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Trump’s Director of FDA Warns Senate Not to Confirm RFK Jr.

By dianeravitch
November 30, 2024 //
7

One of Trump’s appointees in his first administration urged the U.S. Senate not to confirm Robert F. Kennedy as Secretary of Health and Human services because of his ignorant hostility to vaccines. He warned that a variety of contagious diseases would break out, and people would die. It’s worthwhile to recall that before RFK endorsed Trump, RFK was generally viewed by the press and by medical experts as a crackpot.

Scott Gottlieb, who led the Food and Drug Administration during the Trump administration, on Friday warned that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could “cost lives” if confirmed as the next secretary of Health and Human Services.
“You’re going to see measles, mumps and rubella vaccination rates go down,” Gottlieb said on CNBC, referencing Kennedy’s longtime criticism of federal recommendations for childhood immunizations, and noting a recent decline in childhood vaccination rates. The nation is approaching a “tipping point,” Gottlieb said, where a continued decline in childhood vaccines could soon lead to measles outbreaks and deaths of children.
“We’re going to start seeing epidemics of diseases that have long been vanquished, and, God forbid, we see polio reemerge in this country,” he said.
Gottlieb said he had been warning senators against confirming Kennedy to run the federal health department, although he did not identify with whom he had spoken. He added that Kennedy, who founded one of the country’s most prominent antivaccine groups, had “smart people” around him who could take immediate steps to affect Americans’ access to vaccines, such as changing federal vaccine recommendations.

Categories Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Health, Science, Trump

Dr. Oz Has Investments in Health Sector, Conflicts of Interest

By dianeravitch
November 29, 2024 //
15

Dr. Mehmet Oz has significant investments in the healthcare industry that Trump appointed him to regulate. The hits just keep coming.

His investments predispose him to promote for-profit Medicare Advantage plans and to reduce the number of enrollees in Medicare.

The LA Times reported:

President-elect Donald Trump’s choice to run the sprawling government agency that administers Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act marketplace — celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz — recently held broad investments in healthcare, tech and food companies that would pose significant conflicts of interest.


Oz’s holdings, some shared with family, included a stake in UnitedHealth Group worth as much as $600,000, as well as shares of pharmaceutical firms and tech companies with business in the healthcare sector, such as Amazon. Collectively, Oz’s investments total tens of millions of dollars, according to financial disclosures he filed during his failed 2022 run for a Pennsylvania U.S. Senate seat.


Trump said Tuesday he would nominate Oz as administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. The agency’s scope is huge: CMS oversees coverage for more than 160 million Americans, nearly half the population. Medicare alone accounts for approximately $1 trillion in annual spending, with more than 67 million enrollees.


UnitedHealth Group is one of the largest healthcare companies in the nation and arguably the most important business partner of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, through which it is the leading provider of commercial health plans available to Medicare beneficiaries.

UnitedHealth also offers managed-care plans under Medicaid, the joint state-federal program for low-income people, and sells plans on government-run marketplaces set up via the Affordable Care Act. Oz also had smaller stakes in CVS Health, which now includes the insurer Aetna, and in the insurer Cigna.


It’s not clear if Oz, a heart surgeon by training, still holds investments in healthcare companies, or if he would divest his shares or otherwise seek to mitigate conflicts of interest should he be confirmed by the Senate. Reached by phone on Wednesday, he said he was in a Zoom meeting and declined to comment.


An assistant did not reply to an email message with detailed questions.


“It’s obvious that over the years he’s cultivated an interest in the pharmaceutical industry and the insurance industry,” said Peter Lurie, president of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a watchdog group. “That raises a question of whether he can be trusted to act on behalf of the American people.” (The publisher of KFF Health News, David Rousseau, is on the Center for Science in the Public Interest board.)

Categories Accountability, Ethics, For-Profit, Health, Science, Trump

Brian Deer: RFK Jr. Spreads Misinformation and Lies

By dianeravitch
November 29, 2024 //
17

Brian Deer is a journalist who recently published a book about anti-vaccine activists. In an opinion piece in the New York Times, he described how very dangerous Robert F. Kennedy is. If he should be confirmed as leader of the department of Health and Human Services, Deer predicts, he will surround himself with other quacks and vaccine deniers. Recently, he writes, Kennedy has been trying to obscure his radical views against vaccines by talking about food safety. Don’t be fooled. He does not trust science, and his stance on vaccines is dangerous.

