Archives for category: Health
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Thomas Edsall: What Scholars Say About Trump’s Reign of Error and Chaos

By dianeravitch
May 29, 2025 //
12

Thomas Edsall writes a regular feature for The New York Times. In this stunning article, he recounts the views of numerous scholars about what Trump has done since his Inauguration.

This is a gift article, meaning you can open the link and finish reading the article, which is usually behind a paywall.

Edsall writes:

One thing stands out amid all the chaos, corruption and disorder: the wanton destructiveness of the Trump presidency.

The targets of President Trump’s assaults include the law, higher education, medical research, ethical standards, America’s foreign alliances, free speech, the civil service, religion, the media and much more.

J. Michael Luttig, a former federal appeals court judge appointed by President George H.W. Bush, succinctly described his own view of the Trump presidency, writing by email that there had never

been a U.S. president who I consider even to have been destructive, let alone a president who has intentionally and deliberately set out to destroy literally every institution in America, up to and including American democracy and the rule of law. I even believe he is destroying the American presidency, though I would not say that is intentional and deliberate.

Some of the damage Trump has inflicted can be repaired by future administrations, but repairing relations with American allies, the restoration of lost government expertise and a return to productive research may take years, even with a new and determined president and Congress.

Let’s look at just one target of the administration’s vendetta, medical research. Trump’s attacks include cancellation of thousands of grants, cuts in the share of grants going to universities and hospitals and proposed cuts of 40 percent or more in the budgets of the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Science Foundation.

“This is going to completely kneecap biomedical research in this country,” Jennifer Zeitzer, the deputy executive director at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, told Science magazine. Georges Benjamin, the executive director of the American Public Health Association, warned that cuts will “totally destroy the nation’s public health infrastructure.”

I asked scholars of the presidency to evaluate the scope of Trump’s wreckage. “The gutting of expertise and experience going on right now under the blatantly false pretext of eliminating fraud and waste,” Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton, wrote by email, “is catastrophic and may never be completely repaired.”

I asked Wilentz whether Trump was unique in terms of his destructiveness or if there were presidential precedents. Wilentz replied:

There is no precedent, not even close, unless you consider Jefferson Davis an American president. Even to raise the question, with all due respect, is to minimize the crisis we’re in and the scope of Trump et al.’s. intentions.

Another question: Was Trump re-elected to promote an agenda of wreaking havoc, or is he pursuing an elitist right-wing program created by conservative ideologues who saw in Trump’s election the opportunity to pursue their goals?

Wilentz’s reply:

Trump’s closest allies intended chaos wrought by destruction which helps advance the elite reactionary programs. Chaos allows Trump to expand his governing by emergency powers, which could well include the imposition of martial law, if he so chose.

I asked Andrew Rudalevige, a political scientist at Bowdoin, how permanent the mayhem Trump has inflicted may prove to be. “Not to be flip,” Rudalevige replied by email, “but for children abroad denied food or lifesaving medicine because of arbitrary aid cuts, the answer is already distressingly permanent.”

From a broader perspective, Rudalevige wrote:

The damage caused to governmental expertise and simple competence could be long lasting. Firing probationary workers en masse may reduce the government employment head count, slightly, but it also purged those most likely to bring the freshest view and most up-to-date skills to government service, while souring them on that service. And norms of nonpoliticization in government service have taken a huge hit.

I sent the question I posed to Wilentz to other scholars of the presidency. It produced a wide variety of answers. Here is Rudalevige’s:

The comp that comes to mind is Andrew Johnson. It’s hardly guaranteed that Reconstruction after the Civil War would have succeeded even under Lincoln’s leadership. But Johnson took action after action designed to prevent racial reconciliation and economic opportunity, from vetoing key legislation to refusing to prevent mob violence against Blacks to pardoning former members of the Confederacy hierarchy. He affirmatively made government work worse and to prevent it from treating its citizens equally.

Another question: How much is Trump’s second-term agenda the invention of conservative elites, and how much is it a response to the demands of Trump’s MAGA supporters?

“Trump is not at all an unwitting victim,” Rudalevige wrote, “but those around him with wider and more systemic goals have more authority and are better organized in pursuit of those goals than they were in the first term.”

In this context, Rudalevige continued, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025

was not just a campaign manifesto but a bulwark against the inconsistency and individualism its authors thought had undermined the effectiveness of Trump’s first term. It was an insurance policy to secure the administrative state for conservative thought and yoke it to a cause beyond Trump or even Trumpism.

The alliance with Trump was a marriage of convenience — and the Trump legacy when it comes to staffing the White House and executive branch is a somewhat ironic one, as an unwitting vehicle for an agenda that goes far beyond the personalization of the presidency.

In the past, when presidential power has expanded, Rudalevige argued,

it has been in response to crisis: the Civil War, World War I, the Depression and World War II, 9/11. But no similar objective crisis faced us. So one had to be declared — via proclamations of “invasion” and the like — or even created. In the ensuing crisis more power may be delegated by Congress. But the analogue is something like an arsonist who rushes to put out the fire he started.

One widely shared view among those I queried is that Trump has severely damaged America’s relations with traditional allies everywhere.

Mara Rudman, a professor at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, wrote in an email:

The most lasting impact of this term will be felt in the damage done to the reputation of the United States as a safe harbor where the rule of law is king and where the Constitution is as sacred a national document as any country has developed.

Through his utter disregard for the law, Trump has shown both how precious and how fragile are the rules that undergird our institutions, our economic and national security and the foundation for our democracy.

To finish this excellent article, please open the link.

Categories Democracy, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Health, Justice, Science, Technology, Trump

Trump Threatens to Transfer Harvard’s Billions for Scientific Research to Trade Schools, Demands Names of Foreign Students

By dianeravitch
May 27, 2025 //
13

Trump is a petty man who is filled with rage, grievance, and a passion for retribution. His current target is Harvard University because the nation’s most prestigious university told him no. Harvard’s President Alan Garber said it would not allow the federal government to control its curriculum, its admissions, and its hiring policies. No.

Every Cabinet department has pulled research grants to Harvard. Now he warns he might turn the billions that were going to medical and scientific research and hand it over to trade schools.

He would rather stop researchers who are trying to find cures for cancer, tuberculosis, Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis, and other diseases than back down on his efforts to stifle academic freedom and his vendetta against Harvard.

I don’t know about you, but I would rather see the federal government fund the search for a cure for MS than withdraw the funding. If he wants to fund trade schools, why should he do so at the expense of crucial research?

