It's "Alice Through the Looking Glass;" up is down, black is white, and starving public health will "Make America Healthy Again!"
Instead of Throwback Thursday, it’s “Takeback Thursday.” Tuesday, HHS abruptly canceled more than $12 billion in federal grants to states that were being used for tracking infectious diseases, mental health services, addiction treatment and other urgent health issues. The measles outbreak in West Texas and New Mexico is up to 370 cases. In Lubbock, Texas, Katherine Wells, the city’s director of public health reported that public health officials have received orders to stop work supported by three grants that helped fund the response to the widening measles outbreak there.
In possibly the most myopic statement by a health official ever, HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon said in a statement: “The Covid-19 pandemic is over, and H.H.S. will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a nonexistent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago.”
Talk about terminal tunnel vision - I hope that he had the MMR shot.
I worked in the Pharma industry for 30 years and I don't like the way FDA and CDC function. Why are medical devices approved in the EU more than two years ahead of US approvals? Why was Pfizer given carte blanche legal immunity from the mRNA jab? Bigger is not necessarily better as I experienced in 40 years of working through re-orgs, layoffs and delayering of redundancies. Govt ought to be no exception.
Yes, these systems of health, care, and prevention are being more rapidly dismantled and disintegrated than most of us expected. The true loss will be the institutional memory, skills, and knowledge resident in these core systems. When we brake from denial into acceptance, states that care about the health of their populations will need to rapidly build alternative institutions on a shared regional basis and recruit the people with the institutional memory to recreate new replacement systems independent from the federal government and funded on a regional basis. This may lead the the necessity of withholding funds from the feds. The alternative is to watch the coming dark age as we lose the capacity to assure the possibility of health for our regional populations.
To me, this will be a very expensive opportunity lost, and progressively difficult to resurrect the longer the absence. To me, we cannot afford to stand helplessly while watching the deliberate destruction. Creating focused parallel structures is a more effective way than battling the enormity of the vast zone flooded deliberately to destroy and kill. Without health- for our children, families, friends, the rest is just noise and chaos with no foundational meaning. Health, real, not performative and extractive, seems a hill worth dying on.
We are going from having some of the best public health agencies in the world to possibly the worst. These cuts will destroy the morale of the employees left and there will be a secondary exodus. WHO wants to stick around doing impossible or meaningless tasks. You think America has the lowest life expectancy of any industrialized country, now? Bobby Brainworms has only just begun. Only in Bizarro World would a brain-damaged lawyer be put in charge of the Nation’s healthcare system.
Good news and bad news. Vicious extremists and damn fools prepare their own demise in the end. Musk and Hegseth working hard at that. Bad news: how long it takes and how much collateral damage--unknown. There will be damage and I hope it's scandalous but limited--and well-timed close to 2026 elections.
Won't be sad to see them take Makary down with them. He may have to co-own some of the damage. Maybe a damn fool for taking the job.
Thank you for this article, Merrill. This most recent assault on public health adds to the litany of assaults on the American people. The ideologically driven slashes will never tally enough to fund the tax cuts the oligarchs will give themselves, and no amount of arithmetic, even from DOGE, will cover that. So, it's not about the money. It's about the contempt the they have for the 99% and their needs.
Merrill,
It's "Alice Through the Looking Glass;" up is down, black is white, and starving public health will "Make America Healthy Again!"
Instead of Throwback Thursday, it’s “Takeback Thursday.” Tuesday, HHS abruptly canceled more than $12 billion in federal grants to states that were being used for tracking infectious diseases, mental health services, addiction treatment and other urgent health issues. The measles outbreak in West Texas and New Mexico is up to 370 cases. In Lubbock, Texas, Katherine Wells, the city’s director of public health reported that public health officials have received orders to stop work supported by three grants that helped fund the response to the widening measles outbreak there.
In possibly the most myopic statement by a health official ever, HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon said in a statement: “The Covid-19 pandemic is over, and H.H.S. will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a nonexistent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago.”
Talk about terminal tunnel vision - I hope that he had the MMR shot.
I appreciate your comment. Well said.
I worked in the Pharma industry for 30 years and I don't like the way FDA and CDC function. Why are medical devices approved in the EU more than two years ahead of US approvals? Why was Pfizer given carte blanche legal immunity from the mRNA jab? Bigger is not necessarily better as I experienced in 40 years of working through re-orgs, layoffs and delayering of redundancies. Govt ought to be no exception.
Yes, these systems of health, care, and prevention are being more rapidly dismantled and disintegrated than most of us expected. The true loss will be the institutional memory, skills, and knowledge resident in these core systems. When we brake from denial into acceptance, states that care about the health of their populations will need to rapidly build alternative institutions on a shared regional basis and recruit the people with the institutional memory to recreate new replacement systems independent from the federal government and funded on a regional basis. This may lead the the necessity of withholding funds from the feds. The alternative is to watch the coming dark age as we lose the capacity to assure the possibility of health for our regional populations.
To me, this will be a very expensive opportunity lost, and progressively difficult to resurrect the longer the absence. To me, we cannot afford to stand helplessly while watching the deliberate destruction. Creating focused parallel structures is a more effective way than battling the enormity of the vast zone flooded deliberately to destroy and kill. Without health- for our children, families, friends, the rest is just noise and chaos with no foundational meaning. Health, real, not performative and extractive, seems a hill worth dying on.
Ricord Winstead, MD, Family Medicine, retired.
We are going from having some of the best public health agencies in the world to possibly the worst. These cuts will destroy the morale of the employees left and there will be a secondary exodus. WHO wants to stick around doing impossible or meaningless tasks. You think America has the lowest life expectancy of any industrialized country, now? Bobby Brainworms has only just begun. Only in Bizarro World would a brain-damaged lawyer be put in charge of the Nation’s healthcare system.
Good news and bad news. Vicious extremists and damn fools prepare their own demise in the end. Musk and Hegseth working hard at that. Bad news: how long it takes and how much collateral damage--unknown. There will be damage and I hope it's scandalous but limited--and well-timed close to 2026 elections.
Won't be sad to see them take Makary down with them. He may have to co-own some of the damage. Maybe a damn fool for taking the job.
Thank you for this article, Merrill. This most recent assault on public health adds to the litany of assaults on the American people. The ideologically driven slashes will never tally enough to fund the tax cuts the oligarchs will give themselves, and no amount of arithmetic, even from DOGE, will cover that. So, it's not about the money. It's about the contempt the they have for the 99% and their needs.