Josh Marshall wrote this on Bluesky and I think it explains what’s going on with HHS as well as I’ve seen it anywhere:
It’s getting a lot of attn today. But even before today most of the country had very little idea of what has happened at NIH or through it the entire ecosystem of biomedical research in the US. Simply put, Musk, Kennedy & Trump exploded a bomb right in the middle of cancer cure research in the US.
On purpose. For many cancers, research has been put back years or decades. Alzheimers treatment and cure research similar story. If you know people who are survivors of these diseases and fear recurrence or have genetic dispositions or are just like everyone else and know they are liable to these and other diseases potential cures are now less likely to be there when you need them. You have to ask: what is the goal when you pull the plug on the whole ecosystem of cancer cure research? What’s the agenda? The answers are so dark and twisted most people struggle to believe it could be real.
But it is real. And it’s happened so quickly, most of the country doesn’t know it yet. Indeed, I got some key indications over the weekend that even people in the biomedical research world outside of NIH don’t get yet what’s happened. So the bomb has gone off but most people don’t realize it yet. It’s like Bobby Kennedy and Elon and Trump just drove a big semi full of fertilizer Tim McVeigh-style up in front of the national labs and detonated it.
The prospect of more life saving cures and treatments already got much bleaker. If you think you or a loved one might one day get one of these cancers, or Alzheimers, or various other dread diseases 10, 20, 30 years from now your chances have already dimmed because of what’s happened just in the last two months.
And now they’ve decided to up the pace and make it far worse because of a mix of difficult to fully comprehend pathological motives tied to political extremism, belief that AI will supplant medical research & that destroying the current research world will add to their wealth and political power and cement their hold over what was the American republic.
It will take a determined, smart, relentless and implacable counterattack to begin to undo the damage.
There are so many atrocities coming from this administration that it’s hard to decide the worst of it. But when it comes to the most harm to the most people in short, medium and long term, I think this might be it. The U.S. has been one of the most prolific leaders in medical research for a very long time and we’re giving it up because Trump wanted to cover up his support for vaccines during the pandemic — and stick it to the people who made him feel stupid about it. No one can tell him anything so he’s letting Bobby Jr play. Many people will die needlessly.
Let’s hope that we can put this Humpty Dumpty together again but the damage is already severe and it will take a massive effort. It’s heartbreaking.