He wrote on Truth Social yesterday:

“I am considering taking Three Billion Dollars of Grant Money away from a very antisemitic Harvard, and giving it to TRADE SCHOOLS all across our land,” Trump said in a post on social media. “What a great investment that would be for the USA, and so badly needed!!!”

Meanwhile, Trump dreamed up another way to harass Harvard during the hours when he couldn’t get to sleep. He demanded that Harvard give him a list containing the names and countries of origin of all its foreign students. Harvard has nearly 7,000 foreign students. Why? What will he do with those names? Will he say they are spies and try again to expel them? Funny thing is he already has all their names and countries. They were registered when they applied for a visa. It’s all a campaign of endless vengeance by a petty, bitter man.

Categories Academic Freedom, Economy, Extremism, Fascism, Funding, Health, Higher Education, Research, Science, Stupid, Trump

What Can the Federal Government Do to Promote Learning?

By dianeravitch
May 23, 2025 //
13

On May 10, Dana Goldstein wrote a long article in The New York Times about how education disappeared as a national or federal issue. Why, she wondered, did the two major parties ignore education in the 2024 campaign? Kamala Harris supported public schools and welcomed the support of the two big teachers’ unions, but she did not offer a flashy new program to raise test scores. Trump campaigned on a promise to privatize public funding, promote vouchers, charter schools, religious schools, home schooling–anything but public schools, which he regularly attacked as dens of iniquity, indoctrination, and DEI.

Goldstein is the best education writer at The Times, and her reflections are worth considering.

She started:

What happened to learning as a national priority?

For decades, both Republicans and Democrats strove to be seen as champions of student achievement. Politicians believed pushing for stronger reading and math skills wasn’t just a responsibility, it was potentially a winning electoral strategy.

At the moment, though, it seems as though neither party, nor even a single major political figure, is vying to claim that mantle.

President Trump has been fixated in his second term on imposing ideological obedience on schools.

On the campaign trail, he vowed to “liberate our children from the Marxist lunatics and perverts who have infested our educational system.”Since taking office, he has pursued this goal with startling energy — assaulting higher education while adopting a strategy of neglect toward the federal government’s traditional role in primary and secondary schools. He has canceled federal exams that measure student progress, and ended efforts to share knowledge with schools about which teaching strategies lead to the best results. A spokeswoman for the administration said that low test scores justify cuts in federal spending. “What we are doing right now with education is clearly not working,” she said.

Mr. Trump has begun a bevy of investigations into how schools handle race and transgender issues, and has demanded that the curriculum be “patriotic” — a priority he does not have the power to enact, since curriculum is set by states and school districts.

Actually, federal law explicitly forbids any federal official from attempting to influence the curriculum or textbooks in schools.

Education lawyer Dan Gordon wrote about the multiple laws that prevent any federal official from trying to dictate, supervise, control or interfere with curriculum. There is no sterner prohibition in federal law than the one that keeps federal officials from trying to dictate what schools teach.

Of course, Trump never worries about the limits imposed by laws. He does what he wants and leaves the courts to decide whether he went too far.

Goldstein continued:

Democrats, for their part, often find themselves standing up for a status quo that seems to satisfy no one. Governors and congressional leaders are defending the Department of Education as Mr. Trump has threatened to abolish it. Liberal groups are suing to block funding cuts. When Kamala Harris was running for president last year, she spoke about student loan forgiveness and resisting right-wing book bans. But none of that amounts to an agenda on learning, either.

All of this is true despite the fact that reading scores are the lowest they have been in decades, after a pandemic that devastated children by shuttering their schools and sending them deeper and deeper into the realm of screens and social media. And it is no wonder Americans are increasingly cynical about higher education. Forty percent of students who start college do not graduate, often leaving with debt and few concrete skills.

“Right now, there are no education goals for the country,” said Arne Duncan, who served as President Barack Obama’s first secretary of education after running Chicago’s public school system. “There are no metrics to measure goals, there are no strategies to achieve those goals and there is no public transparency.”

I have been writing about federal education policy for almost fifty years. There are things we have learned since Congress passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965. That law was part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s agenda. Its purpose was to send federal funds to the schools enrolling the poorest students. Its purpose was not to raise test scores but to provide greater equity of resources.

Over time, the federal government took on an assertive role in defending the rights of students to an education: students with disabilities; students who did not speak English; and students attending illegally segregated schools.

In 1983, a commission appointed by President Reagan’s Secretary of Education Terrell Bell declared that American schools were in crisis because of low academic standards. Many states began implementing state tests and raising standards for promotion and graduation.

President George H.W. Bush convened a meeting of the nation’s governors, and they endorsed an ambitious set of “national goals” for the year 2000. E.g., the U.S. will be first in the world by the year 2000; all children will start school ready to learn by 2000. None of the goals–other than the rise of the high school graduation rate to 90%–was met.

The Clinton administration endorsed the national goals and passed legislation (“Goals 2000”) to encourages states to create their own standards and tests. President Clinton made clear, however, that he hoped for national standards and tests.

President George W. Bush came to office with a far-reaching, unprecedented plan called “No Child Left Behind” to reform education by a heavy emphasis on annual testing of reading and math. He claimed that because of his test-based policy, there had been a “Texas Miracle,” which could be replicated on a national scale. NCLB set unreachable goals, saying that every school would have 100% of their students reach proficiency by the year 2014. And if they were not on track to meet that impossible goals, the schools would face increasingly harsh punishments.

In no nation in the world have 100% of all students ever reached proficiency.

Scores rose, as did test-prep. Many untested subjects lost time in the curriculum or disappeared. Reading and math were tested every year from grades 3-8, as the law prescribed. What didn’t matter were science, history, civics, the arts, even recess.

Some schools were sanctioned or even closed for falling behind. Schools were dominated by the all-important reading and math tests. Some districts cheated. Some superintendents were jailed.

In 2001, there were scholars who warned that the “Texas Miracle” was a hoax. Congress didn’t listen. In time the nation learned that there was no Texas Miracle, never had been. But Congress clung to NCLB because they had no other ideas.

When Obama took office in 2009, educators hoped for relief from the annual testing mandates but they were soon disappointed. Obama chose Arne Duncan, who had led the Chicago schools but had never been a teacher. Duncan worked with consultants from the Gates and Broad Foundations and created a national competition for the states called Race to the Top. Duncan had a pot of $5 billion that Congress had given him for education reform.

Race to the Top offered big rewards to states that applied and won. To be eligible, states had to authorize the creation of charter schools (almost every state did); they had to agree to adopt common national standards (that meant the Common Core standards, funded wholly by the Gates Foundation and not yet completed); sign up for one of two federally funded standardized tests (PARCC or Smarter Balanced) ; and agree to evaluate their teachers by the test scores of their students. Eighteen states won huge rewards. There were other conditions but these were the most consequential.

