When a Bloodless Constitutional Crisis Can Kill or Maim You

 

When a Bloodless Constitutional Crisis Can Kill or Maim You

It goes well beyond Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F Kennedy, Jr., questioning vaccines and the “diseases they might cause,” or his suggestion that in lieu of vaccination, people wary of the measles outbreak in Texas and New Mexico should instead willingly expose themselves to infect people to catch the disease and develop herd immunity. Based on RFK, Jr’s advice on how Samoa should treat a similar our break in 2020, Lancet reported: “As of Jan 22, 2020, 5707 measles cases and 83 measles-related deaths (estimated attack rate of approximately 285 cases per 10 000 population) have been reported ...” Maybe we can kill off a few vulnerable residents in that part of the country in the same proportions. And here we are at the end of winter of 2025. Are the cases subsiding? Those new outbreaks in Texas and New Mexico, plus reports in Los Angeles (an arriving infant at LAX), show there are hundreds of infected people, and even one death of an unvaccinated child (by the time this gets published, there could be many more)

Because of the deep anti-science animosity carried by MAGA adherents and science skeptics like RFK, Jr, a trending offshoot of hostility against educated “elites” in general, we are cutting the heart out of medical research (in the name of eliminating waste and corruption) as the Trump/DOGE administration freeze all medical research grants, often stopping time-sensitive experiments mid-stream, including research efforts being conducted by governmental agencies themselves. A USAID Ebola project was shut down “by mistake” according to co-President Musk, but he claimed it was instantly restored. Unfortunately, the relevant operatives had dispersed, the program was too damaged by the shutdown to restart, which did not keep Musk from insisting the program was on track again.

But these programs are congressional mandates! But it does not work that way in autocracy supported by a small constituency of Luddites and MAGA soldiers sworn to destroy swarms of elites promoting policies and beliefs that they simply reject. Religious idealogues or simply skeptics that now run their lives based on conspiracy theories without a foundation in anything factual. All empowered by HIM. The National Institutes of Health, including the university research grants they provide to discover rising strains of new diseases and treatments for those that seem to be on the rise, was victim to one of Musk’s chainsaw dismemberments ($47 billion/year to keep Americans safe). A dictator speaks. And that’s it!

Our USAID global reach to stop diseases and eliminate starvation (especially children) overseas, also a congressional mandate, was halted too. Even after a federal trial court ruled to restore those funded programs, the Trump administration simply did not comply with that ruling. The trial court firmed its response, but skipping over the appropriate appellate court for an appeal, the Trump administration got US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts to stay the trial court’s mandate pending a review by the full court. Yes, that same John Roberts who interpreted the US Constitution, which provided no basis for the ruling anywhere, somehow to accord the President of the United States with immunity from criminal prosecution for any action took that was a colorable “official act.”

In The Morning, NY Times news feed (February 25th), Benjamin Mueller writes about how unelected co-President Musk, partnered with the elected co-President Trump, openly usurped congressionally mandated expenditures because they did not fit into the Trumpian campaign pledge to kill the “deep state,” even that part that was supposed to fund medical solutions for those diseases that threaten each and every one of us: “The world’s leading medical labs can be found in the United States, and they rely on grants from the National Institutes of Health. [But the] agency has stopped vetting future studies on cancer, Alzheimer’s, heart disease and other ailments. Trump aides have said they just need time to review spending their predecessors had promised, but it’s unclear what they’re looking for at the N.I.H. or when scholars can expect to start receiving money again…

“Late last month [January], when the Trump administration froze government grants, a federal judge said it couldn’t just hold back money Congress had agreed to spend. But [halting] pending money at the N.I.H., which awards more than 60,000 grants per year, isn’t so simple… That’s because new grants endure a tortured bureaucratic process. The agency has to notify the public of grant review meetings in The Federal Register, a government publication. Then scientists and N.I.H. officials meet to discuss the proposals. The problem is that the Trump administration banned those announcements ‘indefinitely.’ So new research projects can’t get approved.

In effect, scientists say, the Trump administration is circumventing the court order. Health officials didn’t block research outright, but by shutting down the process, they’re still not spending much of the money Congress allocated to various research goals… The administration has also proposed other big changes, saying that universities should bear more of the ‘indirect costs’ of research: maintaining lab space, paying support staff. Trump aides say the changes would trim administrative bloat and free up more government money for research.

“Scientists are panicked, and hundreds of studies are at a standstill, including ones on pancreatic cancer, brain injuries and child health. Last week alone, the N.I.H. canceled 42 of 47 scheduled meetings to assess new grants. Some examples of stalled projects:

• For years, Steffanie Strathdee at the University of California San Diego has followed drug users to research overdoses, which kill some 100,000 people in the United States each year. Her investigation of H.I.V. infections in that group was ready to begin — but came to an abrupt halt when the N.I.H. canceled a review panel meeting this month. ‘Everything is absolutely frozen,’ she told me. ‘It’ll just sit there, hanging in limbo.’
• Anthony Richardson at the University of Pittsburgh was expecting a review panel to weigh a grant application of his on staph infections in people with diabetes, a disease that afflicts more than one-tenth of Americans. It never happened. ‘I am not 100 percent sure what their motives are,’ he said.

“In response to all the uncertainty, universities are retrenching. The University of Pittsburgh froze Ph.D. admissions. Columbia University’s medical school paused hiring and spending. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology froze the hiring of nonfaculty employees.”

Universities and dedicated charitable research entities are not for-profit structures. These funded programs don’t get to recoup all those costs Musk/Trump are suggesting; they often do research that leads to a dead-end or find better solutions in the process. That’s the very nature of why they are involved in research that for-profit medical providers won’t take on. But their work saves millions of lives every year. The majority of new treatments have their roots in this kind of funded research. OK Messrs. Musk and Trump, exactly what is your tolerance for preventable American deaths? What’s your acceptable cost-per-body ratio? Your suffering and misery cost-benefit analysis?

I’m Peter Dekom, and cutting off research to save American (and other lives), so that you can give very, very rich people a massive cut in taxes, is both despicable and profoundly immoral… and the way you are doing it completely illegal.