech lord Peter Thiel.
During his first term, Trump tried to appoint O’Neill as head of the FDA. But it soon came to light that O’Neill had promoted the idea that the FDA should no longer consider the efficacy of drugs when deciding on their approval. People, he said, should use them “at their own risk.”
All this makes it patently clear: American leadership in the fields of science and technology is coming to an end. We had a good run, bringing many important advances, such as the vaccines for polio and COVID-19, to the world, not to mention prosperity to American businesses. But the demise of our scientific progress and influence didn’t begin with Donald Trump or Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Their actions are the natural consequence of a concerted effort begun long ago by a group of people, and a political party, who decided that supporting reason and rationale were not in our national interest.
You have to wonder if any of them saw this coming.