Tennessee won $500 million. It is hard to see what, if anything, is better in Tennessee because of that audacious prize. The state put $100 million into an “Achievement School District,” which gathered the state’s lowest performing schools into a new district and turned them into charters. Chris Barbic, leader of the YES Prep charter chain in Houston was hired to run it. He pledged that within five years, the lowest-performing schools in the state would rank among the top 20% in the state. None of them did. The ASD was ultimately closed down.

Duncan had a great fondness for charter schools because they were the latest thing in Chicago; while superintendent, he had launched a program he called Renaissance 2010, in which he pledged to close 80 public schools and open 100 charter schools. Duncan viewed charters as miraculous. Ultimately Chicago’s charter sector produced numerous scandals but no miracles.

I have written a lot about Race to the Top over the years. It was layered on top of Bush’s NCLB, but it was even more punitive. It targeted teachers and blamed them if students got low scores. Its requirement that states evaluate teachers by student test scores was a dismal failure. The American Statistical Association warned against it from the outset, pointing out that students’ home life affected test scores more than their teachers.

Duncan’s Renaissance 2010 failed. It destroyed communities. Its strategy of closing neighborhood schools and dispersing students encountered growing resistance. The first schools that Duncan launched as his exemplars were eventually closed. In 2021, the Chicago Board of Education voted unanimously to end its largest “school turnaround” program, managed by a private group, and return its 31 campuses to district control. Duncan’s fervent belief in “turnaround” schools was derided as a historical relic.

Race to the Top failed. The proliferation of charter schools, aided by a hefty federal subsidy, drained students and resources from public schools. Charter schools close their doors at a rapid pace: 26% are gone in their first five years; 39% in their first ten years. In addition, due to lax accountability, charters have demonstrated egregious examples of waste, fraud, and abuse.

The Common Core was supposed to lift test scores and reduce achievement gaps, but it did neither. Conservative commentator Mike Petrilli referred to 2007-2017 as “the lost decade.” Scores stagnated and achievement gaps barely budged.

So what have we learned?

This is what I have learned: politicians are not good at telling educators how to teach. The Department of Education (which barely exists as of now) is not made up of educators. It was not in a position to lead school reform. Nor is the Secretary of Education. Nor is the President. Would you want the State legislature or Congress telling surgeons how to do their job?

The most important thing that the national government can do is to ensure that schools have the funding they need to pay their staff, reduce class sizes, and update their facilities.

The federal government should have a robust program of data collection, so we have accurate information about students, teachers, and schools.

The federal government should not replicate its past failures.

What Congress can do very effectively is to ensure that the nation’s schools have the resources they need; that children have access to nutrition and medical care; and that pregnant women get prenatal care so that their babies are born healthy.

Categories Civil Rights, Closing schools, Curriculum, Democrats, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), For-Profit, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Graduation rates, Health, NAEP, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Obama, Poverty, Privatization, Race to the Top, Republicans, Segregation, Special Education, Standardized Testing, U.S. Department of Education, U.S. education, Vouchers

Michael Hiltzik: RFK Jr. is a Danger to Public Health

By dianeravitch
May 22, 2025 //
1

Michael Hiltzik, columnist for The Los Angeles Times, explains why Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is himself a danger to public health. Why did Trump pick him? RFK Jr. is neither a medical nor a scientific researcher. He has made his mark in public as a conspiracy theorist and a publicist for the idea that vaccines cause autism and other illnesses.

Hiltzik writes:

Americans have become woefully familiar with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the purveyor of flagrant misinformation about medical treatments. And with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the minimizer of health crises such as the spreading measles outbreak. And with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the antivaccine crusader.

Now let’s meet Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the promoter of a costly, time-consuming and distinctly unethical order for testing vaccines. “All new vaccines will undergo safety testing in placebo-controlled trials prior to licensure — a radical departure from past practices,” HHS announced in a May 1 statement. What it didn’t say was that the “departure” is “radical” because it’s shunned by medical authorities as a bad thing.

Just this week, Kennedy’s agency doubled down on this order with the appointment of Vinay Prasad, an oncologist at UC San Francisco, as head of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, the division at the Food and Drug Administration that oversees vaccine testing.

Prasad was a strident critic of the Biden administration’s approach to the COVID-19 pandemic, including the COVID vaccines. In a blog post in late April, he called for clinical testing of COVID boosters, along the lines of Kennedy’s order. Prasad succeeds Peter Marks, a widely respected expert who resigned from the FDA in March after clashing with Kennedy.

“I was willing to work to address [Kennedy’s] concerns regarding vaccine safety and transparency,” Marks wrote in his resignation letter. “However, it has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the Secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.”

The HHS announcement about Kennedy’s demand for placebo-controlled trials was unclear about how it defined “new vaccines.” But his previous claims about vaccine safety have made clear that he’s referring not only to first-generation vaccines for diseases, but also boosters and expanded formulations. That’s an important point, as I’ll cover in a moment.

The antivaccine camp, of which Kennedy has long been a leader, has pushed the claim that most childhood vaccines haven’t been adequately tested for safety because they haven’t been subjected to placebo-controlled trials — and therefore may be unsafe.

“Except for the COVID vaccine, none of the vaccines on the CDC’s childhood recommended schedule was tested against an inert placebo, meaning we know very little about the actual risk profiles of these products,” Kennedy’s spokesman at HHS, Andrew Nixon, asserted in connection with the order.

Both components of that claim are misrepresentations.

Let’s take a closer look, starting with some rudimentary points.

The testing that Kennedy and Prasad advocate are randomized control trials. They’re correct in asserting that so-called RCTs are the gold standard in clinical testing of drugs and vaccines.

RCTs typically involve at least two groups of subjects: One receives the medicine in question and another — a control group — receives something else, such as a placebo, a concoction that’s designed to resemble the medicine but is essentially inert, with no evident effect on the disease. The placebo may be an injectable saline solution, or water, or a sugar pill.

Kennedy, like other antivaxxers, is deceptive in saying that the safety of vaccines should be questioned if it hasn’t been tested against an “inert placebo.”

That brings us to the ethics of clinical testing, and why Kennedy’s policy is so dangerous.

Testing a vaccine against a true placebo is ethical and proper when it’s the first treatment for a disease for which no other safe and effective treatment exists. That’s not the case, however, when a known treatment does exist — say after a vaccine has been shown to be safe and effective and has become the standard of care.