He writes:

In November 2019, when an epidemic of measles was killing children and babies in Samoa, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — who in recent days became Donald Trump’s pick to lead the department of Health and Human Services — sent the prime minister of Samoa a four-page letter. In it, he suggested the measles vaccine itself may have caused the outbreak.

He claimed that the vaccine might have “failed to produce antibodies” in vaccinated mothers sufficient to provide infants with immunity, that it perhaps provoked “the evolution of more virulent measles strains” and that children who received the vaccine may have inadvertently spread the virus to other children. “Please do not hesitate to contact me if I can be of any assistance,” he added, writing in his role as the chairman of Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine group.

At the time of his letter, 16 people, many of them younger than 2, were already reported dead. Measles, which is among the most contagious diseases, can sometimes lead to brain swelling, pneumonia and death. For months, families grieved over heartbreaking little coffins, until a door-to-door vaccination campaign brought the calamity to a close. The final number of fatalities topped 80.

I was in Samoa during that outbreak as part of my more than 16 years of reporting on the anti-vaccine movement. The cause of the outbreak was not the vaccine, but most likely an infected traveler who brought the virus from New Zealand, which that year had had the biggest measles outbreaks in decades, especially among that country’s Indigenous and Pacific Islander communities. Migration and poverty were likely factors in a sudden spread of measles in Samoa and New Zealand. But, as an editorial in The New Zealand Medical Journal reported, so too was a factor that Mr. Kennedy specializes in: “increasing circulation of misinformation leading to distrust and reduced vaccination uptake.” Samoa’s vaccination rates had fallen to fewer than a third of eligible 1-year-olds.

Vaccine skepticism has ballooned worldwide, and Mr. Kennedy and others who back him have encouraged it. Americans may be well aware that their possible future health leader holds dangerous beliefs about vaccines. The consequences of his views — and those of his orbit — are not merely absurd but tragic.

In my reporting, parents have mentioned fearing vaccines after watching “Vaxxed,” a 90-minute documentary, which had also toured countries such as New Zealand. The film, focused on unproven allegations, was released more than three years before the Samoa measles outbreak. Among much else, it claimed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had committed fraud.

Two of the filmmakers — Del Bigtree and Andrew Wakefield — are buddies of Mr. Kennedy. The director, Mr. Wakefield, is a former doctor whose medical license was revoked in his native Britain in 2010 amid charges of ethical violations. One of the producers, Mr. Bigtree, became Mr. Kennedy’s presidential campaign communications chief.

In the years before the documentary was released, I revealed, in a series of articles, evidence that Mr. Wakefield’s research in the 1990s had been rigged at a London hospital to make it look as if the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine was linked to autism. This research was retracted in 2010. Mr. Kennedy certainly didn’t seem fazed by Mr. Wakefield’s professional downfall. “In any just society, we would be building statues to Andy Wakefield,” he yelled, for instance, from a platform he and Mr. Wakefield shared at an event in Washington, D.C., a few days before he sent his letter to Samoa.

Reports say Mr. Kennedy is reviewing résumés for his possible Health and Human Services Department empire. He’s reportedlyeyeing Dr. Joseph Ladapo, a Florida health official who has questioned the safety of Covid vaccines. I’d say Mr. Bigtree may get a role; Mr. Wakefield is trickier, given how discredited he is, even in the United States. But there are plenty of others in Mr. Kennedy’s circle whose claims ought to concern everyone.

Consider Sherri Tenpenny, a doctor who has been declared by Mr. Kennedy as “one of the great leaders” of the anti-vaccine movement. She has falsely claimed that a “metal” attached to a protein in the Covid shots was making their recipients magnetic. “They can put a key on their forehead and it sticks,” she told Ohio state lawmakers in June 2021. “They can put spoons and forks all over them and they can stick.” I could pluck plenty more outrageous characters from Mr. Kennedy’s circle over the years, including veteran AIDS denialists.

In recent days, Mr. Kennedy appears to have tried to change the conversation around his vaccine views to focus on America’s junk food diets. But his views on vaccines shouldn’t be forgotten. In January 2021, speaking to a gathering of loyalists in Ohio, he outlined a three-point checklist that had to be met for him to consider a Covid vaccine. First, he said, “you take one shot, you get lifetime immunity.” Second, side effects are only “one in a million.” Third, “herd immunity” is achieved at 70 percent public uptake — after which, he stipulated, “nobody in this society” ever gets the disease again.

