Trump and Infectious Disease. Reason for Grave Concern.

[TLS Guy]

In my previous thread I posted about Trump musseling NIH lecturers.

Now we have even more reason to worry. The bird flu is at inflection point in terms of danger to humans.

6 cattle herds in Nevada are now infected with this worrying H5N1 variant. This is the new variant most transmissible to humans and is a cause for concern. According to this mornings AMA wire, we are now at an inflection point in the epidemic.

The CBC weekly Morbidity and Mortality report was muzzled. This vital publication keeps us medics and other health professionals current on the impact of infectious disease. It is a publication absolutely vital to the public health. Somehow the heroic staff have managed to get a publication out today. It is unclear if this is with the approval of the Trump administration or not, but likely not. During this period a lot of courage and civil disobedience is going to the required.

This is something that should be of grave concern to us all.

 

[j_garcia]

RFK is our real threat now, if appointed. That guy is going to get people killed.

A friend of mine got a routine flu shot a few years back, before covid. They did not mention to him that it included H5N1 that year, which he is very susceptible to, and it almost killed him. He was in the hospital for about a month and a half before recovering.

 

[Trell]

Krugman just wrote an article RFK Jr. and the MAGA Death Trip: The war on science is turning deadly where he's not happy with RFK Jr nor the decades long Republican anti-science.

>>>...
But there’s also a lot to be learned by asking how we managed to build the canal in the first place. Yes, it was a spectacular feat of engineering. But even more important, it was a triumph of medical science and science-based policy. To build the canal, America first had to conquer yellow fever and malaria. This meant understanding how these diseases were spread, then implementing widespread preventive measures that ranged from isolating infected patients with mosquito netting to eliminating sources of standing water in which mosquitoes could breed.

The success of these measures was an extraordinary achievement. But then, for much of the 20th century America led the world both in medical research and in the application of that research to public policy. This one-two punch of knowledge and knowledge-based action led to an incredible decline in the rate of death from infectious disease:

But that was the America that was.

Now Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a crank who rejects vaccines in particular and medical science in general, is on track to become the Secretary of Health and Human Services. The National Institutes of Health have effectively been shut down. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have stopped releasing crucial data. If you go to CDC’s website, there’s a banner across the top reading “CDC’s website is being modified to comply with President Trump’s Executive Orders,” which mainly means purging anything that hints at concern over social inequality.

I don’t know this for sure, but my prediction is that the current purge of language will eventually turn into a purge of people, with the administration firing anyone suspected of being more loyal to science than they are to Donald Trump.

And all of this is highly likely to lead to many preventable deaths — hundreds of thousands, maybe millions. ...<<<