As vaccine specialist Paul Offit of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia has explained, subjecting new versions of those vaccines to placebo-controlled testing — giving some subjects the new vaccine and the control subjects no treatment, would be unethical, because it would require depriving the placebo group access to a known treatment. That was the conclusion of an expert panel assembled by the World Health Organization in 2014.

Offit, in a 2023 rejoinder to Kennedy’s appearance on a Joe Rogan podcast, in which he claimed that drug companies “never do placebo-controlled trials,” pointed to what may be the most famous vaccine trial to illustrate this point.
That was the nationwide trial of Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine. In 1954, 420,000 first- and second-graders were given the Salk shot, and 200,000 got a shot of salt water. Salk objected to the trial’s design. Smaller trials had established the safety and efficacy of his vaccine, so the plan meant depriving 200,000 children of immunity to a disease that was paralyzing 50,000 children a year and killing 1,500.


As Offit noted, in the full trial 16 children died from polio; all were in the placebo group. So were 34 of the 36 children paralyzed in the course of the trial. “These are the gentle heroes we leave behind,” Offit wrote.


Now let’s examine Kennedy’s order as it applies to modern vaccines. As the veteran pseudoscience debunker David Gorski has pointed out, contrary to the assertion by Kennedy’s spokesman, almost none of the vaccines on the current childhood vaccination list is a first-generation vaccine warranting placebo testing. (An exception is Gardasil, which safeguards against human papilloma virus.)

They’re upgraded preparations of vaccines that themselves underwent placebo-controlled trials, or formulations aimed at new variants of the targeted disease, or shots that inoculate against several diseases all at once.

To demand that every new formulation be tested against an inert placebo would mean turning back the clock to reproduce trials that may have taken place decades ago, but resulted in the licensing of the original vaccine after safety and efficacy were established.

That means it would have been unethical to test the new version against a saline control, because the control group would be deprived of any effective treatment. “The bottom line,” Gorski writes, “is that, if you trace back the history of the vaccines developed for a disease like, say, measles, you will eventually find the RCT testing the first effective vaccine against it and that vaccine will have had a placebo control.”
He’s right. In a tweet thread, vaccinologist Peter Hotez traced back the history of several vaccines to their initial RCTs.

What makes Kennedy’s order especially cynical is that designing and implementing a clinical trial is an extraordinarily complex, costly and time-consuming process. As a team of Canadian researchers observed in a 2018 Nature article, a full-scale Phase 3 clinical trial — the level at which drugs and vaccines are studied for safety, efficacy and dosing — requires as many as 3,000 participants and can take as long as four years.

In an online posting last month, Prasad ridiculed “the mainstream media” for being upset about the idea that COVID boosters should in effect receive full randomized clinical trials before approval. He took particular issue with an article by Helen Braswell of STAT asserting that such a requirement might well delay approval of a vaccine targeting a new COVID variant until it was too late to protect users from that variant. Prasad called the argument false because “the virus spreads year round.”

Is that so? At the height of the pandemic, new COVID variants sometimes appeared within months of one another. The virulent Delta variant, for example, appeared in the spring of 2021 and was overtaken by the Omicron variant, which also caused severe disease, that November.

Delays in rolling out vaccines to combat newly emergent disease strains and variants could cost millions of lives. Under existing vaccine approval protocols, the COVID vaccines prevented as many as 20 million deaths globally within a year after they were introduced early in 2021.

Prasad’s new job will put him in charge of developing vaccine testing policies and overseeing the design and approval of clinical trials. I asked him via email what policies he would pursue, whether he was in alignment with Kennedy’s approach, and how he expected vaccine developers to reconcile the costs and time constraints of undertaking clinical trials on the scale he advocates with the imperatives of public health. I didn’t receive a reply.

So far, the Kennedy regime at HHS has lived down to the worst expectations of his critics. His devotion to unnecessary testing of vaccines that have already shown their safety and efficacy is only one aspect of a comprehensive assault on public confidence in science-based medicine.

In a recent appearance on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program, Kennedy dismissed the severity of the current measles outbreak and denigrated the effectiveness of the measles vaccine. The current outbreak of 935 cases is by far the worst in the U.S. since 2019, when 1,274 cases were recorded; at the current rate, we are on the path to nearly 3,000 this year.

Kennedy has promoted almost useless nostrums against measles, such as vitamin A, while describing vaccination as a personal choice. That’s devastatingly wrongheaded. Kennedy confuses “medicine” and “public health.” The former concerns itself with the individual; the latter with the community. Vaccine policy belongs in the latter category because vaccines are most effective when the effort is communitywide.

Measles is among the most contagious diseases known to humankind, which means that communal vaccination is crucial. Professionals have concluded that a 95% vaccination rate is the minimum required to protect the most vulnerable, such as infants, from infection; as of 2024, the U.S. vaccination rate among kindergartners had fallen from 95.2% in 2019-20 to 92.7%.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which falls within Kennedy’s jurisdiction, says the decline in measles vaccinations leaves 280,000 kindergartners at risk. Two children in the U.S. already have died from a disease that was thought to have been eradicated in the U.S. in 2020; Kennedy doesn’t seem concerned that the toll on his watch is poised to get much worse.

Categories Health, Safety, Science, Trump

PBS: What You Need to Know About Medicaid

By dianeravitch
May 21, 2025 //
16

Republicans are struggling to get the votes they need to pass Trump’s budget bill. They have a narrow majority in the House of Representatives, and they need almost every Republican vote to put the bill through. Much of the debate focuses on the fate of Medicaid.

Medicaid and Medicare are often confused. Medicare is health insurance for senior citizens, funded by their lifetime deductions from their income. Medicaid is health insurance for low-income persons.

Trump and most of the party want to cut Medicaid to pay for the Trump tax cuts, which are focused on high-income individuals and corporations. Even with deep cuts to Medicaid, the tax cuts will increase the deficits.

Lisa Desjardins of PBS assembled a fact sheet about Medicaid.

LET’S TALK ABOUT MEDICAID

By Lisa Desjardins, @LisaDNews
Correspondent
 
Hello from just outside the chambers of House Speaker Mike Johnson.
 
I am waiting with a handful of other reporters as a small group of House Republicans try to work out a compromise over the party’s “One, Big, Beautiful Bill.” (I am looking for a shorthand for the bill, perhaps OB3?) 
 
Republicans do not have the votes for this — yet. But they could agree at any point in the next day or two. If not, they face a weekend standoff or the possibility of leaving for Memorial Day recess without the progress Johnson has promised.
 
There is much at stake here. We’d like to pull off one major piece and break down some highlights. Let’s talk about Medicaid.
 