“If they came up with that product,” he said, “I’d be happy to look at it.”

His audience laughed. But it’s not funny.

Categories Elections, Extremism, Fraud, Health, Science, Trump

NYCPSP: The Anti-Vaxxer Appointed by Trump to Lead NIH

By dianeravitch
November 27, 2024 //
25

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is one of the premiere government agencies responsible for research in medicine and public health. NIH is the largest biomedical research institution in the world. Maintaining its scientific integrity is important for the U.S. and the world.

Trump appointed a leading opponent of vaccines to lead the NIH. Others in the medical profession have considered his views to be “fringe,” “extreme,” “out of the mainstream.” Of course, Trump’s choice of Robert Kennedy Jr. to be Secretary of Health and Human Services, which oversees NIH, has garnered many critics, who refer to him as an unqualified and dangerous quack. And then there is Dr. Oz, the hawker of vitamins on TV, as director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. He is said to be a proponent of privatizing Medicare by pushing Medicare Advantage plans owned by private companies.

Why is Trump unleashing his fury on the nation’s public health services? If you know, please share.

Our esteemed reader, who posts under the name, “New York City Public School Parent,” has researched Trump’s nominee to lead the NIH.

She wrote:

Bhattacharya, like Bondi, like William Barr, gets a pass by a liberal media that ignores the worst of their political hackery and their history of dishonesty. Instead of characterizing their actions as corrupt, or demonstrating the utter lack of integrity these folks have, the so-called liberal media instead normalizes their worst actions and mischaracterizes those worst actions as simply “something that rabid partisans on the other side don’t like.” 

When the so-called liberal media was helping the right wing media amplify Bhattacharya’s hyped “evidence-based findings” – that covid was no more deadly than the flu, in spring of 2020, a real journalist, Stephanie M. Lee at Buzzfeed, was reporting on this “evidence” – the very problematic Santa Clara antibody study – financially supported by an airline owner who wanted the public flying again – where Bhattacharya’s doctor wife was caught lying to recruit affluent parents at her kids’ school to participate in a “random” study. Unlike the rest of the journalistic establishment, Lee did more than act as a stenographer, and in 2022 won the Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Reporting. From their press release:

“She investigated a study by John Ioannidis and his colleagues [Bhattacharya and another hack] at Stanford that made a splash early in the coronavirus pandemic when it claimed to show COVID-19 was no more dangerous than the flu. Lee uncovered serious flaws in the study; her stories also showed that Ioannidis had organized an effort to lobby the White House against pandemic lockdowns before collecting any data and that the study had been secretly funded by David Neeleman, the founder of JetBlue and a vocal lockdown opponent.”

Bhattacharya is so lacking in integrity that he made Lee’s life hell for daring to report the truth — he accused her of going after his family (directly causing her to be threatened) because she told the truth – that his doctor wife had improperly solicited parents at her kids’ affluent school to be part of her husband’s “random” antibody study to help prove that covid was no more dangerous than the flu.

He also has a lot in common with Emily Oster – two economists guilty of unprofessionally hyping their very flawed data and getting lots of publicity because they were willing to use that flawed data to make claims that just coincidentally happened to support a dishonest Republican narrative. In both cases, far more credible researchers were correctly pointing out how problematic their “evidence” was – but the media ignored critics and amplified these two folks who were more than happy to hype the lie that indisputable evidence and data supported the Republican narrative about covid being no big danger. 

Later, quietly, these political hacks would make revisions to their data, because their critics were correct that they had hyped flawed data that supported right wing narratives.

Despite the fact that no credible researcher would have ever made the claims of certainty (their “data” proves it!), these two never lost an ounce of credibility despite their errors. 

Typical double standard – if you are helping the Republican narrative, your improper actions are barely mentioned and always spun as irrelevant, thus your reputation as a widely respected truth-teller remains intact in the liberal media. If you are telling the truth and the truth doesn’t support the right wing narrative, the so-called liberal media (in the interest of “balance”) will scrutinize your actions to find some misstep they amplify into a major scandal that suggests you should never be trusted.

Lee now writes for the Chronicle of Higher Education. Bhattacharya is still disparaging her for not acting like the more prominent reporters in the so-called liberal media who specialize in uncritically rewriting press releases amplifying the undisputed “data” and “evidence” supporting right wing narratives.