The basics

  • Medicaid is the federal health care program for low-income Americans. 
  • Close to 71.3 million Americans get their health care this way. 
  • CHIP is the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which, along with states, provides health care for kids whose families can’t afford health care but earn too much to qualify for Medicaid. 
  • Nearly 7.3 million American kids are enrolled in CHIP.
  • Income thresholds: As this chart by the Kaiser Family Foundation shows, it varies by state and can vary on whether you have children or are pregnant. 
  • Medicaid expansion is a program in which the federal government pays 90 percent of the cost for any state that expands Medicaid to include those making up to 138 percent of poverty. In 2025, that is $21,597 a year for individuals or $44,367 for families of four. 
  • 40 states (plus Washington, D.C.)have Medicaid expansion.

 
The funding

We are about to get really nerdy. 
 
The federal government and states share the costs of Medicaid. But the rate of federal sharing varies by state, based on a formula.
 
Something called FMAP, the Federal Matching Assistance Program, helps determine how much each state gets, based on the state’s average income level. These range from a 50 to 77 percent match in the states. 
 
But that match rate is just one half of the formula. The other is how much states spend. Medicaid is often the largest single expenditure for any state. The largest portion of money comes from the state’s general fund or general budget. 
 
But states also use something called a “provider tax,” which is a fee charged on health care providers. Think nursing homes or hospitals.
 
Here is the thing about the provider tax. It is a system whereby states can actually profit.  
 
Think about it this way. States charge hospitals and nursing homes a fee. They spend that fee on Medicaid, upping the amount the federal government must match. (More state spending triggers more federal match.) And then those federal dollars go back to the state and to the providers, as people get care. So states and providers don’t lose money, in theory.
 
But they trigger more federal matching.
 
Why it matters
 
Fiscal conservative holdouts who oppose the current “One Big Beautiful Bill” want action on these provider taxes and potentially on the FMAP level.
 
But the latest draft instead reforms Medicaid primarily by setting up new work requirements for “able-bodied” people, or those without disabilities, in the program. That requirement is currently set to phase in over the next two years.
 
Per the Congressional Budget Office, this Republican Medicaid plan would lead to 8.6 million Americans losing their health insurance over the next decade.  
 
(Changes to the Affordable Care Act would lead to millions more losing coverage, per CBO.)
 
Republicans argue that these are programs the United States cannot afford. 
 
And all of it revolves around precisely how Medicaid works, and how states pay for it.

Categories Health, Poverty, Republicans, Trump

Now Will They Leave Joe Biden Alone?

By dianeravitch
May 19, 2025 //
24

As I was scrolling through Twitter on Sunday, I read a bunch of anti-Biden tweets, so I added my two cents.

I tweeted:

Maybe it’s just me, but I would rather have Joe Biden (surrounded by highly competent people) asleep than Donald Trump at his best (surrounded by Fascists, haters, and law-breakers) on his best day. @jaketapper @AlexThomp

I once wrote on this blog that I would never criticize Joe Biden because he was running against a man who was totally unfit for the job. Several Trumpers has since written to complain about that statement, saying that it demonstrated my bias, but time has confirmed my view.

Regardless of his mental state, Biden would never have appointed a crackpot to run the National Institutes of Health. He would never have defunded USAID, NPR, PBS, FEMA, the Voice of America, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the U.S. Department of Education. Nor would he have let loose Elon Musk’s DOGS to ransack federal agencies, fire thousands of expert career officers, mess with the Social Security Administration, and hoover up all our personal data, for whatever nefarious purposes he chooses. Unlike Trump, Biden would not have terrorized institutions of higher education and threatened academic freedom and freedom of speech. Unlike Trump, Biden respected the independence of the Justice Department and the FBI and did not put political lackeys in charge of them or treat them as his personal attack dogs.

Frankly, I can’t keep track of the many federal programs and agencies that Trump has recklessly destroyed. If anyone knows of such a compilation, please share it. Trump and Musk have vandalized our government, and despite the thousands of injudicious, capricious firings, have not saved any money at all.

Then I came across this post by Julie Roginsky, which appeared shortly after the nation learned that former President Biden has prostate cancer, which has metasticized to his bones. She is writing about the new book by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson that aims to prove that President Biden was experiencing severe mental and physical decline while he was in office and that his family and staff collaborated to conceal that decline from the public.

She wrote:

Maybe now they’ll leave Joe Biden alone — or, better yet, spend some time assessing his actual presidency, both in isolation and in comparison with what has followed.

Stick it to legacy media, which has consistently beaten up on a decent man.

Was Biden operating at half-capacity throughout his term? Was he operating at 10%? Here are some facts, regardless of the opinions rendered by amateur neurologists all over media these days.

“Biden inherited an economy that was flat on its back because of the pandemic, and he’s bequeathing an economy that’s flying high,” said Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s, which just lowered the credit rating of the United States for the first time in history under Donald Trump. 

Biden’s economic tenure was marred by the inflation that was a hangover of the Covid pandemic. But the numbers don’t lie about the rest of it. On his watch, the Dow Jones rose by over 40%, while the Nasdaq rose by almost 50%. The economy expanded by 11% during his four years in office (compared with under 9% during Donald Trump’s first term). Despite inflation, retail sales grew by more than 20%. Household net worth was 28% higher when Biden left office than when he took over from Trump. Unemployment was 2% lower at the end of Biden’s tenure than when he entered the White House. 

Most importantly, no one was predicting the demise of our 250 year American experiment while Biden was in charge.

Now, Biden is diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer, which has spread to his bones. You don’t need to be an oncologist to know that the prognosis is not great.

So maybe now is a good time to reflect not just on Biden’s tenure but on what this obsession with his mental health means for the future of this country. Reporters who have spent the past several weeks on the fainting couch about “the cover up” of his mental condition in the Oval Office have consistently failed to acknowledge the successes of his tenure. They have failed to compare that tenure, both in economic and in governance terms, to what has followed. They have never stopped beating up a man who is no longer in the White House to take stock of the mental health of the current occupant of the White House.

Trump’s mental decline (which is apparent to anyone who has lived in the New York media market for the past four decades) is not happening, you see — because he does not stutter, because he shouts with vigor, because he “truths” at all hours of the night, unlike a septuagenarian who might require more rest. 

In short, all this is just “Trump being Trump.” It cannot be that he is stark raving mad. 

And Trump’s economic record, the one that is driving inflation ever higher, the one that is destroying consumer sentiment, the one that has driven both the stock and bond markets crazy? Never mind all that. Have you listened to Biden’s conversation with Robert Hur? Now that’s a scandal. 

Look, I really don’t care if Biden was confined to a gurney for four years. The facts speak for themselves. The country was more prosperous, the democracy was more stable, the nation was more respected, the people were less terrified, when he was in charge. 

Yes, Biden’s staff may have covered up his medical condition while he was in the Oval Office. But the real scandal is the cover up happening now. The media so obsessed with kicking Biden now that’s gone that it is ignoring the very real danger that his successor poses to us all. 

I am not a religious person but I hope that whatever higher power exists will look out for Joe Biden. He is a good man, who did well on behalf of the people who entrusted him with the presidency. That is a hell of a lot more than could be said about his successor.

I repeat:

Maybe it’s just me, but I would rather have Joe Biden (surrounded by highly competent people) asleep than Donald Trump at his best (surrounded by Fascists, haters, and law-breakers) on his best day. @jaketapper @AlexThomp

Categories Biden, Democracy, Extremism, Fascism, Health, Trump

Georgia: Brain-Dead Woman Kept Alive Because She Was Nine Weeks Pregnant

By dianeravitch
May 18, 2025 //
10

This is one of the saddest stories I have read in a long time. Georgia has one of the most draconian abortion laws in the nation. Because of that law, a woman who is brain-dead will be kept “alive” until she gives birth. She is nine weeks pregnant. The baby will be removed when it reaches 32 weeks. One of those Bible-thumpers should offer to adopt the baby. Lots of Bible-thumpers or the State Legislature should pay the outrageous bills that will pile up.

Robyn Pennacchia of the Wonkette wrote about this horrendous case:

Adriana Smith of Atlanta, Georgia, has been brain dead for more than 90 days.

Back in February, Smith — a registered nurse at Emory University Hospital — started experiencing intense headaches and went to get checked out at a local hospital, because she knew “enough to know something was wrong.”

“They gave her some medication, but they didn’t do any tests. No CT scan,” Smith’s mother, April Newkirk, told 11Alive news. “If they had done that or kept her overnight, they would have caught it. It could have been prevented.”

The next morning, Smith’s boyfriend discovered her gasping for air and gurgling on what he believed was blood. She went back to the hospital, where they finally did a CT scan and discovered multiple blood clots in her brain. Unfortunately, they were too late and Smith was declared brain dead as they prepared to go into surgery.

This would have been a horrific enough scenario under normal circumstances, but Smith was also nine weeks pregnant … and in Georgia. Georgia has one of the worst maternal mortality rates in the nation, 33.9 deaths per 100,000 live births — 48.6 per 100,000 for Black women and 22.7 for white and Hispanic women. Part of that is because women like Adriana Smith are ignored when they tell doctors that something is wrong. 

Georgia also has a “Heartbeat Law” that bans abortion after fetal pole cardiac activity is detected (but before there is even an actual heart).

Because of Georgia’s garbage abortion ban, Smith now has to be kept on life support until the fetus is 32 weeks along and can be removed. Like, they are literally using her dead body as an incubator for a fetus. 

Please, take a moment to scream into a nearby throw pillow, if you need it. 

Via 11Alive:

Under Georgia’s heartbeat law, abortion is banned once cardiac activity is detected — typically around six weeks into pregnancy. The law includes limited exceptions for rape, incest, or if the mother’s life is in danger. But in Adriana’s case, the law created a legal gray area.

Because she is brain dead — no longer considered at risk herself — her medical team is legally required to maintain life support until the fetus reaches viability. 

The family said doctors told them they are not legally allowed to consider other options. […]

Now, due to the state abortion ban, Smith is being kept on life support.

“She’s been breathing through machines for more than 90 days,” Newkirk said. “It’s torture for me. I see my daughter breathing, but she’s not there. And her son — I bring him to see her.”

Newkirk said it’s been heartbreaking seeing her grandson believe his mother is “just sleeping.”

It would be bad enough if the state were just forcing the family to keep Smith “alive” on life support in order to be an incubator for the fetus, but they’re also requiring them to pay for it. While it’s not exactly easy to track down exact costs, an ICU bed in a Georgia non-profit hospital costs, on average, $2,402 a day on its own, without any additional treatment. According to a report from the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality, mechanical ventilation costs, on average, “$3,900 per day after the fourth day.” So that’s $6302 a day just for the basics. Then there’s everything else on top of that. 

And health insurance doesn’t cover life support when there’s no chance of survival or improvement. 

So we’re already at $1.6 million before even getting into the cost of the baby’s care. The average stay in the NICU for a baby born at 32 weeks is 36 days, and a NICU stay can cost $3,000 to $20,000 a day. That is more likely to be covered by health insurance — though it is not actually clear if the baby would be covered by Smith’s health insurance if she’s dead, or for how long. And that’s just in the beginning. It is hard to imagine that a kid born in those circumstances would not have some pretty serious health issues down the road. 

This family is fucked. 

Donate Just Once!

I am going to need to point out, for the 80 bajillionth time, that the people who love the idea of forcing a woman to give birth against their will (or while braindead) are almost universally against universal health care. Especially the ones who are going around crying about “birth rates.” 

I’m not saying it would make anything okay, it wouldn’t, but the very fact that these absolute pieces of shit want to force people to give birth against their will and pay for the privilege as well is galling. In this case, the state wants to force this family to pay possibly $1.6 million or more to keep a brain dead woman alive so that she can give birth to a fetus that was only nine weeks along when she died. 

Perhaps it’s crass to think of money, given the fact that keeping a woman on life support just to incubate a fetus is appalling enough on its own. And it is. But a nearly two million dollar surcharge is a hell of an added insult to injury. 

Categories Cruelty, Ethics, Extremism, Gender, Georgia, Health

Texas: More Than 700 Cases of Measles Reported

By dianeravitch
May 12, 2025 //
4

In 2000, the contagious disease measles was officially eradicated in the United States. However, since the rise of anti-vaccine anxieties during the COVID pandemic, a growing number of parents have refused to let their children be vaccinated.

Texas is the center of a measles outbreak. 702 children have measles; 95% had not been vaccinated. Two have died, neither of them had been vaccinated. The national number is certainly larger.

The Houston Chronicle reported:

The measles outbreak that started in the South Plains region of Texas surpassed 700 cases on Tuesday, according to health officials.

The latest update from the Texas Department of State Health Services shows the state has seen 702 cases of measles since the outbreak began spreading in late January. The outbreak, which has also spread to New Mexico and Oklahoma, is the largest in the United States since measles was declared eliminated in the country in 2000.