The media also hyped the Great Barrington Declaration, which had very few credible researchers in epidemology, medicine or science among their signees, but included fake doctors and doctors who were also dead serial killers.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/09/herd-immunity-letter-signed-fake-experts-dr-johnny-bananas-covid

Categories Elections, Extremism, Fraud, Health, Research, Science, Trump

Trump Chooses Critic of Vaccines and Lockdowns to Lead NIH

By dianeravitch
November 26, 2024 //
12

President-Elect Trump made another off-the-wall nomination, which is sure to demoralize the scientists and doctors who work in public health for the federal government.

The Boston Globe reported:

President-elect Donald Trump has chosen health economist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a critic of pandemic lockdowns and vaccine mandates, to lead the National Institutes of Health, the nation’s leading medical research agency.

Trump, in a statement Tuesday evening, said Bhattacharya, a 56-year-old physician and professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, will work in cooperation with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, “to direct the Nation’s Medical Research, and to make important discoveries that will improve Health, and save lives.”

“Together, Jay and RFK Jr. will restore the NIH to a Gold Standard of Medical Research as they examine the underlying causes of, and solutions to, America’s biggest Health challenges, including our Crisis of Chronic Illness and Disease,” he wrote.

The decision to choose Bhattacharya for the post is yet another reminder of the ongoing impact of the COVID pandemic on the politics on public health.

Bhattacharya was one of three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, an October 2020 open letter maintaining that lockdowns were causing irreparable harm.

The document — which came before the availability of COVID-19 vaccines and during the first Trump administration — promoted “herd immunity,” the idea that people at low risk should live normally while building up immunity to COVID-19 through infection. Protection should focus instead on people at higher risk, the document said.

“I think the lockdowns were the single biggest public health mistake,” Bhattacharya said in March 2021 during a panel discussion convened by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

The Great Barrington Declaration was embraced by some in the first Trump administration, even as it was widely denounced by disease experts. Then- NIH director Dr. Francis Collins called it dangerous and “not mainstream science.”

Categories Disruption, Elections, Extremism, Health, Science

Timothy Snyder: Trump’s Plan to Destroy Our Government

By dianeravitch
November 26, 2024 //
14

Timothy Snyder, professor of history at Yale University, is the author of On Tyranny. He writes and speaks frequently on television about the importance of defending our institutions against authoritarianism and resisting Putin’s quest to reclaim the Soviet Union.

He posted:

Each of Trump’s proposed appointments is a surprise.  It is comforting to think that he is simply a vengeful old man, lashing out this way and that.  This is unlikely.  He and Musk and Putin have been talking for years. And the whole idea of his campaign was that this time he had a plan.

We should be wary of shock, which excuses inaction.  Who could have known?  What could I have done?  If there is a plan, shock is part of the plan.  We have to get through the surprise and the shock to see the design and the risk.  We don’t have much time. Nor is outrage the point. Of course we are outraged. But our own reactions can distract is from the larger pattern.

The newspapers address the surprise and the shock by investigating each proposed appointment individually.  And we need this.  With detail comes leverage and power.  But clarity must also come, and quickly.  Each appointment is part of a larger picture.  Taken together, Trump’s candidates constitute an attempt to wreck the American government.  

In historical context we can see this.  There is a history of the modern democratic state.  There is also a history of engineered regime change and deliberate state destruction.  In both histories, five key zones are health, law, administration, defense, and intelligence.  These people, with power over these areas of life, can make America impossible to sustain.

The foundation of modern democratic state is a healthy, long-lived population.  We lived longer in the twentieth century because of hygiene and vaccinations, pioneered by scientists and physicians and then institutionalized by governments.  We treat one another better when we know we have longer lives to lose.  Health is not only the central human good; it enables the peaceful interactions we associate with the rule of law and democracy.  Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the proposed secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, would undo all of this.  On his watch, were his ideas implemented, millions of us would die.  Knowing that our lives will be shorter, we become nasty and brutish.

A modern democratic state depends upon the rule of law.  Before anything else is possible, we have to endorse the principle that we are all governed by law, and that our institutions are grounded in law.  This enables a functional government of a specific sort, in which leaders can be regularly replaced by elections.  It allows us to live as free individuals, within a set of rules that we can alter together.  The rule of law depends on people who believe in the spirit of law.  Matt Gaetz, the proposed attorney general, is the opposite of such a person.  It is not just that he flouts law himself, spectacularly and disgustingly.  It is that he embodies lawlessness, and can be counted upon to abuse law to pursue Trump’s political opponents.  The end of the rule of law is an essential component of a regime change.

The United States of America exists not only because laws are passed, but because we can expect that these laws will be implemented by civil servants.  We might find bureaucracy annoying; its absence, though, is deadly.  We cannot take the pollution out of the air ourselves, or build the highways ourselves, our write our Social Security checks ourselves.  Without a civil service, the law becomes mere paper, and all that works is the personal connection to the government, which the oligarchs will have, and which the rest of us will not.  This is the engineered helplessness promised by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who are to head a black hole named after a cryptocurrency.  There are already oversight instruments in government.  DOGE is something entirely different: an agency of destruction, run by people who believe that government should exist for the wealthy or not at all.

In a modern democratic state, the armed forces are meant to preserve a healthy, long-lived people from external threats.  This principal has been much abused in American practice.  But never before Donald Trump have we had a president who has presented the purpose of the armed forces as the oppression of Americans.  Trump says that Russia and China are less of a threat than “internal enemies.”  In American tradition, members of the armed forces swear an oath to the Constitution.  Trump has indicated that we would prefer “Hitler’s generals,” which means a personal oath to himself.  Pete Hegseth, Trump’s proposed secretary of defense, defends war criminals and displays tattoos associated with white nationalism and Christian nationalism.  He is a fundraiser and television personality, with a complicated sexual past and zero experience running an organization.  

In a world of hostile powers, an intelligence service is indispensable.  Intelligence can be abused, and certainly has been abused.  Yet it is necessary to consider military threats: consider the Biden administration’s correct call the Russia was about to invade Ukraine.  It is also necessary to counter the attempts by foreign intelligence agencies, which are constant, to harm American society.  This often involves disinformation.  Tulsi Gabbard, insofar as she is known at all, is known as a spreader of Syrian and Russian disinformation.  She has no relevant experience.  Were she to become director of national intelligence, as Trump proposes, we would lose the trust of our allies, and lose contact with much of what is happening in the world — just for starters.  We would be vulnerable to all of those who wish to cause us harm.

Imagine that you are a foreign leader who wishes to destroy the United States.  How could you do so?  The easiest way would be to get Americans to do the work themselves, to somehow induce Americans to undo their own health, law, administration, defense, and intelligence.  From this perspective, Trump’s proposed appointments — Kennedy, Jr.; Gaetz; Musk; Ramaswamy; Hegseth; Gabbard — are perfect instruments.  They combine narcissism, incompetence, corruption, sexual incontinence, personal vulnerability, dangerous convictions, and foreign influence as no group before them has done.  These proposed appointments look like a decapitation strike: destroying the American government from the top, leaving the body politic to rot, and the rest of us to suffer.

I do not defend the status quo. I have no doubt whatsoever that the Department of Defense and the Food and Drug Administration require reform.  But such a reform, of these or other agencies, would have to be guided by people with knowledge and experience, who cared about their country, and who had a vision of improvement.  That is simply not what is happening here.  We are confronted instead with a group of people who, were they to hold the positions they have been assigned, could bring an end to the United States of America.  

It is a mistake to think of these people as flawed.  It is not they will do a bad job in their assigned posts.  It is that they will do a good job using those assigned posts to destroy our country.

However and by whomever this was organized, the intention of these appointments is clear: to create American horror.  Elected officials should see this for what it is.  Senators, regardless of party, should understand that the United States Senate will not outlast the United States, insist on voting, and vote accordingly.  The Supreme Court of the United States will likely be called upon.  Although it is a faint hope, one must venture it anyway: that its justices will understand that the Constitution was not in fact written as the cover story for state destruction.  The Supreme Court will also not outlast the United States.

And citizens, regardless of how they voted, need now to check their attitudes.  This is no longer a post-electoral moment.  It is a pre-catastrophic moment.  Trump voters are caught in the notion that Trump must be doing the right thing if Harris voters are upset.  But Harris voters are upset now because they love their country.  And Harris voters will have to get past the idea that Trump voters should reap what they have sown.  Yes, some of them did vote to burn it all down.  But if it all burns down, we burn too.  It is not easy to speak right now; but if some Republicans wish to, please listen.

Both inside and outside Congress, there will have to be simple defiance, joined with a rhetoric of a better America.  And, at moments at least, there will also have to be alliances among Americans who, though they differ on other matters, would like to see their country endure.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Health, Insane, Justice, Republicans, Trump

Florida: Surgeon General Recommends Eliminating Fluoride from Water

By dianeravitch
November 24, 2024 //
15

Governor DeSantis hired Dr. Joseph Ladapo as Florida’s Surgeon General because he wanted a doctor who took a contrarian view on COVID: to support those who were anti-vaccine, anti-mask, and unwilling to follow public health guidelines. In other words, in the world of people who care about science, a quack.

Now, Dr. Ladapo is calling for the end of fluoridating the drinking water of Florida. He’s taking cues from the nation’s leading medical crackpot, Robert F. Kennedy.

The Washington Post reports:

The top health official of the nation’s third-largest state called Friday for a halt to adding fluoride to Florida’s water, citing controversial studies that suggest the widely hailed public health practice poses a risk to developing brains.

Surgeon General Joseph A. Ladapo issued a recommendation citing “the neuropsychiatric risk associated with fluoride exposure, particularly in pregnant women and children,” and noting the availability of alternative sources of fluoride intoothpaste and mouthwash.

“It is clear more research is necessary to address safety and efficacy concerns regarding community water fluoridation,” Ladapo said in a statement.“The previously considered benefit of community water fluoridation does not outweigh the current known risks, especially for special populations like pregnant women and children.”

Ladapo’s announcement comes three weeks after Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is President-elect Donald Trump’s choice to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, said the Trump administration plans to issue a similar recommendation nationwide next year. Kennedy’s remarks drew rebukes from public health experts who say that the practice has helped protect Americans’ teeth, particularly in vulnerable communities where children might not regularly brush their teeth.

“It’s madness,” said Kurt Ferré, a retired Portland, Oregon, dentist and longtime pro-fluoridation activist. He said Florida’s seniors especially benefit from fluoride because of the oral health issues that come with age and medical care for older adults.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has long recommended putting fluoride in Americans’ drinking water, hailing it as one of the 10 great public health achievements of the 20th century and citing data that the practice reduces cavities by about 25 percent in children and adults. The water systems of more than 200 million Americans are fluoridated, according to CDC data.

Fluoridation has been a key public health strategy for decades, and proponents have pointed to studies showing oral health problems declining in cities that added the mineral and rising in communities that removed it.

Categories Elections, Extremism, Health, Science

Is Trump Trying to Destroy the Federal Role in Public Health?

By dianeravitch
November 23, 2024 //
7

Trump announced the appointment of Dr. David Weldon, a former Congressman from Florida, as director of the Centers for Disease Control. He has unorthodox views, to say the least. But we can always count on the Secretary of Health and Human Services, to maintain the integrity of our premier public health agency.

Oh, wait, Trump’s nominee for Secretary is the noted conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Is Trump trying to gut our public health agencies? How many career physicians who are noted authorities in their field will quit rather than work for know-nothings?

The New York Times reported about Dr. Weldon:

President-elect Donald J. Trump chose Dr. David Weldon, a former congressman, on Friday to serve as the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Dr. Weldon, 71, is a native of Long Island and earned a medical degree in New York before moving to Florida to practice. Starting in 1995, he served seven terms in Congress, representing the 15th District of Florida, before forgoing re-election and returning to his medical practice.

As a member of Congress, Dr. Weldon pushed the false notion that thimerosal, a preservative compound in some vaccines, had caused an explosion of autism — a hypothesis that experts say has no evidence. He also introduced a “vaccine safety bill” that aimed to relocate most vaccine safety research from the C.D.C. — which he said had an “inherent conflict of interest” — to a separate agency within the Department of Health and Human Services.

Mr. Trump’s choice signals yet again his commitment to reforming the role of federal health agencies in radical ways. Though Dr. Weldon is an internist, his skepticism of vaccine safety and concern about C.D.C. overreach echo those of other nominees, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

“In addition to being a Medical Doctor for 40 years, and an Army Veteran, Dave has been a respected conservative leader on fiscal and social issues,” Mr. Trump wrote in a statement released Friday night, saying that Dr. Weldon would “restore the CDC to its true purpose.”

“Americans have lost trust in the CDC and in our Federal Health Authorities, who have engaged in censorship, data manipulation, and misinformation. Given the current Chronic Health Crisis in our Country, the CDC must step up and correct past errors to focus on the Prevention of Disease.”

As a member of congress, Dr. Weldon also authored the so-called Weldon Amendment, which barred the Department of Health and Human Services from funding federal or state programs that “discriminated” against health insurance plans that did not cover abortions.

He unsuccessfully sought a Senate seat in 2012 and a Florida House seat in 2024.Dr. Weldon also served as president of the Alliance of Health Care Sharing Ministries, a trade group for Christian organizations that offered an alternative to traditional health insurance.

The groups have come under scrutiny for potentially misleading people into thinking the groups had some legal obligation to pay their medical claims. Dr. Weldon has said that the members of his association were clear that they were not offering insurance, which is subject to strict regulations.

For the first time, the incoming C.D.C. director will need Senate confirmation. If Dr. Weldon is successful, he will sit at the helm of an agency with a budget of more than $15 billion, which has historically been used to track and respond to infectious disease outbreaks.

But Mr. Trump’s choice to lead its parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, is Mr. Kennedy, who has been outspoken about his plans to deprioritize communicable disease research in favor of preventive medicine.

If Mr. Kennedy, too, is confirmed by the Senate, the mission and focus of the C.D.C.’s work may change.

Reed Abelson contributed reporting.

Categories Accountability, Disruption, Elections, Extremism, Florida, Health, Trump

Heather Cox Richardson: Eliminating the Department of Education?

By dianeravitch
November 21, 2024 //
12

Trump has promised to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education. He needs Congressional approval to do it. Trump made this promise during the campaign. The details are spelled out in Project 2025. The elimination of ED is step one. Then right wingers approve their dream, which is to “block grant” all the big funding. That means that the money goes to states without limits on how it is spent. They can spend it as they wish, without federal oversight. But then comes the kicker: the federal government stops funding Title 1, Special Education, and other “categorical programs,” and the states have to fund it themselves. This works for the well-off states, because they currently pay more than they receive. But the poor states, which voted overwhelmingly for Trump, are screwed. They receive more from the federal Department of Education than they pay in. Tough justice. Bad for kids.

What about the U.S. Department of Education?

Heather Cox Richardson wrote:

One of President-elect Trump’s campaign pledges was to eliminate the Department of Education. He claimed that the department pushes “woke” ideology on America’s schoolchildren and that its employees “hate our children.” He promised to “return” education to the states. 

In fact, the Department of Education does not set curriculum; states and local governments do. The Department of Education collects statistics about schools to monitor student performance and promote practices based in evidence. It provides about 10% of funding for K–12 schools through federal grants of about $19.1 billion to high-poverty schools and of $15.5 billion to help cover the cost of educating students with disabilities.

It also oversees the $1.6 trillion federal student loan program, including setting the rules under which colleges and universities can participate. But what really upsets the radical right is that the Department of Education is in charge of prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race and sex in schools that get federal funding, a policy Congress set in 1975 with an act now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). This was before Congress created the department.

The Department of Education became a stand-alone department in May 1980 under Democratic president Jimmy Carter, when Congress split the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare into two departments: the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education. 

A Republican-dominated Congress established the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1953 under Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower as part of a broad attempt to improve the nation’s schools and Americans’ well-being in the flourishing post–World War II economy. When the Soviet Union beat the United States into space by sending up the first  Sputnik satellite in 1957, lawmakers concerned that American children were falling behind put more money and effort into educating the country’s youth, especially in math and science. 

But support for federal oversight of education took a devastating hit after the Supreme Court, headed by Eisenhower appointee Chief Justice Earl Warren, declared racially segregated schools unconstitutional in the May 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. 

Immediately, white southern lawmakers launched a campaign of what they called “massive resistance” to integration. Some Virginia counties closed their public schools. Other school districts took funds from integrated public schools and used a grant system to redistribute those funds to segregated private schools. Then, Supreme Court decisions in 1962 and 1963 that declared prayer in schools unconstitutional cemented the decision of white evangelicals to leave the public schools, convinced that public schools were leading their children to perdition. 

In 1980, Republican Ronald Reagan ran on a promise to eliminate the new Department of Education.

After Reagan’s election, his secretary of education commissioned a study of the nation’s public schools, starting with the conviction that there was a “widespread public perception that something is seriously remiss in our educational system.” The resulting report, titled “A Nation at Risk,” announced that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”

Although a later study commissioned in 1990 by the Secretary of Energy found the data in the original report did not support the report’s conclusions, Reagan nonetheless used the report in his day to justify school privatization. He vowed after the report’s release that he would “continue to work in the months ahead for passage of tuition tax credits, vouchers, educational savings accounts, voluntary school prayer, and abolishing the Department of Education. Our agenda is to restore quality to education by increasing competition and by strengthening parental choice and local control.”

The rise of white evangelism and its marriage to Republican politics fed the right-wing conviction that public education no longer served “family values” and that parents had been cut out of their children’s education. Christians began to educate their children at home, believing that public schools were indoctrinating their children with secular values. 

When he took office in 2017, Trump rewarded those evangelicals who had supported his candidacy by putting right-wing evangelical activist Betsy DeVos in charge of the Education Department. She called for eliminating the department—until she used its funding power to try to keep schools open during the covid pandemic—and asked for massive cuts in education spending.

Rather than funding public schools, DeVos called instead for tax money to be spent on education vouchers, which distribute tax money to parents to spend for education as they see fit. This system starves the public schools and subsidizes wealthy families whose children are already in private schools. DeVos also rolled back civil rights protections for students of color and LGBTQ+ students but increased protections for students accused of sexual assault. 

In 2019, the 1619 Project, published by the New York Times Magazine on the 400th anniversary of the arrival of enslaved Africans at Jamestown in Virginia Colony, argued that the true history of the United States began in 1619, establishing the roots of the country in the enslavement of Black Americans. That, combined with the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, prompted Trump to commission the 1776 Project, which rooted the country in its original patriotic ideals and insisted that any moments in which it had fallen away from those ideals were quickly corrected. He also moved to ban diversity training in federal agencies. 

When Trump lost the 2020 election, his loyalists turned to undermining the public schools to destroy what they considered an illegitimate focus on race and gender that was corrupting children. In January 2021, Republican activists formed Moms for Liberty, which called itself a parental rights organization and began to demand the banning of LGBTQ+ books from school libraries. Right-wing activist Christopher Rufo engineered a national panic over the false idea that public school educators were teaching their students critical race theory, a theory taught as an elective in law school to explain why desegregation laws had not ended racial discrimination. 

After January 2021, 44 legislatures began to consider laws to ban the teaching of critical race theory or to limit how teachers could talk about racism and sexism, saying that existing curricula caused white children to feel guilty.

When the Biden administration expanded the protections enforced by the Department of Education to include LGBTQ+ students, Trump turned to focusing on the idea that transgender students were playing high-school sports despite the restrictions on that practice in the interest of “ensuring fairness in competition or preventing sports-related injury.” 

During the 2024 political campaign, Trump brought the longstanding theme of public schools as dangerous sites of indoctrination to a ridiculous conclusion, repeatedly insisting that public schools were performing gender-transition surgery on students. But that cartoonish exaggeration spoke to voters who had come to see the equal rights protected by the Department of Education as an assault on their own identity. That position leads directly to the idea of eliminating the Department of Education.

But that might not work out as right-wing Americans imagine. As Morning Joe economic analyst Steven Rattner notes, for all that Republicans embrace the attacks on public education, Republican-dominated states receive significantly more federal money for education than Democratic-dominated states do, although the Democratic states contribute significantly more tax dollars. 

There is a bigger game afoot, though, than the current attack on the Department of Education. As Thomas Jefferson recognized, education is fundamental to democracy, because only educated people can accurately evaluate the governmental policies that will truly benefit them.

In 1786, Jefferson wrote to a colleague about public education: “No other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of freedom, and happiness…. Preach, my dear Sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish and improve the law for educating the common people. Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us against [the evils of “kings, nobles and priests”], and that the tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.”

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Education Industry, Education Reform, Equity, Extremism, Funding, Health, Inequality, Trump, U.S. Department of Education

Laura Helmuth: RFK Jr. Is a Public Menace

By dianeravitch
November 21, 2024 //
15

Laura Helmuth recently resigned as Chief Editor of Scientific American after expressing her outrage online about Trump’s election. I can understand her anger because she knew that Trump would appoint completely unqualified people to take charge of federal agencies overseeing the health of the American people. But I wish she hadn’t expressed it online!

She posted this information on BlueSky about the importance of vaccines:

The measles vaccine has saved 94 million lives over the past 50 years, and it plus vaccines against 13 other pathogens have cut infant mortality by 40 percent and saved 154 million lives.
154 MILLION LIVES 🧪
Anti-vaxxer RFKJ is a menace to global health

If RFK Jr. has his way, vaccines will be voluntary. Among the unvaccinated, disease will run rampant. Even the vaccinated may be at risk. It will be dangerous to attend public events or go anywhere that is crowded.

Categories Elections, Evil, Extremism, Health, Science, Stupid, Trump
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