Two children, an 8-year-old girl and a 6-year-old girl, died after contracting the virus, and 91 people have been hospitalized. Neither child who died had received the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, and they did not have any underlying medical conditions, according to the DSHS.

Roughly two-thirds of cases in Texas have been in children and teens. More than 95% have been in individuals who are unvaccinated, or whose vaccination status is unknown.

Categories Health, Ignorance, Texas

Arkansas: Supporters of Abortion Rights Meet, Protestors Don’t Show Up

By dianeravitch
May 10, 2025 //
1

Arkansas is deep-red, so of course the Legislature banned abortion. Supporters of abortion rights gathered enough signatures to put the issue to the voters, but the politicians knocked their referendum off the ballot. But the issue has not gone away.

I thought readers might like to read about the persistence of abortion right supporters.

The Arkansas Times is a dissident website that keeps readers informed about events like this one. If you want to know what Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders is doing, this is a great source.

Austin Gelder wrote about the annual planned parenthood Garden Party:

For proof of the sorry state of reproductive rights in Arkansas, consider that for the second year in a row, no protesters even bothered to show at the annual Planned Parenthood Garden Party.

It’s been a brutal run here since the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision of 2022 whipped away the national right to abortion access,  pulling the trigger on an Arkansas law primed to ban virtually all abortions in the state as soon as our blood-red state government officials could get away with it.

Since then, the annual Planned Parenthood fundraiser still goes on. But the protesters who used to hoist their placards of bloody, dismembered fetus parts in view of the wine sippers and bidders at the silent auction tables aren’t a problem anymore. Transgender people and immigrants have displaced abortion care providers as the right’s new bogeyman, leaving reproductive rights advocates to regroup in peace.

Anti-abortion groups tout Arkansas as the “most pro-life state in the nation.” To the crowd at the Planned Parenthood Garden Party in Little Rock Wednesday night, other superlatives – worst maternal mortality rate in the country, vying with Mississippi for the highest rate of teen pregnancy, among the worst states for child well-being – are more apt. 

Planned Parenthood Great Plains Executive Director Emily Wales was in town for a party nonetheless. And while she didn’t sugarcoat the status report, it wasn’t quite as bitter as you might expect. 

“Arkansas has paved the way for some pretty awful policies, not just for abortion access, but also excluding us from the Medicaid program and then continuing to pass anti-abortion billswhen there is really no abortion that is accessible for people,” Wales said. “That is not about health care, it’s about messaging and fear.”  

Arkansas’s consolation prize for winning this race to the bottom is that we’re down here pioneering tips and tricks to share with other states who find themselves shut off from access to necessary medical care. A decade ago, then-Gov. Asa Hutchinson blocked Planned Parenthood clinics in Arkansas from collecting Medicaid reimbursements for non-abortion services. (Federal reimbursements for abortions generally were banned even before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.) Now, Planned Parenthood affiliates in other states are facing similar threats, and the Trump administration maintains a chokehold on the Title X federal funding that once helped cover the cost of family planning consultations, prescriptions and procedures.  

“I don’t want to lean into our trauma or say that we’re resilient, because we’ve always been under attack,” Wales said. “But we have learned lessons about how to adapt and change and meet the moment. And right now, we have sister affiliates in Planned Parenthood who are trying to figure out what happens if they lose Medicaid, or if their Title X funding that was recently cut for many Planned Parenthoods doesn’t come back, what do they do? And for places like Arkansas, we are now in the position of advising other Planned Parenthoods on how you keep your doors open.”

Doesn’t seem like much to brag about until you consider that Arkansas’s two Planned Parenthood clinics – one in Little Rock and one in Rogers – are seeing increasing numbers of patients each year, even with the state’s abortion ban in place. The number of patients served by Planned Parenthood in Arkansas rose nearly 45% from July 2023 to July 2024. Turns out they really do provide lots of other medical services after all!

Iffy weather necessitated a change of venue for this year’s garden party, from the grounds of a historic home in the Quawpaw Quarter to the decidedly less garden-themed Next Level Events in the Union Station basement. The regulars showed up anyway, their numbers weighted toward people old enough to have a glimmer of memory of the pre-Roe days, but a three-dozen-strong corps of young volunteers organized the nametag table and passed out hors d’oeuvres. 

Speakers skipped those apologetic qualifiers that used to precede seemingly every statement about abortion. None of that tired and defensive, “Nobody likes abortion, but …” anymore.

Instead, speakers leaned into the freedom that comes with having little to lose. The din of a chatty, tipsy crowd packed into a subterranean space helped, too. “I feel like I could say anything and you wouldn’t know,” Wales said. “I could be wildly offensive about, perhaps, the current administration, and no one would ever know.”

Other speakers laughed about the time Lori Williams, longtime clinical director at Little Rock Family Planning Services and the night’s winner of the Brownie Ledbetter Award, helped torpedo a 2013 bill to require ultrasounds for abortion access at six weeks by pulling out an alarmingly phallic vaginal ultrasound probe during a legislative committee hearing. 

Sarah Thompson, a leader with Grandmothers for Reproductive Rights and winner of this year’s Christina Mullinax Persistent Spirit Award, lamented progress made and lost.

“When I needed abortion care in Arkansas, I had to leave the state, and it was a long time ago. And now young women still have to leave the state to obtain abortion care,” Thompson said. “I’ll never stop doing this work. It’s part of who I am for the rest of my life.” (It should be noted that many Arkansas women still do access abortion services without leaving the state thanks to the prevalence of mail-order medication for early term abortions — though many Republicans want to put a stop to that as well.)

Arkansas is part of Planned Parenthood of Great Plains, a consortium that includes Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri. Abortion is legal in Kansas, and last year, Missouri voters reinstated abortion rights, although state lawmakers there are angling to repeal them again. That kind of heartache is familiar to the 100,000+ Arkansans who signed a petition to give the state a chance to vote on reinstating abortion rights in 2024, only to see that opportunity smothered by dubious legal shenanigans.

“Care in Arkansas does not look the way we want it to, and eventually it will return to what it needs to be, but we’re going to keep working on that,” Wales said. “Until then, we will be creative and thoughtful, and we are not about to be intimidated by what’s happening at the federal level, because we are really, really good at undermining authority.”

Categories Arkansas, Gender, Health

Jonathan V. Last: MAHA Is a Fraud

By dianeravitch
May 3, 2025 //
3

Jonathan V. Last writes for and edits one of the liveliest and most informative sites on the Internet: The Bulwark. That is home base for a significant number of Republican Never Trumpers. In this post, he explains that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is not only unqualified in medical issues but his ignorance puts all of us in danger.

America has never been healthier. Going backwards is going to mean more people getting sick and dying.

(Composite / Photos: GettyImages / Shutterstock)

1. The Past Sucked

I had a great conversation with Your Local Epidemiologist, Katelyn Jetelina, yesterday. It’s here if you missed it.

As she was explaining the state of play with measles outbreaks and falling vaccination rates, I asked her if there was any analog to this moment in the history of public health. She couldn’t think of one.

What America’s new public health establishment—by which I don’t mean actual public health experts but their dilettante conspiracist bosses—is doing is choosing to move the country backwards. Less medical research, a pull-back on life-saving vaccines, turning away from science and embracing folk medicine.

Our new health establishment is explicit about wanting to go backwards. It’s right there on the hat: Make America Healthy Again.

Again.

Meaning: America used to be “healthy” and now is not.

I’m sorry, I know we’re supposed to meet people where they are and give them a loving truth sandwich, but this is the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard.

Does anyone remember what “health” looked like in America a generation or two ago? Half the country smoked. People dropped dead at 50 on the reg. Child birth was dangerous. Seatbelts were suss. Drug use was off the charts.

Dangerous communicable diseases were still around. Cancer was a death sentence. AIDS looked like an unstoppable tsunami.

Food? Do remember what grocery stores looked like in 1980? Aisles of canned vegetables, processed foods, and frozen TV dinners. Fresh produce? Good luck. That section of the Acme was a shoebox.

But that’s all anecdotal. Let’s look at the data. Because it shows—absolutely, unequivocally—that this is the healthiest period in American history.

Let’s start with the dumbest possible metric: life expectancy.

We’ve had a slight downtick in the last year or two largely driven by COVID. You know why a lot of people died from COVID? Because they refused to follow public health advice during the pandemic and then refused to get vaccinated once we had vaccines in hand. So it was precisely the MAHA idiocy that moved our life expectancy backward.

Let’s zoom out and look at America compared to the rest of the developed world:

You want to “Make America Healthy Again”? Get the fucking COVID vaccine like everyone else in the civilized world did.

How about infant mortality? That’s another excellent marker of health in a society. Oh, look—it’s incredibly low: 5.61 deaths per 1,000 live births. This is up slightly from 2020 because, again, COVID. But it’s still a historic low.

When do you think the golden, “healthy” past was? In 1980, the infant mortality rate was more than double what it is today (12.0). In 1960 it was more double that number (25.9).

Real problems do exist. For instance: Access to healthcare for African-American women. The black infant mortality rate is double that of white Americans and the maternal mortality rate for African-American women has been rising sharply for a generation.

These statistics are absolutely shameful. Yet you don’t hear a lot about them from the beef-tallow crowd, do you?

How about infectious diseases? In 1900 half of all deaths in America were from communicable diseases. Through medical advances—especially vaccines—we got that number down to about 5 percent—until COVID. All by itself COVID accounted for 12 percent of all deaths in the United States in 2021.

So again: If you want America to be healthy you’d do exactly the opposite of what the Trump administration is doing and urge everyone to get vaccinated.

And while we’re talking about healthy habits: Americans don’t smoke like they used to.

Also, forty years ago less than a fifth of people in cars used seatbelts. Today that number is well over 90 percent.

2. The Big C

Let’s talk about cancer. You ever feel like, “Man, people are getting cancer like crazy these days?”

Here’s what happened. There was a huge spike in the incidence of cancer diagnoses from 1975 to 1995. Why? Two things.

First, people were living longer and you have to die of something. Since people weren’t dying from polio, measles, and communicable diseases, they were living long enough to get cancer.

Second, medical science developed more tools to detect cancer. Inventing effective tests and screenings means finding more incidences. Donald Trump knows this.

So when you look at this graph the solid lines are cancer incidences. You see that they go up, and then down. But I want you to look at the dotted lines:

The dotted lines are the cancer mortality rates. And what you see is that in the early 1990s, people started surviving cancer at higher rates even as the incidences of cancer increased. And from 1995 to 2000, as the cancer incidence rate peaked, the mortality rate fell off a cliff.

Why?

Because better tests = more cancer diagnoses = earlier interventions + therapeutic advances = much higher survival rates.

The pattern we see with cancer incidence describes a lot of our health challenges today. Why do so many people get dementia or Alzheimer’s now? Because they’re surviving cancer and—again—something is going to get us eventually.

Why so many autism diagnoses? Because 40 years ago doctors didn’t understand what they were seeing in kids who had ASD. Now they do. Once medical science understands what it’s looking at, you’re going to get more diagnoses. This isn’t hard to understand.

Look: There are some things that have legitimately gotten worse over time. The incidence of Type 2 diabetes has increased dramatically since 1950. Some of this is linked to increasing obesity.

What’s the answer? Diet and exercise, which you may recall Michelle Obama talking a lot about (and getting ridiculed by Republicans for her trouble). Semaglutide drugs show tremendous potential for helping curb obesity and reduce the incidence of diabetes.

You may be surprised to hear that MAHA does not like this class of pharmaceuticals.

So what’s going on here? Why does the “Make America Healthy Again” movement romanticize the health outcomes of the past (which were worse) and misunderstand the health outcomes of the present (which are significantly better along the most important vectors and continue to improve over time)?

Why do people like RFK Jr. oppose medical practices that create better outcomes (vaccines; the Ozempic-class drugs)?

I don’t know. Maybe you have a theory and can discuss it in the comments.

But at the end of the day, the “why” doesn’t matter. What matters is the results. And the results are going to be bad.

3. Worse Than Fraud

Buildings used to catch on fire all the time in America. It was a serious problem. That’s why cities had as many fire stations as churches.

Over time, we cut way down on the number of fires. We switched construction materials. We came up with safer mechanisms for delivering gas and electricity. We developed best-practices and enshrined them in building codes. The big thing was the invention of the sprinkler system.

The result was that even as the total number of buildings in America kept growing, the annual number of structure fires kept going down. Dramatically.

Imagine a movement that looked at this data and decided America didn’t need sprinkler systems anymore.

Modern building costs are too high. There’s too much red tape. We spend billions on sprinkler systems every year that are never used. Let’s go back to the old ways. Make Buildings Great Again.

After all, we don’t have to worry about fires anymore.

The MAHA movement is like that. Except that while trying to get rid of sprinkler systems and building codes, they are also walking around carelessly tossing lit matches.

These people aren’t just frauds. They’re arsonists. And right now they run the U.S. government, the CDC, the NIH, and the fire department, too.

Categories Health, Hoax, Science
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »